Life and Death of Latisha King

Gayle Salamon is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBT Studies in 2011.

"This beautifully crafted work in slow and critical phenomenology allows us to understand the fatal consequences of skewed gender perception. Salamon takes us through the trial of Latisha King, murdered by a classmate who understood transgendered expression as an aggressive assault. Paying close attention to how the participants in the murder trial discuss and enact their normative passions about how the body should appear, Salamon shows us how phenomenological description that open up for strong criticism modes of perception and action that bear lethal consequences for those who contest hegemonic gender norms. This book is a model of careful and thoughtful philosophy and cultural criticism, bringing to life the resources of a phenomenological tradition that can name, describe, and oppose the obliteration of queer and trans lives. This work is as electric as its slow, making us think, and teaching us to see." - Judith Butler,author of Gender Trouble "Undertakes exactly the kind of parsing, original thinking, attention to detail, and care for its subject that the act of violence at the story's core aimed to hollow out.Salamon's combination of courtroom reportage and phenomenological thinking feels fresh here, as her book bends the conventions of academic discourse to witness enmeshed bodies moving in real time space and time." - Maggie Nelson,author of The Argonauts "With transness facing the threat of possible governmental erasure, I can think of no book more important than Gayle Salamons The Life and Death of LatishaKing. . . . Salamon brilliantly renders how gendered violence, trans erasure, and what the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl calls 'retroactive crossing out' can produce a transphobic imagination." (The Paris Review) "[Salamon] turns our perspective on the trial away from its grueling examination of the gender non-conformity of Latisha King and onto the gendered embodiments of the teachers and attorneys instead." (Lambda Literary) "The Life and Death of Latisha Kingis no ordinary true-crime narrative, but a hard-hitting philosophical investigation into gender and its cultural depiction." (Foreword Reviews) "Gayle Salamon's writing in The Life and Death of Latisha King is sparse, giving a sense of stillness and quiet as if every word of the text were heavy with the weight of mourning. Short sentences and simple wording bring the point to the surface,[1] laying bare a reality that readers cannot but contend with … As a work of critical theory and philosophy, the book continues Salamon's earlier Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (2010) and makes an important contribution to scholarship in feminist, queer, and trans studies that engages with phenomenology (including by scholars such as Beauvoir, Bettcher, Butler, Diprose, Heinämaa, Stryker, Weiss, Young). Insofar as the book is a personal account of Salamon's experience during the trial and her processing of that experience, it can also be at home alongside works such as Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) and Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014) … The balancing between the heaviness of loss and mourning, and the hope and love that sustain Salamon's account, is noteworthy." - Hypatia "Why is there so much hate and transphobic violence in the world? Gayle Salamons new book is a powerful response to this question. . . points towards the difficult task of thinking about forms of difference and the violence that often attends them, and suggests that examining how gender is differently perceived is a crucial step beyond acknowledging that transphobic violence exists." (Medical and Health Humanities) "Although the author's primary focus is to carefully study the perception of a brown trans body, delicate passages describing testimonies of Latisha's skill and confidence while gliding in high-heeled boots or a supportive teacher gifting her a green prom dress conjure the child's stunning personhood in a visual field beyond the court proceedings." - The Drama Review