My Words To
Victor Frankenstein
Above The Village Of Chamounix --
Performing
Transgender Rage"
By Susan Stryker
[Note from Anne
Lawrence: "My Words..." is not always easy reading. If you are
tempted to skip any of it, at least read the final three paragraphs -- some of
the most moving writing about transsexuality you'll
find anywhere.]
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
The following work is a textual adaptation of a performance piece
originally presented at "Rage Across the
Disciplines," an arts, humanities, and social sciences conference held
June 10-12, 1993, at California State University, San Marcos. The
interdisciplinary nature of the conference, its theme, and the organizers' call
for both performances and academic papers inspired me to be creative in my mode
of presenting a topic then much on my mind. As a member of Transgender Nation
-- a militantly queer, direct action transsexual advocacy group ---I was at the
time involved in organizing a disruption and protest at the American
Psychiatric Association's 1993 annual meeting in San Francisco. A good deal of
the discussion at our planning meetings concerned how to harness the intense
emotions emanating from transsexual experience -- especially rage -- and
mobilize them into effective political actions. I was intrigued by the prospect
of critically examining this rage in a more academic setting through an
idiosyncratic application of the concept of gender performativity.
My idea was to perform self-consciously a queer gender rather than simply talk
about it, thus embodying and enacting the concept simultaneously under
discussion. I wanted the formal structure of the work to express a transgender
aesthetic by replicating our abrupt, often jarring transitions between genders
-- challenging generic classification with the forms of my words just as my transsexuality challenges the conventions of legitimate
gender and my performance in the conference room challenged the boundaries of
acceptable academic discourse. During the performance, I stood at the podium
wearing genderfuck drag -- combat boots, threadbare
Levi 501s over a black lace body suit, a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt
with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant,
grunge metal jewelry, and a six-inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck
on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my
black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panelists' table. The jacket
had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the right side
lacings, and Queer Nation-style stickers reading SEX CHANGE, DYKE, and FUCK
YOUR TRANSPHOBIA plastered on the back.
MONOLOGUE
The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical
science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn
together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these
circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and
the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often
perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the
monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding
rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I
must struggle to exist.
I am not the first
to link Frankenstein's monster and the transsexual body. Mary Daly makes the
connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in
"Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon," in which she
characterizes transsexuals as the agents of a "necrophilic
invasion" of female space (69-72). Janice Raymond, who acknowledges Daly
as a formative influence, is less direct when she says that "the problem
of transsexuality would best be served by morally
mandating it out of existence," but in this statement she nevertheless
echoes Victor Frankenstein's feelings toward the monster: "Begone, vile insect, or rather, stay, that I may trample
you to dust. You reproach me with your creation"
(Raymond 178; Shelley 95). It is a commonplace of literary criticism to
note that Frankenstein's monster is his own dark, romantic double, the alien
Other he constructs and upon which he projects all he cannot accept in himself;
indeed, Frankenstein calls the monster "my own vampire, my own spirit set
loose from the grave" (Shelley 74). Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond and
others of their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular
golem? (1)
The attribution of
monstrosity remains a palpable characteristic of most lesbian and gay
representations of transsexuality, displaying in
unnerving detail the anxious, fearful underside of the current cultural
fascination with transgenderism. (2) Because transsexuality more than any other transgender practice or
identity represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational
presupposition of fixed genders upon which a politics of personal identity
depends, people who have invested their aspirations for social justice in identitarian movements say things about us out of sheer
panic that, if said of other minorities, would see print only in the most
hate-riddled, white supremacist, Christian fascist rags. To quote extensively
from one letter to the editor of a popular San Francisco gay/lesbian
periodical:
I consider transsexualism to be a fraud, and the participants in it . .
. perverted. The transsexual [claims] he/she needs to change his/her body in
order to be his/her "true self." Because this "true self"
requires another physical form in which to manifest itself,
it must therefore war with nature. One cannot change one's gender. What occurs
is a cleverly manipulated exterior: what has been done is mutation. What exists
beneath the deformed surface is the same person who was there prior to the
deformity. People who break or deform their bodies [act] out
the sick farce of a deluded, patriarchal approach to nature, alienated from
true being.
Referring by name to one particular person, self-identified as a
transsexual lesbian, whom she had heard speak in a public forum at the San
Francisco Women's Building, the letter-writer went on to say:
When an estrogenated man with breasts loves a
woman, that is not lesbianism, that is mutilated
perversion. [This individual] is not a threat to the lesbian community,
he is an outrage to us. He is not a lesbian, he is a
mutant man, a self-made freak, a deformity, an insult. He deserves a slap in
the face. After that, he deserves to have his body and mind made well again.
(3)
When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I find no more reason
to mourn my opposition to them -- or to the order they claim to represent --
than Frankenstein's monster felt in its enmity to the human race. I do not fall
from the grace of their company -- I roar gleefully away from it like a
Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from
hell.
The stigmatization
fostered by this sort of pejorative labelling is not
without consequence. Such words have the power to destroy transsexual lives. On
January 5, 1993, a 22-year-old pre-operative transsexual woman from Seattle, Filisa Vistima, wrote in her
journal, "I wish I was anatomically 'normal' so I could go swimming. . . .
But no, I'm a mutant, Frankenstein's monster." Two months later Filisa Vistima committed suicide.
What drove her to such despair was the exclusion she experienced in Seattle's
queer community, some members of which opposed Filisa's
participation because of her transsexuality -- even
though she identified as and lived as a bisexual woman. The Lesbian Resource
Center where she served as a volunteer conducted a survey of its constituency
to determine whether it should stop offering services to male-to-female
transsexuals. Filisa did the data entry for
tabulating the survey results; she didn't have to imagine how people felt about
her kind. The Seattle Bisexual Women's Network announced that if it admitted
transsexuals the SBWN would no longer be a women's organization. "I'm
sure," one member said in reference to the inclusion of bisexual
transsexual women, 4 6 the boys can take care of themselves." Filisa Vistima was not a boy, and
she found it impossible to take care of herself. Even
in death she found no support from the community in which she claimed
membership. "Why didn't Filisa commit herself
for psychiatric care?" asked a columnist in the Seattle Gay News.
"Why didn't Filisa demand her civil
rights?" In this case, not only did the angry villagers hound their
monster to the edge of town, they reproached her for being vulnerable to the
torches. Did Filisa Vistima
commit suicide, or did the queer community of Seattle kill her? (4)
I want to lay
claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon
against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I
know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. Just as the words
"dyke," "fag," "queer," "slut," and
"whore" have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men,
by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women
who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like
"creature," "monster," and "unnatural" need to be
reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling
one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature,
after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing
other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being
called a "creature" results from the threat the term poses to your
status as "lords of creation," beings elevated above mere material
existence. As in the case of being called "it," being called a
"creature" suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find
no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human
material Being; everything emerges from the same
matrix of possibilities. "Monster" is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, "divine portent," itself formed on the
root of the verb monere, "to warn." It came
to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous
creatures like the sphinx who were composed of
strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of
such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like
angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served
to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, "Pay attention;
something of profound importance is happening."
Hearken unto me,
fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose
flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the
similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you
this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to
protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the
groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my
expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us
both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to
confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have
I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.
CRITICISM
In answer to the question he poses in the title of his recent essay,
"What is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)," Peter Brooks
suggests that, whatever else a monster might be, it "may also be that
which eludes gender definition" (219). Brooks reads Mary Shelley's story
of an overreaching scientist and his troublesome creation as an early dissent
from the nineteenth-century realist literary tradition, which had not yet
attained dominance as a narrative form. He understands Frankenstein to unfold
textually through a narrative strategy generated by tension between a visually
oriented epistemology, on the one hand, and another approach to knowing the
truth of bodies that privileges verbal linguisticality,
on the other (199-200). Knowing by seeing and knowing by speaking/hearing are
gendered, respectively, as masculine and feminine in the critical framework
within which Brooks operates. Considered in this context, Shelley's text is
informed by -- and critiques from a woman's point of view -- the contemporary
reordering of knowledge brought about by the increasingly compelling truth
claims of Enlightenment science. The monster problematizes
gender partly through its failure as a viable subject in the visual field;
though referred to as "he," it thus offers a feminine, and
potentially feminist, resistance to definition by a phallicized
scopophilia. The monster accomplishes this resistance
by mastering language in order to claim a position as a speaking subject and
enact verbally the very subjectivity denied it in the specular
realm.
Transsexual
monstrosity, however, along with its affect, transgender rage, can never claim
quite so secure a means of resistance because of the inability of language to
represent the transgendered subject's movement over time between stably
gendered positions in a linguistic structure. Our situation effectively
reverses the one encountered by Frankenstein's monster. Unlike the monster, we
often successfully cite the culture's visual norms of gendered embodiment. This
citation becomes a subversive resistance when, through a provisional use of
language, we verbally declare the unnaturalness of our claim to the subject
positions we nevertheless occupy. (6)
The prospect of a
monster with a life and will of its own is a principal source of horror for
Frankenstein. The scientist has taken up his project with a specific goal in
mind -- nothing less than the intent to subject nature completely to his power.
He finds a means to accomplish his desires through modern science, whose
devotees, it seems to him, "have acquired new and almost unlimited powers;
they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the
invisible world with its shadows. . . . More, far more, will I achieve,"
thought Frankenstein. "I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers,
and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation" (Shelley 47).
The fruit of his efforts is not, however, what Frankenstein anticipated. The
rapture he expected to experience at the awakening of his creature turned
immediately to dread. "I saw the dull yellow eyes of the creature open.
His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled
his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched
out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped" (Shelley 56, 57). The monster
escapes, too, and parts company with its maker for a number of years. In the
interim, it learns something of its situation in the world, and rather than
bless its creator, the monster curses him. The very success of Mary Shelley's
scientist in his self-appointed task thus paradoxically proves its futility:
rather than demonstrate Frankenstein's power over materiality, the newly
enlivened body of the creature attests to its maker's failure to attain the
mastery he sought. Frankenstein cannot control the mind and feelings of the
monster he makes. It exceeds and refutes his purposes.
My own experience
as a transsexual parallels the monster's in this
regard. The consciousness shaped by the transsexual body is no more the
creation of the science that refigures its flesh than the monster's mind is the
creation of Frankenstein. The agenda that produced hormonal and surgical sex
reassignment techniques is no less pretentious, and no more
noble, than Frankenstein's. Heroic doctors still endeavor to triumph
over nature. The scientific discourse that produced sex reassignment techniques
is inseparable from the pursuit of immortality through the perfection of the
body, the fantasy of total mastery through the transcendence of an absolute
limit, and the hubristic desire to create life itself. (7) Its genealogy
emerges from a metaphysical quest older than modern science, and its cultural
politics are aligned with a deeply conservative attempt to stabilize gendered
identity in service of the naturalized heterosexual order.
None of this,
however, precludes medically constructed transsexual bodies from being viable
sites of subjectivity. Nor does it guarantee the compliance of subjects thus
embodied with the agenda that resulted in a transsexual means of embodiment. As
we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are
something more, and something other, than the creatures our makers intended us
to be. Though medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting
bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate
naturalness as their effect, engaging with those very techniques produces a
subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect biomedical technology
can achieve. Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places
its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic, queer
relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist.
Frankenstein's
monster articulates its unnatural situation within the natural world with far
more sophistication in Shelley's novel than might be expected by those familiar
only with the version played by Boris Karloff in James Whale's classic films
from the 1930s. Film critic Vito Russo suggests that Whale's interpretation of
the monster was influenced by the fact that the director was a closeted gay man
at the time he made his Frankenstein films. The pathos he imparted to his
monster derived from the experience of his own hidden sexual identity. (8)
Monstrous and unnatural in the eyes of the world, but seeking only the love of
his own kind and the acceptance of human society, Whale's creature externalizes
and renders visible the nightmarish loneliness and alienation that the closet
can breed. But this is not the monster who speaks to me so potently of my own
situation as an openly transsexual being. I emulate instead Mary Shelley's
literary monster, who is quick-witted, agile, strong, and eloquent.
In the novel, the
creature flees Frankenstein's laboratory and hides in the solitude of the Alps,
where, by stealthy observation of the people it happens to meet, it gradually
acquires a knowledge of language, literature, and the
conventions of European society. At first it knows little of its own condition.
"I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or
who claimed any intercourse with me," the monster notes. "What did
this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?
These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them." (Shelley 116, 130). Then, in the pocket of the jacket it
took as it fled the laboratory, the monster finds Victor Frankenstein's
journal, and learns the particulars of its creation. "I sickened as I
read," the monster says. "Increase of knowledge only discovered to me
what a wretched outcast I was." (Shelley 124, 125).
Upon learning its
history and experiencing the rejection of all to whom it reached out for
companionship, the creature's life takes a dark turn. "My feelings were
those of rage and revenge," the monster declares. "I, like the
arch-fiend, bore a hell within me" (130). It would have been happy to
destroy all of Nature, but it settles, finally, on a more expedient plan to
murder systematically all those whom Victor Frankenstein loves. Once
Frankenstein realizes that his own abandoned creation is responsible for the
deaths of those most dear to him, he retreats in remorse to a mountain village
above his native Geneva to ponder his complicity in the crimes the monster has
committed. While hiking on the glaciers in the shadow of Mont Blanc, above the
village of Chamounix, Frankenstein spies a familiar
figure approaching him across the ice. Of course, it is the monster, who
demands an audience with its maker. Frankenstein agrees, and the two retire
together to a mountaineer's cabin. There, in a monologue that occupies nearly a
quarter of the novel, the monster tells Frankenstein the tale of its creation
from its own point of view, explaining to him how it became so enraged.
These are my words
to Victor Frankenstein, above the village of Chamounix.
Like the monster, I could speak of my earliest memories, and how I became aware
of my difference from everyone around me. I can describe how I acquired a
monstrous identity by taking on the label "transsexual" to name parts
of myself that I could not otherwise explain. I, too, have discovered the
journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bodies of creatures
like me since the 1930s. I know in intimate detail the history of this recent
medical intervention into the enactment of transgendered subjectivity; science
seeks to contain and colonize the radical threat posed by a particular
transgender strategy of resistance to the coerciveness of gender: physical
alteration of the genitals. (9) I live daily with the consequences of
medicine's definition of my identity as an emotional disorder. Through the
filter of this official pathologization, the sounds
that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed as the confused ranting of
a diseased mind.
Like the monster,
the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me
as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the
blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity
of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival. But there
is yet another rage within.
JOURNAL (FEBRUARY 18, 1993)
Kim sat between my spread legs, her back to me, her
tailbone on the edge of the table. Her left hand gripped my thigh so hard the
bruises are still there a week later. Sweating and bellowing, she pushed one
last time and the baby finally came. Through my lover's back, against the skin
of my own belly, I felt a child move out of another woman's body and into the
world. Strangers' hands snatched it away to suction the sticky green meconium from its airways. "It's a girl,"
somebody said. Paul, I think. Why, just then, did a jumble of dark, unsolicited
feelings emerge wordlessly from some quiet back corner of my mind? This moment
of miracles was not the time to deal with them. I pushed them back, knowing
they were too strong to avoid for long.
After three days
we were all exhausted, slightly disappointed that
complications had forced us to go to Kaiser instead of having the birth
at home. I wonder what the hospital staff thought of our little tribe swarming
all over the delivery room: Stephanie, the midwife; Paul, the baby's father;
Kim's sister Gwen; my son Wilson and me; and the two other women who make up
our family, Anne and Heather. And of course Kim and the baby.
She named her Denali, after the mountain in Alaska. I don't think the medical
folks had a clue as to how we all considered ourselves to be related to each
other. When the labor first began we all took turns shifting between various
supporting roles, but as the ordeal progressed we settled into a more stable
pattern. I found myself acting as birth coach. Hour after hour, through dozens
of sets of contractions, I focused everything on Kim, helping her stay in
control of her emotions as she gave herself over to this inexorable process,
holding on to her eyes with mine to keep the pain from throwing her out of her
body, breathing every breath with her, being a companion. I participated, step
by increasingly intimate step, in the ritual transformation of consciousness
surrounding her daughter's birth. Birth rituals work to prepare the self for a
profound opening, an opening as psychic as it is corporeal. Kim's body brought
this ritual process to a dramatic resolution for her, culminating in a
visceral, cathartic experience. But my body left me hanging. I had gone on a
journey to the point at which my companion had to go on alone, and I needed to
finish my trip for myself. To conclude the birth ritual I had participated in,
I needed to move something in me as profound as a whole human life.
I floated home
from the hospital, filled with a vital energy that wouldn't discharge. I
puttered about until I was alone: my ex had come over for Wilson; Kim and
Denali were still at the hospital with Paul; Stephanie had gone, and everyone
else was out for a much-needed walk. Finally, in the solitude of my home, I
burst apart like a wet paper bag and spilled the emotional contents of my life
through the hands I cupped like a sieve over my face. For days, as I had
accompanied my partner on her journey, I had been progressively opening myself
and preparing to let go of whatever was deepest within. Now everything in me
flowed out, moving up from inside and out through my throat, my mouth because
these things could never pass between the lips of my cunt. I knew the darkness
I had glimpsed earlier would reemerge, but I had vast oceans of feeling to
experience before that came up again.
Simple joy in the
presence of new life came bubbling out first, wave after wave of it. I was so
incredibly happy. I was so in love with Kim, had so much admiration for her
strength and courage. I felt pride and excitement about the queer family we
were building with Wilson, Anne, Heather, Denali, and whatever babies would
follow. We've all tasted an exhilarating possibility in communal living and
these nurturing, bonded kinships for which we have no adequate names. We joke
about pioneering on a reverse frontier: venturing into the heart of
civilization itself to reclaim biological reproduction from heterosexism and
free it for our own uses. We're fierce; in a world of "traditional family
values," we need to be.
Sometimes, though,
I still mourn the passing of old, more familiar ways. It wasn't too long ago
that my ex and I were married, woman and man. That love had
been genuine, and the grief over its loss real. I had always wanted
intimacy with women more than intimacy with men, and that wanting had always
felt queer to me. She needed it to appear straight. The shape of my flesh was a
barrier that estranged me from my desire. Like a body without a mouth, I was
starving in the midst of plenty. I would not let myself starve, even if what it
took to open myself for a deep connectedness cut off the deepest connections I
actually had. So I abandoned one life and built this new one. The fact that she
and I have begun getting along again, after so much strife between us, makes
the bitterness of our separation somewhat sweet. On the day of the birth, this
past loss was present even in its partial recovery; held up beside the newfound
fullness in my life, it evoked a poignant, hopeful sadness that inundated me.
Frustration and
anger soon welled up in abundance. In spite of all I'd accomplished, my
identity still felt so tenuous. Every circumstance of life seemed to conspire
against me in one vast, composite act of invalidation and erasure. In the body
I was born with, I had been invisible as the person I considered myself to be;
I had been invisible as a queer while the form of my body made my desires look
straight. Now, as a dyke I am invisible among women; as a transsexual, I am
invisible among dykes. As the partner of a new mother, I am often invisible as
a transsexual, a woman, and a lesbian. I've lost track of the friends and
acquaintances these past nine months who've asked me if I was the father. It
shows so dramatically how much they simply don't get what I'm doing with my
body. The high price of whatever visible, intelligible, self-representation I
have achieved makes the continuing experience of invisibility maddeningly
difficult to bear.
The collective
assumptions of the naturalized order soon overwhelmed me. Nature exerts such a
hegemonic oppression. Suddenly I felt lost and scared, lonely and confused. How
did that little Mormon boy from Oklahoma I used to be grow up to be a
transsexual leatherdyke in San Francisco with a
Berkeley Ph.D.? Keeping my bearings on such a long and strange trip seemed a
ludicrous proposition. Home was so far gone behind me it was gone forever, and
there was no place to rest. Battered by heavy emotions, a little dazed, I felt
the inner walls that protect me dissolve to leave me vulnerable to all that
could harm me. I cried, and abandoned myself to abject despair over what gender
had done to me.
Everything's
fucked up beyond all recognition. This hurts too much to go on. I came as close
today as I'll ever come to giving birth -- literally. My body can't do that; I
can't even bleed without a wound, and yet I claim to be a woman. How? Why have
I always felt that way? I'm such a goddamned freak. I can never be a woman like
other women, but I could never be a man. Maybe there really is no place for me
in all creation. I'm so tired of this ceaseless movement. I do war with nature.
I am alienated from Being. I'm a self-mutilated
deformity, a pervert, a mutant, trapped in monstrous flesh. God, I never wanted
to be trapped again. I've destroyed myself. I'm falling into darkness I am
falling apart.
I enter the realm
of my dreams. I am underwater, swimming upwards It is
dark. I see a shimmering light above me. I break through the plane of the
water's surface with my lungs bursting. I suck for air -- and find only more
water. My lungs are full of water. Inside and out I am surrounded by it. Why am
I not dead if there is no difference between me and what I am in? There is another
surface above me and I swim frantically towards it. I see a shimmering light. I
break the plane of the water's surface over and over and over again. This water
annihilates me. I cannot be, and yet -- an excruciating impossibility -- I am.
I will do anything not to be here.
I will swim forever.
I will die for eternity.
I will learn to breathe water.
I will become the water.
If I cannot change my situation I will change myself.
In this act of
magical transformation
I recognize myself again.
I am groundless
and boundless movement.
I am a furious flow.
I am one with the darkness and the wet.
And I am enraged.
Here at last is
the chaos I held at bay.
Here at last is my strength.
I am not the water --
I am the wave,
and rage
is the force that moves me.
Rage
gives me back my body
as its own fluid medium.
Rage
punches a hole in water
around which I coalesce
to allow the flow to come through me.
Rage
constitutes me in my primal form.
It throws my head back
pulls my lips back over my teeth
opens my throat
and rears me up to howl: : and no sound dilutes
the pure quality of my rage.
No sound
exists
in this place without language
my rage is a silent raving.
Rage
throws me back at last
into this mundane reality
in this transfigured flesh
that aligns me with the power of my Being.
In birthing my
rage,
my rage has rebirthed me.
THEORY
A formal disjunction seems particularly appropriate at this moment because
the affect I seek to examine critically, what I've termed "transgender
rage," emerges from the interstices of discursive practices and at the
collapse of generic categories. The rage itself is generated by the subject's
situation in a field governed by the unstable but indissoluble relationship
between language and materiality, a situation in which language organizes and
brings into signification matter that simultaneously eludes definitive
representation and demands its own perpetual rearticulation
in symbolic terms. Within this dynamic field the subject must constantly police
the boundary constructed by its own founding in order to maintain the fictions
of "inside" and "outside" against a regime of
signification/materialization whose intrinsic instability produces the rupture
of subjective boundaries as one of its regular features. The affect of rage as
I seek to define it is located at the margin of subjectivity and the limit of signification.
It originates in recognition of the fact that the "outsideness"
of a materiality that perpetually violates the foreclosure of subjective space
within a symbolic order is also necessarily "inside" the subject as
grounds for the materialization of its body and the formation of its bodily
ego.
This primary rage
becomes specifically transgender rage when the inability to foreclose the
subject occurs through a failure to satisfy norms of gendered embodiment.
Transgender rage is the subjective experience of being compelled to transgress
what Judith Butler has referred to as the highly gendered regulatory schemata
that determine the viability of bodies, of being compelled to enter a
"domain of abjected bodies, a field of
deformation" that in its unlivability
encompasses and constitutes the realm of legitimate subjectivity (16).
Transgender rage is a queer fury, an emotional response to conditions in which
it becomes imperative to take up, for the sake of one's own continued survival
as a subject, a set of practices that precipitates one's exclusion from a
naturalized order of existence that seeks to maintain itself as the only
possible basis for being a subject. However, by mobilizing gendered identities
and rendering them provisional, open to strategic development and occupation,
this rage enables the establishment of subjects in new modes, regulated by
different codes of intelligibility. Transgender rage furnishes a means for disidentification with compulsorily assigned subject
positions. It makes the transition from one gendered subject position to
another possible by using the impossibility of complete subjective foreclosure
to organize an outside force as an inside drive, and vice versa. Through the
operation of rage, the stigma itself becomes the source of transformative
power. (10)
I want to stop and
theorize at this particular moment in the text because in the lived moment of
being thrown back from a state of abjection in the aftermath of my lover's
daughter's birth, I immediately began telling myself a story to explain my
experience. I started theorizing, using all the conceptual tools my education
had put at my disposal. Other true stories of those events could undoubtedly be
told, but upon my return I knew for a fact what lit the fuse to my rage in the
hospital delivery room. It was the non-consensuality
of the baby's gendering. You see, I told myself, wiping snot off my face with a
shirt sleeve, bodies are rendered meaningful only
through some culturally and historically specific mode of grasping their
physicality that transforms the flesh into a useful artifact. Gendering is the
initial step in this transformation, inseparable from the process of forming an
identity by means of which we're fitted to a system of exchange in a
heterosexual economy. Authority seizes upon specific material qualities of the
flesh, particularly the genitals, as outward indication of future reproductive
potential, constructs this flesh as a sign, and reads it to enculturate
the body. Gender attribution is compulsory; it codes and deploys our bodies in
ways that materially affect us, yet we choose neither our marks nor the
meanings they carry. (11) This was the act accomplished between the beginning
and the end of that short sentence in the delivery room: "It's a girl."
This was the act that recalled all the anguish of my own struggles with gender.
But this was also the act that enjoined my complicity in the non-consensual
gendering of another. A gendering violence is the founding condition of human
subjectivity; having a gender is the tribal tattoo that makes one's personhood
cognizable. I stood for a moment between the pains of two violations, the mark
of gender and the unlivability of its absence. Could
I say which one was worse? Or could I only say which one I felt could best be
survived?
How can finding
one's self prostrate and powerless in the presence of the Law of the Father not
produce an unutterable rage? What difference does it make if the father in this
instance was a pierced, tatooed, purple-haired punk
fag anarchist who helped his dyke friend get pregnant? Phallogocentric
language, not its particular speaker, is the scalpel that defines our flesh. I
defy that Law in my refusal to abide by its original decree of my gender.
Though I cannot escape its power, I can move through its medium. Perhaps if I
move furiously enough, I can deform it in my passing to leave a trace of my
rage. I can embrace it with a vengeance to rename myself, declare my transsexuality, and gain access to the means of my legible reinscription. Though I may not hold the stylus myself, I
can move beneath it for my own deep self-sustaining pleasures.
To encounter the
transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating
itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness
of the natural order. Confronting the implications of this constructedness
can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the
gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My transsexual
body literalizes this abstract violence. As the bearers of this disquieting
news, we transsexuals often suffer for the pain of others, but we do not
willingly abide the rage of others directed against us. And we do have
something else to say, if you will but listen to the monsters: the possibility
of meaningful agency and action exists, even within fields of domination that
bring about the universal cultural rape of all flesh. Be forewarned, however,
that taking up this task will remake you in the process.
By speaking as a
monster in my personal voice, by using the dark, watery images of Romanticism
and lapsing occasionally into its brooding cadences and grandiose postures, I
employ the same literary techniques Mary Shelley used to elicit sympathy for
her scientist's creation. Like that creature, I assert my worth as a monster in
spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life
worth living. I have asked the Miltonic questions Shelley poses in the epigraph
of her novel: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man?
Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" With one voice, her
monster and I answer "no" without debasing ourselves, for we have
done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the
natural order. Though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not
deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which
Nature itself spills forth. (12)
If this is your
path, as it is mine, let me offer whatever solace you may find in this
monstrous benediction: May you discover the enlivening power of darkness within
yourself. May it nourish your rage. May your rage
inform your actions, and your actions transform you as you struggle to
transform your world.
NOTES
1. While this comment is intended as a monster's disdainful dismissal, it
nevertheless alludes to a substantial debate on the status of transgender
practices and identities in lesbian feminism. H. S. Rubin, in a sociology
dissertation in progress at Brandeis University, argues that the pronounced
demographic upsurge in the female-to-male transsexual population during the
1970s and 1980s is directly related to the ascendancy within lesbianism of a
"cultural feminism" that disparaged and marginalized practices
smacking of an unliberated "gender
inversion" model of homosexuality -- especially the butch-femme roles
associated with working-class lesbian bar culture. Cultural feminism thus
consolidated a lesbian-feminist alliance with heterosexual feminism on a
middle-class basis by capitulating to dominant ideologies of gender. The same
suppression of transgender aspects of lesbian practice, I would add,
simultaneously raised the spectre of male-to-female
transsexual lesbians as a particular threat to the stability and purity of nontranssexual lesbian-feminist identity. See Echols for
the broader context of this debate, and Raymond for the most vehement example
of the anti-transgender position.
2. The current
meaning of the term "transgender" is a matter of some debate. The
word was originally coined as a noun in the 1970s by people who resisted
categorization as either transvestites or transsexuals, and who used the term
to describe their own identity. Unlike transsexuals but like transvestites, transgenders do not seek surgical alteration of their
bodies but do habitually wear clothing that represents a gender other than the
one to which they were assigned at birth. Unlike transvestites but like
transsexuals, however, transgenders do not alter the vestimentary coding of their gender only episodically or
primarily for sexual gratification; rather, they consistently and publicly
express an ongoing commitment to their claimed gender identities through the
same visual representational strategies used by others to signify that gender.
The logic underlying this terminology reflects the widespread tendency to
construe "gender" as the sociocultural
manifestation of a material "sex." Thus, while transsexuals express
their identities through a physical change of embodiment, transgenders
do so through a non-corporeal change in public gender expression that is
nevertheless more complex than a simple change of clothes.
This essay uses
"transgender" in a more recent sense, however, than its original one.
That is, I use it here as an umbrella term that refers to all identities or
practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer
socially constructed sex/gender boundaries. The term includes, but is not
limited to, transsexuality, heterosexual transvestism, gay drag, hutch lesbianism, and such
non-European identities as the Native American berdache
or the Indian Hijra. Like "queer,"
"transgender" may also be used as a verb or an adjective. In this
essay, transsexuality is considered to be a
culturally and historically specific transgender practice/identity through
which a transgendered subject enters into a relationship with medical,
psychotherapeutic, and juridical institutions in order to gain access to
certain hormonal and surgical technologies for enacting and embodying itself.
3. Mikuteit 3-4, heavily edited for brevity and clarity.
4. The preceding
paragraph draws extensively on, and sometimes paraphrases, O'Hartigan
and Kahler.
5. See Laqueur 1-7, for a brief discussion of the Enlightenment's
effect on constructions of gender. Feminist interpretations of Frankenstein
to which Brooks responds include Gilbert and Gubar, Jacobus, and Homans.
6. Openly
transsexual speech similarly subverts the logic behind a remark by Bloom, 218,
that "a beautiful 'monster,' or even a passable one, would not have been a
monster."
7. Billings and
Urban, 269, document especially well the medical attitude toward transsexual
surgery as one of technical mastery of the body; Irvine, 259, suggests how transsexuality fits into the development of scientific
sexology, though caution is advised in uncritically accepting the
interpretation of transsexual experience she presents in this chapter. Meyer,
in spite of some extremely transphobic concluding
comments, offers a good account of the medicalization
of transgender identities; for a transsexual perspective on the scientific
agenda behind sex reassignment techniques, see Stone, especially the section
entitled "All of reality in late capitalist culture lusts to become an
image for its own security" (280-304).
8. Russo 49-50:
"Homosexual parallels in Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935) arose from a vision both films had of the monster as an
antisocial figure in the same way that gay people were 'things' that should not
have happened. In both films the homosexuality of director James Whale may have
been a force in the vision."
9. In the absence
of a reliable critical history of transsexuality, it
is best to turn to the standard medical accounts themselves: see especially
Benjamin, Green and Money, and Stoller. For overviews
of cross-cultural variation in the institutionalization of sex/gender, see
Williams, "Social Constructions/Essential Characters: A Cross-Cultural
Viewpoint," 252- 76; Shapiro 262-68. For accounts of particular
institutionalizations of transgender practices that employ surgical alteration
of the genitals, see Nanda; Roscoe. Adventurous readers curious about
contemporary non- transsexual genital alteration practices may contact
E.N.I.G.M.A. (Erotic Neoprimitive International
Genital Modification Association), SASE to LaFarge-werks,
2329 N. Leavitt, Chicago, IL 60647.
10. See Butler,
"Introduction," 4 and passim.
11. A substantial
body of scholarship informs these observations: Gayle Rubin provides a
productive starting point for developing not only a political economy of sex,
but of gendered subjectivity; on gender recruitment and attribution, see Kessler
and McKenna; on gender as a system of marks that naturalizes sociological
groups based on supposedly shared material similarities, I have been influenced
by some ideas on race in Guillaumin and by Wittig.
12. Although I
mean "chaos" here in its general sense, it is interesting to
speculate about the potential application of scientific chaos theory to model
the emergence of stable structures of gendered identities out of the unstable
matrix of material attributes, and on the production of proliferating gender
identities from a relatively simple set of gendering procedures.
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All rights reserved.
© 1999 Anne A.
Lawrence, MD
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