When: Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Book Talk: 3–4:30 pm

Reception: 4:30–5:30 pm

Where: Hershey Salon (Hershey Hall 158)

Seating is first come first served.

Care without Pathology examines the transnational emergence of trans health as an institutionalizing field and public good. It argues that the field of trans health can be characterized as a struggle between paternalistic and pathologizing modes of care, on the one hand, and the notion of “care without pathology” on the other. The book suggests that trans health movements—alongside reproductive justice, disability justice, and others—have mobilized care without pathology to transform health politics. Drawing on ethnographic and document-based data centered in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology examines how activists and care providers across the Americas work to change the protocols, governing logics, and distributive arguments underpinning trans health as a field.

It follows activists and providers as they grapple with diagnoses, economic accessibility, population health, austerity politics, racialized politics of care and debt, colonial regimes of knowledge, and depathologizing demands. Care without Pathology argues that trans health is far from being an exceptional or unusual form of health care. Rather, its constitutive debates are at the heart of broader contemporary transformations related to biomedicine and health politics writ large.

About the author: Christoph Hanssmann is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis.