Sunday, November 30, 2014

The Hanging Tree: Remembering the Transgender Community


"Are you, are you coming to the tree,
wear a necklace of hope,
side by side with me?"

The Hanging Tree
Suzanne Collins

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End Times

On the last day of Transgender History Month, I wake up early to the scripture set for Sunday, November 30th, in Catholic and Congregational churches is the Gospel of Mark 13:1-37. In it, Jesus prophesies the hard days ahead. In particular, the author of Mark is living in the wake of the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem by the Roman government. But Jesus's words extend further. "Be watchful! Be alert!" he warns, "Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes from place to place and there will be famines. These are the beginnings of the labor pains."  (Mark 13: 8-33). These are chastening words to hear in November as the Liturgical Year is coming to an end. Indeed, the final days of the Christian cycle always dwells on Apocalyptic visions. This is not for reasons of despair but to remind those who have heard the scripture throughout the year that the revolution of values proposed means great difficulty for all involved. These endings are also new beginnings, "labor pains." When this month is over and Advent begins, the tone shifts from despair to hope and anticipation. "Woe to pregnant women and nursing mothers in those days. Pray that this does not happen in winter," (Mark 13: 17-18) strikes with palpable warning of the destruction that comes before the story resets with the birth of Jesus at Christmas and the restart of the Liturgical year.

Revolutions must be prepared for divisiveness, those who will set "nation... against nation and kingdom against kingdom." A radical collectivity, such as the community Jesus modeled in the 1st century CE calls us not to give in to such divisions but to always seek out the other, the poor and the marginalized as our kindred . These mounting deaths and systematic violence can feel impossible to overcome. “They will hand you over to the courts. You will be beaten in synagogues. You will be arraigned before governors and kings because of me, as a witness before them," Jesus warns (Mark 13:9). The places where the law is read, justice is carried out, power is ordered can all be turned against us with the aim to divide and conquer. These are the Hanging Trees of Myers, Cleveland, Ferguson, Panem and we might add Jerusalem and Golgotha. When Mark is writing his Gospel, he knows not only how the Jewish and Christian communities will be split and fragmented but how Jesus, who he writes speaking these words, will soon find himself on a "hanging tree" of the Roman government. Jesus hangs on his tree and calls for others to follow him. This may mean hanging side by side with those we are told are criminals, boundary crossers, revolutionaries, but they are our fellow victims of a system which opens wide to hang us all. It is this "hanging tree" (the Cross/Crucifix) that becomes a symbol for hope but one that does not hide the scars of those who have died before us.

Getting out of bed on this day, the Transgender Day of Remembrance, can be that much harder when reading literature that claims that "It Gets Better" only after it gets much much worse. Yet by considering such days in context provides a reason and an impetus for action. Apocalyptic literature is a genre defined by endings. By its structure it asks the question I am asking: how do we move on when the past and the future is filled with destruction of all the things and people we love? When all things come to an end, our systems, our communities, our own lives, will it mean anything? The challenge to remember the trans community is to work for a world that we may not see. We may never reach the promised land, the utopia at the end of the revolution, and that stresses how important it is that we do not work for ourselves. If these are "labor pains" then it is possible and likely many of us will not live through the birthing process. Even more, transgender narratives teach us that things often do not become themselves until some time after our initial birth. The future requires rearing as well as midwifing. Remembering the trans community may mean that those who inherit the world that we build may look radically different than us and those who have come before us. "Be watchful! Be alert!" Transformation demands nothing less than an act of love without predetermining or categorizing or fixing what and who our beloved people may become and what or who may be included.

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Re-membering Transgender

Can you remember Yaz'min Shansez? Pictured below, Yaz'min was a thirty-one years old trans woman of color who lived in Myers, Florida. If you were walking down a particular alley on June 19th, you would have seen her body laying behind a garbage bin, filling the private drive with the smell of burning flesh. If you were there a little earlier, you would have seen her body being set on fire. Can you re-member that? Can you bring back a member of the trans community? Are you, are you going stand in her place?

The month of November has been marked as Transgender History Month, with Nov. 20th set as Transgender Remembrance Day. Now that this period has come to an end, I ask, what did we remember? Remembering seems to suggest that we are bringing back something that we have forgotten. Certainly the lives and deaths of trans persons around the world go duly unnoticed, buried under the more accessible headlines of cisgender victims. For the intentionally transphobic, there is an active practice of dismembering or misremembering the trans community. There are those who actively pull the trigger, strangle the throat, or burn the flesh. Then there are those who passively accept the death of trans persons as the natural consequence of transgressing boundaries. These are the systematically transphobic; no special feeling or thought is required to participate in this mode of diminishing the membership of the trans community. The less that is done or thought, the more effective the erasure.

Can you remember Betty Skinner? Pictured below, Betty was a fifty-two year old disabled trans woman, living confined to a senior assisted living complex in Cleveland, Ohio, where she was found dead. Unable to leave her bed during the attack, much less the violent environment, Betty's life ended when her head was bashed in. Controlled, bound, and alone, no one was there to help Betty nor to identify her murderers. The police have no leads or suspects. Can you re-member what so many turned their back on? Can you re-collect the divided and secluded members of the trans community? Are you, are you able to feel the chains of disability?

Remembering is not merely about intentionality. It is not about a special feeling or thought. It is about re-collecting fragments of a divided and erased history. It is about re-membering a community that is decimated on such a daily basis, that the reported deaths of transgender persons this year come close to matching number of days in 2014. Suddenly, such a systematic remembrance may appear impossible. How do we re-write a history that has not been written? How do we resurrect those denied a livable life? Many of these wounds will never heal. The best alternative we have may be to help them scar. We can do this by being the voice of the forgotten and being the bodies of the dismembered. This does not mean standing in the spot light and speaking for a vulnerable community (and the dead are in many respects particularly and politically vulnerable). This means re-directing the spot-light to those who need it and standing in the shadows, in the margins, in the place of the forgotten. It means remembering the transgender community by becoming an active member of it. This does not necessarily mean transforming ones body or gender presentation, but it does mean changing one's relations and one's politics. It means not viewing the oppression and violence as something that happens to "them" but as the potential for power and resistance that happens through "us."



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Are You Politically Trans*?


This November was more than Transgender History Month, it saw the return of two revolutions, one real and one imagined. The Transgender Law Center remembered, as the protests flooded the streets after the Virginia Supreme Court washed its hands of the blood of the murder of a black youth, "What’s happening in Ferguson cannot be understood outside of the deeply troubling context of systemic oppression in policing in the United States. Nearly half of Black transgender people have been incarcerated at some time, and only 35% of trans people report that they feel comfortable seeking police assistance... It is clear that these realities are not just a few problems with a system that otherwise works" (Transgender Law Center). What we read in these words is the work of a alternative mode of history. By recording the intersection of violences, a critical solidarity grows. This does not conflate race and gender, but rather acknowledges a shared political community founded on shared positionality and power. We hear this multiplicity, an existence between and across boundaries of identity that characterizes a critical trans politics, echoing through our imagined communities. We hear the drums in hearts of Myers, Cleveland, and Ferguson, providing the rhythm to music in "The Hanging Tree" from The Hunger Games: the Mockingjay Part 1, released November 19th (right before Transgender Remembrance Day). Sung in a fictionalized future for the United States, the song recollects the histories of lynchings that have brought together disparate communities to stand against not only the ideas but the physical systems that works to divide interconnected lives into more easily managed sections, often tracing along and encouraging perceived differences in gender, race, ability, and class.

"Are you, are you, coming to the tree?" the song begins, perhaps not merely repeating a plea to its audience but directing its plea to more than one audience. "They strung up a man, They say who murdered three," the song continues. Again, the use of repetition, the reference to an unnamed "they," emphasizes not only the many actions of an actor but the plurality of actors. This is about a system, a system which claims to speak for justice but casting a shadow of doubt at what "they say." "Strange things did happen here, No stranger would it be," concludes the first stanza, "If we met at midnight, In the hanging tree." Yet again, repetition uses rhythm to destabilize what we think we know about the invoked "strange" or "stranger." What has happened before, history, seems to continue to play itself out, perhaps forecasting our own future. This turn from "a man" to "they" and finally to a "we" brought together by a shared "strangeness" creates a formula for the movement across differences in time and identity towards a collectivity. Even if one feels alienated by the distinctiveness of the events of one lynching, in the fullness of time the system may just as well swallow us all. The logic of the "they" that seems to generate its own justifications.

The operation of the song is to produce a sense that "the Hanging Tree" is not the plight of any one "man" or the weapon of any one "they" but collectively "Our Hanging Tree" where systems devour its own operators. This flipping of the script potentially cuts both ways. Not only might be find ourselves at times the victims but at other times the victimizers. It's all a matter of time and rhythm. The danger and the power lies in collectively (but unequally) being tied up together in the tree. We each "wear a necklace of rope" the song confessions in one place and "wear a necklace of hope" in the dubbed rewrite. Sexism, ableism, and racism create inequalities in power, unique privileges and vulnerabilities which form the architecture of the systems of employment, enforcement, and encounters that grow outwards and upwards like a great hanging tree. It is by redirecting this power and sharing positions on the tree that we can finally begin the process of transforming the system itself. Systems predisposes our relations and by resisting and redefining those relations, we our trans politics can remember our community by looking not only behind (to the past) and forward (to the future) but sideways, to all those who stand "side by side."

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In a system of violence where each of our deaths are interconnected, no list of those politically trans bodies we lost this year can possibly be exhaustive, but in a critical act of calling for the remembering of a community that cuts across all lines and allegiances, we might remember a few who lived and died beside Yaz'min and Betty, even if they never knew each other existed.

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Thursday, November 20, 2014

Scars of the Pardoner: the Physician's Surgery (4/5)


"Is ther no grace, 
is ther no remedye?"

The Physician's Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer

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While progressive narratives are useful to provide forward thrust to medieval tales of the past, numerous figures challenge the surgical approach to the body and to history. Persisting only through fragments, Chaucer’s the Canterbury Tales presents the tensions between periodizing change and finding continuity through personal and social violence. Chaucer posed such a challenge in the exchange between the Physician and Pardoner when in Fragment VI, the two speakers enter into a dialectical exchange on surgical violence and the ethics of partitioning lives so that others may progress into the future. By attending to how the progressive surgical thesis of the Physician is countered by the Pardoner’s recollection of divided bodies, taking responsibility for our genealogically ties to medieval surgical approaches to the body and stand in solidarity with the scars of those who persist today as fragments, inextricable from the operations of sharp machines.

The Physician’s proceeds by providing a Tale from the classical authorities from which he derives his medical knowledge and thesis: if you have a problem, cut it out. “The Physician’s tale” concerns the management of gender divides in society and the laying on of hands on women’s bodies in order to alter and/or protect its wholesomeness. It is a tale of the life of Virginia, the only child and heir to a Greek knight, Virginus, is expected to be sold into marriage and to reproduce future heirs for her father’s line. Suddenly, Virginia’s body is threatened with rape, enslavement, and losing its virginity, all of which in the medieval imagination is tantamount to a sex-change operation due to the associated shifts in physical and social status. Tensions violently resolve as Virginus takes a blade to his daughter’s neck, demonstrating that if the integrity of a woman’s body or a patriarch’s ownership of it is disturbed, one solution is to cut it to pieces.



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Virginia, defined by her quintessentially pre-sex status, evidences the ongoing securitization of a lord’s possession of men and women’s genetic lines, a system chastity and eunuchs enforced, allowing lords like Virginus to not have to “think about gender.” The Physician’s Tale goes on at length describing the form of Virginia’s body, “lilie whit” “reed” as “a rose” without the stain of sex or surgery, to contrast the violent penetrations of her body to come.[i] At this moment, Virginia’s body does not need correction because of her chastity she is already effectively fixed. “In hire,” tells the Physician, “ne lakked no condicioun.”[ii] The Physician’s language regularly evidences the intermeshing of medical and religious terminology for sterility, emphasizing that she was whole both in body and in spirit, “As wel in goost as body chast was she, / For which she floured in virginitee / With alle humylitee and abstinence.”[iii] Virginia’s virginity neither challenges the integrity of her body nor the gender politics in her community.

Once Virginia’s pre-sex state has been established, the introduction of gender politics signals the beginning of the division of her physically and socially whole body. Apius claims he can “make hire with hir body synne,” with or without consent, signaling that as soon as his scheme is introduced, Virginia’s body begins to break from Virginus.[iv] By becoming sexualized, Virginia disturbs the naturalized borders of her virginity, an operative that at any point might turn to or be taken to Apius. “For whoso dooth, a traitour is,” warns the Physician of sex, establishing sexually active woman as a betrayal against the physical and social body, “Of alle tresons sovereyn pestilence.”[v] Drawing on medical and legal language, uncontrolled sex is a disease and damnation because it is a “sovereign” crime; the legal consequence of infidelity by and with a sovereign being held as treason against a King’s lordship, the consequence for which was dismemberment.

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If the pre-op virgin state is not secure and sexual operations must be considered, then the solution of patriarchs, like the Physician, is to divide the body once and for all into a post-op state where it can no longer threaten the naturalized order of gender. The escalation of Apius from a potential rapist to enslaver propels operations of laying hands on women, resonating the slippage between the violence securing a virgin “doghter” or a castrated “thral,” by demonstrating the possibility that any body may be taken by force.[vi] “Youre is the charge of al hir surveiaunce,” instructs the Physician on managing gender politics, warning that “by youre necligence in chastisynge, / That they ne perisse.”[vii] If sexuality introduces a disease that may already end in division and death, then extreme operation, such as the surgical construction of eunuchs or the murder of a daughter, to secure health and the surveillance of gender barriers in an estate may be pardoned.

Once the legal dispossession of his daughter (and her pre-sex body) is immanent, Virginus works to secure her soul by dividing it from her flesh. Confessing that such surgery should only be performed in dire circumstances, Virginus coerces Virginia to accept his decision to foreclosing of her future. “O gemme of chastitee, in pacience / Take thou thy deeth, for this is my sentence,” he entreats her, “dyen with a swerd or with a knyf.”[viii] At first, Virginia responds as she would to a doctor, begging “Is ther no grace, is ther no remedye?”[ix] Accepting his judgment, she internalizes her division between father and master, virgin and sex slave, operator and operated, in a state “constituting something less than agency.” Virginia is only able to affect surgical access to her body with a prayer, “his swerd he wolde smyte softe.”[x] Making herself an fragmented body for the sake of her kingdom, the last we see of Virginia is her severed head in the hands of her father as he return to the courts, “to the juge he gan it to presente.”[xi]

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Becoming a part rather than a whole, the narrative contest over Virginia body might be said to end with the haunting image of her severed head, but a trans-operative approach to the story follows the continuing affects of her fragments on other bodies. Witnessing the still bleeding wounds of Virginia’s cut up flesh, the crowds turn against the other operatives in the disruptive Tale: they lay hands on Apius, the would be rapist, “caste hym in a prisoun right anon, / Ther as he slow himself;” while Apius’s servant, Claudius, “was demed for to hange upon a tree;” and Virginius for his role in the violence was severed from the community and exiled.[xii] While the dismemberment of Virginia evidently causes the cutting off of further lives, it must be stressed that bodies were already divided by the barriers that governed sex that segregated bodies from Tale’s start. In other words, when the operations of gender are so inscribed in the divisions of society, the scars of violence are not absolved simply by removing the technology of the knife.

A proponent of a surgical approach to bodies and history, the Physician’s Tale supposes that the flurry of operations its end cuts off any loose ends of the story, yet leaves readers in the ruins of division, questioning, what we do with unresolved remains. When the Physician concluded, the Host begins to swear like a mad man, "Harrow!" quod he, “by nayles and by blood! / This was a fals cherl and a fals justise.”[xiii] Calling out the names of bodily fragments, the Host turns to the Pardoner and the assorted body parts her carries to help wash away the stain of the Physician’s bloody Tale. Scholars have noted that the Pardoner’s reply, “It shal be doon…by Seint Ronyon!” plays on a pun for testicles. This references the Pardoner’s supposed status as a “gelding,” and signals that far from giving comic relief to pardon the violence of division, his recollection of broken bodies will not let the scars of any part of such operations be readily forgotten. [xiv]


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Part 3: The Trans-Operative
Part 5: The Pardoner's Scars
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[i] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 32-33.

[ii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 41.

[iii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 45.

[iv] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 138.

[v] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 91.

[vi] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 187-189.

[vii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 198-199.

[viii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 217.

[ix] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 236.

[x] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 252.

[xi] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 256.

[xii] Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 267-273.

[xiii] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 288-289.

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


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