Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-17-2025
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.
Recommended Citation
Liashenko, Joshua. 2025. “ Resilience.” Annals of Anthropological Practice e70001. https://doi.org/10.1111/napa.70001
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The author
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Gender and Sexuality Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Medicine and Health Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Annals of Anthropological Practice in 2025. https://doi.org/10.1111/napa.70001