Phenomenology as method in trans studies

GLQ

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 263-281

  Rubin, Henry S ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646817289     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-4-2-263     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 157.
2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xiv.
3. Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology; and the Idea of Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), xi.
4. Henry Rubin, Transformations: Emergent Female to Male Transsexual Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
5. This research was based on in-depth interviews with eighteen transsexual men from San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Interviews lasted between one and three hours each and were tape-recorded and transcribed. I asked participants to discuss their bodies and their identifications. They produced narratives that proceeded from early childhood to adulthood with special emphasis on the points that helped to organize the conflicts with their bodies, their families, and their communities.
6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities, 1962), xvi-xvii.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 329.
8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 80.
9. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 353.
10. Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), 120.
11. This "natural attitude" about gender that Kessler and McKenna describe and criticize has eight components: (1) there are two and only two genders; (2) gender is invariant across any given lifetime; (3) genitals are the essential sign of gender; (4) exceptions to the first rule are pathologies; (5) there may be no transfers from one gender to another in any lifetime; (6) everyone has a gender; (7) gender is an objective fact; (8) gender is a natural attribute, not a decision.
12. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 207-8.
13. Karen Nakamura, "Suturing the Transsexual Body," unpublished essay.
14. Anne Bolin, "Transcending and Transgendering: Male-to-Female Transsexuals, Dichotomy, and Diversity," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 447-86.
15. Ki Namaste first pointed out these appropriations ("Tragic Misreadings: Queer Theory's Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity," in Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, ed. Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason [New York: New York University Press, 1996], 183-203).
16. She reads Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990),
17. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), for their undercutting of transgender subjectivity and the similarity of queer discourses on transsexualism to psychiatry's failure to grasp transsexual existence.
18. Likewise, Jay Prosser has criticized Judith Halberstam's reading of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues
19. ("No Place Like Home: The Transgendered Narrative of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues," Modern Fiction Studies 41 [1995]: 483-514),
20. I have made my criticisms of queer appropriations explicit in "Trans Studies: Between a Metaphysics of Presence and Absence," in Reclaiming Gender: Essays on Transsexuality/Transgressing Gender at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Stephen Whittle and Kate More (London: Cassell, forthcoming).
21. Matt, interview by author, San Francisco, 5 August 1994.
22. Shadow, interview by author, San Francisco, 29 August 1994.
23. Francis, interview by author, San Francisco, 14 July 1994.