Passing

Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

Maria C. Sanchez, Linda Schlossberg

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780814708613
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Passing for what you are not--whether it is mulattos passing as white, Jews passing as Christian, or drag queens passing as women--can be a method of protection or self-defense. But it can also be a uniquely pleasurable experience, one that trades on the erotics of secrecy and revelation. It is precisely passing's radical playfulness, the way it asks us to reconsider our assumptions and forces our most cherished fantasies of identity to self-destruct, that is centrally addressed in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion.

Identity in Western culture is largely structured around visibility, whether in the service of science (Victorian physiognomy), psychoanalysis (Lacan's mirror stage), or philosophy (the Panopticon). As such, it is charged with anxieties regarding classification and social demarcation. Passing wreaks havoc with accepted systems of social recognition and cultural intelligibility, blurring the carefully-marked lines of race, gender, and class.

Bringing together theories of passing across a host of disciplines--from critical race theory and lesbian and gay studies, to literary theory and religious studies --Passing complicates our current understanding of the visual and categories of identity.

Contributors: Michael Bronski, Karen McCarthy Brown, Bradley Epps, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hitchcock, Daniel Itzkovitz, Patrick O'Malley, Miriam Peskowitz, María C. Sánchez Linda Schlossberg, and Sharon Ullman.

1 Telling Tales

Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography

Judith Halberstam

Introduction

The names “Brandon Teena” and “Billy Tipton” have become synonymous with a cluster of questions and concerns about passing, gender identities, memory, history, and transgender biography. Brandon Teena was a young woman who passed successfully as a man in a small town in Nebraska and who was brutally murdered when some local men decided to take their bloody revenge for what they considered to be a grand deception. Billy Tipton was a jazz musician who was only discovered to have a female body after his death. Since Tipton had married several times and was survived by a wife and adopted children, the revelation of his biological sex created a minor sensation. In the case of each of these transgender subjects, their lives were dismantled and reassembled through a series of biographical inquiries. This paper situates transgender biography as a sometimes violent, often imprecise project, one which seeks to brutally erase the carefully managed details of the life of a passing person and which recasts the act of passing as deception, dishonesty, and fraud.

This chapter originally appeared in “Queer Autobiographies,” a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies 15.1 (spring 2000), edited by Thomas C. Spear.

I will be asking here what kind of truths about gender we demand from the lives of people who pass, cross-dress, or simply refuse normative gender categories. None of the transgender subjects whom I examine here can be definitively identified as transsexual; none can be read as lesbian; all must be read and remembered according to the narratives they meticulously circulated about themselves when they were alive. “Telling Tales,” addresses thorny questions about the ethics of biography, about who has the right to tell tales about whose life, and it explores and fleshes out the postmodern category “transgender.”

Transgender History

For the last five years or so I have been working on topics under the organizational heading of “female masculinity.” However, very recently it has become obvious to me that this term lends itself to an interrogation of the politics and history and cultures of what we call “transgender” subjectivities. While “transgender” has served as a kind of umbrella term in recent years for cross-identifying subjects, I think the inclusivity of its appeal has made it quite unclear as to what the term might mean and for whom. Some theorists, such as Bernice Hausman, have dismissed transgenderism as a form of false consciousness which circulates through the belief that genders can be voluntary and chosen, and she concludes that “the new gender outlaws are just newer versions of the old gender conformists” (197). Others, like female-to-male transsexual theorist Henry Rubin, read transgender politics as a postmodern critique of the commitment to the “real” that he thinks is implied by transsexualism. Still others, like Biddy Martin, identify transgenderism as a faddish celebration of gender crossing which assigns non-cross-identified queers to the ignominy of gender conformity. But as I will show in this paper, we have hardly begun to recognize the forms of embodiment that fill out the category of transgenderism, and before we dismiss it as faddish, we should know what kind of work it does, whom it describes, and whom it validates. “Transgender” proves to be an important term not to people who want to reside outside of categories altogether but to people who want to place themselves in the way of particular forms of recognition. “Transgender” may, indeed, be considered a term of relationality; it describes not simply an identity but a relation between people, within a community, or within intimate bonds.

I will engage here with the somewhat paradoxical project of transgender history—paradoxical because it represents the desire to narrate lives that may wilfully defy narrative—but I will begin by establishing the terrain of female masculinity and registering where and how it overlaps with what has been called transgenderism. At least one of the reasons that I began thinking through and about female masculinity in the early 1990s was the desire to mark a place for cross-identifying women which did not fold neatly into community and medical models of transsexuality. As female-to-male transsexuals became more numerous and more visible in urban queer communities, there was inevitably a reshuffling of categories and etiologies. Young people coming out in the 1990s may be forgiven for not quite knowing what their experiences of cross-identification may mean. If “lesbian” in this context becomes the term for women who experience themselves as female and desire other women, and if “FTM transsexual” becomes the term for female-born people who experience prolonged male-identification and think of themselves as male, then what happens to those female-born people who think of themselves as masculine but not necessarily male and certainly not female? We do use the term “butch” for this last category, but I try to extend the term “butch” beyond its 1950s context and its inevitable coupling with “femme,” and I locate it in a larger terrain: female masculinity. Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuals, in particular, has been enormously useful in thinking through the relations between the terms “transgender” and “queer” and elucidating the continuities and difference between butch and FTM.

I will use Prosser’s work here in order to map the theoretical terrain of transgender studies. Prosser’s formulation of the role of narrative in transsexual transition has established itself in opposition to what he understands to be a queer and, indeed, postmodern preference for performativity over narrativity. In Second Skins, Prosser asks what the effect of a theory of gender performativity has been upon our understanding of transsexuality; he also argues that for all our talk about “materiality” and “embodiment,” it is precisely the body that vanishes within ever more abstract theories of gender, sexuality, and desire. Prosser points out that in Gender Trouble, Judith Butler implies that the transgender subject symbolizes the “gender trouble” to which every subject is heir; in other words, the split between sex and gender which is so readable within the transgender or transsexual body reveals the constructedness of all sex and gender. Gender normativity, within this schema, is a place of self-deception inasmuch as the “straight” subject imagines his or her gender to be consistent with his or her sex and the relation between the two to be “natural.” Prosser comments:

While within this framework, this allocation is a sign of the devaluation of straight gender and conversely queer’s alignment of itself with transgender performativity represents queer’s sense of its own “higher purpose,” in fact there are transgendered trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that which this scheme devalues. Namely, there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be nonperformative, to be constative, quite simply, to be. (32)

This is a complicated passage but I think it can be rendered as: many transsexuals do not want to represent gender artifice, they actually aspire to the real, the natural, to the very condition that has been rejected by the queer theory of gender performance.

While I am totally sympathetic to Prosser’s argument that the transsexual has been used in queer theory as a symbol for the formulation of a subjectivity that actually threatens transsexual claims to legitimacy, I do think there are problems with Prosser’s formulation of a transsexual desire for realness and with his sense that gender realness is achievable. After all, what actually constitutes the real for Prosser in relation to the transsexual body? The penis or vagina? Facial hair or shaved legs? Everyday life as a man or a woman? The primary example of a transsexual desire for realness that Prosser examines involves Venus Extravaganza from Paris Is Burning, a figure whom Butler discusses at length in Bodies That Matter. Prosser critiques Butler for making a distinction between transgender transgression and transsexual capitulation to “hegemonic constraint,” and he notes that as long as Venus remains gender ambiguous then she can represent the transgression of the “denaturalization of sex;” but because she expresses a desire to become a white woman and live in the suburbs, Butler talks of the “reworking of the normative framework of heterosexuality.” Prosser, on the other hand, not only wants to release the transsexual from the burden of representing subversive sexuality and gender, but he also wants to draw attention to the fact that Venus Extravaganza is killed by a transphobic john not because she is a woman but because she is mid-transition—not quite a woman. Prosser notes ominously: “Butler’s essay locates transgressive value in that which makes the subject’s life most unsafe” (49).

In the argument between Prosser and Butler I believe a distinction needs to be made between “realness” and the “real,” a distinction which would have been meaningful to Venus, who lived in the world of balls, voguing, and realness. Realness in Paris Is Burning is, in the words of Dorian Corey, “as close as we will ever come to the real.” It is not exactly performance, not exactly an imitation, it is the way that people—minorities excluded from the domain of the real—appropriate the real and its effects.¹ Realness, the appropriation of the attributes of the real, one could say, is precisely the transsexual condition. The real, on the other hand, is that which always exists elsewhere and as a fantasy of belonging and being. Venus accordingly expresses her desire for the real in the form of things she will obviously never attain—suburban respectability. Similarly, the FTM expresses his desire for a manhood which on some level will always elude him. This need not be the downfall of transsexual aspiration, however; indeed, it may be its strength. Needless to say, the fantasy that many queers may entertain of gender realness is extremely important as we challenge the limits of theories of performance. Prosser suggests that transsexuals become “real” literally through authorship, by writing themselves into transition. “Narrative,” Prosser notes, “is not only the bridge to embodiment but a way of making sense of transition, the link between locations: the transition itself” (9). Gender discomfort can be alleviated by narratives which locate the oddly gendered subject in the world and in relation to others. While I cast the relationship between the transgender subject and narrative in slightly different terms in this paper, I find Prosser’s understanding of the role of narrative in transsexual self-authorization to be crucial. What happens, I ask, when the transgender subject has died and is unable to provide a narrative of his complex life? What is the difference between transsexual autobiography and transgender biography?

One way in which queers and transgenders have put themselves in the way of gender realness is to inhabit categories of their own making. While some people suggest that categories (gay, lesbian, transsexual) are themselves the site of regulation, trouble, and repression, I would argue that—to use one of Butler’s terms—categories represent sites of “necessary trouble.”² Queer theory has long been preoccupied with the relationship between identity and regulation; post-Foucault, we recognize that to embrace identities can simply form part of a “reverse discourse” within which medically constructed categories are lent the weight of realness by people’s willingness to occupy those categories.³ However, it may be that we have allowed this Foucauldian insight to redirect discussions of identification away from the subjects of categories themselves. The term “reverse discourse” in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 identifies and rejects the traditional formulations of gay and lesbian political struggle as essentially oppositional. Since certain sexual liberation discourses recapitulate the very terms of the homo/hetero binary which oppress minority sexual subjects in the first place, then these discourses become part of the installation of the sexual hierarchy that they seek to oppose. However, Foucault also understands emancipation struggles as strategically and historically necessary; furthermore, a “reverse discourse” is in no way the “same” as the discourse it reverses. Indeed, its desire for reversal is a desire for transformation.

We may not want to reject all reverse discourses per se, but we may want to limit the ways in which we invest in them as end points (coming out, for example). Foucault, and Butler for that matter, clearly believe that resistance has to go beyond the taking of a name (“I am a lesbian”) and must produce creative, new forms of being by assuming and empowering a marginal positionality. Furthermore, the production of categories is different in different spaces—expert produced categories (“the homosexual,” “the invert,” “the transsexual”) are ultimately far less interesting or useful than the sexual vernaculars or categories produced and sustained within sexual subcultures. The naming of sexual vernaculars and the production of community histories can be traced back to the work of Gayle Rubin, who has spoken eloquently about the limits of expert discourses (such as psychoanalysis) on sexuality, and the importance of questions of “sexual ethnogenesis” or the formation of sexual communities.⁴ Scientific discourses have tended to narrow our ability to imagine sexuality and gender; in general, the discussions that take place in medical communities about embodiment and desire may be way behind the discussions taking place on email lists, in support groups, and in sex clubs. Doctors, for instance, use categories in a very different way from the manner in which people cruising for sex partners use categories. Accordingly, we should take over the prerogative of naming our experience and identifications.

Nowhere has the effect of naming our identifications been clearer in recent years than in relation to the experience we call “transgendered.” Transgender is for the most part a vernacular term developed within gender communities to account for the cross-identification experiences of people who may not accept all of the protocols and strictures of transsexuality. Such people understand cross-identification as a crucial part of their gendered self, but they may pick and choose among the options of body modification, social presentation, and legal recognition available to them. For instance, you may find that a transgender male is a female-born subject who has had no sex-reassignment surgery, takes testosterone (with or without medical supervision), and lives mostly “as a man” but is recognized by his community as a transgendered man in particular. The term “transgender” in this context refuses the stability that the term “transsexual” may offer to some folks and embraces more hybrid possibilities for embodiment and identification. At the same time, the term “transsexual” is itself undergoing reconstruction by publicly identifiable transsexuals; Kate Bornstein, for one, has made a career from the reshaping of the public discourse around gender and transsexuality.⁵ In other words, transsexual is not simply the conservative medical term to transgender’s transgressive vernacular; both transsexuality and transgenderism shift and change in meaning and application in relation to each other rather than in relation to a hegemonic medical discourse.

While some people will argue against using the term “female masculinity” for transgender subjects, for female-born people who go on to live as men, the work performed by this term is useful in terms of recording the histories of transgender subjects. In relation to the female-born person who passes as male (with or without hormones) for most of his life, the term “female masculinity” registers the distinction at least between his cultivated masculinity and a male’s biological masculinity and addresses the question of the transgender man’s past history as female. For these subjects, of course, we need a transgender history, a method of recording the presence of gender ambiguous subjects sensitive enough not to reduce them to either “women all along” or “failed men.” Transgender bodies, ultimately, seem to be both illogical and illegible to any number of “experts” who try to read them. At the same time, transgender lives often seem to attract enormous attention from biographers, filmmakers, talk show hosts, doctors, and journalists, all of whom are dedicated to forcing the transgender subject to make sense. While one would not wish to assign the transgender life to the inauspicious category of nonsense, we should be wary of overly rational narratives about lives filled with contradiction and tension. Ultimately, we must ask questions about history and documentation, as well as the sometimes dangerous project of scrutinizing lives which were organized around gender passing.

The lives and deaths of Brandon Teena, a Nebraskan teenager who was murdered by local boys when they discovered that he was a woman living as a man, and Billy Tipton, a jazz pianist who was discovered posthumously to have a female body, have suffered the untimely and rude effects of over-exposure. While obviously my efforts to examine the flurry of representation surrounding Brandon Teena and Billy Tipton and other transgender figures actually adds to this effect, the production of counter-narratives seems all the more important in a media age when suppression of information is virtually impossible (nor would I necessarily argue for the suppression of information under any circumstances). In the cases of Billy Tipton and Brandon Teena, however, it serves some purpose to examine the motives behind various representations of transgender lives. In general, we can identify three different and often competing sets of motivations for the representation of a transgender life by non-transgender people:

1) The project of stabilization—in this mode of production, the destabilizing effects of the transgender narrative are defused by establishing the transgender narrative as strange and uncharacteristic and even pathological;

2) the project of rationalization—here the biographer or film maker or writer finds reasonable explanations for behavior that seems dangerous and outrageous: an economic motive, a need to be in hiding, the lack of community are some rationalizing narratives;

3) the project of trivialization—the transgender life might be dismissed within such a narrative as non-representative and interesting but without any real effects upon gender normativity.

The term “transgender” can be used as a marker for all kinds of people who challenge (deliberately or accidentally) gender normativity. Jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott, just to give one example, is a male vocalist whose high counter tenor voice causes him to be heard as “female.” His voice has been described as “angelic,” and he has influenced many famous female jazz vocalists, such as Nancy Wilson. The term “transgender” can be applied here not to remove Jimmy Scott from the category “male,” but rather to prevent him from being heard as “female.” In interviews he strenuously objects to criticisms of his voice that liken it to a woman’s, and he insists, in a way, that his voice, his transgender voice, extends the category of maleness rather than capitulates to the strict dictates of gender normativity. In this context, the term “transgender” appears as an adjective to describe a voice rather than as an identification category which describes Scott’s gender identity or sexual orientation. In wha...