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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520292697 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2018 |
| Series: | American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present , #3 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 184 |
| Sales rank: | 849,671 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Trans*
What's in a Name?
Whatever is not normative is many.
Eileen Myles, quoted in Ariel Levy, "Dolls and Feelings" (2015)
Over the course of my lifetime I have called myself or been called a variety of names: queer, lesbian, dyke, butch, transgender, stone, and transgender butch, just for starters. Indeed, one day when I was walking along the street with a butch friend, we were called faggots! If I had know the term "transgender" when I was a teenager in the 1970s, I'm sure I would have grabbed hold of it like a life jacket on rough seas, but there were no such words in my world. Changing sex for me and for many people my age was a fantasy, a dream, and because it had nothing to do with our realities, we had to work around this impossibility and create a home for ourselves in bodies that were not comfortable or right in terms of who we understood ourselves to be. The term "wrong body" was used often in the 1980s, even becoming the name of a BBC show about transsexuality, and offensive as the term might sound now, it at least harbored an explanation for how cross-gendered people might experience embodiment: I, at least, felt as if I was in the wrong body, and there seemed to be no way out.
Today, young people who cross-identify are able to imagine themselves into other bodies, bodies that feel more true to who they are. And as times change, as medical technologies shift and develop, we also struggle to name the new "right-ish" bodies that emerge while continuing to work around the "wrong" bodies that remain. This chapter sifts through the changing protocols and rubrics for bodily identification over the past hundred years and asks, simply, what is in a name?
*
Many a great novel begins with a name or identification of some sort — "Call me Ishmael." Or, "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip." But also, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect." And of course, "I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate — at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement." Names establish character, lead into events, and create expectations. To be sure, there are also novels that begin in the absence of names: "I am an invisible man" and "Where now? Who now? When now?" These non-naming flourishes challenge the idea of character and raise questions about the ability of naming to capture all the nuances of human identification. Indeed, one of the most lovable children's cartoons of all time, Finding Nemo, features a friendship between a clownfish, Nemo, whose name means "nobody" in Latin, and a blue fish, Dory, who can barely remember her own name from one moment to the next. The confusion that both Nemo and Dory sow leads not to a cozy lesson about who we "really" are but in fact makes the argument for learning to be part of a group, in part by challenging "proper" names. I offer these examples to make sense of the powerful nature of naming — claiming a name or refusing to and thus remaining unnameable. Indeed, this book uses the term "trans*," which I will explain shortly, specifically because it holds open the meaning of the term "trans" and refuses to deliver certainty through the act of naming.
In a contemporary context, it is hard to imagine what it may have felt like to lack a name for one's sense of self. But only a few decades ago, transsexuals in Europe and the United States did not feel that there was a language to describe who they were or what they needed. Christine Jorgensen, heralded by historian Joanne Meyerowitz and others as "America's first transgender celebrity," wrote a letter to her parents in the 1950s telling them that in her "nature made a mistake." And in Radclyffe Hall's infamous novel about inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928), the female-born protagonist, who calls herself Stephen, anguishes about her identity. Her governess, also an invert, tells her in a magnificent speech,
You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet — you've not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don't shrink from yourself, but face yourself calmly and bravely. Have courage; do the best you can with your burden. But above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind. Let your life go to prove this — it would be a really great life-work, Stephen.
Hall used the term "misfit" for herself and called her hero, Stephen, an outlaw as well as an outcast and an invert, the word used in the early twentieth century in Europe and the United States to describe people in whom gender identity and sexual instincts have been turned around, such that a female-bodied person desiring another woman would be considered a male soul trapped in a female body and a malebodied person harboring same-sex desires would be seen as a female soul trapped in a male body. The term "inversion" has a certain explanatory power in The Well of Loneliness, but only in that it names a disastrous betrayal of some putatively natural femininity. Until the middle of the last century, countless transgender men and women fell between the cracks of the classifications systems designed to explain their plight and found themselves stranded in unnameable realms of embodiment. Today we have an abundance of names for who we are and some people actively desire that space of the unnamable again. This book explains how we came to be trans* and why having a name for oneself can be as damaging as lacking one.
Naming, needless to say, is a powerful activity and one that has been embedded in modern productions of expertise and knowledge production. I have selected the term "trans*" for this book precisely to open the term up to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. As this book will show, trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix. This terminology, trans*, stands at odds with the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions.
The mania for the godlike function of naming began, unsurprisingly, with colonial exploration. As anyone who has visited botanical or zoological gardens knows, the collection, classification, and analysis of the world's flora and fauna has gone hand in hand with various forms of colonial expansion and enterprise. The seemingly rational and scientific project of collecting plant specimens from around the world and replanting them at home masks conquest with taxonomy, invasion with progress, and occupation with cultivation. But naming drifted quickly in the nineteenth century from plant life to human life; as many historians of sexuality have detailed, the terms that we now use to describe and explain gender and sexual variation were introduced into the language between 1869 and the first decade of the twentieth century.
Many theorists and historians have noted the way that expertise became a major component of early-industrialized societies. As large, complex social groups emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, having moved from agrarian to urban settings and from farm work to factory work, the systems of knowledge that tried to keep up with massive social changes produced experts in every field. There were time management experts who studied how to extract labor from bodies and machines as efficiently as possible. Criminal anthropologists such as Cesare Lombroso measured heads and hands to argue that there were body types given over to crime and violence. The differences between men and women were codified and formalized in relation both to certain types of work for working-class women and to the household division into separate spheres for bourgeois women. Ideas of racial identity that had long been deployed within colonialism in order to justify brutal forms of rule now became a part of the logic of governance and racial difference, and racial categories, in turn, fed into the new understandings of gender and sexuality that were circulating courtesy of doctors, medical researchers, and the new discipline of psychoanalysis. Having language for certain modes of desire had an enormous impact on how people lived, loved, and hid or exposed themselves. All of these efforts to classify human behavior emerged out of and contributed to ongoing racial projects that held apart white populations from populations of color; these "scientific" distinctions between normal and abnormal bodies lent support to white supremacist projects that tried to collapse racial otherness into gender variance and sexual perversion.
When it came to gender and sexuality, few eras were as turbulent as the 1890s and the early decades of the twentieth century. And while today Facebook famously offers you fifty-one ways of identifying yourself on their site, a hundred years ago those categories were under rapid construction using the raw materials of accelerated urbanization, diverse populations in small and dense areas, and intensification of the desire to classify, know, and define. So, rather than a great leap forward, our current profusion of classificatory options actually harks back to the early days of sexology, when doctors like Richard von Krafft-Ebing produced new, expert knowledge on human sexual and gendered behavior. In 1886, Krafft-Ebing circulated a huge compendium of what he called the "contrary sexual instinct," and in the table of contents readers could find discussions on a multitude of erotic states, from "Anthropophagy" to "Whipping of Boys," "Necrophilia" to "Larvated Masochism." For Krafft-Ebing (writing before Freud had codified sexual instincts in relation to fixed orientations), the task was to document exhaustively the variety of forms within which the sexual instinct could be expressed. Of less interest to Krafft-Ebing was the articulation of a streamlined system opposing male to female and homo- to heterosexuality. Krafft-Ebing's work on gender and sexuality emerged at a time when Europe was engaged in a large-scale imperial orientation toward classification, collection, and expertise. Our current investments in the naming of all specificities of bodily form, gender permutations, and desire emerge from this period.
This project of exhaustive classification, a nineteenth-century practice that, as I have said, extended from botany to early anthropology to sexology, gave way in the twentieth century to the framing of the sexual and gendered body in relation to orientation, norms, and identity. Freud pushed back on nineteenth-century notions of an external frame that makes explicit the internal secrets of the body (this was at least one of the themes of criminal anthropology expressed by Lombroso and others) and argued for attention to the irrational, the unconscious, and the orientation of desire. Michael Foucault, in turn, refused the notion of an empirically verifiable set of orientations and argued that psychoanalysis produced the very concepts of bodily identity that it claimed to discover; and, he added, the production of the gendered and sexual body was co-orchestrated by the subject, who regulated himself in relation to social norms. The fiction of a gendered and sexual identity, Foucault proposed, took hold and became the reigning narrative of being in late twentieth-century life.
Our current vocabularies combine an assortment of medical and vernacular terms — the medical terminology was produced in the last century and the vernacular terms have evolved alongside it as corrections, modifications, and, often, outright refusals. And so, we still occasionally use the medical word "homosexual" for same-sex desire, but more often we say "gay" or "lesbian"; we do use the term "transsexual" more often than "homosexual," but that is because transsexuals still are tethered in some way to medical technologies and services because they/we desire surgeries and hormones. And the term "transgender" has emerged in recent years as a way of collecting the many lived forms of transsexuality that include no-op transsexuals, no-hormones transsexuals, and others. The power of naming that has fallen to doctors and psychologists, social workers and academics, commands the authority of scientific inquiry and joins it to a system of knowledge that invests heavily in the idea that experts describe rather than invent. However, as we know from watching the slow implosion of seemingly "natural" systems from one hundred years ago, naming fixes bodies in time and space and in relation to favored social narratives of difference.
The terms homosexual/heterosexual and transsexual as well as other markers like man/woman, masculine/feminine, whiteness/blackness/brownness, are all historically variable terms, untethered in fixed or for that matter natural or inevitable ways to bodies and populations. While homosexuality tells at the same time the history of heterosexuality, and while women's histories are all too often absorbed by men's histories, transhirstory is a story waiting to be told. In an amusing commentary on this lost history, transgender artist Chris Vargas has created a Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA: www.chrisevargas.com/motha/). This imaginary institution has the goal of "bringing a cohesive visual history of transgender culture into existence," using a framework that is deliberately perpetually "under construction." In this way, Vargas asks what it would mean to build a set of interlocking histories around people who regularly and sometimes deliberately fall out of the historical record.
"Words change depending upon who speaks them; there is no cure," writes Maggie Nelson in a more poetic intervention into this current confusion over gender-variant language. "The answer is not just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly." Seeing language in this way, as a shifting ecosystem within which words might fly, fall, or fail to convey their message, but also one within which words might hover over the multiplicity to which they point, relieves us of the mundane task of simply getting the name right.
We would do well to heed this lyrical warning against looking to stabilize fluctuations in meaning. If we seek to find in language an exhaustive catalogue of all human forms, we might stray into the kind of artificial production of multiplicity that informs the fifty-one ways to be a body offered us by Facebook. What do these terminologies represent in terms of the creation and collapse of contemporary systems of sex/gender definition? One of the first terms mentioned on Facebook is a relatively new one that signifies a person's exclusion from or rejection of gender categories: "agendered." An agendered person might be androgynous, gender fluid, gender neutral. The concept of being without a gender, however, is whimsical at best, since there are few ways to interact with other human beings without being identified with some kind of gendered embodiment. The concept of "agender," then, names a wish to be outside of gender norms, rather than the real experience of being so. Indeed, while liberal democracies cleave to the idea of gender neutrality or race blindness, it is very clear in these societies that historically situated differences are extremely important to name, study, recognize, and account for, if only because they provide histories of legally sustained hate and antipathy.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Trans*"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jack Halberstam.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Overview Preface 1. Trans*: What’s in a Name? 2. Making Trans* Bodies 3. Becoming Trans* 4. Trans* Generations 5. Trans* Representations 6. Trans* Feminisms Conclusions Acknowledgments Notes On Pronouns Works CitedRelated Subjects
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