Thursday, March 31, 2016

The Visibility of Transgender: A History of "Freaks & Queers"


"They were made freaks, socially constructed for the purpose of entertainment and profit"

Freaks and Queers
Eli Clare
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A Genealogy of Freaks


As a transgender man with cerebral palsy, Clare recognizes from personal experience how a variety of people, especially those he names in his chapter "Freaks and Queers" are separated from society by longstanding habits of gawking. As a lived situation, being treated as a "freak" makes Clare feel alone and unique. This experience of being isolated by medical and social categorizes is compounded by the treatment of the modern moment as one of unprecedented scientific and cultural knowledge. Transgender, transgender, intersex, cerebral palsy, and disability are all words with very particular modern meanings. As such the bodies and lives they are supposed to describe are defined within specific modern contexts, effectively cutting them off from the impulse to draw on historical struggles, cultural genealogies, and collective pride. "I want to unravel freak, to pull on the thread called history," writes Clare of the desire to cross the geographic and temporal divisions that keep marginalized people from identifying with one another (71). Indeed, by remapping history, Clare discovers how transgender, intersex, and disabled people have long been isolated from collective experiences of time and space through the work of various kinds of Freak Shows. Clare writes, "bearded women, fat women... intersexed people... became wondrous and horrifying exhibits... nature did not make them into freaks, the freakshow did." (71-72). In other words, transgender and intersex people did not suddenly appear in the nineteenth and twentieth century as isolated objects of study and entertainment but are in part produced in the mechanisms of enfreakening that has roots in the medieval period.

"Intersexed people, transsexuals, and people who don't conform to gender norms - such as bearded women who grow their beards - have their own history at the freakshow," claims Clare (96). For Clare, "history at the freakshow," is not simply a history of the freakshow. Rather, diverse peoples who have existed across time have crossed through periods and places where they have been transformed into localized tourist attractions. These places - or shows - take on different forms and use different language but the function of the freakening is a mechanism that extends across differences in time and embodiment. "The history of freakdom extends far back into western civilization," writes Clare. "The court jester, the pet dwarf, the exhibition of Renaissance England, the myths of giants, minotaurs, and monsters all point to this long history" (71). Clare reaches wide and far to gather a wide collection of peoples into his history yet roots this collectivity as central in the anachronistic project of the freakshow. "The freakshow," writes Clare, "construct[ed] an exaggerated divide between 'normal' and Other, sustained in turn by rubes willing to pay good money to stare." (72). In particular, Clare's cultural history hovers around the pre-modern period where the stories of Amazons and Hermaphrodites were imagined alongside pet dwarves and monsters.  In the medieval period, these peoples who today are isolated in medical studies and doctor's offices can be found together in islands on the margins of the world or showed before princes.

Clare acknowledges that there is a linguistic and archival problem in mapping a history of freakdom but hopes to find stories that allow for imaginative alternatives in pre-modern pre-medicalized bodies of freaks.  "Queer identity has been pathologized and medicalized," writes Clare. "Until 1973, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder. Today, transsexuality and transgenderism, under the names of gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder, are considered psychiatric conditions. Queerness is all too frequently intertwined with shame, silence, and isolation"(96). For critics of medieval transgender or intersex studies, these modern medical terms can be through up as roadblocks. The claim can be made that premodern peoples did not understand themselves with the same concepts by which current peoples identify. Yet Clare argues that this fixation on terminology is a part of the practice of objectifying shared subjective experiences that are often much messier. "In the centuries before medicalization...," writes Clare, "the Christian western world had encoded disability with many different meanings" (82). A key part of this work then is translation and the ability of metaphor and analogy to help identification across differences. This points towards imagined cultural histories over the strict boundaries of medical categorization. "I want to follow the messier course, to examine the ways in which the ugly words we sometimes use to name our pride to into tap into a complex knot of personal and collective histories" (93). If enfreakening is the process of isolating and shaming individual persons, then this alternative mapping of the past emphasizes the slippages in category and experience in order to call for collective power and pride through shared history.


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The Place of Freaks

There becomes a circuitous relationship between freaks and their environment, as indeed as the physical and social machinery of various types of freakshows work to contain and explain bodies that diverge from the norm according to their constructed surroundings. When these freakshows were the most successful at its their work, the peoples would appear as natural monsters - literally from the Latin those who "show" or prove a point. This however, argues Clare, is an effect and not a cause of their circumstances. "Whatever these paying customers - rubes in circus lingo - believed, they were not staring at freaks of nature," writes Clare. "Rather, the freak show tells the story of an elaborate and calculated social construction" (71). These circumstances were the beliefs that defined the meaning of the lives contained in the shows but which in turn constructed the environments which were regarded as the natural place of such monsters. Enfreaking was then a process rather than a natural state. "At the center of this construction is the showman, who, using costuming, staging, elaborate fictional histories, marketing, and choreography, turning people from four groups [disabled people, both native and foreign non-disabled people of color, and non-disabled people with visible differences] into freaks," writes Clare (71). These showman were those who had the power of narrative. Mandeville fits this role in his travels for the Hermaphrodites and Amazons which he places and describes. Such showmen control the machinery but treat their role as merely explanatory, covering up the role their knowledge construction had in making the circumstances they described and represented.

"I want to hear their stories, but like the stories of other marginalized people, they are often never told, but rather eaten up, thrown away, lost in the daily grind of survival," writes Clare (78). The power to write histories are a privilege of circumstances where a person is command of their time, surroundings, and language to be allowed to tell stories.  "Some of the 'freaks' didn't read or write, due to their particular disabilities or to the material/social circumstances of their lives. Or, as in the case of many of the people brought here from other countries, they didn't speak English and/or didn't come from cultures that passed stories through the written word" (78).  Those who could write were the people who were free from the confines of their place in society. This meant that those who lived on the margins or were enlisted into freakshows often did not have control of their environment enough to turn it into narrative. "Clearly, working as a freak meant working a lousy job, many times the only job available," writes Clare. "Sometimes the job was lousier than others" (77). Indeed, these jobs and social positions could be described various as "lousy" because of an environmental intimacy and social association with louses and other parasites. The places of the freaks on the margins, were made out as less hygienic, less controlled by the healthy and wholesomeness of central peoples and places. Here the undesirable lived alongside and on one another. Metaphorically, the peoples on the margins became imagined as infestations, clinging and hiding along the fringes of properly governed places and bodies. Yet as Clare notes, these were often the only places and ways of living left for these peoples to survive and from these places magrinalized people are left to draw the metaphors and images with which they will be described to the world of gawkers.

As time went on, the brushing away of premodern travel texts and even the modern side-shows signals to many the improvement of the lives of those marked as monsters and freaks yet as Clare demonstrates, changes in form do not always mean a change in the machinery or its effects. Although the Isle of Hermaphrodites is nowhere on the modern map, this does not mean that freakshows ended but rather shifted to less public medical offices and textbooks. "The end of the freak show didn't mean the end of our display or the end of voyeurism," writes Clare. "We simply traded one kind of freakdom for another" (Clare 87). As a process, the freakshow can change while continuing to fulfill its purpose. In the premodern islands, as in today's gawkers of transgender and intersex people, 
"they came to be educated and entertained, titillated and repulsed. They came to have their ideas of normal and abnormal, superior and inferior, their sense of self, confirmed and strengthened" (71).Throughout his expansive history, Clare continually moves into language of the collective and co-identified, saying "we" and "us" when referring to the monsters, freaks, and other marginalized. On the other hand, Clare refers to gawkers as "they" who enfreaken or "them." The differentiation happens at the place of the freakshow where differences were and are asserted. "Take for instance public stripping, the medical practice of stripping disabled children to their underwear and examining them in front of large groups of doctors, medical students, physical therapists, and rehabilitation specialists. They have the child walk back and forth. They squeeze their muscles. They watch his gait, muscle tension, footfall, back curvature. They take notes and talk among themselves about what surgeries and therapies they might recommend" (88). While the dirty freakshow has been replaced by sterile enviornments, the isolation and objectification of the bodies continue. In the end, these forms of categorical knowledge, of putting peoples in their places, is an act of power as well of delight.


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The Flaunters and the Gawkers

Given the place of transgender, intersex, and disability in the history of freak shows, Clare argues that it is necessary to be able to transform these loca of shame into appropriated sites of pride. Indeed, these counter-movement, argues Clare, began from the earliest moment that the privileged traveled far and went through expense in order to be able to see the marginalized. "I relish the knowledge that there have been people who have taken advantage of white people's and nondisabled people's urge to gawk," writes Clare (95). While staring and gawking are both acts of power, asserting the freak as set apart by their difference from society's rules of polite interaction, those who were stared at were imbued with a kind of power to enchant. Even as they were pushed to the margins, these peoples on the margins drew people to them and became loca sancta in their own right. The critical contingency is that this power may or may not be a force the marginalized could control. Clare writes, "the people who worked as freaks - especially those who had some control over their own display - grasped an exploitative situation in an exploitative world and, as often as possible, turned it toward their benefit" (79). Freakshows made money for showmen and this was a trade that many transgender and intersex people learned. By turning their lives into performances, people can exploit the gawking they receive for their own benefit. By demonstrating that such divides and places are artificially defined, the possibilities for alternatives arise.  "Even the binary of female-bodied and male-bodied appears more and more to be a social construction," Clare observes, "as intersexed people... begin to speak publicly about their lives and the medical intrusion they've faced" (127-128). By claiming history and identifying with one another's struggles, the tools and constructs that define gender in the body and the environment are reveal as socially made, thus suggesting that they might be remade or otherwise used.

Clare asks if history can reclaim and find pride in the freaks struggle?  "They shape pride out of a centuries-old legacy of performing on the street corner, at the open air fair, in the palace and at the carnival as freak, monster, pet dwarf, court jester, clown," writes Clare. "The history that for so long has placed us on stage, in front of audiences, sometimes in subversion and resistance, other times in loathing and shame, ask not only for pride, but also for our witness as our many different personal histories come tangling into our collective one" (100). In the end, the crux is about the question of who can benefit and who can identify from freakshows. Will they always be managed by outside authorities or can the marginalized claim a collective history? The critical shift seems to be the move from a medical model back to a cultural model of place as it provides more slippages, messy middles, and possibilities for simultaneous effect. "We are declaring, that doctors and their pathology, rubes and their money, anthropologists and their theories, gawkers and their so called innocuous intentions, bullies and their violence, showmen and their hype, Jerry Lewis and his telethon, government bureaucrats and their rules will no longer define us," concludes Clare (90). Indeed, Clare calls for a new turn in scholarship that seeks to give the power of definition and location to the peoples defined and located rather than controlling them by such means. History and mapmaking need not be dispelled as a way to understand lived experiences of time and space but the tools and constructs must be better shared. "We need to know our history, come to understand which pieces of that history we want to make our own, and develop a self-image of pride," writes Clare (90). The freakshow and isle of monsters might turn from a place of shame into a place of pride if only it turns from the isolated topic (and topos) of specialists and authorities into a world of collective identification. Only then can history become a form of liberating the past and not a further circumscribing of it. 

The benefit of sharing the power of a history will embolden the oppressed today rather than define their limits. "Whatever we name ourselves, however we end up shattering our self-hatred, shame silence, and isolation," writes Clare, "the goal is the same: to end our daily material oppression." (101). Continuing to use the collective tense, "we," Clare insists on a history and mapmapping that looks at making connections to marginalized places rather than alienated "them" from one another and the self. Pride in this form is a collective experience that invites identification and a sharing of stories, bodies, and other social resources. Only with this group power can change happen. "Pride is not an inessential thing. Without pride, disabled people are much more likely to accept unquestioningly the daily material conditions of ableism: unemployment, poverty, segregated and substandard education, years spent locked up in nursing homes, violence perpetuated by caregivers, lack of access," writes Clare (91). Mapping out these places of isolation and connecting them with places of monstrocity and freakdom in the past combined critical powers. Where scholars see one as oppressive so too might they be drawn to see the injustice in the other. By so being connected, these lives speak to the value and meaning of one another. A sense of pride develops and pride means a share in power. Power then might mean material change. "Without pride," concludes Clare, "individual and collective resistance to oppression becomes nearly impossible." (91). Pride is the impulse and the power to look beyond the confines of time and place to see more connected and collective possibilities of shared histories and space.


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More on Eli Clare
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Clare points to Rosemarie Garland Thomson's theorizing and historicizing scholarship as critical to comprehending the genealogies that constructed Amazons, Hermaphrodites, Trans and Intersex people as freaks. "Perhaps the freak show's most remarkable effect was to eradicate distinctions among a wide variety of bodies," writes Garland Thomson. "[A]ll the bodily characteristics that seemed different or threatening to the dominant order merged into a kind of motley chorus line of physical difference on the freakshow stage" (Garland Thomson 62-63).
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Monday, March 21, 2016

Super Trans: Transgender in Comic Books with M.W. Bychowski


"You can't prove who you are...
and if we ask other people to tell us we're real, 
we've lost everything"

Kate "Coagula" Godwin
The Doom Patrol
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Super-Trans

It was Saturday, March 5th in Exeter, New Hampshire when I walked down a narrowly flight that likely inspired (along with the famous song) the naming of the Stairway to Heaven Comic Book Store (SWtH). I had a good relationship with the shops owner, a retired English teacher. At our first meeting, when he found out about my research on trans literature, he had insisted that I share some of my work with him. Upon getting to know each other more, the topic of my Transform Talks and workshops came up. He invited me to speak some evening in one of his shops. We planned the event to happen before my family and I moved to Connecticut. If the event went well, such Transform Talks would be a good excuse to get me to travel back to Maine/New Hampshire for visits. In any case, it was a parting gift to one another, an event that could share the conversations we have had in the store with a wider audience as well as a way to say bon voyage to that community. A poster was drawn up to advertise the event, along with a few “variants” to be available to subscribers of our different social media. This mimicked the practice in comics where variant and exclusive covers are released along with special issues in order to drum up the interest of collectors. Word got around the store as well as among local activists and a comic book reading group. For a while, both of our expectations were fairly conservative. The owner promised that if nothing else he would be there and we could have a nice informal discussion on the topic. Yet as I arrived at the store to find the room set up for the Transform Talk, the room was already filling with some twenty or so attendants. This would be a good discussion.

The subject of the talk, “Super Trans: Transgender in Comic Books,” had struck a cord with many so that attendants roped in family and friends to come. We began by going around the room and introducing ourselves, named our preferred pronouns, and explaining what had brought us here today. Most but not all present claimed that they had only encountered transgender rarely in comics and others admitted that the only instances they could remember are from video games. Nonetheless, by the end of the circuit, I had added several titles to my list that I would explore later. The crowd began to flip through books when I passed around a stack of comics that would be featured in today’s talk. I also affirmed that a special attendant would win a free comic at the close of the evening, as promised on the poster. (The winner of the comic ended up choosing "Angela: Queen of Hel #1" on my recommendation). Beginning to write on the board, I explained that the focus of today’s talk was to explore how transgender functions narratively in comic books. For the time being, this would push beyond or aside the work of merely listing transgender characters in comics, debating who could or could not be considered trans, or answering the very interesting question of the presence of transgender readers and writers in the industry. The key topics of the talk would be how comic books use: (1) transgender as metaphor, (2) transgender as narrative, and (3) transgender as perspective.

Before I began, I gave a preliminary history and set of definitions. Surprising some not familiar with my typical area of study, I drew the history of transgender in comic books back to the medieval period. The erotic narratives, battle scenes, and many iterations of characters familiar to comics are present in chivalric romance. Yet furthermore, so is the practice of sequential art. Many who approach medieval manuscript images for the first time may be confused when they see the same character appearing many times in a single page, assuming that the duplication is the mistake of the artist or the viewer. To understand how the illustrations work, one must think like a comic book reader. Multiple scenes often appear played out on a single page but without the bars to separate them. Gawain can be scene conversing in one corner, fighting in another, and fleeing in a third. Beyond the form and narratives, trans characters such as Sir Silence from Roman de Silence serve as forerunners to later trans warriors in comics as would be evident when we got to the next section. Jumping ahead to modern comics, we see trans figures presented as farcical and usually evil or amoral characters such as the duplicitous He-She whose left side and right side were split male and female. Then we reached an era in the late 1980s and 1990s were transgender characters were being presented among other queer persons. Then comes (as in other genres) about 20 years where transgender characters nearly vanished from comics in order to allow more normative and integrated versions of gay and lesbians to take the focus. Recently, in the past few years comics have begun using the word transgender and even offering a few characters. Yet even when transgender discourses weren't being mentioned by name or dignified, the power of trans lives were still being utilized as metaphors, narratives, and perspectives.

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Transgender as Metaphor

The order of the topics was explained as I began discussing “transgender as metaphor,” noting that this form of integration is in many respects the least reflective of trans experiences or political concerns. In fact, at this level, transgender does not need to be embodied or identified by any specific character. Rather, the name or cultural meanings of transgender hover at the level of association in order to do what metaphors do best: explain one thing by means of another. Something or someone is meant to be understood as “transgender like.” Even when a trans person is present, they are not presented for their own sake but in order to help aid in understanding another character or organization. A relatively benign example of this exists in the current Batgirl Comic where her former roommate, Alysia Yeoh, revealed herself as transgender on the same night that Batgirl reveals that she was formerly a woman with disabilities, living for many years in a wheelchair. The mirroring, coming out trans as Batgirl came out crip, demonstrates just one way that transgender is used to help shed light on the telling of super hero secret identities and origin stories. The movement from a place of secure secrecy to revelation is one super heroes have played out to exhaustion but by introducing a transgender counter-point the tired old trope takes on new life. Suddenly in the light of transgender, the super revelation is revived with signals of long feared social prejudice and internal struggles. Importantly, the long held yet often denied association between transgender and disability is affirmed. The act of passing as a cisgender woman mirrors the experience of passing as able-bodied; even super-abled; positioning the pre-transition past as a source of shame and secrecy. Yeoh’s story is not greatly elaborated, as in the case of black side-kicks or gay best friends, her story is not there primarily for her own sake but to further the story of the cisgender hero.

Transgender as Narrative

Beyond merely existing as a metaphorical way of understanding conventional cisgender issues, comics at times positions characters (especially non-trans characters) in recognizably transgender narratives. The effect of adapting stories in such ways is to position "transgender as narrative." The classic example of transgender being mimicked in narrative is the gender-swap story where a normatively cisgender character finds themselves temporarily transposed into another gender. Typically the goal of such narratives is the overcoming of the gender-swap. Such conclusions are framed as a cure and a return to normalcy. I call this structure the "Super Trans" narrative because it positions certain people as heroic because they were able to overcome the transgender situation. By structuring narratives in such a way, transgender is itself treated as the problem to be fixed, resolved, or overcome in a Super Trans narrative. The goal should be an experience as close to cisgender norms as possible. Even when the story uses a trans identified character, the person can still be caught in a Super-Trans narrative. Transition towards the identified gender coincides with the plot moving forward. The unreal gender is replaced by the real gender. Gender dysphoria is muted. Surgery, hormones, or some other scientific or magical apparatus corrects the body. A problem with the Super Trans narrative is that it can be easily inverted by a turn of rhetoric. The claimed identity can be treated as the unreal identity and the character is to be corrected or converted to submit to their assigned identity. An example of this occurs both in the Ultimate Spider-Man with Jessica Drew and in Camelot 3000 with Sir Tristan. In both cases, a male identified character is cloned or reincarnated as a gender they don't claim, as women. The character's trans identification is treated as a problem and their stories cannot move forward until they accept the gender they were given. Drew and Tristan are left to live begrudgingly as women - as if in Marvel's super-hero universe and in the year 3000 there are no technologies or magics, social acceptance or liberty to transition as they will - so the trans identity is surrendered.


Transgender as Perspective

The key problems with using transgender as a metaphor or narrative is that the trans person is treated as a mechanism or an object, inciting the need for writers to embrace the subjectivity of trans experiences by presenting "transgender as perspective." In such a scenario, trans persons are not treated as an experience external to the narrator or reader. Either through active dialog with trans characters who express a full range of their experiences or else to position the trans character as narrator or protagonist the readers are called on the identify with trans subjectivities. Trans people must do this metaphoric work all the time when they translate the experiences of cisgender people into their own understanding of the world. Literature has the power to allow us to see through the minds and senses of others, so why do we limit our perspectives to those who closely match the majority? This isn't simply oppressive in a justice sense but oppressive in the sense that it is boring. By shifting from the view of transgender as an object to perceiving through trans subjectivities the objects of concern shift to other matters. The physical environment, the social pressures, the metaphors and narratives that aren't noticeable to those on the outside arise. What if we offer trans and cis readers alike narrations they don't often get to read: looking through the eyes of dysphoria, feeling the touch of sexual play through genitals that have undergone surgery, smelling the scent of perfume perhaps transgressive purchased or chaffing in clothes dictated by parents or school. These experiences are widespread but different among trans populations. Yet they don't often appear in print. As a result, many don't have words, metaphors, narratives, to describe their lives. By throwing down the innovative gift to write and read as a trans person, the possibilities grow into uncharted areas. Such opportunities arise in comics such as Angela Asgard's Assassin, Witch Hunter, and Queen of Hel where the title character's beloved Sera (an angelic trans woman) functions often as the viewpoint into the story by acting as narrator, primary speaker (Angela fights more than speaks), or musical bard. Angela is the main object but she is perceived for the reader by Sera. In this way, writers and readers come to need Sera as much as Angela does.


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Variant Covers Advertising "Super-Trans"
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#TransformTalks

After my prepared thoughts were presented, the conversation opened up to the wider group. It was a diverse group with many perspectives to share. Those collected ranged across the colorful landscape of gender, including numerous trans and other gender non-binary people.  The owner of Stairway to Heaven has proudly spoken publicly about the many many genders of people who frequent his store. I had first encountered the store when I was browsing Exeter one day, better getting to know my neighboring town. Yet what kept me coming back was the extraordinarily friendly owner and staff. I felt welcome in this place. I could come without having to put myself on display or explain myself. This feeling of exhibition accompanied by alienation  and a degree of public shaming comes in the vast majority of places I go in the form of stares, voyeuristic photographs, as well as degrading or invasive gestures and comments. I resist or ignore the misbehavior of the public on a regular basis but I crave safe places where I can step out of the sea of glares. Most days when I am too tired or hurt to deal with this slow casual violence I usually just stay home. A place like Stairway To Heaven Comics gave me somewhere I could go outside of the house and family to live out my time without having to wear my armor. Not all comic book stores are like this but most have more than usual reason to be. Comic books as well as associated recreations like Magic the Gathering Card Games, Pokemon tournaments, or Dungeons and Dragons sessions have long marked populations that are frequently marginalized, at least until very recently. People who have been historically alienated should learn as many ways as possible to recognize and ally with other alienated groups. The crowd collected for this Transform Talk at SWtH Comics were evidence that this store lived towards that potential of coalition building.

"What If?" is a traditional question in comic books. This question has sparked many characters, places, and plot lines. The question has been featured in the title of many stories that are intended to describe alternative universes or timelines where life is different than we know it. Big events such as Crisis on Infinite Earths, Spider-Verse, and Secret Wars are just a few of the cross-over events that have taken advantage of the infinite possibilities for difference to cross-pollinate, intersect, implode, and resurrect. Without the question "What If" Ultimate Drew and Sir Tristan would not exist in Marvel and DC. Many transgender, queer, feminist, crip people or people of color would not get stories without the ability to ask the question and pose alternative realities. In a way, this night came out of a "What If?" Whatever we discussed, perhaps our greatest statement was in being together, reading, and discussing comics. Why make comics by, for, and about transgender people? Because we are the inspiration, makers, and consumers of comics. Because we come to these stores with our fiances, partners, friends, coworkers, allies, and children. Because of all the people who weren't there. Because of anyone who weren't given comics to read or had their comics taken. Because of those who are told in explicit and implicit ways that comics are not for them. Because the world is changing and different. Because the world can change and be different. Trans-formation is propelled by talks such as this. This is how Super Trans turns from a form of metaphor or narrative into a political act begun when we come together to ask the question in many voices: what if?

"Super heroes are a boy thing," our youngest daughter once said shortly after starting kindergarten. She did not get this sentiment from home. For a long time before, she would brag about how much she looked up to Iron Man. She asked us to buy her clothes and candy themed on the Avengers. But once she started in kindergarten, she started bringing home a lot of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic sentiments being parroted around by the other kids at school. Having already gone through similar moments with her sister, we were sad but ready to work with her on points where her family's and her community's politics clashed. It is for this reason that it was so important that the smallest and most active of those twenty-some people at the comic talk was my daughters. The owner of the store later complimented how well they sat and listened, then when they got a bit distracted, picked comics of their own and read in the corner. This comic store was a place where I felt welcome and invited, it was important to me that so did my daughters. They got to read and shop on their own but also to look around at the diverse people who came together to discuss comic literature: men and women, non-binary, trans, cis, and queer people of color. Indeed, the straight cisgender men for whom presumably "super heroes were a thing," were in the minority. This was a women's space and a trans queer space. This was a space that welcomed me and welcome my daughters. And in the past several weeks, my youngest has reclaimed Iron Man and intends on being him for Halloween. And that is the greatest gift that comics has given me: they help me affirm for my daughters that they are the super heroes of my life in language they understand and enjoy. They are Super Trans-formative.
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Monday, March 7, 2016

Reclaiming Home: the Pilgrimage of Transgender in Exile & Pride


"In queer community, I found a place to belong 
and abandoned my desire to be a hermit"

Exile and Pride
Eli Clare
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Queer Loca Sancta

"But just as the stolen body exists, so does the reclaimed body" declares Eli Clare in the conclusion of "Stones in my Pocket, Stones in my Heart" from Exile and Pride (132). Oakland, California is not so far away from Port Orford, Oregon to boast such a fundamentally different climate that one could expect a radical change in lifestyle based merely on geography, yet because of the distinct social climates which defined them each Eli Clare became reborn when he left the woods to attend Mills College in the city. "Queer identity, at least as we know it, is largely urban" claims Clare (37). "The happening places, events, dialogues, the strong communities, the journals, magazines, bookstores, queer organizing, and queer activism are all city-based." Certainly, there were physical features, buildings, roads, and the density of population that made the experience of walking down a road in Oregon and California distinct, but it is how these spaces were uses that made the difference in allowing Clare to begin the process of reclaiming a sense of home in a community and in his body.  "For me the path from stolen body to reclaimed body started with my coming out as a dyke" (132-133). "I went to dyke events, read dyke books, listened to dyke music, hung out at my first dyke bar, went to my first dyke dance." Were there buildings in Port Orford that could have been used for dancing? Yes. But the social controls over the town would never have allowed it. "Queer people - using the narrow definition - don't live in Port Orford," Clare states simply (30). To understand this statement it is necessary to follow the social definition of identity and place. Clare once lived in Port Orford but he could not be queer there. He could not be himself. And so, even when he occupied space there, and his body was occupied by the force of others, he, a queer, did not live there. For these reasons, to follow how one toxic place can take lives one must next examine how another place give life again in order to get a fuller worldview of the social divisions of space and how bodies may move and be moved through it.

An examination of Clare's sexuality in rural and urban places could be undertaken, mapping his relations to other bodies, yet his world puts gender and the love of self rather than desire for others in the forefront. The claim that Clare discovered himself as a dyke complicates this reading by using highly sexualized and woman-oriented gendered language yet he insists that this was for him the first stepping stone out of a rigid cisgender definition of gender towards a pluralistic mode of categorizing genres of embodiment.  "Simply put, the disabled, mixed-class tomboy... didn't discover sexuality among dykes," clarifies Clare, "but rather a definition of woman large enough to be comfortable for many years" (133). The invocation of space here is critical. The physical place of the dyke bar was "big enough" for him both because it allowed him be materially present but the greater shift was that the lack of patriarchal controls allowed him to be present in other ways. He was able to feel "comfortable." "Comfort" comes from the Latin "com-" meaning "together" and "-fort," meaning "strengthened." It was a place where Clare felt able to extend towards other possibilities for embodiment and desire and in turn others extended toward him. Lynne Huffer calls this social form of subject formation "coextension," the unregulated and undetermined flow of vital energies that all for new mad, queer, erotic forms of life to emerge. "And somewhere along the line," observes Clare, "I pulled desire to the surface, gave it room to breathe" (134). In response to the desire of others for him, he learned how to desire himself and in time to desire these intimacies to touch. There is, in Huffer's sense, a folding together of queer space and bodies. The place gave Clare room to breath in it and in response Clare was able to make space inside himself to allow in the vitality of the queer environment. The power of the place worked on him perhaps more than he had yet power to act on it or, in certain senses, the power to act on himself.

"In queer community, I found a place to belong and abandoned my desire to be a hermit," recalls Clare (134). The structuring of free space into a defined place can be a tool of violence and oppression, walling in bodies from traveling or changing. Places like Port Orford can sustain systems of violence in its system of making genders and sexualities which have a place in its schema. Yet not all places are so toxic that queer and transgender persons are forced to become hermits in order to survive. In places like Oakland, in dyke bars and bookstores, Clare was able to breath in his body and in his space. Over time, he was able to come out of the shell that he built to protect himself and begin the process of reoccupying himself and building a life around him. It was in such a place that Clare built himself back up from the wreckage of Port Orford and began to feel pride in what he found and what he made. Thus armed with dignity and confidence, Clare became better able to make connects, explore desires, and freely identify with others. The shape of this unfurling could be seen in the transformed image of himself. Clare recalls the joy of watching himself dress in the clothes that helped him feel at home in his body, "in the mirror, dressing to go out, knotting my tie, slipping into my blazer, curve of hip and breast vanishing beneath my clothes" (123). Through the support of queer loca sancta, dyke bars, Clare was able to reclaim a sense of home in himself and his environment, including all the others who shared the space. He had places to go out, had people he wanted to see, and had a body he wanted to be seen because at last he was able to dress and determine the modes by which his body would be accessed (or not) by others. This is the power of queer and transgender loca sancta, they can affirm for the bodies who occupy them that they are sanctified and desirable.

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The Cost of Travel

Yet this relocation, losing and finding home, would not have been possible without the ability to travel between places and identities. Not all potential hermits are able to escape places like Port Orford in order to come to breath the free dyke air of Oakland. Clare admits the particular circumstances that gave him the slippage he needed. "I think about my disabled body, how as a teenager I escaped the endless pressure to have a boyfriend, to shave my legs, to wear make-up," writes Clare (130). "The same likes that cast me as genderless, asexual, and undesirable also framed a space in which I was left alone to be my quiet, bookish, tomboy self, neither girl nor boy." This asexuality is for many people yet another oppressive part of disability. They are denied the gender and sexuality they work to express. Yet for queer trans men like Clare, the asexuality imposed on him by his environment because he has CP was room enough to be liberated from many of the compulsory demands to be a heterosexual girl. It is in this between state of being a hermit that Clare came to Oakland.  "I was 18 and had just moved to the city," he writes (132). "I didn't want to be a girl, nor was I a boy. I hid my body, tried as much as possible to ignore it." Although this asexual identity kept Clare's body at a distance from himself and others, this gave him the safety to escape the attention and touch of unwanted aggressors. By going less noticed, he did not develop the deep roots in Port Orford which would have kept him from leaving. These clothes that hid his body functioned in one place like the robes of a gender hermit and became in his escape the garment of the transgender pilgrim.

The ability to travel is a power of the exile that not all are able to attain. The circumstances of Clare's life, the often intersecting but sometimes competing oppressions of disability and dysphoria gave him the distance from prescribed gender norms to be able to slip away into an asexual hermitage for a time and later to become a pilgrim to the city. "But listen, if I had wanted to date boys, wear lipstick and mascara, play with feminine clothes - the silk skirts and pumps, the low-cut blouse, the outrageous prom dress - I would have had to struggle much longer and harder than my nondisabled counterparts," confesses Clare (130). The lessons of Port Orford was that Clare's gender and sexuality was not his own. They were prohibited, prescribed, and enforced in violence on his body. His recollections of living as a hermit in his home and his body were not merely that he was walled off from his later destination of queer and transgender masculinity but that he was walled off on the other side from normative feminine gender and sexuality. Had he desired rather than begrudged the dresses he described as being like bondage, he might have never have felt at home in them because the markers of disability dismissed his power of femininity. Disability and the disabled are not supposed to be desirable and so are not supposed to flaunt their gender. He was forced at times to submit to the sexual dominance of others but would not be allowed to embrace his own even if he had felt normative desires. Furthermore, notes Clare, the demands of such high femme attire are largely not made with the particularities of his CP embodiment in mind. The precision needed to put on make-up and the delicacy of the fabrics demonstrate that much of feminine standards of beauty are intended for non-CP persons. For Clare, the environment offered the hermitage of asexual and agender as the path of least resistance. It was a place he was willing for years to hide out until he could plot his escape but it was after all the beginning of exile.

The narrow paths that lead to Clare's escape from the place that wasn't home for his body or transgender society only emphasized for him the contingency and high cost of moving from exile towards pride. Clare found among the anti-loca sancta of the city, the dyke bars, room enough to allow him to sit in a queer and trans environment. It gave him the freedom to share space without being put in any specific place in the community. He could be or not be, move and change, all essential powers for growth and free breathing. "And what if that definition [of gender] hadn't been large enough, what then?" asks Clare (133). "Would I have sought out hormones and/or surgery?" The space of city did not make demands on Clare to immediately claim an identity even as he eschewed the chains of Port Orford. Now that he could have a sexuality, he was not pressured to affirm an allegiance as a lesbian. Now that he no longer had to be a girl, he was not forced to be a man. Yet not all alternative queer and transgender spaces are so free. There are places, many places, where transgender persons are only embraced if they defined themselves according to one of the two binary positions: a transgender man or a transgender woman. Often in such cases social assistance is only given to transgender persons to transition if they undergo the full range of treatments for gender identity disorder, now called gender dysphoria. Such treatments include hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery (now called gender affirmation surgery), legal name and gender change, as well as psychological diagnosis and therapy. Such care is usually very expensive, running easily upwards of $100,000 and above. Transgender transitions are often mapped like roads with these treatments as waymarkers that authorize access to an alternative gender. The cost for transitions becomes the price demanded if people are allowed to escape the gender and sexual confines of their home but denied free access to alternative transgender spaces and modes of being.


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The World of the Pilgrim

Transgender is for Clare not a destination nor any other fixed place but a mode of liberating movement. Indeed, in referencing "the trans movement" Clare seems to suggest both the political drive for change and the hard personal wanderings. "The trans movement suggests a world full of gender and sex variation, a world much more complex than one divided into female-bodied women and male-bodied men," explains Clare (128). The road for a transgender person at the terminus of transgender man or woman but criss-cross with a wide range of possibilities, some of which are not yet named. The wide open road and unmarked footpaths of gender and sexuality can seem like chaos. Those who are most invested in the structures of power that order specific places and forms of embodiment express such queer and trans alternatives as empty or completely unorganized. The fear may be sincerely felt or it may simply be a scarecrow, yet another boundary marker, to keep people in their place and from exploring the free world beyond. Yet Oakland is a place with structures and systems of its own, only with space enough to allow queer and transgender bodies to breath. Indeed, the transgender movement is not aimed at destroying the loca sancta that are home for many who live there. Rather, transgender simply gestures to the road and offers assistance on the way to other places. "Many trans activists argue for an end, not to the genders of woman and man, but to the socially constructed binary" (128). Tearing down the walls that enforce strict gender norms or forcibly enact sex on subjugated bodies are not the same as living in a world without a place to call home. Rather it turns such walls into bridges, it opens gateways, breaks chains, and also makes maps, founds cities, and offers resources to wayfarers who might want to enter the wilderness of gender where few have yet trodden. 

In the conclusion to "Stones in my Pocket, Stones in my Heart" in particular, and Exile and Pride in general, Clare returns to the metaphor of the walls that define gender and sexuality, that section shared space into places of home and exile. Yet this time, Clare imagines himself not as a hermit but as a pilgrim. The wall becomes a bridge that he can cross or one that he can straddle, hanging his legs on both sides at once or just dwelling on the in between space.  "In the end, I will sit on the wide, flat top of my wall, legs dangling over those big, uncrackable stones, weathered smooth and clean," writes Clare (138). Yet ever the social critic, Clare's pilgrimage is not offered only as a personal story but as a map for others to join him on the wandering hike through the deep woods and urban alleys of gender. Clare imagines and invites others to imagine themselves on the wall next to him, reveling in multiplicity and the liberty to change. "[I] Sit with butch women, femme dykes, nellie men, studly fags, radical faeries, drag queens and kings, transsexual people who want nothing more than to be women and men, intersexed peple, hermaphrodites with attitudes, transgendered, pangendered, bigendered, polygendered, ungendered, androgynous people of many varieties and trade stories long into the night... Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world" (138). In the end, Clare positions his story as just one among many shared in a wider community. Each place in the spectrum of gender he crosses and occupies are but nodes that connect with wider queer and trans networks of possibility. "The stolen body, the reclaimed body, the body that knows itself and the world, the stone and the heat that warms it; my body has never been singular" (137).

The world of the transgender pilgrim is one that invites a change in how we view our environments and the bodies that occupy, shape, and escape them. On one level, the movement seeks to reveal the diversity of wildlife living in our backyard, the other forms of gender and sexuality turned into hermits and exiles. "Trans people of all varieties say, 'This is how we can be men, women, how we can inhabit all the spaces in between,'" writes Clare (132). The revelation of Exile and Pride is not that Port Orford is a straight cisgender place and Oakland is full of queer and transgender people. Rather the world we live in is a love wilder and dynamic than we expected. The ground shifts beneath our feet. On another level, such pilgrims demonstrate that places, rural and urban, straight and queer, cis and trans, are socially constructed. The problem when a queer or trans youth finds themselves lost, alone, or violated where they grow up is not that the child is broken and needs to be fixed. Nor is it that the child needs to be taken from toxic environments to safe spaces. Care both for the person and their location may need to occur. This is where attention to personal stories and scars are critical. "Harder to express how that break becomes healed, a bone once fractured, now whole, but different from the bone never broken," writes Clare (132). "How do I mark this place where my body is no longer an empty house, desire whistling lonely through the cracks, but not yet a house fully lived in?" Yet these scars can be used to tell tales and incite social change. Importantly, toxic environments are not set by nature and unchangeable. More often, the problem is in the social environment and not in the individual, the place and not the person needs to be transformed. This may mean physical changes need to be made to bodies and buildings but it also means that social changes need to be made in who and how the world is allowed to be used and shared.

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