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Part I
Trans Identities and Sexual Violence
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Chapter One
Tarrying with Sexual Difference
Toward a Morphological Ontology of Trans Subjectivity1
Athena V. Colman
A concrete philosophy is not a happy one. It must stick close to experience, and yet not limit itself to the empirical but restore to each experience the ontological cipher which marks it internally.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs
With the emergence of trans studies, which has sought to theorize trans embodiment, trans subjectivities, and identities in their multiplicity, it would seem that Luce Irigaray’s positing of the question of sexual difference as ontological difference has been outstripped by the specificity of the phenomenon she sought to attend to: embodied sexuate difference.2 Thus, on the face of it, bringing Irigaray’s thought of sexual difference to a consideration of trans subjectivity and embodiment may seem passé or even regressive. However, the trans embodiment Irigaray’s formulation of sexual difference putatively excludes has in fact reignited, rather than extinguished, the very question of sexual difference. The very term transition implies a transition from female to male or male to female, and even those who reject the notion of transition in favor of “gender fluidity,” or gender variance, are inevitably embroiled in the ways by which the very notion of transition has become a new ordering principle of coherence and a norm of trans identification. For example, on some views, it remains more intelligible to claim that one’s transition is a matter of access to medical technologies; such that even if one’s access to resources cannot accomplish the goal of transitioning, at the very least one’s desire should.
The recent phenomenon of transsexual separatism, which is characterized by “transsexuals—particularly those who have undergone genital reconstruction and who choose not to disclose their trans history—[and who] see themselves as non-consensually subsumed under the transgender umbrella”3 asserts a difference within trans discourse, which is often articulated at the register of a reinvestment in—or attempt to depart from—claims about sexual difference. Rather than lay the question of sexual difference to rest, trans discourses rehearse many of the hierarchized binary oppositions theorized by feminist thinkers decades ago. As Julia Serano’s work explicates, there is an assumption of the inferiority of women and femininity operative in many instances of transphobia, particularly against trans women. Her analysis of transmisogyny extends feminist insights: “In a male-centered gender hierarchy, where it is assumed that men are better than women and that masculinity is superior to femininity, there is no greater perceived threat than the existence of trans women, who despite being born male and inheriting male privilege ‘choose’ to be female instead.”4 The clarity of Serano’s account illustrates how much transmisogyny gains its conceptual coherence from the fundamental problematic of sexual difference. And so, it would seem that for a while longer, we must tarry with the question of sexual difference.
This essay enacts that tarrying by remaining with the ontological stakes of the question of sexual difference. On the one hand, it is clear that from at least one perspective, trans embodiment and subjectivity remain an insoluble problem for Irigaray’s account of sexual difference; namely, that the ontological elaboration of sexual difference is unable to respond at the level of ontology to trans identities. To clarify, on this view, trans embodiment and subjectivity is not so much aberrant as it is unintelligible on its own terms and so can only be understood as derivative of the larger question of sexual difference. On the other hand, it is also clear that the same problematics of sexual difference, which Irigaray elucidated so long ago, remain operative in trans discourses and enacted in the reality of the violence of transphobia, especially violence against trans women.5 Indeed, it would seem that trans women are excluded from Irigaray’s thought of sexual difference at the same time as they are subject to an amplification of the violence of its cultural absence.6
In what follows, I read Irigaray with Talia Mae Bettcher, in order to first show how trans discourses that make ontological claims about trans subjectivity often reiterate the larger problematics of sexual difference. I then argue this reading illuminates the necessity of returning to the question of an ontology of sexual difference. While Irigaray’s prioritizing of sexual difference risks reduplicating violence against alterity in its sexuate expression, I argue her unique thinking of the relational ontology of sexual difference, in particular, her account of morphology and the relational context of birth, provides resources for thinking trans embodiment and identification in terms of sexual difference. Such an elaboration may open up accounts of trans subjectivities that respond to the “epistemic violence”7 of their theorization, avoiding the reduction of trans bodies to being the repository of nonnormative (abject) embodiment and countering tendencies to view trans embodiment in abstraction, or as “a universal (visible) trans subject.”8
Posing the Question: Irigaray and Butler
In the philosophical consideration of sex/gender, we can productively stage two accounts that seem opposed: the claim of sexual difference in Irigaray’s philosophy and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity.9
Irigaray’s thought works to retrieve sexual difference from the oblivion of its assumption. That is to say, the everyday appearance of sexual difference is at the same time the site that covers over the very erasure of this difference. Although it appears that sexual difference is everywhere, for Irigaray, this covers over the culture of sexual indifference it reinscribes. In order to illustrate the possibility of thinking this difference, Irigaray’s rereading of the history of Western thought points to the exclusion of the feminine and its associated cognates of woman, female, and so forth; demonstrates how the Western symbolic is dependent upon the support of the feminine (e.g., for her unrecognized labor in social reproduction) at the same time as it depends upon her negation; and reconsiders moments in this history where the question of sexual difference almost appears on the horizon of Western thought. Irigaray points to these seminal moments in the history of philosophy where the feminine almost enters the symbolic (e.g., Diotima’s speech in Plato, sexuality in Freud, etc.) but in the end is used to erect the symbolic that bars her entry into any symbolic.
The call for a feminine symbolic is not simply a claim about recognition. Women, or the feminine, cannot be recognized in the current symbolic as the very logic that subtends its meaning requires her absence or negation as a subject. Thus, our task cannot be one of further inclusion of women in the present symbolic but must be, more radically, the realization and creation of an entirely distinct feminine symbolic. This requires that the very question of sexual difference appears on our horizon of meaning, that is, that asking the question of sexual difference becomes central to human life and culture. Our task, then, is to think through the question of sexual difference.10 Since we do not, according to Irigaray, have access to the notion of “two” sexes in our present symbolic, we must seek ways in which to construct and recover a feminine imaginary. To be clear, Irigaray’s call to reach through the appearance of difference to the actuality of difference does not recall or fall prey to the classic philosophical problematic of an appearance/reality divide: sexual difference does not hide beneath particulars or in another metaphysical realm waiting to be rescued by untethered reason. Irigaray is more radical—sexual difference is the actuality we cover over every day. If we are to reach an understanding of true difference, sexual difference, we must undermine what appears to be differentiated. Irigaray claims the recovery of the feminine requires an attentiveness to the perception of difference. The problem is that representation reduces perception to sensation. “The logic of Western culture ends in a substitution of representation for perception.”11 For Irigaray then cultivating a culture of perception is central to the development of our capacities to attend to and support a culture of two, of two imaginaries and the irreducible interval between them, which is difference as such.
The other dominant account of sex/gender is Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity, where sexual difference is not ontologically primary but is a discursive inscription constituted by the “stylized repetition of acts”—“regulatory practices,” or later, what she will qualify as “citationality,” which both constrain and produce gendered subjectivity. Her brilliant transposition of Foucault’s dispositif (disciplinary apparatuses) finds gender a regulatory norm that governs the way we produce ourselves as subjects.12 Despite the notorious difficulty of her texts, I believe the capture of the theory of performativity lies in the power of what, retrospectively, seems painfully obvious: that if gender were “natural” or ontologically primordial, why are gender ideals never achievable; and how, if we are ontologically feminine or masculine, could we ever fail to achieve—or not measure up—to what we already are? Indeed, for Butler, the moment of failure in normative gender success, seen for example in so-called masculine women (butch) or feminine men, are sites of incoherence (underwritten by associated discursive practices such as compulsory heterosexuality) that do not illustrate the exception to the rule of normativity but rather show us the rule itself—our own constant failure to make permanent the gender to which we nonetheless never measure up and are never adequate to. Notably, neither moment in this putative opposition between performativity and “primordial” ontological difference seems to accommodate trans subjectivities. Here a crucial caveat is needed: there is no universal trans subject or trans experience. To emphasize the point, it is worth quoting Nihils Rev and Fiona M. Geist again here, “[There is a] tendency among researchers, writers, and activists to assume a universal (visible) trans subject. This tendency frequently makes particularities of trans experience vanish into abstraction.”13 To posit a universal trans subject negates the phenomenological and feminist work that has led us to attend to experience in its location, history, and specificity in the first place.
Bettcher: T...
