part one bodies
There is little time for grief in the Phenomenology [of Spirit] because renewal is always close at hand. What seems like tragic blindness turns out to be more like the comic myopia of Mr. Magoo whose automobile careening through the neighborâs chicken coop always seems to land on all four wheels. Like such miraculously resilient characters of the Saturday morning cartoon, Hegelâs protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological insightsâand fail again. As readers, we have no other narrative option but to join in this bumpy ride.
âJudith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
chapter 1
Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex
Transgender and the Queer Moment
Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motiveârecurrent, eddying, troublant. The word âqueerâ itself means acrossâit comes from the Indo-European root twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart.
âEve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies
In its earliest formulations, in what are now considered its foundational texts, queer studies can be seen to have been crucially dependent on the figure of transgender. As one of its most visible means of institutionalization, queer theory represented itself as traversing and mobilizing methodologies (feminism, poststructuralism) and identities (women, heterosexuals) already, at least by comparison, in institutionalized place. Seized on as a definitively queer force that âtroubledâ the identity categories of gender, sex, and sexualityâor rather revealed them to be always already fictional and precariousâthe trope of crossing was most often impacted with if not explicitly illustrated by the transgendered subjects crossing their several boundaries at once: both the boundaries between gender, sex, and sexuality and the boundary that structures each as a binary category.
Even in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickâs work, which has argued most trenchantly for âa certain irreducibilityâ of sexuality to gender, and thus one might deduce would follow a certain irreducibility of homosexuality to transgender, homophobic constructions are understood to be produced by and productive of culturally normative gender identities and relations.1 The implications of this include a thorough enmeshing of homosexual desire with transgender identification. In its claim that women in the nineteenth century served to mediate desire between men, Sedgwickâs Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire suggests that the production of normative heterosexuality depended on a degree of male identificationâand yet importantly, the disavowal of this identificationâwith woman as the object of desire.2 At the beginnings of queer therefore, in what is arguably lesbian and gay studiesâ first book, heterosexuality is shown to be constructed through the sublimation of a cross-gendered identification; for this reason, making visible this identificationâtransgendered movementâwill become the key queer mechanism for deconstructing heterosexuality and writing out queer.
Sedgwickâs next book foregrounds this methodological function of transgender explicitly. Epistemology of the Closet presents transgender as one good reason for the development of a theory of (homo) sexuality distinct from feminism. The critical visibility of transgenderââthe reclamation and relegitimation of a courageous history of lesbian trans-gender role-playing and identificationââposes a challenge to lesbianismâs incorporation within feminism: âThe irrepressible, relatively class-nonspecific popular culture in which James Dean has been as numinous an icon for lesbians as Garbo or Dietrich has for gay men seems resistant to a purely feminist theorization. It is in these contexts that calls for a theorized axis of sexuality as distinct from gender have developed.â3 Exceeding feminismâs purview of gender, transgender demands and contributes to the basis for a new queer theory; paradoxically, transgender demands a new theory of sexuality. It is transgender that makes possible the lesbian and gay overlap, the identification between gay men and lesbians, which forms the grounds for this new theory of homosexuality discrete from feminism. And it is surely this overlap or cross-gendered identification between gay men and lesbiansâan identification made critically necessary by the AIDS crisisâthat ushers in the queer moment.
Most recently in her autobiographical narratives and performance pieces, Sedgwick has revealed her personal transgendered investment lying at and as the great heart of her queer project. Her confession of her âidentification? Dare I, after this half-decade, call it with all a fat womanâs defiance, my identity?âas a gay manâ âcomes outâ with the transgendered desire that has been present in her work all along.4 Similarly in its readings, Tendencies derives its queer frisson openly and consistently from an identification across genders: a mobility âacross gender lines, including the desires of men for women and of women for men,â a transgendered traversal that in its queering (skewing and unraveling) of apparently normative heterosexuality is simultaneously a movement across sexualities.5 To summon the queer moment, the book begins with a figure for transgenderâgay men wearing DYKE T-shirts and lesbians wearing FAGGOT T-shirts.
But Sedgwick is just the tip of the iceberg. The transgendered presence lies just below the surface of most of lesbian and gay studiesâ foundational texts. Early work on the intersections of race, gender, and sexual identities theorized otherness as produced through a racist, homophobic, and sexist transgendering, and thus again transgendering became the means to challenging this othering. Kobena Mercerâs work on the fetishizing/feminizing white gaze of Robert Mapplethorpe at the black male body; CherrĂe Moragaâs description of the hermaphroditic convergence of the chingĂłn and the chingada; Gloria AnzaldĂșaâs memory of the mitaâ y mitaâ figure in the sexual, gender, and geographic borderlands: these various cross-gendered figures emerged both as constructions and, in their articulation by these critics, deconstructions of cultural ideologies that insist on absolute difference in all identity.6 Other early lesbian and gay studies work invested in the transgendered subjectâs âtransâ a transgressive politics. For Teresa de Lauretis, Sue-Ellen Case, Jonathan Dollimore, and Marjorie Garber whether appearing in contemporary lesbian cinematic representations of butch/femme desire, in theatrical cross-dressing in early modern England, or as popular cultural gender-blending icons, the transgendered subject made visible a queerness that, to paraphrase Garber, threatened a crisis in gender and sexual identity categories.7 Crucial to the idealization of transgender as a queer transgressive force in this work is the consistent decoding of âtransâ as incessant destabilizing movement between sexual and gender identities. In short, in retrospect, transgender gender appears as the most crucial sign of queer sexualityâs aptly skewed point of entry into the academy.
Without doubt though, the single text that yoked transgender most fully to queer sexuality is Judith Butlerâs Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.8 Gender Troubleâs impact was enormous: published in 1990, appearing with the decade, it transformed transgender into a queer icon, in the process becoming something of an icon of the new queer theory itself. Yet how this actually happened, how Gender Trouble imbricated queer with transgender, and how the book itself was imbricated with transgender forms something of an intriguing critical phenomenon. For the embodied subject of transgender barely occupies the text of Gender Troubleâa book very much, after all, about subjectsâ failure of embodiment. As Butler herself states in remarking her surprise at the tendency to read Gender Trouble as a book about transgendered subjects, âthere were probably no more than five paragraphs in Gender Trouble devoted to drag [yet] readers have often cited the description of drag as if it were the âexampleâ which explains the meaning of [gender] performativity.â From this later point, her 1993 essay âCritically Queer,â Butler clearly challenges the equation of transgender and homosexuality, or to be precise, the construction of transgender as the only sign of a deconstructive homosexuality: âcross-gendered identification is not the exemplary paradigm for thinking about homosexuality, although it may be one.â9 Yet the effect of Gender Trouble was precisely to secure transgender as a touchstone of lesbian and gay theory. How did Gender Trouble canonize, and how was it canonized for, a theory of transgender performativity that was apparently not its substance?
In the first essay appearing in the first edition of the first academic journal devoted to lesbian and gay studies, glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, itself a canonical moment in queer studies, Sedgwick comments on Gender Troubleâs canonically queer status: âAnyone who was at the 1991 Rutgers conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies [another canonizing mechanism], and heard Gender Trouble appealed to in paper after paper, couldnât help being awed by the productive impact this dense and even imposing work has had on the recent development of queer theory and reading.â Surmising that these invocations were not indicative of an uncomplicated loyalty to Gender Trouble however, Sedgwick goes on to suggest that âthe citation, the use of Butlerâs formulations in the context of queer theory will prove to have been highly active and tendentious.â10 That Gender Trouble was subject to a set of reiterations and recitations proliferating meanings beyond the intention of the âoriginalâ might be considered especially fitting given its own attraction toward Foucauldian proliferation as the effective means for denaturalizing copies that pretend to originality. Its argument about recitation lent an amenability to its own recitation. Thereâs something very campy, very definitively queer, about readings that refused to adhere to the letter of Butlerâs argument, that refused, to use its vernacular, to ârepeat loyally.â The original underwent a certain overreading, playful exaggeration, a mischievous adding of emphasis, yet nevertheless remained a discernible referent.
Camp may in fact be quite fundamental to our reading of Gender Trouble and our understanding of its transgender import. In his introduction to his anthology on camp (one of two anthologies on camp that appeared soon after Gender Trouble) David Bergman nominates Butler as âthe person who has done the most to revise the academic standing of camp and to suggest its politically subversive potential.â11 Bergman stakes that her success in queer studies comes in part from bringing to camp a high theoretical toneâand, we might add, from bringing camp to high theory. Pushing further on the connections between camp, queer, and the argument of Gender Trouble, it might be said that Butlerâs centrality in queer theory is in part an effect of queerâs recuperation of camp and queerâs recuperation through camp. The late eighties/early nineties, simultaneous with the beginnings of queer theory, saw the cultural and political reappropriation of camp, and the history of the term âqueerâ is most symptomatic of this. From homophobic epithet designating and reinforcing the otherâs social abjection to self-declared maker of community pride, âqueerâ was reclaimed precisely according to the transformative mechanisms of camp in which what has been devalued in the original becomes overvalued in the repetition. In turn, in its queer reevaluation, camp has proven a key strategy for queer theoryâs own institutionalization, a means by which to piggyback into the academy on (appropriating and redefining) already established methodologies. Between Men, for instance, deployed a distinctive camp style in subjecting canonical nineteenth-century literature to deliberate yet wonderfully subtle overreadings that brought to the surface its sexual subtexts. In its academic manifestation, camp actually comes to appear a form of queer deconstruction, not simply inverting the opposition between the original and the copy, the referent and the repetition but creating, according to Scott Long, a third space, âa stance, detached, calm, and free, from which the opposition as a whole and its attendant terms can be perceived and judged.â12 This third space, this queer deconstruction, is surely queer theory.
It is certainly this camp inversion of the expected order of terms to elucidate the construction of the original that forms the very pith of Gender Troubleâs theory: the subject does not precede but is an effect of the law; heterosexuality does not precede but is an effect of the prohibition on homosexuality; sex does not precede but is an effect of the cultural construction of gender. Butlerâs argument consistently reverses the expected history between the two terms in each formulation to bring them into a third space where each opposition as a whole can be perceived and judged. The binaries of sexual difference that undergird what Butler terms âthe metaphysics of sexâ are fragmented and mobilized with a Derridean flourish into sexual diffĂ©rance (GT 16). The driving sensibility of Gender Troubleâs theory is in this respect an archetypically camp one. Although the embodied transgendered subject doesnât occupy Gender Trouble in any substantial way, it is this camp reversal of terms that conveys the sense that the transgendered subject of drag is always in the margins of the text, the implicit referent (ironically given Butlers use of camp/drags function to displace the referent). For it as the personification of campâthe third/intermediate term that reveals the constructedness of the binary of sex, of gender, and of the sex/gender systemâthat queer studies has anointed the transgendered subject queer. âCritically Queerââs reading of Gender Troubleâs reception is thus absolutely right. Transgendered subjects, butches and drag queens, did come to appear the empirical examples of gender performativity, their crossing illustrating both the inessentiality of sex and the nonoriginality of heterosexuality that was the bookâs thesis. And those five paragraphs or so where Gender Trouble does explicitly address the subject in drag certainly do nothing to contradict this conception of transgender as exemplarily camp/queer/performative: âIn imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itselfâas well as its contingencyâ (GT 137). In this sentence (particularly given that the italics appear in the original), transgenderâs function is unambivalently and emphatically that of the elucidating example of gender performativity.
This chapter charts the achievement of and challenges that association, transgender/camp/queer/performativity. That transgender can emerge as a âstudiesâ in the late nineteen-nineties, that the figure at the center of many of transgenderâs projects is the âgender troubler,â is largely due to Butlerâs canonization (both the canonization of Butler and her inadvertent canonization of transgender): âs/heââthe transgenderist, the third camp term whose crossing lays bare and disrupts the binaries that found identityâthreads prominently through the self-declared first reader in the new field of transgender studies.13 My concern is the implication of this harnessing of transgender as queer for transsexuality: what are the points at which the transsexual as transgendered subject is not queer? The splits and shifts between the deployment of transgender and that of transsexuality within Butlerâs work are revealing on this count. Whereas in Gender Trouble the transgendered subject is used to deliteralize the matter of sex, in Butlers later Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of âSex,â the transsexual in particular symbolizes a carefully sustained ambivalence around sex.14 That Butler chooses to elucidate the limits of the transgendered subjectâs deliteralization of sex through the figure of a transsexual is a powerful indicator of the conceptual splitting between transsexual and queer and, indeed, of queer theoryâs own incapacity to sustain the body as a literal category. In transsexuality sex returns, the queer repressed, to unsettle its theory of gender performativity. In making Butler the substance of my first chapter, I intend both to mark the absolutely generative force her work has had for this book and to suggest that the limitations over the figure of the transsexual and the literality of the sexed body in her work make necessary my readings of the transsexual body narratives that follow.
Queer Gender and Performativity
To realize the difference of the sexes is to put an end to play
âJacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff, âFetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Realâ
Even though it is articulated only in the last of four sections in the final chapter (âBodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversionsâ [GT 128â141]), that is in less than one-twelfth of the book, it is the account of gender performativity that is most often remembered as the thrust of Gender Trouble. Sedgwick illustrates: âProbably the centerpiece of Butlerâs recent work has been a series of demonstrations that gender can best be discussed as a form of performativity.â More intriguing than the disproportionate emphasis accorded the final section of Gender Trouble in general remembrance, however, is the way in which gender performativity has become so coextensive with queer performativity as to render them interchangeable. Sedgwick, again, exemplifies the way in which âgenderâ has slipped rapidly into âqueer.â âQueer Performativityâ (the title of her essay on James) she writes, is âmade necessaryâ by Butlerâs work in and since Gender Trouble; and in Tendencies Sedgwick assigns Butler âand her important bookâ (Gender Trouble) a representative function, âstand[ing] in for a lot of the rest of usâ working on queer performativity.15 How does this slippage from gender to queer in the discussion of performativity come about, and how does Gend...