Resilience

Abstract

Once a ubiquitous framework for assessing the capacity for recovery, perseverance, and success in the face of adversity, resilience has been met with growing critiques in its application. As a frequently used “pretty word” within health disparities research, resilience has come to signify how at-risk communities overcome hardship in ways this work argues overdetermine their labor, activist potential, and existence. This critique examines resilience through the lens of ethnographic research conducted among transgender and nonbinary healthcare providers who provide gender-affirming care within their communities. As a marginalized community experiencing transphobia and increasing structural barriers to life-affirming and life-saving healthcare, trans healthcare workers embody many tenets of resilience in how they are recast as medical authorities rather than victims. The aim of this intervention is to disentangle socio-cultural meanings and expectations associated with the application of resilience. This work argues resilience presupposes colonial and cis-heteronormative progress narratives in which trans people's capacity to overcome oppression renders their labor and advocacy as tied to perceived static conditions of transphobia. Through reexamining the use of resilience in health disparities research, researchers can better center communities in which they are engaged while avoiding monolithic representation and uncritical interpretation of oppressive systems.