Scars of the Pardoner: The Trans-Operative (3/5)

“Transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history 

... as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the reconfigured...body.”

Sandy Stone

The Empire Strikes Back: 

A Post-Transsexual Manifesto

*************************************

Responding to histories that naturalize the division and erasure of polemic gender, a critical trans project recollects fragmented parts of bodies, communities, and histories in order to redeploy their treacherous operation against the foreclosing of alternative futures. In this work I follow Stone’s argument from “The Empire Strikes Back,” rejecting the progressive premise that trans bodies should be historically limited by cuts dividing their personal and collective existence. “I suggest,” writes Stone, “constituting transsexuals not as a class or a problemic third gender but rather as a genre – a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire is yet to be explored.”[i] In what I term a “trans-operative” mode, history is not a descriptive categorization of time into a series of pre-/post-eras, but instead a productive literary act of reading and composition that works by betraying divided alliances, opening access and appropriating historically divided technologies, bodies, and texts, such as Matthew 19:12.

The trans-operative recollection of history is distinct from a project of restoration refusing born this way politics that positions trans persons as “eunuchs from birth.” The argument for a third sex haunts discussions of castrates, appearing to offer an alternative besides men or women, yet by conflating trans bodies into one uninterrupted continuum, the distinct pleasures and violence are forgotten, perpetuating yet another project of erasure. Instead of attending to operations, or in the case of doctors refusing to allow access to operations, they become a mere discourse of words, “ongoing struggles over beliefs and practices within academic and medical communities… far removed from the body” (229). Whether under the name eunuch or transsexual, hermaphrodite or intersex, crafting an ahistorical third gender inevitably cuts out countless bodies and voices.

*************************************

*************************************

Likewise, the trans-operative resists progressive campaigns to become naturalized citizens in the political gender map as an artificial third party, “made that way by men.[ii]” This liminality makes castrates targets for enlistment as operatives to reinforce divisions between men and women, past and present regulating our operations to conditions set by the contemporary forces that construct and limiting us to “something less than agency. ”  [iii] Contemporary castrates come to accept a place as the constructed gender in contrast to the naturalness of men and women who point to the work transgender politics and history wondering, “don’t you think we think too much about gender?” Thus, while transgender politics often accepts a place as post-modern, post-op sex, the history of castration that has made us, written as scars on our skin, demands we reassess these operations. “Is the surgery performed to create a ‘normal’… body after all?” asks Butler, “The mutilations and scars that remain hardly offer compelling evidence that this is accomplished.”[iv] 

A trans-operative approach demands that we sustain access to history by allowing persons to “make themselves eunuchs,” appropriating figures from the past and allowing texts to claim them to carve out their own genres of embodiment and narrative, following Stone’s call, “To begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written.”[v] This method treats history as a “productive” venture rather than a merely description one. As has been demonstrated, history can be double-edged work, creating relations that utilize bodies without acknowledging their distinct presence and labor. It seeks not add something wholly anachronistic to the archive but by reading the scars of erased histories for places where the absences reopen texts to the work recollecting stolen bodies, challenging the finality of periodization, and producing access between parts of a dispersed continuum. 

*************************************

*************************************

Disturbing the barriers formed by progressive histories and operations demands that we implicating us in the ongoing relations between past and present. “Transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history,” writes Stone, “to begin to articulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the reconfigured and reinscribed body.”[vi] Following Stone, a trans-operative approach acknowledges its agency is dispersed across supposedly discrete sides of a divide: man and woman, doctor and patient, before and after, knife and skin. As operatives are implicated across all sides, citing responsibility for how our bodies have been used and reappropriating the technologies that have divided our collective material and historical relations. To accomplish this, we must discern, first, how bodies are made instruments of castration and the erasure of history and, second, how recollection of fragments open up new potential for life across division.

Taking responsibility for history involves acknowledging the harm that operations have done beyond the scope of the 20th century, insisting that medieval studies and trans studies are not tangentially related but inextricable. Castrates across time help to replicate more castrates and more kinds of surgery, whether or not they were complicit in these operations and their reproduction, by being made into docile bodies for the development of technologies of the knife. This suggests that by internalizing the inscription of barriers as necessary for personal and social health and participating in an a progressive history, we are all implicated not only in the coercion of intersex and trans bodies into clinics but diverse manners of laying hands on another body. A trans-operative approach to texts recollects how this divides reproduce one another to testify that the scars that cut across countless bodies remain rooted in our collective skin and we are answerable to them.

*************************************

*************************************

The recollection of discarded parts of history can constitute an act of liberation by reclaiming access to our divided bodies and affirming that temporal limits placed on lives are not insurmountable. It must be noted that this work is never done without threatening the supposed security provided by the partitioning of time and bodies into discrete fields. Those who have internalized these divisions may feel that agitators have become traitors, political operatives threatening the safety such boundaries promise, keeping unresolved problems safely in the past where we no longer have to think about them. Progressive politics claim to bury social operations such as castration and slavery in the past, but in the process often buries their victims along with them. The recollection of fragments and the production of new genres of relation to erased histories are worth the dangers of reopening scars to help our collective bodies “rise from off of the doctors slab, like Lazarus from the pit,” to find new life in politics and cultural memory. 

Turning now to appropriate the Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales, for a trans-operative history, I re-open a discourse that proponents of progressive history, like Chaucer’s Physician, may want closed. In “the Pardoner’s (Over-)Sexed Body,” Robert Sturges discusses those who argue that we think too much about the Pardoner’s gender, try to fix the Pardoner by taking him to be a eunuch, cutting off problematic parts and readings of his body in the process.[vii] Such readings note his effeminate features, high singing voice, role in the Church, origin in the Mediterranean, and the ominous note that he is either a “gelding or a mare.”[viii] Each of these readings inscribe themselves on the history of the text, yet none of them erase the other scars of the Pardoner. Instead, a trans-operative approach demands that we do not try to pardon the past by erasing it nor try to make it pardon us by repeating operations that cut up bodies and cut off lives.

*************************************

*************************************
Part 1: A Physician's Tale
Part 2: A History of Castration
Part 4: The Physician's Surgery
Part 5: The Pardoner's Scars
*************************************

*************************************

[i] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 231. 

[ii] See: Taylor, Gary. Castration, 154; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 186; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 7-9. 

[iii] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 229. 

[iv] Butler. “Doing Justice to Someone,” 187. 

[v] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 232. 

[vi] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 232. 

[vii] Robert S Sturges. “The Pardoner’s (Over-)Sexed Body.” Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory. N.Y. St. Martin’s Press. 2000. 35-46. 

[viii] Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 691.

*************************************

*************************************