Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement
216
Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478002338 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/06/2019 |
| Series: | ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
CULTURES
Performing Racial Trans Senses
Questions arising on the move, at the borders, in the encounter with the other, and when stranger meets stranger, all tend to intensify around the problem of the other foreigner — someone doubly strange, who doesn't speak or look like the rest of us, being paradoxically at once exotic guest and abhorred enemy. — TRINH T. MINH-HA, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (2011) I refer to disidentification as a hermeneutic, a process of production, and a mode of performance. Disidentification can be understood as a way of shuffling back and forth between reception and production. For the critic, disidentification is the hermeneutical performance of decoding mass, high, or any other cultural field from the perspective of a minority subject who is disempowered in such a representational hierarchy. — JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999)
In her documentary video "Transcending Stonewall" (2011), trans Korean American performance artist Yozmit evokes the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City as the historical event that has made her art and existence possible. Against the increasingly gender, sexually, and racially normalized image of LGBT liberation, Yozmit (who alternates between feminine and masculine pronouns) reclaims this uprising for trans and gender nonconforming people, who continue to struggle with what she describes as the "stonewall inside." Her reclaiming of Stonewall makes it possible to remember the survival- income trans women of color and trans and gender nonconforming people of color, including Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and Stormé DeLarverie, who have been written out of mainstream LGBT histories and whose organizing in the face of societal and state forms of criminalization, eviction, and violence sparked contemporary LGBT movements. Through a street performance just outside the landmark Stonewall Inn, documented by her video, Yozmit brings this submerged history to life through movement, costuming, and documentation.
Although Yozmit's performance documentary re-enlivens the history of Stonewall, it does not try to restore an image of Stonewall that will make the event more visible or transmittable. Her incrementally slow silent walk in outlandish polka-dotted costuming, which covers the entire surface of her body from head and face to toe, disaligns the iconic vision of Stonewall. Yozmit's voiceover description of the performance furthers another obstruction: "Just like our gender, male and female, there's no separation for me … But there's been so much conflict inside me as a human being. And I feel like I finally found harmony within. And without that energy, the fight, and struggle of Stonewall, I couldn't break that stone wall inside me. I think that's the Stonewall of 2011. That energy has transcended into something more harmonious and natural" (2011). If Yozmit's performance interrupts the view of Stonewall, the documentary's description reenergizes Stonewall as energy, fight, and struggle as it withdraws Stonewall from sight to refer to the ongoing struggle with the "stone wall inside," or internal conflict with — and potential transcendence of — the separation between genders. Her antivisual performance and narrative strategies intervene in what Che Gossett has described as the memorializing of Stonewall and other historical sites of queer and transgender resistance through a purging of criminalized racial, gender, and class undesirables that enables the production of a sanitized archive of queer memory (2013). Yozmit withdraws the image of Stonewall from the visible regime of the social world to reconstitute it within an internal world rife with struggle and utopian potential. Far from being apolitical or asocial, her antivisual aesthetics of interiority address, recode, and resist the colonization of embodied sense through racial gender histories of U.S. state and social rule, settlement, captivity, occupation, and containment.
This chapter focuses on the trans aesthetics, cultural imaginings, and political impacts of Asian American visual artists Yozmit, Wu Tsang, and Zavé Martohardjono. These cultural workers use multimedia performance and film/video to stage, disalign, and subvert the naturalized senses of binary cisgender embodiment that enforce the inside/outside boundaries of the white settler American subject, national body, and nation-state. In particular, the piece describes and theorizes the ways in which their performed racially trans embodied practices intervene in U.S. state and social mind-body-sense regimes that have sought to extinguish, surveil, sequester, and control the multiplicity of Asian American genders — and the social and sensual relations this multiplicity engenders. The chapter builds connections between emerging twenty-first century trans Asian American art and activism and more established queer and feminist, especially Asian American queer and feminist, cultural critiques and histories.
Yozmit: Racial Trans Embodiments
Yozmit is a New York – and Los Angeles – based trans migrant Korean performance artist who draws from an eclectic mix of training and practices in costume design, traditional Korean singing (pansori and gayageum byungchang), modern dance, fashion, pop music and culture, corporeal mime (Étienne Decroux technique), Buddhist mythology and meditation, and shamanism. Her performance art brings together these interdisciplinary elements to create a multisensory experience of sound, spatial movement, and visual content that shifts between embodied and disembodied worlds. For Yozmit, who identifies as a trans woman who is both woman and man, feminine and masculine, performance expresses the "divine thing" that is "having both genders" (2011, 2014). If performance is a spatially and temporally bound cultural event that stages a collective encounter with the aesthetics and practices of the quotidian everyday through the body of the performer, Yozmit's performances so often produce an alienation from the performed self and from the live ecology of performance. As exemplified in the Stonewall street performance of Transcending, her bodily acts disrupt the familiar spatial and temporal continuities of seeing, moving, and producing meaning to provoke the body's internal senses. Beyond its confinement to the art event as a discrete moment of meaning-making or "speech acts," Diana Taylor has described performance as "doing," or as living gestures and actions that transmit knowledge, memory, and senses of belonging through repeated and new enactments (2016, 1 – 41). Performance works through and can also rework codified social practices embedded in the body through "imitation, repetition, and internalizing the actions of others" (Taylor 2016, 13). Yozmit uses her body as an expressive medium to transmit an understanding of the body's structuring through gender and the body's potential metamorphosis through gender.
In his live performance at the New Music Seminar's 2012 Opening Gala in New York City, Yozmit appears in a neo-Victorian gold-and-white monochrome dress propped by an enormous mesh skirt. His towering appearance draws us spatially upward and outward in a ritual of witnessing. Much like his Stonewall street performance, Yozmit's ornate costuming and routinized movements provide visual signals while dispelling the drive to see and read. The amorphous flow of his bulb-shaped bonnet and sleeves and the netted enclosure of his skirt invite more of an enfolding of sight where it meets the body than a gaze. Yet, the folds of Yozmit's costumed body also retain the rigid structure of their design so that the dress that absorbs our vision is also an exoskeleton that keeps us on the external surface of the body. Adding to his shrouded appearance, Yozmit chants and sings in an undecipherable language that vaguely resembles Korean, accompanied by electronic beats, streaming color lights, and dancers. This first part of the performance ends when the dancers open his mesh skirt outward into two split screens to reveal him at human scale standing on a platform just above electronica DJ Alek Sandar, who had been spinning music behind/within the mesh skirt. After a costume change behind the screens of the mesh skirt, Yozmit emerges for the second part of his performance, loudly singing the words he had chanted softly and indistinctly earlier —"sound of new pussy"— as the song chorus. Yozmit's staging of the interplay and tension between the surface and depth of the body continue the queer work of denaturalizing heteropatriachal gender/ sex while also highlighting the cisgender structures that continue to bind the materiality of bodily sense to binary essential sex.
The scene of drag performance continues to provide vital queer methods for deconstructing gender as a sign that "naturally" represents or correlates with the assigned sex of the body. In her groundbreaking work on gender performativity, which is situated distinctly from her more current focus on the precarious life of minoritized populations and the performative collective embodiment of political action, Judith Butler relied on drag as a subcultural practice and conceptual metaphor to show the "imitative structure of gender itself — as well as its contingency" (1990, 137; preface; politics of assembly). In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler counters the perception of drag, cross-dressing, and butch/femme identities as imitations of "real" heterosexual masculinity and femininity by arguing that these supposed parodies of gender reveal the nonnatural parodic character of gender itself, which has no original to be copied. Butler draws on drag's particular association with performance to denaturalize the correlation between the sexed body and gender as performance or presentation and also between gender identity and gender performance or presentation:
The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance (1990, 137).
The theatrical artifice attributed to drag as a "performance," especially femme drag, makes visible not only the socially constructed nature of gender but ultimately the production of the Western liberal subject's experience and knowledge of "being" as bodily individuated "felt" substance through the performance of gender. The repetitious acts (movement, gesture, utterances) that perform gender at the liminal external/internal surface of the body generate the imagined internal depth of gender identity and the binary differentiated boundaries of the gendered body unified through the concept of sex. Fusing queer subcultural styles with British speech act philosophy and French feminist psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and poststructuralism, Butler's gender performatives identify gender as an unstable assemblage that includes the surface of gender performance, the interiority of gender identity, and bodily containment unified by sex — produced under the coercion of the dominant social law of binary gendered reproductive heterosexuality.
In Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler further developed her theory of gender performatives through engagement with the racially and ethnically constituted gender performances and kinship systems of the Black and Latinx queer, trans, and gender nonconforming Harlem ballroom competitions documented in the film Paris Is Burning (1990), directed by Jennie Livingston. "Realness" in the film's ballroom culture, which is the main standard by which competitions are judged based on contestants' ability to authentically present as "real" heterosexual women and men across high/low socioeconomic classes in white and Black social contexts, provides Butler with a culturally specified description of the ambivalent structure of gender (as drag performance), established by a heterosexual discursive regime that enforces the reproduction of binary gender norms as real and natural while also producing gender's potential excess through parody, failure, recoding, and subversion. In particular, Butler reads Venus Xtravaganza, celebrated Puerto Rican trans "femme realness queen" in the balls, daughter in the House of Xtravaganza, and survival-income sex worker — and her murder — as illustrating the limitations of parody and the totality of discursive gender norms: "Venus, and Paris Is Burning more generally, calls into question whether parodying the dominant norms is enough to displace them; indeed, whether the denaturalization of gender cannot be the very vehicle for reconsolidation of hegemonic norms."
Despite her attention to some of the power differentials between the cisgay men in drag and Venus in the film's ballroom circuit and her strong critique of the gender laws that result in Venus's death, Butler treats Venus's trans desire to feel complete in her womanhood, which Venus also associates (sometimes hyperbolically) with the safety and comfort of being able to have a car, a man she loves, and a nice home, as a "tragic misreading of the social map of power" and "fatally unsubversive appropriation" (Butler 1993, 128, 131; Livingston 1990). In sync with the documentary's style of contrasting the imaginative desires of drag "realness" in the balls with narrated critical knowledge of the realities of the street for the ball's cisgay men, while emphasizing the nondifference between imaginative desire and the longing to be real according to dominant reality's gender standards for the ball's trans women (with Venus and Octavia Saint Laurent speaking to us much of the time from their private bedrooms), Butler reads Venus and her death as showing not only the symbolic rigidity and power of gender norms but also the (uncritical) incorporation and repetition of the gender norms that have dispossessed her — as pure imitation. Yet, can we understand Venus's murder not so much as socially enacted punishment for her failure (and desire) to make her body — her "remaining organs" — compliant with symbolic norms but rather as punishment for daring to exist at all as the woman she already was and would have continued to be if she had lived (with or without bottom surgery) — a woman differentially constituted by a transiting of racial gender that barred her from being "real" (Butler 1993, 131)?
As a trans artist who often performs in drag venues, Yozmit's performances play with the differences and connections between drag as a queer subcultural practice that makes the social imposition of gender and sex visible through gender expression; transgender as an internal gender identification, disaligned with the gender assigned at birth, that may or may not be visible as or aligned with gender expression; and transsexual, a term that has not been politically repurposed (such as queer or transgender) while it continues to be used to describe those who undergo medically assisted hormonal and/or surgical gender transition away from gender assigned at birth, either as a subcategory of or distinguished from transgender. Yozmit's enclosed bodice, mesh screened skirt, and encoded chanting at the New Music Seminar stage femmeness as a surface with the promise of revealing the real (correlating or noncorrelating) gender and sex within and underneath. This suspended movement between gender as surface and depth is not resolved when Yozmit opens up her screened skirts. In part two of her performance, Yozmit appears from behind her skirts, stripped down to a bare Gothic-style gold metallic dress that exaggerates her breasts. She has a handheld screen strapped to her pelvis. Singing "sound of new pussy" mixed with familiar yet alien tones that mimic language, she strips away pieces of her dress, as if taking off metal armor, to reveal a sequin black dress. The blank screen between her legs begins to flash a pair of red lips as Yozmit dances out the rest of the song to DJ Sandar's electronic beats. By keeping viewers at the threshold between surface and depth, Yozmit's performance calls attention to the cisheterosexual discursive order of vision and desire that establishes differential social value between cismasculinity and cisfeminity by reading gender presentation as a binary sign for gender interiority and bodily essence in sex. Each stripping away of the femme surface only reveals another femme surface that suggests depth and substance.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Racial Trans Technologies 1
1. Cultures: Performing Racial Trans Senses 30
2. Networks: TRANScoding Biogenetics and Orgasm in the Transnational Digital Economy 59
3. Memory: The Times and Territories of Trans Women of Color Becoming 75
4. Movement: Trans and Gender Nonconforming Digital Activisms and U.S. Transnational Empire 101
Conclusion. Trans Voice in the House 135
Notes 149
References 157
Index 173
What People are Saying About This
“Jian Neo Chen's book Trans Exploits is essential because it centers and uplifts trans people of color. This work is critical because it highlights the contributions and impact of trans people of color and their influence in shaping our culture, politics, and movement.”
"In Trans Exploits, Jian Neo Chen focuses on the foundational and ongoing racial displacement of trans people of color from systems of white supremacy, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and white trans communities. Through conversations with a diverse range of artists and activists, Chen explores a rich series of cases in which trans people of color use digital media to create new expressive spaces and comment upon their displacement. This book will be important for a wide range of fields, including cinema and media studies and trans of color critique. ”
“Jian Neo Chen's book Trans Exploits is essential because it centers and uplifts trans people of color. This work is critical because it highlights the contributions and impact of trans people of color and their influence in shaping our culture, politics, and movement.”