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starfrostingWhat have I accomplished today? Why, thanks for asking. Today I bought my plane ticket to Istanbul. I also did Pilates for a few minutes on my hard wooden floor. I went to one of two classes, but that's not too bad cos one was just a (mandatory) lit tutorial. Oh also I had a masochistic cathartic conversation with my mom, and had possibly the worst Indian food I've ever been unlucky enough to waste 11euro on.
Oh and yesterday I discovered that I can indeed brew a fine cup of coffee with paper towel. So there.
I also wrote the intro for my Queer Gothic paper. You know, the one that I got an extension on cos the professor thought it would be worth waiting for? (No pressure or anything.) I like it. It is tight and has verbose often snide footnotes.
It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from personal and political 'technological' pollution? 1
Even though all human subjects engage technologies of gender in their corporeal stylizations, transsexuals are figured as monstrous manifestations of the triumph of artefactual technique over the ‘natural’ body.2 According to this logic, the transsexual body signals an affront to the naturalized order of dimorphic sex, being as it is the effect of elected hormonal and surgical intervention. However, dominant discourses simultaneously position transsexuality as an affirmation of the naturalness of binary sex, albeit a pathetically synthetic one. Bound thus within the double-edged rationale of nontranssexual normativity, transsexuals might very well double over in abjection. After all, while the monster marks the borders and breaks of human ontology, as a terrifying specter s/he is necessarily excluded from intelligible personhood. Abject figurations of transsexual subjects depict us as failed copies of real men and women, affronts to the ostensibly natural sexual difference that produces legitimate personhood. Dominant systems of gendered meaning produce the figure of the transsexual as an exile whose expulsion reveals the proper territory of congruently sexed corporeality. “And yet,” as Julia Kristeva reminds us, “from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.”3
Monsters are notoriously treacherous creatures, and transsexual appropriations of monstrosity bite back, seizing upon the trope only to twist it once again. Trans theorists propose the monster as a strategic figuration capable of disrupting norms of coherent gender while staking a perverse [why perverse?] claim to intelligibility and new schemes of recognition. In her “My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” Susan Stryker articulates transsexual monstrosity as a means of speaking from a defiantly-abject position (thereby spurning the interlocking violent systems of meaning that aim to produce dimorphically-sexed morphologies and discretely-gendered heterosexual men and women) while insisting on the necessity of moving from abjection into sustainable life. “Though I cannot escape [phallogocentrism’s] power,” Stryker writes, “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.” Perhaps, she continues:
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.4
Seeking the jouissance available to those abjected by a deeply injurious foreclosure from legible community, Stryker stakes a claim to monstrosity as a means of resistance. Transsexual monstrosity constitutes neither a reactive “no” to the category of the human from which it is excluded nor a simpering plea for inclusion. “Like [Frankenstein’s] monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment,” Stryker intones. “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.”5
Is it possible to mobilize the boundary-disturbing monstrosity of transsexual embodiment against the very logic that reduces such lives to untenable spectacles meant to allegorize the naturalness of the cisgendered human?6 In other words, can one revel in disrupting naturalized accounts of the human and, at the same time, commit oneself to resignifying the boundaries and content of the category such that it overflows itself and allows for sustainable gendered life on other terms? Is the becoming-intelligible of transsexual subjects compatible with our more recognizably-monstrous becomings, or does claiming intelligibility constitute capitulation to unlivable norms?
II. judy, be mine!
III. edelman, ya basta(rd), rebut!
IV. oh edelman, how you collapse “tantasy of eventual totalization, and, therefore...fantasy as such”! ---now I’m going to collapse some of yr dichotomies and attempt to show that abjection can be a source of jouissance, but it can also make yr life unlivable, moving into IV.c)
V. recognition, motherfuckers. monsters reveal the constructedness of the human and the impossibility of purity. let’s follow that resistance to purity in configuring trans.monstrosity, no? (c’mon, donna + cyborg politics. just a little.)
VI. anti-normative articulation of norms. more butler.
VII. something.
But it's kind of not the same without
Can you do lj-cuts within lj-cuts? I wish.
Okay, here's the potentially fucked up one:
'While the term “transsexual” is one derived from medical discourses of gender variance and generally used to name those subjects who, diagnosed with gender identity “disorder,” pursue a prescribed program of hormones and surgery in order to live as the so-called opposite sex, I use it here to mark all gender variant subjects who engage in body altering practices such as hormone replacement therapy, chest surgery, or genital reconstructive surgery. This admittedly problematic usage would then include genderqueers, FTM (female-to-male) and MTF (male-to-female) trans people who may or may not identify as “M”s or “F”s respectively, and transbutches, among others. I do this partly to upset the dichotomy in which “transgender” comes to signify transgressive resistance in opposition to the supposed determination of transsexual subjectivity by psycho-medical norms. At other points in the paper I will revert to the more conventional use of “transgender” as an umbrella term for gender variance, one which does not necessarily include the explicitly-gendered alteration of one’s body.'
And here's the just sort of hilarious one:
'“Cisgendered,” while a somewhat clumsy term, means one who does not cross (“trans”) gender. Like the term “nontrans,” it serves to mark a previously unmarked category and so destabilize the epistemological authority signified by the relative linguistic privilege of existing without a prefix.'
Oh and yesterday I discovered that I can indeed brew a fine cup of coffee with paper towel. So there.
I also wrote the intro for my Queer Gothic paper. You know, the one that I got an extension on cos the professor thought it would be worth waiting for? (No pressure or anything.) I like it. It is tight and has verbose often snide footnotes.
It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from personal and political 'technological' pollution? 1
Even though all human subjects engage technologies of gender in their corporeal stylizations, transsexuals are figured as monstrous manifestations of the triumph of artefactual technique over the ‘natural’ body.2 According to this logic, the transsexual body signals an affront to the naturalized order of dimorphic sex, being as it is the effect of elected hormonal and surgical intervention. However, dominant discourses simultaneously position transsexuality as an affirmation of the naturalness of binary sex, albeit a pathetically synthetic one. Bound thus within the double-edged rationale of nontranssexual normativity, transsexuals might very well double over in abjection. After all, while the monster marks the borders and breaks of human ontology, as a terrifying specter s/he is necessarily excluded from intelligible personhood. Abject figurations of transsexual subjects depict us as failed copies of real men and women, affronts to the ostensibly natural sexual difference that produces legitimate personhood. Dominant systems of gendered meaning produce the figure of the transsexual as an exile whose expulsion reveals the proper territory of congruently sexed corporeality. “And yet,” as Julia Kristeva reminds us, “from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.”3
Monsters are notoriously treacherous creatures, and transsexual appropriations of monstrosity bite back, seizing upon the trope only to twist it once again. Trans theorists propose the monster as a strategic figuration capable of disrupting norms of coherent gender while staking a perverse [why perverse?] claim to intelligibility and new schemes of recognition. In her “My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” Susan Stryker articulates transsexual monstrosity as a means of speaking from a defiantly-abject position (thereby spurning the interlocking violent systems of meaning that aim to produce dimorphically-sexed morphologies and discretely-gendered heterosexual men and women) while insisting on the necessity of moving from abjection into sustainable life. “Though I cannot escape [phallogocentrism’s] power,” Stryker writes, “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.” Perhaps, she continues:
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.4
Seeking the jouissance available to those abjected by a deeply injurious foreclosure from legible community, Stryker stakes a claim to monstrosity as a means of resistance. Transsexual monstrosity constitutes neither a reactive “no” to the category of the human from which it is excluded nor a simpering plea for inclusion. “Like [Frankenstein’s] monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment,” Stryker intones. “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.”5
Is it possible to mobilize the boundary-disturbing monstrosity of transsexual embodiment against the very logic that reduces such lives to untenable spectacles meant to allegorize the naturalness of the cisgendered human?6 In other words, can one revel in disrupting naturalized accounts of the human and, at the same time, commit oneself to resignifying the boundaries and content of the category such that it overflows itself and allows for sustainable gendered life on other terms? Is the becoming-intelligible of transsexual subjects compatible with our more recognizably-monstrous becomings, or does claiming intelligibility constitute capitulation to unlivable norms?
II. judy, be mine!
III. edelman, ya basta(rd), rebut!
IV. oh edelman, how you collapse “tantasy of eventual totalization, and, therefore...fantasy as such”! ---now I’m going to collapse some of yr dichotomies and attempt to show that abjection can be a source of jouissance, but it can also make yr life unlivable, moving into IV.c)
V. recognition, motherfuckers. monsters reveal the constructedness of the human and the impossibility of purity. let’s follow that resistance to purity in configuring trans.monstrosity, no? (c’mon, donna + cyborg politics. just a little.)
VI. anti-normative articulation of norms. more butler.
VII. something.
But it's kind of not the same without
Can you do lj-cuts within lj-cuts? I wish.
Okay, here's the potentially fucked up one:
'While the term “transsexual” is one derived from medical discourses of gender variance and generally used to name those subjects who, diagnosed with gender identity “disorder,” pursue a prescribed program of hormones and surgery in order to live as the so-called opposite sex, I use it here to mark all gender variant subjects who engage in body altering practices such as hormone replacement therapy, chest surgery, or genital reconstructive surgery. This admittedly problematic usage would then include genderqueers, FTM (female-to-male) and MTF (male-to-female) trans people who may or may not identify as “M”s or “F”s respectively, and transbutches, among others. I do this partly to upset the dichotomy in which “transgender” comes to signify transgressive resistance in opposition to the supposed determination of transsexual subjectivity by psycho-medical norms. At other points in the paper I will revert to the more conventional use of “transgender” as an umbrella term for gender variance, one which does not necessarily include the explicitly-gendered alteration of one’s body.'
And here's the just sort of hilarious one:
'“Cisgendered,” while a somewhat clumsy term, means one who does not cross (“trans”) gender. Like the term “nontrans,” it serves to mark a previously unmarked category and so destabilize the epistemological authority signified by the relative linguistic privilege of existing without a prefix.'
