A Vitapolitics Frame: How Trans Activists Make Sense of Trans Lives in Interactions with Allies

Abstract This study explored how activists frame their lived experience in the context of a social movement that uses suffering as a key frame, and the implications of this framing for their relationships with allies. Suffering can garner support for marginalized groups, yet the resulting allyship can be patronizing. In an interview study of 41 trans social movement activists, we found that they resist the simplicity of the suffering frame and the “vulnerable subjecthood” that is projected onto them by allies by expressing an alternative frame that is based on vitality. This frame, which we call “vitapolitics,” infuses the trans experience with agency, vibrancy, and complexity for the purpose of political action. Although espousing vitapolitics, trans activists comply with the suffering frame as it remains strategically effective. Thus, there are tensions between activists’ frustration with and resistance to suffering as constitutive of the trans experience and their willingness to make tactical use of it for social movement gains, as well as between their lived experience of agency and vitality and the perception by allies that they need to be saved. These tensions are rarely made explicit in ally-allied interactions and are missing from most studies of allyship in social movements.