Genres of Embodiment: On Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

"She likes her boys to be girls"

Judith Butler

______________________________

______________________________

The problem of passing is the target against which Stone’s essay intends to strike back against because of its work of erasing transgender history, stories, and lives. In order to combat the gravitational force passing exerts to bring the creative composition back into the binary framework Stone turns to the body. For Derrida, the body is an event (or iteration) that remains opens to new encounters and creative possibilities. For Butler, the body is an object of desire that arises out of the admixture of the culturally intelligible ground and the figure it embodies. The turn to Butler in “the Posttranssexual Manifesto” functions as a logical expansion of the creativity of genre (i.e. if there are more than two genres, how do these genres manifest in gender communities?) but also to bring discourse of gender back to consider how trans embodiment is desirable in and of itself.

“As one lesbian femme explained,” writes Butler, “she likes her boys to be girls, meaning that ‘being a girl’ contextualizes and resignifies ‘masculinity’ in a butch identity. As a result, that masculinity, if that it can be called, is always brought into relief against a culturally intelligible ‘female body.’”[1] Butler stresses in the follow-up to Gender Trouble, for all the discourse of gender and genre it’s Bodies That Matter.[2] “Matter” or “mattering” for Butler is also a verb. We might also use the word embody. Bodies matter by embodying certain genres, even those supposed to belong to other bodies. So specific is butch womanhood, femme lesbians may specifically desire it over butch manhood or any other form of gender. The genre of embodiment matters insofar as it is valued and insofar as it participates in masculinity without belonging to it. For those who only recognize male and female as “culturally intelligible” a woman may be a woman, but for those in the know, butch and femme are distinct genres of embodiment.

As trans genres of embodying enter discourse they deconstruct assumptions of forms, methods, and orientations while also offer distinct objects that may be pursued for their own sake. A founder of discourse in trans studies, Stone cites Butler’s work on butches and femmes as useful and comparable genres to emergent trans identities, “Butler introduces the concept of cultural intelligibility, and suggests that the contextualized and resignified ‘masculinity’ of the butch, seen against a culturally intelligible ‘female’ body, invokes a dissonance that both generates a sexual tension and constitutes the object of desire.”[3] In other words, transgender does more than just disturb others’ sense of gender and sexuality; transgender embodies something, does something, and builds something that matters in its own right. A critical trans approach is not just trying to deconstruct gender and genre as an exercise in language but in order to make room for new genres of embodiment to become culturally intelligible and be recognized as mattering.

Where do the divisions of genders and new fields stop? Butler calls such questions an ontological crisis that occurs in society at large as well as in academy when the terms “transgenderism and transsexuality” are introduced, distinctions of gender she considers an acute enough division as “lesbian and gay” or “butch and femme.” The former draws stronger associations to psychiatric diagnosis and the latter with surgical operations. Both embody gender in different ways different from one another but also distinctly trans. How is it useful to say they are both trans genres of embodiment? Take the example of a Goth girl and boy in high school may be able to share more music, clothing, and make-up than the Goth girl and her cheerleader classmate. Choice of association is key but a teacher observing her students might be able to deduce the same by what Stone and Butler call “culturally intelligible” embodiments.

______________________________

______________________________

So why is it necessary to make trans genres of embodiment culturally legible? So different members can share clothing tips! So a person and community can be useful to another. Transgender is an umbrella where people and fields can work together but also an archive and a critical methodology with insights to share. “What about the notion, suggested by Kate Bornstein,” asks Butler, “that a transsexual… must be approached through active verbs that attest to the constant transformation which ‘is’ the new identity or, indeed, the ‘in-betweenness’ that puts the being of gendered identity into question?”[4] As Prosser tactically jokes, “transitioning is what transsexuals do.” Trans persons can offer advice and technologies to other trans persons going through transitions, even if their transitions are different. In the details, all transitions are necessarily different. Even across time, transsexuality studies have insights to offer the study of medieval eunuchs.

Trans genres of embodiment may offer a way of making sense of bodies that are not currently culturally intelligible. A critical trans method of reading gender looks for “the same in the other,” features that connects and articulates trans modes of embodiment where others only seem confusion or contradiction. This is one reason Butler address transgender in her examination of Gender Trouble, “a certain crisis in ontology… has become more acute as we consider various new forms of gendering that have emerged in light of transgenderism and transsexuality.”[5] A difficulty arises insofar as the same in the other may exist between trans persons, medieval and modern, but not necessarily between cisgender persons and either era of transgender. In short, in order for medieval figures to be culturally intelligible as trans, medieval scholars may need to become familiar with various new forms of transgender described in contemporary trans studies and literatures.

Entrance into transgender studies demands a certain familiarity and competence with disturbances. Whereas the compulsion to pass orders transgender histories to erase moments that break from the norm and reorient back to cis binaries of male and female, critical trans studies to affirm new networks of what bodies and what body parts matter, what Butler calls, “the sexed body as ‘ground’” as well as the technologies with which those bodies compose themselves into culturally intelligible genres, “the butch or femme identity as ‘figure’ [that] can shift, invert, and create erotic havoc of various sorts.”[6] Trans-ing embodiment means looking at the dysphoria and diagnosis of transgender, the scars and scalpels of transsexuality, the clothing changes of transvestism, as well as the chromosomes and “secondary” characteristics of intersex to discover and claim the narratives, tropes, and tools as primary in producing particular genres of embodiment.

Trans studies is more than a definition of a diagnosis or a queer disturbance in the gender binary, as transgender has functioned for decades as a big tent. A key part of Stone’s manifesto is that there is no one easy definition of transgender. This is the reason Stone offers genres a model of thinking about trans genders as well as why she points to Butler’s work on butch and femmes when she writes on “the proliferation of specifically gay discourses of sexual difference, as in the case of ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ as historical identities of sexual style,” also citing, “queens, butches, femmes, girls, even the parodic reappropriation of dyke, queer, and fag.”[7] The work of transgender demands more than a single monolithic definition. Once one gets into the study of transgender one discovers a vast network of interconnecting histories and embodiments. Far from deconstructing gender into oblivion, genres of embodiment demand a broad field of complexity.

______________________________

______________________________

The work of genres of embodiment is to allow the silenced body to speak of all the arts, the histories, materials, relationships and transitions that go into composing it. Opening the stitches and scar tissue of eunuchs and transsexuals to let them speak, navigating the conflicts of dysphoria in order to give voice to silenced calls for reform, all of this this can be painful and difficult. “I could not ask a transsexual for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing, to be consciously ‘read,’ to read oneself aloud—and by this troubling and productive reading, to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written ”[8] Culturally intelligible trans bodies and genres, histories and literatures emerge out of plausible histories, often breaking the systems which have allowed for us to personally and collectively belong for so long.

To make plausible histories, trans-ness is explained away, elided as exceptional, or erased. Defining passing, Stone articulates it as a form of ahistorical belonging, “to be accepted as a ‘natural’ member of that gender. Passing means the denial of mixture. One and the same with passing is effacement of the prior gender role, or the construction of a plausible history.”[9] These plausible histories are not only personal but collective. A plausible history of the middle ages is one where a cis man can uncritically consider a medieval knight as a natural ancestor or himself a natural heir to his manhood. Such a history does not allow for shifts in genres of manhood that occur in intervening centuries and the figures whose lives’ testify to the transition and diversity of genres.

Conversely, a trans person who denies a cultural ancestry with eunuchs and hermaphrodites likewise creates a plausible history where forms and eras do not mix. In order to “belong” to a binary society and field, the specifics of history are smoothed over to be considered “plausible” and the narratives forced into standard forms to be “culturally intelligible.” Of such histories, Stone writes, “[t]ranssexuals who pass seem able to ignore the fact that by creating totalized, monistic identities, forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality, they have foreclosed the possibility of authentic relationships,” and consequently, “transsexuals know that silence can be an extremely high price to pay for acceptance.”[10] The price of a gender that cuts across all time or a temporally exclusive one—existing only within one period—is the denial of relations to other persons or possible ways of life. In the end, both histories of passing are ahistorical as they do not account for change or diversity as a natural result of the evolution of gender over time.

A close reading of bodies across history suggest that cisgender binaries may have never existed and certainly do not exist now. Seen from within genres of embodiment, the problem is not that bodies are truly silent but have been silenced because we do not yet know how to make them culturally intelligible, so we pass over their stories and histories. As Arthur K. Frank observes of the Wounded Storyteller, “[t]he body is not mute, but it is inarticulate; it does not use speech but begets it… Hearing the body in the speech it begets is never an easy task.”[11] We can get lost in all the genres of speech they beget as they are born, wounded, and transition. The challenge of listening is that we cannot know the meaning of bodies in advance. New forms, narratives, and languages may be needed to hear what is said. To trans embodiment may begin as simply as listening to bodies. The task may be hard but once we begin to listen we find that bodies are too full of speech. By listening with trans lives, not only do their forms take shape but the tools and stories, the genres of embodiment that they turn to in order to compose themselves.

______________________________

______________________________

[1] Butler 156.

[2] Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: The Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.

[3] Stone 230.

[4] Butler xi-xii.

[5] Butler xi-xii.

[6] Butler 157.

[7] Butler 41, 156.

[8] Stone 232.

[9] Stone 231.

[10] Stone 232.

[11] Arthur K. Frank. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. 27.

______________________________

More on Genres of Embodiment

______________________________

Scars of the Pardoner: A Physician's Tale (Part 1/5)

"I rose from the doctor's slab...
Now everybody gets to take a stab,
they cut me up into parts"

Hedwig's Lament
Hedwig and the Angry Inch

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

“Don’t you think we think too much about gender?” a doctor once asked me at the start of a routine physical. As one of a few transgender patients in this Polish doctor’s Chicagoland practice, I couldn’t help suspecting that I was receiving questions that he didn’t ask everyone. He asked his question again, compelling a complicit silence, while informing me that he would neither enforce nor assist in any work of reconstructing sex.[i] He admitted that there are doctors who would prescribe whatever patients requested, “just to get their money,” but he didn’t want them to “take advantage” of me. This led him to repeat his thesis a third time, “don’t you think we think too much about gender?”

This is perhaps an imprudent question to ask a scholar ready to offer her body as testimony against attempts to cut up and cut off vulnerable communities. “I rose from off of the doctor's slab, like Lazarus from the pit,” I hummed to myself from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “Now everyone wants to take a stab, and decorate me with blood graffiti and spit.”[ii] He kept working to enlist me to support his narrative of progress in which we are now in a post-gender era where sexism can finally be forgotten as a relic of the past. I sat there contemplating all the doctors meetings that relate my story to Hedwigs’s journey from living as a man in East Germany to living as a woman in the Midwest United States, tales where bodies are made into metaphors for severed lives, “standing...in the divide / Between east and west / Slavery and freedom / Man and woman, top and bottom,” and how this narrative work has propelled our construction as operatives in a genealogy of castration that draws itself across our collective skin as the scars of stolen histories.[iii] 

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

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

This exchange is not only between two individuals, but competing narrative approaches to reconstructing the body and its history. On the one hand, this physician’s approach to history testifies that the trans body is not self-evident but stolen time and time again to serve narratives of progress. It aspires to tell me that the conversation on sex was over before I arrived, that we are now in a post-sexism, post-transsexual era, cutting me off from affecting surgical access to my body and voicing a counter-history. Progressive models of the body use many narrative tropes but a lasting marker remains the shift from pre-operation (pre-op) status, signifying the past, to a post-operation (post-op) status, signifying the present. This approach to history claims to move society forward by putting things in the past; as though history was some sort of waste bin where parts of our body and community can be left to erode into nothingness and forgotten.

The division of bodies and the erasure of the past has since become signatures of trans bodies in narrative. In the 1950s, doctors developed the language of pre- and post-op in what Sandy Stone describes as part of a clinical “strategy of building barriers within a single subject.”[iv] As genitals underwent operation to bring that body in line with the prescribed gender, clinic’s “charm school” taught transsexual and intersex persons to continue to performatively expunge parts of their history that did not fit in with their future.[v] Thus, while such operations became less compulsory in the ‘90s, trans persons internalized these divides, treating gender transition as a cure to a personal and social disease, the weight of which they must increasingly manage alone.[vi] In this era, doctors indirectly deploy trans bodies as operatives to pardon the wounds of violent pasts while using their metaphor-laden scars to enforce segregation. These cuts do not simply take away but add barriers between man and woman, control and freedom, past and future. 

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

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

In contrast to this narrative of progress, I sat in this doctor’s office representing the persistence of scarred skin, inextricable from histories of castration, slavery, and rape where bodies are stolen and torn open, insisting on more critical attention, alliance, and liberation across attempts to cut up and periodize our existence into manageable and disposable parts. I respond the question posed by the progressive model of the body and history, “don’t you think we think too much about gender?” by demonstrating that attempts to cut bodies into a pre- and post-op periods fail to account for the continued presence and activity of the parts that are supposed to be eliminated by the operation These progressive histories are not without their usefulness and yet the distinctions drawn between periods must be understood as a construct of historicization that polices artificial divides between communities that exist within a trans-historical continuum. 

This study begins with a brief genealogy of castration stretching from late the Middle Ages into a wider array of medical, religious, legal and social operations aimed at erasing problematic parts of the past. It is the repetition of this breaking from the past that helps establish progressive histories that divide pre-modern castrates from post-modern transsexuals. While this study concentrates on the genealogy of the “castrate”[vii] those that have undergone castration as part of their physical and social reconstruction, this critical trans project aims to consider how the work of progressive histories of the body encompass a wider array of scars. I will utilize the term “operative” for bodies undergoing surgical reconstructions, drawing on the wider implications of notions of pre- and post-operation.[viii] The rape of women, the surgical or chemical castration of people of color, the genital mutilation of queer bodies, and the butchery of non-human animals are all parts in the construction of progressive timelines and a critical trans history. 

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

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

I utilize Sandy Stone’s seminal transgender studies essay, “The Empire Strike Back: a Post-Transsexual Manifesto” to argue for a “trans-operative” tension between the practices that surgically construct the human and the fragmented bodies that pose resistance to “erased history” through the affirmation of their past wounds, the scars that division leaves, and the potential for a recollection of the disparate parts and persons in a critical trans-historical collective.[ix] I look to castrates as models of progressive medical theories, an array of bodies, physically or symbolically constructed by what Judith Butler calls “sharp machines” or “the technology of the knife” to serve as metaphors for divided histories, arguing that “trans-operative” better describes the continuum of bodies existing across these events of social redefinition.[x] While castrates have been used as metaphors of a fragmented past that gives way to an imagined wholeness, this symbolic resolution continues to be disturbed by the presence of operative flesh, which, like scar-tissue, demands a place in our history as the remnants of violent politics of cultural castration. 

In the lasts section, I turn to the cutting and cut-up flesh of Fragment VI in Geoffrey Chaucer’s the Canterbury Tales, a problematic work providing two tales of the potential repercussions of rape, murder, and castration that flow from the reconstructive power of the blade.[xi] By drawing out how the progressive medical approach of “the Physician’s Tale” frames “the Pardoner’s Tale,” establishing Virginia as a representative of the surgical logic at work in the 14th century, I reopen up texts and bodies which have already drawn critical attention on matters of gender and articulate how the Pardoner’s bloody knife work and relics respond to this model by calling for a trans-historical reassessment of trans-operative bodies, those moving between operations of the past and present, to counter the progressive histories they have been made to service.

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

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

Part 2: A History of Castration
Part 3: The Trans-Operative
Part 4: The Physician's Surgery
Part 5: The Pardoner's Scars

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

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

[i] I initially replied that working in gender studies I believe I am professionally compelled to answer, “No” to that question. He did not find this funny.
[ii] Trask and Mitchell. “Tear Me Down.” Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
[iii] Trask and Mitchell. “Tear Me Down.”
[iv] Sandy Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Stryker, Susan ed. N.Y.: Routledge, 2006. 226.
[v] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 227.
[vi] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 221-229.
[vii] Kathryn Reusch. “Raised Voices: The Archeology of Castration.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. Larissa Tracy ed. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd. 2013. 31.
[viii] In moving from “operation” to “operative” I intend first to break from the binary of operator/operated to suggest that all bodies are operative(s): first, as an adjective to denote an ongoing state of productive functioning, especially in relation to surgery, and, second, as a worker, especially relating to manufacturing and political agencies. The mutation into “trans-operative” asserts that the processes and states are in a continually state of flux across definitive borders of identity.
[ix] Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 230.
[x] Judith Butler. “Doing Justice to Someone: A Transsexual Allegory.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Stryker, Susan ed. N. Y.: Routledge, 2006. 187.
[xi] Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Larry D. Benson. “The Pardoner's Introduction, Prologue and Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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

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