Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?

Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender? Susan Stryker Paisley Currah Lisa Jean Moore WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 36, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2008, pp. 11-22 (Article) Published by The Feminist Press DOI: 10.1353/wsq.0.0112 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wsq/summary/v036/36.3-4.stryker.html Access Provided by SUNY College @ Purchase at 11/03/11 11:55AM GMT INTRODUCTION: TRANS-, TRANS, OR TRANSGENDER? SUSAN STRYKER, PAISLEY CURRAH, AND LISA JEAN MOORE The title that appears on the cover of this journal is Trans-, not Trans, and not Transgender. A little hyphen is perhaps too flimsy a thing to carry as much conceptual freight as we intend for it bear, but we think the hyphen matters a great deal, precisely because it marks the difference between the implied nominalism of “trans” and the explicit relationality of “trans-,” which remains open-ended and resists premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix. Our call for papers read: “Trans: -gender, -national, -racial, -generational, -genic, -species. The list could (and does) go on. This special issue of WSQ invites feminist work that explores categorical crossings, leakages, and slips of all sorts, around and through the concept ‘trans-’.” While gender certainly—perhaps inevitably—remains a primary analytical category for the work we sought to publish in this feminist scholarly journal, our aim in curating this special issue specifically was not to identify, consolidate, or stabilize a category or class of people, things, or phenomena that could be denominated “trans,” as if certain concrete somethings could be characterized as “crossers,” while everything else could be characterized by boundedness and fixity. It seemed especially important to insist upon this point when addressing transgender phenomena. Since the early 1990s, a burgeoning body of scholarly work in the new field of transgender studies has linked insights and analyses drawn from the experience or study of phenomena that disrupt or unsettle the conventional boundaries of gender with the central disciplinary concerns of contemporary humanities and social science research. In seeking to promote cutting-edge feminist work that builds on existing transgenderoriented scholarship to articulate new generational and analytical perspectives, we didn’t want to perpetuate a minoritizing or ghettoizing use of “transgender” to delimit and contain the relationship of “trans-” conceptual operations to “-gender” statuses and practices in a way that rendered them the exclusive property of a tiny class of marginalized individuals. [WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2008)] © 2008 by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, & Lise Jean Moore. All rights reserved. 12 ■ INTRODUCTION Precisely because we believe some vital and more generally relevant critical/political questions are compacted within the theoretical articulations and lived social realities of “transgender” embodiments, subjectivities, and communities, we felt that the time was ripe for bursting “transgender” wide open, and linking the questions of space and movement that that term implies to other critical crossings of categorical territories. This issue of WSQ centrally address the challenges presented to traditional feminist scholarship by the transgender sociopolitical movement of the past two decades, but it aims to resist applications of “trans” as a gender category that is necessarily distinct from more established categories such as “woman” or “man.” Rather than seeing genders as classes or categories that by definition contain only one kind of thing (which raises unavoidable questions about the masked rules and normativities that constitute qualifications for categorical membership), we understand genders as potentially porous and permeable spatial territories (arguable numbering more than two), each capable of supporting rich and rapidly proliferating ecologies of embodied difference. Our goal is to take feminist scholarship in expansive new directions by articulating the interrelatedness and mutual inextricability of various “trans-” phenomena. Any gender-defined space is not only populated with diverse forms of gendered embodiment, but striated and crosshatched by the boundaries of significant forms of difference other than gender, within all of which gender is necessarily implicated. To suggest a few examples: do transgender phenomena not show us that “woman” can function as social space that can be populated, without loss of definitional coherence, not only by people born with a typical female anatomy and reared as girls who identify as women, but also by people reared as girls who identify as women but who have physical intersex conditions, or by people who were born with a typical male anatomy but who selfidentify as women and take all possible steps to live their lives that way, or by people born female who express conventionally masculine social behaviors but who don’t think of themselves as or want to be men? Do transgender phenomena not show us that some who unproblematically occupy the space of social manhood have vaginas rather than penises, or that some men can choose to wear dresses without surrendering their social identities as men? Likewise, does not a working-class woman who makes her living through manual labor cross boundaries of middle-class feminine respectability because of the dirt under her nails? Hasn’t Hillary STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE ■ Clinton been called mannish because she is politically powerful? Didn’t white men denying black men the vote through Jim Crow legislation in the years before female suffrage assign black men the same citizenship status as that given to white women? In all of these examples, “transgendered” bodies occupy the same gender-spaces as nontransgendered ones, and transgender characteristics can be attributed, as a form of disciplining, to bodies that might not subjectively identify as being transgendered. A fundamental aspect of our editorial vision for this special issue of WSQ is that neither “-gender” nor any of the other suffixes of “trans-” can be understood in isolation—that the lines implied by the very concept of “trans-” are moving targets, simultaneously composed of multiple determinants. “Transing,” in short, is a practice that takes place within, as well as across or between, gendered spaces. It is a practice that assembles gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, and that allows for their reassembly. Transing can function as a disciplinary tool when the stigma associated with the lack or loss of gender status threatens social unintelligibility, coercive normalization, or even bodily extermination. It can also function as an escape vector, line of flight, or pathway toward liberation. A fundamental question we would like to pose is: What kinds of intellectual labor can we begin to perform through the critical deployment of “trans-” operations and movements? Those of us schooled in the humanities and social sciences have become familiar, over the past twenty years or so, with queering things; how might we likewise begin to critically trans- our world? In her recent Queer Phenomenology, Sarah Ahmed asks her readers to pay attention to the spatial dimensions of the term “orientation,” reminding them that orientation fundamentally pertains to the relationship between bodies and space, and that many terms related to sexuality— straight, bent, deviate, perverse, and so on—describe patterns of bodily movements through, and occupations of, space. In a similar spirit, we invite our readers to recognize that “trans-” likewise names the body’s orientation in space and time; we ask them to reorient themselves toward transgender phenomena, and to begin imagining these phenomena according to different spatio-temporal metaphors. It’s common, for example, to think of the “trans-” in “transgender” as moving horizontally between two established gendered spaces, “man” and “woman,” or as a spectrum, or archipeligo, that occupies the space between the two. (We ourselves began this introduction with precisely these spatial meta- 13 14 ■ INTRODUCTION phors.) But what if we think instead of “trans-” along a vertical axis, one that moves between the concrete biomateriality of individual living bodies and the biopolitical realm of aggregate populations that serve as resource for sovereign power? What if we conceptualize gender not as an established territory but rather as a set of practices through which a potential biopower is cultivated, harnessed, and transformed, or by means of which a certain kind of labor or utility extracted? “Trans-” thus becomes the capillary space of connection and circulation between the macro- and micro-political registers through which the lives of bodies become enmeshed in the lives of nations, states, and capital-formations, while “-gender” becomes one of several set of variable techniques or temporal practices (such as race or class) through which bodies are made to live. What counterdominant work might we accomplish by putting “trans-” in the place that Foucault assigned to sexuality in the “The Right of Death and Power Over Life” at the end of volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, making it our name for the space of passing between the “anatamo-political” corporal techniques of subjective individualization and the bio-political management and regulation of populations? What might be gained, in other words, by regarding “trans-,” rather than gender, as the stable location where current forms of capital and sovereign power seek to reproduce themselves through our bodies, and where we—if we can or if we must—might begin to enact and materialize new social ontologies? How might we begin transing these two perspectives on transgender, dancing back and forth between the temporality of “trans-” and the spatiality of “–gender,” and the spatiality of “trans-” and the temporality of “–gender”? How might we move between the necessary places of identity where we plant our feet and the simultaneous imperative to resist those ways in which identities become the vectors through which we are taken up by projects not of our own making? How might we begin to link “trans-” to other suffixes that target bodily zones or functions other than those addressed by “–gender”, and thus begin to articulate what might be called a general “somatechics,” or analytics of embodied difference? The movement between territorializing and deterritorializing “trans-” and its suffixes, we want to suggest, as well as the movements between temporalizing and spatializing them, is an improvisational, creative, and essentially poetic practice through which radically new possibilities for being in the world can start to emerge. As part of the making-real of the STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE ■ trans-movements we envision, we have assembled in this special issue of WSQ work we consider to be “doubly trans-” in some important sense— work that situates “trans-” in relation to transgender yet moves beyond the narrow politics of gender identity. Afsaneh Najmabadi opens this issue with an original, empirically grounded analysis of transsexuality within the Islamic Republic of Iran. She pays particular attention to the ways in which Eurocentric medical discourses and identity categories mean differently in Iranian contexts, and she offers a sophisticated reading of the ways in which state sanction of sex-reassignment surgeries not only provides material benefits for many transsexuals, but can also create safer social spaces for nontransgendered homosexual men and women. Her careful scholarship on this point is a welcome corrective to the increasingly frequent and rhetorically powerful deployment in the West of the figure of “the Iranian transsexual” to demonstrate the “backwardness” of Islam in relation to Eurocentric narratives of political progress and personal liberation. At an historical moment when the United States seems poised for war with Iran, the vital transnational and cross-cultural perspective on Iranian transgender sociocultural formations found in Najmabadi’s work helps counter the veiled Islamophobia which can be found even in “progressive” EuroAmerican queer and feminist discourses. If the case of transsexuality in Iran demonstrates that seemingly identical practices of bodily transformation can perform quite different kinds of work in different national contexts, Elizabeth Loeb’s article on bodily integrity, identity disorders, and the sovereign stakes of corporeal desire within U.S. law helps show how seemingly dissimilar practices can in fact function as different instantiations of the same enabling logic of power. Loeb grapples with the relationship between bodily integrity and sovereign power from the perspective of “Wannabes,” a term self-applied by some individuals who seek to amputate “healthy” limbs. Loeb notes how Wannabes increasingly frame their arguments for redefining their own sense of corporeal integrity by making reference to transsexual practice, essentially asserting that if it’s acceptable for transsexuals to cut off some body parts, it should be acceptable for them to cut off other parts. She demonstrates how “Gender Identity Disorder,” the disciplinary metric that legitimates gender reassignment surgeries, has been deployed to justify the creation of “Body Identity Integrity Disorder,” a new pathologiz- 15 16 ■ INTRODUCTION ing designation through which Wannabes hope to decriminalize and legitimate the medical practice of self-demand limb amputation. In investigating the current criminalization of this consensual surgery, performed in circumstances no different from those of elective cosmetic surgeries, Loeb not only documents the legal construction of Wannabe amputee desire or practice as an incursion on state sovereignty, but also argues that “identity disorder” is itself a pervasively deployed strategy of biopolitical management within neoliberal organizations of sovereign power. In her meditations on the Antony and the Johnsons’s song “The Cripple and the Starfish,” in which the singer equates the act of loving with the act of cutting off a finger that can “grow back like a starfish,” Eva Hayward addresses, from an strikingly different angle of approach, the question of amputation raised by Loeb. Hayward, who uses her own transsexuality autoethnographically in the articulation of her argument, disavows the assumption of loss and lack implied by the concept off “cutting off.” She refuses to be haunted by a nostalgia for an imagined wholeness that has been surgically diminished and, rather, understands that her surface been refolded and differently spatialized. Hayward suggests productive links and lines of thinking between transgender discourses and disability studies in an effort to show how multiple forms of bodily difference or atypicality can be nonhierarchically related to one another. She also brings a critical science studies perspective on nonhuman animal embodiment to the same question, asking what transspecies lessons could be learned from the regenerative potential of starfish limbs. Natalie Corinne Hansen similarly takes up the question of transgender and transspecies relationality in her excellent close reading of a short first-person narrative by Ken in Dean Kotula’s transgender anthology, The Phallus Palace. Hansen directs her attention to the reliance of Ken’s narrative, which works to authenticate his hormonal transition from female to man, on the concept of gender’s biological determination, as well as on a belief in the human dominance over other animals. Hansen argues that Ken’s transition-narrative depends on assigning limited agency to animals, while reinforcing binary systems of gender oppression. But her analysis of Ken’s stake in his story, and her critique of reductionist views of humananimal relationships, are not the sole contributions of this essay. Hansen also asks how one might construct gendered identities across species boundaries without falling into the trap of biological determinism. In yet another account of biology that confounds the presumed STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE ■ dichotomy of sex difference, Aaron Norton and Ozzie Zehner discuss “tetragametic chimerism,” the creation of organisms with intermingled cell lines. Noting that “chimeras” are also mythical monsters described in Western literature as long ago as the eighth century B.C.E. Norton and Zehner refract this cultural construct through the lens of trans-genomic science to interrogate the multiple narratives that converge in the lives of two mothers, both tetragametic chimeras, in order to explore the role of genetic technologies in the cultural production of motherhood. In so doing the authors show how sciences of life are also cultural practice. Their analysis of chimerism is in dialogue with an eclectic range of critical concepts, including Haraway’s cyborg, Butler’s gender performativity, and Strathern’s notions of kinship. Norton and Zehner argue that chimerism is a trans-phenomena that has the potential to radically alter our beliefs about embodiment, kinship, and motherhood. Lucas Crawford’s essay on “transgender without organs” offers an explicitly Deleuzian approach to “trans-” questions of many sorts. At the level of concrete description, the essay uses Crawford’s experiences growing up in small-town Nova Scotia to critique the urban biases of transgender theorizing and to demonstrate the geographical specificity of various techniques and modalities of gender transitioning. At a higher level of theorization, however, Crawford launches a brilliant account of the interrelationship between embodiment, geographical location, spatial movement, and affective experience. Drawing the same distinction between “affect” (that which moves us) and “feeling” (that which holds us in place) that Deleuze and Guattari make in A Thousand Plateaus, Crawford critically interrogates the most familiar trope of transgender experience, “feeling trapped in the wrong body.” In doing so, he links the practice of materializing a transgender embodiment with critical practices of deterritorialization that always point toward the horizon of new possibilities, rather than with the sentimentality of “going home.” Like Crawford, Marcia Ochoa examines the relationship between transgendering and specificity of place, in ways that resonate with the state- and sovereignty-oriented analytical frameworks of both Najmabadi and Loeb. Through her punning neologism “loca-lization,” Ochoa explores the complex processes in Venezuela through which transformistas (individuals assigned male at birth who “present themselves in their everyday lives as women”) are produced as marginal to citizenship and excluded from the political imaginary. Her essay examines the concepts 17 18 ■ INTRODUCTION of citizenship and civil society not by analyzing the political theory of participatory democracy, or by collecting empirical data on NGOs, but rather by foregrounding the exclusion of certain citizens she calls locas. The loca makes sense only within the complex, mutually constitutive “processes of modernity, nation and globalization” that assemble uniquely at any given geospatial location. Her ethnographic research in Venezuela recounts how locas/transformistas pervert and rearticulate the “modern project of disciplining nature” via their micropolitical bodily practices. In doing so, their interventions (re)create the affective, aesthetic, and structural projects of citizenship. The excluded bodies of the locas described by Ochoa find their counterpart in Clare Sear’s concept of the “problem body,” which Sears develops as a more generalized form of Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla’s notion of the “deviant body.” By juxtaposing freak show displays of gender nonconformists in nineteenth-century San Francisco with the regulation and production of normatively gendered bodies in public space, Sears launches a broader discussion of how certain kinds of bodies (such as the bodies of racialized others, of the “maimed” or “crippled,” as well as nonnormatively gendered bodies) become targets of certain state-sanctioned operations—including, but not limited to, the operation of exclusion from civic life. And as was the case with Ochoa’s locas, Sears’s problem bodies can likewise become the site of contestatory practices that challenge the state’s organization and control of the territory it occupies. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes takes the notion of the loca in yet another direction. In his hands, transloca becomes an “enabling vernacular critical term that accounts for the intersection of space (geography) and sexuality in the work and lived experience of queer diasporic artists who engage in male-to-female drag.” The centerpiece of La Fountain-Stokes’s article is a reading (performative in itself) of Jorge Merced’s performance of Ramos Otero’s story “Loca de la locura,” in El Bolero, as that of a transloca. For La Fountain-Stokes, “trans-” mediates and conjoins the translocal and the transgender. In this sense, he contends, “trans-” does not necessary connote “unstable, or in between, or in the middle of things, but rather…the core of transformation—change, the power or ability to mold, reorganize, reconstruct, construct—and of longitude: the transcontinental, transatlantic, but also transversal.” Shifting the national and political focus of the volume back toward Western Asia, Rustem Ertug Altinay offers a critical biography of Bulent STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE ■ Ersoy, a popular performer of Ottoman classical music in present-day Turkey, who happens to be transsexual. Altinay shows how multiple cultural and social institutions construct an identity for Bulent Ersoy that is suitable for public consumption, weaving between knowledge of her life prior to transitioning as well as her current life. Ersoy’s public persona engages with contemporary meanings of being Muslim, and being upperclass, as well as being transsexual. Altinay recounts how, in the process of her transition, Ersoy’s persona progressively challenged codes of masculinity through the medium of music. He then contrasts this deployment/ contestation of masculinity with the exaggeratedly Muslim, and exaggeratedly upper-class and feminine, presentation of self that has enabled Ersoy to survive and thrive under highly disciplinary codes of gendered behavior and appearance. Robin Bauer writes of his sociological participation/observation in BDSM communities in Western Europe and the United States, and interviews with fifty other members of these communities. Bauer defines BDSM as a broad range of embodied practices that may or may not include bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism. Treating these informants as experts on their own phenomenologically experienced, socially situated, and materially embodied lives, Bauer interrogates their expertise to establish BDSM as a venue in which individuals transgress social taboos, including gender strictures, often with erotic effects. He argues that these communities have a highly attenuated and deeply embodied understanding of nonheteronormative gender identities that enable productive transformation within the context of safe erotic playgrounds. Such BDSM experiences have the potential to transform human relationships and social power in the social worlds beyond the safe spaces of BDSM play. Hala Kamal’s contribution, “Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic,” positions “trans-” as a problem of translation. In this piece, Kamal examines the politics and processes of translating the word “gender” from English to Arabic. “Trans-gender” in this contribution’s iteration is not about individual gender transitivity, but rather about the attempt to migrate the concept of “gender” across linguistic and cultural barriers. Kamal, a member of the Women and Memory Forum, the group that translated the encyclopedia, was charged with the task of translating “gender.” The impossibility of the attempt to make “gender” legible in Arabic, with all the English specificities and connotations valued by the 19 20 ■ INTRODUCTION translator—socially constructed and feminist, among others—and finding or creating a term that would work with Arabic language grammatical rules was revealed by the author’s ultimate choice: a transliteration, aljender. Most issues of WSQ have a section that revisits a “feminist classic,” whether it be poetry or prose, fiction or visual pieces. For the Transissue, we present C. L. Cole and Shannon L. C. Cate’s meditations on Adrienne Rich’s landmark 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Although Rich’s crucial intervention has faded into the distance in many feminist and queer studies landscapes, Cole and Cate remind us of the importance of its theoretical operations, such as denaturalizing heterosexuality and viewing the lesbian continuum as “a strategic mechanism for generating politically viable identities and alliances.” They suggest that Rich’s thought should not be seen as occupying only one end of several related binaries: essentialist not constructionist, second wave rather than next wave, feminist in opposition to queer. Instead, in their incisive commentary, they show how Rich’s critical frameworks can be transposed to imagine a “transgender continuum on which socalled male-born men and female-born women can find themselves building political connections with those whose gender is more obviously outside society’s narrow ‘frame’ of the normal.” The call for papers for the Trans- issue garnered a number of responses from individuals interested in questions of pedagogy. Rather than selecting just one author to write a full-length article, we chose a format that would spark dialogue and debate among a number of individuals, writing from a range of perspectives. Vic Muñoz and Ednie Kaeh Garrison agreed to curate a “textual conversation” on “TransPedagogies.” The questions participants wrangled with are too numerous to completely inventory here, but to provide some sense of the range and depth, a few of them are: How does the concept of “gender identity” fail to describe the dialogical processes through which gender is constituted? How does trans-disciplinarity in the academy contest the boundaries between researchers and participants, and how might it be analogized to transgendering? How does the presence of “trans-” students in the classroom change how gender is taught? What should women’s colleges do when they admit female students who subsequently come out as “trans-”? WSQ regularly includes a section called “Alerts and Provocations,” STRYKER, CURRAH, & MOORE ■ whose purpose is to focus readers’ attention on matters of topical interest or timely political significance. In this issue, Paisley Currah’s contribution, “Expecting Bodies: The Pregnant Man and Transgender Exclusion from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” highlights the issue of trans/sexed bodies in public policy contexts. He uses the media sensation of the “pregnant man” as a tease for readers, and then situates that incident in a larger analysis of legal constructions of “unexpectedly sexed” bodies. He shows how the particular gender logics framing the public response to the pregnant man also governed the decision by the Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives to cut “gender identity” from a bill that would ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. Finally, the content we have described above is interspersed with images, poetry, creative prose, and book reviews, all selected because of their potential thematic connections to “trans-.” We won’t attempt to render those interjections into the thumbnail sketches that define the particular academic form known as the “introduction to the special issue,” but we do invite readers to approach those selections both as stand-alone pieces with their own (in-transitive) integrity, and as fragments whose migrations into this special issue bring new, unanticipated meanings to “trans-.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank WSQ’s outgoing general editors, Cindi Katz and Nancy Miller, for the original invitation to curate this special issue; WSQ’s new general editors, Victoria Pitts-Taylor and Talia Schaffer, for their work shepherding the project to completion; WSQ editorial associates Jess Bier and Stacie McCormick, for their conscientious labor on this issue; fiction/visual images editor Susan Daitch and poetry editor Kathy Ossip, for their thoughtfulness in selecting material appropriate to the issue’s theme; the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on the articles; and Rayden Sorock, a student at Purchase College, State University of New York, for his help in coordinating the book reviews, readers’ reports, and other details for the journal. SUSAN STRYKER is an associate professor of gender studies at Indiana Univer- sity. She is the author or editor of several books, most recently the introductory text Transgender History (Seal Press. 2008), as well as the Emmy 21 22 ■ INTRODUCTION Award-winning public television documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (ITVS/Frameline, 2005). PAISLEY CURRAH teaches political science at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. He is a coeditor, with Richard M. Juang and Shannon Price Minter, of Transgender Rights (Minnesota University Press, 2006). He is a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute. His next book, The United States of Gender: Regulating Transgender Identities, is forthcoming from New York University Press. LISA JEAN MOORE is a professor of sociology and gender studies at Purchase College. She teaches courses in feminist theory; the sociology of birth and death; science, technology, and queer theory; and the sociology of men. Her previous book, Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, is published by NYU Press. She has just completed the book Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (NYU Press) with Monica Casper.