Transgenderism and the question of embodiment: Promising Queer politics?

GLQ

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 231-261

  Elliot, Patricia ^a   Roen, Katrina ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0345239319     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-4-2-231     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Biddy Martin, "Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias," diacritics 24, nos. 2-3 (1994), ed. Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, 104-21. For the purposes of this paper, we distinguish between transgender theories, which are those written by and for people who identify with transgender issues, and feminist, lesbian, and gay theories, whose proponents might or might not identify with transgender issues. We take "queer theory" to be a broader category that seeks to encompass a variety of different identities and political goals.
2. For the purposes of this article, we take Bornstein, Feinberg, MacKenzie, and Stone to be major spokespersons for the transgender movement. We do not assume that theirs are the only valuable contributions, but they enjoy a popularity that makes them accessible and widely read.
3. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders," 107.
4. While Martin engages in a rigorous critique of Sedgwick's and Butler's usages of key terms (sex, gender, sexuality), she does not provide definitions of these terms herself. This suggests to us that she is raising the question of what they ought to mean - the question of definition itself. Our intention is to explore the potential of their various definitions for transgender theories. In their introduction to the diacritics issue, Butler and Martin describe "crossing" as "an appropriation, assimilation, or even a territorialization of another site or position . . . or . . . a movement beyond the stasis attributed to 'positions' located on a closed map of social power" (Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, "Cross-Identifications," diacritics 24, nos. 2-3 [1994]: 3). Two concepts of crossing are involved here: (1) a visible movement from one fixed position to another (which contrasts with the invisible movement of "passing") that demonstrates that a person can move from one to the other without disturbing the boundary; and (2) a visible movement beyond a supposedly fixed position that demonstrates that the positions themselves are unstable and hence that the boundaries are not fixed. It is this second concept of crossing that we believe Martin finds useful.
5. In a later, much less sympathetic discussion of queer theory, Suzanna Danuta Walters develops this critique. See Suzanna Danuta Walters, "From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace (Or, Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Fag?)," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (1996): 830-69.
6. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1993).
7. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders," 108.
8. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders," Ibid., 111.
9. This means Butler's own reading is also an effect of particular discourses and especially subject to the new historicism that has assumed a dominant place in recent feminist theory. See Charles Shepherdson, "The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex," in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994): 164.
10. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders," 110.
11. Martin defines "interiority" as a person's relationship to "power, autonomy, attachment, and vulnerability" ("Sexualities without Genders," 106). Privileging Butler here seems odd given the kind of work feminists have been doing for at least the last thirty years.
12. For an extended discussion of earlier feminist contributions, see Susan Bordo, "Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body," in Up against Foucault, ed. Caroline Ramazanoglu (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179-202.
13. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders," 112.
14. This means that relationships between sexual identities are not self-evident but require being made. This tends to occur in coalition politics where, for example, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons join forces to combat oppression.
15. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders," 117.
16. Sandy Stone, "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 280-304, quotation on 295.
17. Jeffrey Weeks, Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 104.
18. Stone, "Empire Strikes Back," 294.
19. We understand gender to encompass both an institutionalized interpretation of what it means to live as a woman or a man (including rules of belonging) and individual interpretations of what it means to live as a woman or a man. Sexuality we define as the way we represent and enact bodily pleasures and desires, a term that engages concepts of the body (both real and symbolic) and concepts of gender, if only to negate them, and which is not reducible to them. Sex we define as the mostly anatomical features by which social designations of female, male, and intersexed bodies are made.
20. Stone, "Empire Strikes Back," 298-99.
21. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
22. Gordene Olga MacKenzie, Transgender Nation (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994).
23. Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul (Boston: Beacon, 1996).
24. The desire to make the body disappear occurs elsewhere as well. See Judith Halberstam, "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity," in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 210-28.
25. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders," 104.
26. Charles Shepherdson argues that assuming a sexed embodiment is a human imperative, not a social convention. Although the meanings attached to that imperative have a history, as does the process of acquiring it, it is not considered dispensable. Psychoanalysis is, of course, a theory developed in a particular historical and cultural milieu, but this does not necessarily make its account of the constitution of subjectivity false, nor does it necessarily limit its applicability to a particular time and place. For a discussion of this problem in terms of the impasse in psychoanalysis and feminism, see Teresa Brennan, "An Impasse in Psychoanalysis and Feminism," in A Reader in Feminist Knowledge, ed. Sneja Gunew (New York: Routledge, 1991), 114-38,
27. Patricia Elliot, "Politics, Identity, and Social Change: Contested Grounds in Psychoanalytic Feminism," Hypatia 10, no. 2 (1995): 41-55.
28. Shepherdson, "The Role of Gender," 165.
29. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1986), 61.
30. Quoted in Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler," Radical Philosophy 67 (1994): 32-39. Susan Stryker, in a moving account of her own transgender experience, draws on Butler to offer a theory of how compulsory gender attribution constitutes a violation of the subject.
31. See "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," GLQ 1 (1994): 237-54.
32. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), x.
33. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" Ibid., 14.
34. Peng Cheah, "Mattering," diacritics 26 (spring 1994): 113.
35. Peng Cheah, diacritics Ibid., 115-16.
36. Cheah offers another view of embodiment based on a Derridean concept of différance and a "nonanthropologistic" theory about the "dynamism of the given" (Peng Cheah, diacritics ibid., 132).
37. Catherine Millot, Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1990). Many transsexuals will claim that no psychoanalytic theorization of transsexuality can be respectful of transsexuals. Although psychoanalysts are not always immune to the moralism that reinforces a normal/pathological paradigm, most subscribe to a rather different model of psychic life in which norms require explanation and "deviations" are an inescapable part of sexuality. In our research, we have found only one transsexual who directly addresses the question of the role of fantasy and the unconscious in her life.
38. See Terri Webb, "Autobiographical Fragments from a Transsexual Activist," in Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross Dressing and Sex-Changing, ed. Richard Elkins and Dave King (New York: Routledge, 1996), 190-95.
39. Shepherdson, "The Role of Gender," 161.
40. This theory also means that performing surgery on intersexed persons serves the social requirement for conformity but will not in itself guarantee that the subject's sexed embodiment will "correspond" to the anatomical sex constructed.
41. Joan Copjec, quoted in Shepherdson, "The Role of Gender," 162.
42. Penley, quoted in Shepherdson, "The Role of Gender," ibid., 163.
43. Shepherdson, "The Role of Gender," Ibid., 175.
44. Most of the accounts we have read involve this fantasy at some point or another. We believe the fantasy is often given up after the surgery fails to realize it but that in the process one gains a body and a relationship to sexual difference that the fantasy had precluded. On this issue, we disagree with Shepherdson and Millot, who fear that surgery for this group of transsexuals is necessarily dangerous.
45. This research project consisted of a series of one-on-one interviews conducted by Katrina Roen in 1996. Participants identified themselves as "transsexual" and/or "transgendered" and are referred to pseudonymously. Interviews were conducted in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the course of doctoral research.
46. Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, 103.
47. Indigenous people of Aotearoa.
48. See especially Jim's comments below on having the urge to have a penis to penetrate with, even before he "knew" that boys have penises and girls do not.
49. White person living in Aotearoa.