Eunuch Facta: Denaturalizing Sex in the Transformation

"If I still could 
have the choice..."

The Transformation

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The following is part 2 of an ongoing series
on Exemplum and Eunuchs
focusing on the Transformation (1994)
a documentary by Susan Aikin

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The Facta of the Eunuch

"Now what's really important is that you need to practice your English," the preacher tells Ricardo in a ministry planning session. "You see, I can tell people what you went through, but you went through it, you lived it. You see what I'm saying? I can tell them about it from my point of view but it's not as good as you." While Ricardo already speaks Spanish, recalling in his the voice of his history as Sara, Terry insists that in order to be a proper facta for his Texan, Christian message, Ricardo must be made to speak his words in English. As in any exemplum, a concept is defined in advanced and then a body is grabbed hold of as an example; then it begins to take shape as its exempla. The body is foreign to the English language of “eunuch” or “transsexual” (or any language) yet by cooperation takes on its shape as it is made readable and as it comes to articulate itself by the expected forms of the genre. [i] This means the body must be inscribed with verbal language (English scientific terms) as well as visual language (male clothing).

By conceding his need for Ricardo to tell his own story, Terry admits the subversive aspect of using exempla that threatens to invert the power dynamics of their relationship. The examplum depends on the inarticulate material facta of the trans body to ground its dicta, yet also needs it to speak back the dicta, the Word, the Logos, that frames and forms it. This agency is nonetheless contingent. The trans body exerts its power by co-operating with the authorities making an example out him. As a part in the operation of sharp-machines, the choices of the facta are dependent on how they meet with their associated dicta. Thus agency is not free, but contingent. It arises along point of the meeting, contact, even the violent edge where authorities work like a knife pressing against the skin of the trans body to carve out the form dictated by the exempla. 

Given that exemplum function as operations in social discourse, the sacrifice of Sara is at once physical and narrative. In one direction, the story of the eunuch cannot be told without the exchanging of finances and material resources. First, Ricardo needed to be brought on board. But moving Ricardo takes further exchanges. "Ricardo, as soon as they actually sign over the deed to the land to us,” says Terry, referring to a facility he is buying to house more trans converts to his mission, “we are going to be traveling to raise money for the buildings.” After Ricardo’s transformation, Terry has tapped a certain stream of resources that need to replenished and expanded if his operations are to continue. More space and more money are going to be needed for Christus Medicus to keep working his supposed miracles on new converts. More converts are necessary, given that Terry was able to convince Ricardo to join him primarily because he took advantage of Sara’s vulnerable physical and social position after finding out she was dying of HIV.

In another direction, the movement of money and bodies are dependent on the effectiveness of the story that Terry dictates and Ricardo evidences. “You," says Terry pointing at Ricardo, "are coming with me so you can tell it from your perspective." The authority he has as a preacher is itself contingent on the continual co-operation of storyteller and audience, preacher and layperson, dicta and facta. Terry cannot move around without Ricardo. This is why it is critical that Terry gets Ricardo on board. "Understand?" Terry asks, "You are going to be traveling all around the United States to tell people where you came from and help us raise money for the buildings. Understand?" The repetition of the question, "understand?" functions at first as an assertion of his authority, as the speaker of the dicta. This insistence also shows his need for Ricardo to consent his power, as facta. The authority needs to be understood. 

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Co-Operating Power

The power of facta is not that they understands repeats the dicta in the same form, if that was the case than the dicta would be sufficient on its own, but that the materiality of the trans body can represent the doctrine in other modalities, especially visually. Terry does not just need people to hear about Ricard's transformation but to see material facts. For this, he not only needs Ricardo to work for him, he needs Sara. "We are going to send out a brochure - do you remember Sara?" Terry says to Ricardo showing him a picture of himself as he appears now. "This is going to be what's on the other side," he says pointing to a picture of Sara. "That's going to blow people away." For Terry's exemplum in the Transformation to work, he needs to show transformation. That means that he does not simply need any body. Terry’s cis-male body is not sufficient. Nor is Ricardo’s body. He needs the trans body to repeatedly perform its trans-formation. The new whole, the eunuch, needs the part that is cast away by the authority, to enact power. Sara must be repeatedly killed in sacrifice and resurrected to give Terry authority as Christus Medicus. 

The power and material resources that buy Ricardo’s cooperation, Terry in turn uses him to procure. "To me this is like a dream. I am a poor man. The poorest of the poor," admits Ricardo. "When I was a transvestite, people would say to me ‘Sara you are so beautiful.’ But they didn’t know how hurt I was inside; how much I wanted a home," says Ricardo. "But now I feel rich… rich in love. I’ve always had love, but life has been so hard on me." Ricardo is rich now, to which he adds (or corrects), “rich in love.” Far from being an abstract, transcendent belief in a cosmic force, Ricardo’s love is manifest in the riches that brought him off the street, given to him by Terry and his new wife, Betty. Ricardo’s new life comes into being out of this exchange of properties. Sara’s love and beauty are sacrificed to buy Ricardo new kinds of love: a home and finances.

Despite the church’s exploitation of Cbristus Medicus’s dicta and Ricardo’s facta, the dangerous contingencies that Terry’s mechanisms view as a threat and try to contain, are embraced by Betty who offers different approach to love than either eunuch or pastor. “Betty, there can be nothing between us,” Ricardo recounts saying to Betty. “Because I was a Transvestite for many years. I even have breasts still. And I am HIV positive.” Ricardo is well aware of the precariousness of his life. Parts of his life, particularly HIV, mark him as a threat to social wholeness. The potential life and love from Ricardo and Betty's bond would be terminal. “Are you sure you don’t mind my being HIV positive?” Ricardo asks Betty before the wedding, stressing the danger of sharing properties, including body fluids. Betty embraces the facts of his life, open to share her resources and allowing him to affect her. They do not have frequent sex, Betty admits. When they do, she too contacts the lasting material and social effects of hormones, heroin, and HIV. 

While not “transgender,” insofar as she binds herself to Ricardo, his vulnerability becomes her vulnerability as she shares in trans experiences of rejection and subjugation. When the couple went to get married, they are told, “you can’t get married in the church." When asked why they are being turned away the church tells him, “because of your past.” “We all have a past,” Ricardo replies. “Don’t you guys say that Christ cleanses us of our sins?”[ii] Like a surgeon cutting away parts of the past, baptism serves as ritual exemplum where the material washing in water signifies the spiritual dicta of being “born again.” Despite baptism’s ecumenicalism, the material facts of trans bodies allows for public challenges to the dicta, what “you guys [Christians] say,” of Christus Medicus’s power to mark an absolute separation of part and whole, of before and after. Opening the body of Christ to the facts of Ricardo and Betty’s love means cooperating with all parts of them.

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Destabilizing Power

Contingency stresses precariousness and uncertainty because it acknowledges that truth is not absolutely in either the eternal, lasting dicta or the immediate, mutable facta. Rather, contingent operations and cooperation function through the contact of different genders, matters, beliefs, and temporalities. The life and love Betty and Ricardo share is not fixed, but are formed and reformed by the transforming contact between persons, past and present, and their mutual contact with Christus Medicus. “Now everything is fine," worries Ricardo, "but if I get sick... I hope you won’t abandon me in the hospital then.” Ricardo’s concerns with Betty’s love stress that the products of cooperation cannot be known in advance. “I know," Betty replies. " But I love you and I want to be with you!” Embracing uncertainty, the contingent facts of Betty’s embodied “faith” and “love” are distinguished from Terry’s rhetorical dicta. By her continual contact, Betty asserts that she is not a docile part of Terry's exploitative operations, but a co-operative with Ricardo.

In contrast to these critiques and abuses asserted by absolute all or nothing dicta, Betty offers a model of love as a radically positive and transformative dicta, the activity of continually stitching together disparate facts of different moments and embodiments. "Love is not just something that just happens in the beginning. Love is something that continues to grow. But love is not just something that’s a feeling either. Love is a commitment … that means when things aren’t going well you are still going to be there." Change, whether it is the shift from Sara to Ricardo, or the inconstancy of health, calls on love to sustain cooperation through transformation, constituting what Betty calls growth. Betty recalls that they have “talked about this [love and mutability] many times” and will continue to have check-ins. This love is not a once and for all dictum, a feeling or essence that a person has or not, but a lived fact between persons requiring risk and collaboration.

In the end, the wholesomeness promised Terry and Betty’s dicta on faith and love depends on the cooperation of eunuch facta formed and narrated to be its antithesis, the embodiments of fragmentation, inconstancy, and contingency. “I repented for my past life [as Sara]," says Ricardo narrating the Transformation’s final scene in a drive back from Texas to New York. "Now when I think about everything I lived I remember some of it as beautiful. Because the real truth is that I enjoyed it. That’s what I would have liked to be: a woman.” This contingency leads Ricardo to consider how he might reclaim the abandoned part of his life and return to living as Sara. Yet this change would likely involve ending his life as Ricardo, as Terry’s eunuch, and Betty’s husband. As Ricardo or Sara, the trans operative life is defined by castration, a “trans” position between separated parts of life that love might hold together if our sense of wholeness might be transformed. 

Before title screens announce Ricardo’s death, his final words leave viewers with the sense of the trans life’s precariousness. “If I could still have the choice, if I could change my life right now,” says Ricardo, “even now that I have my wife and everything, I would chose to be a woman.” While Ricardo imagines a free life, “if I could still have a choice,” he knows that the facts of his life are checked by contingency, by dictated limits set between his body and will. Undoing the change enacted by Chritus Medicus is impossible, only more changes, more castrations, more cuts; perhaps in the form of film cuts that slice together lives separated by time, circumstance and operations. Sacrificing parts of his life as Sara and Ricardo an exempla with competing presences and powers, the eunuch’s life stories implicate the audience as cooperative in the narrative. Choices still exist, but now shift to the hands of those who share in the eunuch’s story. All become eunuch-makers, implicated in crafting what becomes of the future of his pasts.

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[i] Whereas most of his interviews occur in his Cuban Spanish, Ricardo uses the English terms "homosexual" "transvestite" and "drag queen" for sexuality and trans embodiment. Even by the 1990s, the scientific term "transsexual" was still fighting for legitimacy and use in the public, while another scientific terms, "homosexual" and "transvestite" were being considered expansive enough to include a wide variety of embodiments. Indeed, the trans body seemed to be so elastic so as to be able to pivot between a wider variety of exempla on both gender and sexuality. 

[ii] (Aikin & Aparicio). 

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Eunuch Dicta: Naturalizing Sex in the Transformation

"You have stuck him 
in the Devil's face and said,
'Look what I can do'"

The Transformation

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The following is part 1 of an ongoing series
on Exemplum and Eunuchs
focusing on the Transformation (1994)
a documentary by Susan Aikin

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The Dicta of the Eunuch

“Let’s talk about Ricardo,” says Terry at the film’s opening, over a black-screen introducing the preacher as the primary narrative, the source of the dicta that will grab hold of Sara/Ricardo's body in order to narrate it into an exemplum on eunuchs in the 1990s. “Let’s talk about Ricardo,” he repeats as the film cuts to him sitting in a white room, on a white couch with a photo-album in hand.[i] As if acknowledging this absent presence, the scene ends with fading back again from the white room to a black-screen announcing the film’s title. This movement from white to black plays with notions of death and heavenly light. In these spaces suggest that Terry is speaking a metanarrative dicta from outside of Time. Terry's principles are associated with scriptural dicta, a priori, and then the body is produced as facta to demonstrate it. The "talk about Ricardo," depends on the showing and looking as key to the operations of power, yet depend on laying hands on Ricardo's body in order to grab him and shove him in people's faces.

Wrestling with the splitting of these two forms of the exempla by the 1990s, Terry works to turn Ricardo, understood as a “homosexual” or “transsexual” back into an eunuch and thus reclaim a public discourse into religious, locating the medical authority with Satan in order to hold up the scripture. Public and sermon authorities, function as different dicta that differently frames the factum of the eunuch body around which he pivots. This is the necessary turn in an exemplum where the dicta must give way to the power of the facta. Yet in all these cases, the authority of nature, religion, or medicine is exterior to the body it defines. In turn, the exemplary bodies are called upon to present their bodies as facta for the Christus Medicus proses to make incomplete bodies, taking control of them, in order to “make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom.”

"First of all, you can probably focus on this," Terry says opening up his photo album, on the right a picture of Sara and on the left a picture of Ricardo. "Find Ricardo in here, so everyone is on the same page. This is Ricardo. When I met Ricardo he was Sara." Holding Sara and Ricardo's images as illustrative facta, Terry sets himself as the authority of the exemplum that will both not only verbal but visual. He orders the engagement, tells the audience where to focus, and defines the terms. "The thing that makes him unusual," says Terry, "he is enormously charismatic. He attracts people. He has power, he has presence. he has a personality." While Terry positions himself as the authority, but he needs Ricardo as factum in order to provide the physical "presence" in order to attract people to his message. For medieval audiences examples were highly persuasive, but for modern audiences steeped in scientific empiricism and materialism, the physical facts of a eunuch are indispensible to keep these sharp machines operational.

In order for the eunuch to be a proper operative, operations cut out parts of their body and history, in order to make it fit into the Church’s sexual regulatory operations. As such, Terry must renarrate Ricardo’s history to contain and cut down Sara’s presence. "Ricardo was there on that first night [the Church visited]" Terry recounts. "Sara," he corrects himself. "Sara was there on that first night." This slip is significant. It places Ricardo before Sara; a narrative it has Sara collaborate when the film cuts to her account of living as an unhappy man in Cuba before traveling to New York to live as a woman. Ricardo is the origin and the ending, while Sara is an interruption in the middle. "There was something missing,” Terry of Sara, “He never knew what it was to be a man.” Sara becomes the non-masculine part that is always already cut away, in the story an eunuch, lacking and castrated from birth, a pre-op subject for Christ’s reparative operations.

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Naturalizing Authority

Ricardo’s latent “power” and Sara’s lingering “presence” in the film, however, remains dangerous to authorities and narratives that try to contain them. Holding images of Ricardo in his hand as he narrates the film, a mise en scène figurative of material dependences, Terry asserts the dominance of his dicta to frame and authorize the facta of the eunuch’s life story. Positioning himself as Christus Medicus, a kind of surgeon, Terry excuses laying hands on trans images and bodies by establishing a state of crisis that requires him to resolve. The poverty of trans women, the physical need for nourishment and medical care, becomes evidence of the supposed to lack of meaning without the dictum of the Church providing structure. This is especially true in cultures, medieval and modern, based on a “Gospel of Wealth” or “Prosperity Gospel” where financial success or failure is supposed to reflect degrees of God’s favor and wholesomeness.

Given the power of physical facts, the transformation of material circumstances is then key to defining Sara’s life as defined by a lack of resources and sexual wholeness and positioning Ricardo’s post-op life on the side of social fulfillment. This is done in part through the insertion of flashbacks to choice interviews with Sara from the Salt Mines. “I couldn’t wait to come [to the US],” says Sara in one talking head, “but now I am sorry I came. Because here if you have no money you are nothing.” The nothingness that Sara references is the absence of power and presence that money provides. Thus despite the promise of “the land of the free,” because she is denied material resources, she is not free to live as she will. As Sara says these haunting words, the screen freezes and the distinct voice of “Ricardo” from another scene speaks over the image. In a frozen moment before the change, we see the woman who is supposed to be “nothing” in this place linger as if to affirm that she remains an absent presence throughout the film. 

Indeed, a persistent irony of the eunuch transformation narrative is that its post-op “power” (Ricardo) is dependent on repeatedly invoking the “presence” of a supposedly erased and empty part of the pre-op past (Sara). In this, nothingness reveals itself not to be a state of non-being but rather the result of continual emptying to divide undesirable parts from the desired whole. Because nothing and being, part and whole, past and present are all operations in the same shape machine, the difference is not ontological but functional. While remaining intermeshed, the prior is made to be the unseen background to the latter’s foreground. This exchange is evident in when the film catches up the voice of Ricardo in the post-transformation time and space, where the still of Sara is replaced by the actively swaying Ricardo and the subtitle “Ricardo” appears on the bottom of the screen. “Dallas, Texas” appears on the screen as it pans over a dark room with dark furniture, where a Terry’s church thanks God for bringing Ricardo (into being) there. 

Through the ritualized operations of Chritus Medicus, Sara is made “nothing,” the missing something, to serve as a background for Ricardo’s thingness. Despite the dark enclosure that remains around them during the prayer, Terry calls the place where he brought Ricardo out from “a deep and dark hole.” This is where Sara worked the streets at night as a prostitute, injected drugs and hormones. Then, as later, she becomes a (penetrated) hole for the sake of her survival, but here she does so for pleasure as well. Sara’s location is indeed deep, as blood, semen, make-up, salt and semi-tangibles like love and community saturate each other, leaving traces of them in her blood. It is a dark space, relegated to the margins, taken off the street until the night work.[ii] It is this place, in the form of HIV/Aids that Sara carries deep in her body even as she migrates to Texas, remaining as the haunting material cause for Ricardo coming (into being) there. 

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Spiritualizing Authority

While Christus Medicus’s authority depends on asserting the essential naturalness of the post-operative trans body, the exemplum needs to continually show the scars of the operations in order to evidence its power. There is a kind of double-meaning when Terry stands beside his church with Ricardo, thanking God for his transformation, praising, “You have stuck him in the devil’s face and you have said, ‘look what I can do’” The words are telling. The material facts of Ricardo’s new body and circumstances are perpetually being shoved in the face of Christians so that Terry can effectively tell them “look what I can do.” Rather than merely disturbing established gender discourses, the materiality of the trans body grounds scriptural rhetoric in a sense of physical realness. Rather than hiding the fault lines of reconstructed gender, the scars of trans bodies were showed off as a tool of social control, even as they offered their own forms of resistance.

Sometimes the scar that is erased and shown as part of the operation of sharp machines are not enough, the exemplum occasionally needs to open wounds as a reminder of the dangerous facts of living without the security of its framing dictates. “HIV affected [Sara/Ricardo’s] mind,” recounts one of his trans friends in an interview. “He grew afraid of dying alone on the streets. The Church was the only way out.”[iii] It is perhaps too easy to paint Sara's life on the streets as free and uninhibited. Yet it was physical and social operations already acting on Sara that drove her into the hands of Terry's Church. Sara had long been trained to trade her body for what she needed. She traded her skin as a prostitute in order to gain the currency to exercise limited claims over her body: paying for food, clothing, hormones and heroin; each operating between violence and pleasure, necessity and choice. At HIV’s arrival into the network, however, this machine became unlivable and Sara came to desire the closed system of the Church.

The gated community of Terry’s Born Again Church allows admittance only at a high price, yet promises to give life and future as it takes away another. “I thank God that I have AIDs,” says Ricardo in an interview, sitting comfortably in a plush chair and warm sweater, “I wouldn’t have come off the street, and I wouldn’t have devoted myself to God. I’m not a fanatic, I just love the way God loves me.”[iv] Nowhere in the documentary does Ricardo claim that he is fully gave himself to the church, although he participates in it. He says that God participates in him through the care he is given. He does not say he loves God (or His Church), but how God loves him. Across in the exemplum of the eunuch, sharp machines reveal the contingency of parts and wholes, dicta and facta working together with the promise of mutual benefit. In this way, even as it makes its trans operatives to be docile, it teaches them a critical tool for exploiting systems. This practice of cooperating in ways that at once erase and sustain, subjugate and empower, builds into the trans operatives a powerful capacity for contingency.

Along these scars and contingencies lie fault lines where the cooperative trans body always keeps one foot out of the door, never fully deployed in any form or machine in which it participates. Those eunuch machines, those transgender operations, freed from the yoke of pre- and post-op demarcations become trans operatives (like double agents) who may use the feature which is most used to subjugate them, their mutability, to effect changes on both sides of supposedly strict divides of gender and faith. Such operatives may effect wider change that offers a greater variety of livable lives and in a new sense of Christus Medicus, to “love the way God loves.” Yet even as exemplum position its exemplary bodies to potentially open up the meaning of dicta, it is not an easy slash and burn. Changing machines, especially those working towards love, require cooperation.

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[i] (Aikin & Aparicio). 

[ii] Despite this failure to establish closure, once and for all, enclosure appears to be a pivotal desire for both Terry and Ricardo. McRuer notes that Ricardo’s environment is particularly closed-off and he is almost exclusively shown indoors, in houses, in Church or in a hospital (McRuer 116-119). Becoming sick from Aids, Ricardo appears anxious to exist in the supposed closed systems of church, house, and care.

[iii] ”(Aikin & Aparicio).

[iv] (Aikin & Aparicio).

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A Queer Confessor to the Masses: On Matthew 19:12

"For there are eunuchs 

who were born that way from their mother's womb; 

and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; 

and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs 

for the sake of the kingdom of heaven"

Gospel of Matthew 19:12 

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In a previous post, Eunuchs for the Kingdom,

I examined how Matthew 19:12 opens up the ontology of transgender bodies

from a medical and social trans identities to an instrumental use.

Here, I examine how the same passage may be redeployed

for the purposes of a critical trans politics 

that reaches across difference and periodization.

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Queer Confessor to the Masses

To be marked as Transgender is to become a storyteller. Stories and histories are inscribed on our bodies from all directions. It is a common occurrence, seemingly about a 50/50 chance, when I am traveling in public, that someone will come up to me and begin telling me a story from their life. Whether I am on a bus, train, or airplane, the scene seems to replay itself in strikingly similar ways. Often I am reading a book or listening to music, when I notice that a person is standing very close to me and looking in my direction. Usually they appear to be a cis-gendered, able-bodied, heterosexual male and they have a look in their eyes like they have something they crave to tell me.

"What?" I ask, leaning in after they say something almost inaudible. They speak up a little louder but not enough to be readily heard by others around. "I just wanted to say," they begin, "I've seen you around." That's probably true. While as a trans-woman I am fairly passable as a cis-woman, to the passenger looking for something interesting I often seem to provide a puzzle on their ride to wherever they are going. I am tall, strong bodied, a deep voice, and with a queer butch edge to my otherwise femme demeanor. It's hard not to notice when I've been noticed. The frequency with which people don't merely sneak glances, but boldly stare was shocking when I first transitioned. In any case, I am used to people noticing me, for better or for worse.

What follows in these interviews is perhaps surprising: without even telling me their name or asking for mine, the unexpected traveling companion proceeds unprompted to tell me a story from their life. At first this trend confused me. If they had been staring at me, interested, puzzled, one would suppose they would come at with prying questions. Instead, what I end up receiving from nominally my cis-gendered, straight visitor is a tale of their queer escapades: the halloween they cross-dressed, their secret fetish for women's underwear, the party at which they kissed another man for the first time. Sometimes I follow up with questions: how did that make you feel? What style cut do you like to wear? Would you do it again? After a short-while, having shared their story, they leave. In the end, the encounter was more about them than about me.

"I'm like a queer confessor to the masses," I tell my friends afterwards. Like a priest, I am approached by strangers who tell me their queer/trans transgressions against the hetero-normate ideal around which they orient their lives.  In a sense, simply by listening, I am handing out pardons for their heterosexuality and masculinity. They approach my body as though it is some relic or confessional where they can whisper their secrets in safety then walk away back into their straight world, unburdened by a past that is no longer locked inside them. I become a figure of that abject past, a dark hole where they can safely dispose of the parts of them that they don't want to be seen in the light of the present day. Psychoanalysts, like Slavoj Zizek, Lee Edelman, and Will Stockton, argue that the desire and disgust of the queer body derives from their symbolic representation of the nothingness, the lack, the death-drive at the heart of all desire. God and the soul are likewise read as signs of the Lack par excellence. In this way, being queer and being a confessor (a stand-in for the big Nothing) are overlapping positions in the social imagination. 

Yet approaching the transgender body through the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis covers over lived bodies. The desire, lack and nothingness in concern is not the trans body in question, but the person who marks us, turns us into metaphors for their own subject formation. I think of Alison Kafer's encounters with devotees, summarized in her essay "Desire and Disgust," where nominally cis-gender able-bodied heterosexual men look on her as a fetish for their own desire about amputation. Despite holding her up as something holy, a sacred relic to be devoted to, their desire runs on and turns into disgust. Her body becomes a symbol of the lack and the nothingness inside the devotees, as my body does for those who come to confess their queer sins. The history of her life and mine is an interruption in the story that appropriates the body of the other. This is the body-sized hole in the devotees' and psychoanalysts' narratives: our lives either don't matter or are unspeakable. We are conscripted to serve as sites of devotion and confession for the public's stories, histories, and formations but we are denied the ability to claim our own.

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The Castration of a Salesman

Every so often, however, the screen between the person sharing their story and me comes up, as the projection of nothingness or restoration begins to fade away and we are able to encounter each other as two vulnerable bodies with our own scars and histories. One instance where this moment of contact erupted occurred as I was on a train from Chicago to Washington D.C. in the winter a few years ago. At first, the scene resembled the usual script point for point. I was sitting in the observation car reading a book on the history of castration when an elderly gentleman was suddenly looming over me. "I've seen you around," he began. I put down my book, leaving my forefinger on the page, and nodded, wondering if this would be a long exposition. He looked me up and down, then looked at my book, with the title "CASTRATION" in bold print on the side and pointed. "I saw what you were reading," he said, "and I have a story for you." Once again I nodded and tried to wait patiently as a pregnant pause filled the space between his slow words. "Is it alight with you if I tell you later?" he asked, hesitantly. "Sure," I told him, "I'll be here all morning." He shuffled off and I returned to my book, expecting not to see him again. He seemed to have lost his nerve.

About two hours later, I was shocked out of footnoting a page by the man's sudden reappearance in the seat across from me. He was in the process of unfolding a notebook and a mechanical pencil. I consolidated my workspace and tried not to seem too surprised as I welcome him back. "I needed to write things down," he explained. "You see, I have this *condition* that makes short-term memory quite difficult for me," he went on, emphasizing the word "condition" in a lower voice. "I've found I need to write down what I want to say or else I tend to wander off or repeat myself." As he told me this, he clicked the pencil and checked off the first item on his notebook. Glancing over at his notes, I surmised that I was in for long story and moved to get more comfortable in my seat. Recollecting the story the man shared with me is difficult both because of its content and the form in which it was told. The events he shared with me were fragmented and suggested an unspoken association rather than proceeding as a targeted and linear narrative. At first I tried to discern how one vignette unfolded into the next or what the point of it all was supposed to be, but soon I surrendered my internal editorializing. After all, he was not putting forth an argument but sharing his life with me. 

What can be articulated is that he was once a traveling salesman, peddling roofs with his partner around the southern United States for the decades after World War I. He had been raised mostly in various boarding schools and relished telling me about the various boyhood companions he had. How many of them went with him into the war, he never said, but admitted that after he returned from active service he missed many of them dearly. When he was back in the States, he married quickly and soon got into selling roofs on the recommendation of a friend. The sales-trips would last weeks at a time, as his partner and him drove from town to town, staying in hotels along the way. These were the best years of his life, he told me, taking a break from checking off points on his list and getting very quiet as he looked down at the table. These intermissions became more and more frequent as he elaborated on the flow of their sale's pitch, the types of roofs they sold to customers across the country, and the adventures they had traveling from place to place. Then suddenly his story broke off again. I wasn't sure how many years had past or where he was in the country (or how much time had passed or where we were in our train-ride either for that matter), but halting in the middle of describing how his partner and him were trying to fix their car during one of many breakdowns, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and went quiet.

"I'm sorry," he said dabbing his eyes with an old and soiled handkerchief, "I can't say any more about that." Shifting the story again to another time, apparently some time much later in his life, he mentioned that his wife was very happy when he came off the road, after which time, he never saw his partner. What his life at home was like was even harder to discern, as his voice had become shaky and the pauses turned from interruptions or turns in the narrative to a part of the mode of his speech. Whatever happened, working close to home and his wife, seemed to feel like a long fallow period of his life. Something had been lost. Something he would not name, except to say, jumping back to the previous stage of his story without transition, "we never did anything, my partner and I. We couldn't." Looking over at my books on castration, he pointed with the knuckle of his forefinger and told me, "but after it was over, I thought of Matthew 19:12, and that's when I came so close to doing THAT." He put down the notebook again, put his hands folded upwards in his lap and stared down at them. "I couldn't do it," he stammered, making it even harder to understand what "it" was in this context. "I wanted, I wanted, but I couldn't," he continued, "and cutting it off seemed like the only answer."

This time the narrative broke apart and never returned. I offered a few soothing words with sympathetic eyes. The old salesman had fallen into pieces. We sat together for some time in relative quiet, him adjusting himself and me nodding in affirmation. "Sorry," he said, beginning to put away his notebook, "when I saw you and saw your books, I thought..." He looked out the window for a while, seemingly uncertain how to proceed. "It's okay," I told him, "thank you for sharing that with me." "Can I ask you for one last thing?" he concluded, "can we pray together?" This request, like much of what preceded it, caught me completely off guard. Hesitantly I probed what he meant by that. Extending out his hands, he took mine, and finished by asking for God to look over us and guide us on our way. "Amen," I uneasily echoed with him as he picked up his things and left the car. 

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Children of the Knife

I call myself a queer confessor to the masses in circumstances such as these, but in this case, when parts of the exchange were the closest  I've ever come to performing a rite of Reconciliation, I did not feel like I had just undergone a ritual, sincere or farcical. It was, however, a return or a rebinding of a community brought together not by a feeling of wholeness or restoration, but of shared fragmentation of our bodies, stories, and pasts. It is a community defined not necessarily by any particular embodiment or identity. A reductive reading of the salesman's story would be to describe him as a gay man, even a repressed gay man. Yet he is not heterosexual either. In the end, he never confirmed or denied his castration. He never uttered the word eunuch or transsexual to describe either him or me. 

Yet on this journey he saw me as a sort of kindred with a shared association to the cutting off of body parts with whom he could share his story. What brought us together, across difference in time periods and modes of articulating ourselves was a shared relation to what Judith Butler calls "sharp technologies" (Doing Justice to Someone). Real or imagined, material or metaphorical, present or past, the power of edged devices has formed us. We are discursively children of the knife.

While the circumstances of becoming physical or metaphorical eunuchs may have pressed on us from outside, there is a sense through which we can "become eunuchs for the kingdom" in ways that continue to challenge the sharp divides between oppressor and oppressed. Instead of being complacent in the disinterested exchange between those who read us as marginalized others who can bear the weight of their queerness, we can challenge each other with a radical vulnerability. 

I had sat down and expected that this man would be yet another passer-by in my life and yet through his willingness to make his scars bare to me, I became implicated in his body. By sharing a history that was slowly (through the force of time and neurological change) becoming taken from him, I became implicated in his story. By receiving the desire and suffering of castration from him, I became implicated in his liberation.

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