Genres of Embodiment: On Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

"She likes her boys to be girls"

Judith Butler

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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.

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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.

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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.

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[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.

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More on Genres of Embodiment

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The Island of the Amazons: the Medieval Place of Transgender

“Amazon: < Latin Amazon, < Greek Ἀμαζών, -όνα; 
explained by the Greeks < ἀ priv. + μαζ-ός a breast” 

Oxford English Dictionary

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A young child is being prepared to have their identity affirmed for the first time in their lives but before this happens, tradition dictates that they will not be recognized as a member of this gender unless they first undergo surgery to alter their sex characteristics. They are expected to go through a form of mastectomy, called by some “top surgery.” After this transition, parts of the body usually marked as feminine are altered to follow normatively masculine forms, giving access to traditionally masculine activities. Such gender transitions are not freely available, or imaginable, in all places in the world. The youth lives in a community that is marginalized, isolated on a kind of island, on the edge of normative society. Certainly this is how John Mandeville described the Amazons.[2]

In this paper, I read John Mandeville’s descriptions of “the Land of Amazons,” focusing on the rhetorical framing of its land and people, through a trans and intersex lens to critique how the text defines forms of embodiment and physical environment through refigured and reinscribed gender systems. I argue that the Isle of the Amazons was imagined as a trans place on the edge of shared space where bodies and the society might be otherwise reconstructed, and that the land-bridges and social histories that connect the normative with alternative suggests potential for integration or rehabilitation of medieval transgender places to a greater extent than the water-locked “Isle of the Hermaphrodites;” which seem less able to be integrated into patriarchal forms of embodiment and power. This project follows in the line of Sandy Stone’s seminal transgender studies text, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-transsexual Manifesto.”[3] I take literally her call: “transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history, to begin to rearticulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body.”[4] A critical trans politics requires a medieval transgender history that reclaims bodies that have been refigured and reinscribed, at times—in effect— to un-trans them, and at others with a yearning for other forms of embodiment and other futures than those that existed in a medieval cisgender framework. Just as modern transgender studies must name the struggles of the past, it must take responsibility for the futures imagined and permitted by pre-modern cultural ancestors of transgender, intersex, and other non-binary peoples.

First, I respond to the historical place of transgender in medieval studies, particularly the tendency in feminist and queer scholarship to situate Amazons as and through cisgender womanhood, while admitting to some level of cultural masculinity; deemphasizing the surgical transition as a definitive narrative for Amazons—aspects situating them in histories of transgender and masculinity. Second, while drawing on trans theory looking to reclaim the power of erased histories, I unpack how the “Isle of the Amazons” looks forward, extending to touch, and anticipate cultural descendants in modern transgender communities.[5] This “co-extension” between the Amazons and their environment for trans community signals that pre-modern society was more prepared to integrate refigured and reinscribed embodiments than it was intersex forms of gender.[6] Finally, I mark how Mandeville’s text maneuvers such medieval trans figures for contingent relations and futures with patriarchal and trans exclusive radical feminisms.

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I. Refigured Bodies

Before queer and trans feminists made social (re)constructionist claims on gender, Mandeville knew that one is not born an Amazon but becomes one. His Amazon are social and physical constructs, surgically made by a mastectomy to the right or left breast. Mandeville writes, “þei don awey þat on pappe with an hote hiren” and a child is made an Amazon.[7] The gender designated at birth determines who may become an Amazon and live on the island, or leave to be raised with men, yet it is not until surgery that gender is set. Surgically refigured and reinscribed, a child gains entry into the place of an Amazon. The word “Amazon” comes from the Greeks who explain it as being derived from “a-” (without) –“mazos” (breast); “Amazon” names a person who has undergone top surgery. Thus while Amazons play a role in the history of strong and/or butch cisgender women, they have more genealogical connections with trans men than previously imagined. In the modern cultural imagination and also in the modern medievalist readings, the Amazon has been taken as what Karma Lochrie in her excellent Heterosyncrasies, calls “stone butch” women, embodying concepts of “female masculinity,” which prepare the way for a trans intervention while not yet moving beyond cisgender womanhood.[8] In her study, Lochrie acknowledges the trans-humanism of the Amazon’s embodiment citing “Camilla’s desire for the helmet,” in Lydgate’s Laud Troy Book, as the Amazonian orientation toward a “masculine prosthetic.”[9] This prosthetic impulse points towards the reconstruction of the Amazon’s gender, as physical as well as social forms of life, reflect a kind of trans masculinity that goes beyond merely the drive for power or erotic enjoyment. Amazons enact what Lochrie calls “the breakdown of sexual difference,” yet does more than simply disturb gender; reconstructing as much as they deconstruct.[10]

Yet the reconstruction of gender does not end with being refigured, as Amazons is divided further into two sub-genders: the upper-class knights and the lower-class archers. These subdivisions reflect medieval patriarchal concepts about embodying hierarchies. There must be those born to be rulers and workers in Mandeville’s medieval imagination, even among a gender divergent society. His Amazons illustrate theories of trans politics, even as they create hierarchies within gender variant communities. Mandeville writes, “ȝif it be a womman of gret lynage þei don awey the left pappe.”[11] The surgery has both physical and symbolic effects. Madeville claims that the left breast is removed for material purposes, “þat þei may the better beren a scheeld.”[12] Through this surgical transition, a child is marked as an Amazon in general and as upper class in particular. This further division of society according to artificially constructed embodiments demonstrates the Amazons’ (and Mandeville’s) understanding that gender and class are pliable discourses that can be made and remade, divided and reconnected as desired. The shielded Amazons represent the island's biopower by reflecting figurations of medieval patriarchy, specifically the armored class of knights who ruled much of Europe. The island of England, from where Mandeville supposedly derives, is lorded over by the knights visually distinguished from the other lower orders of troops as armored riders. Furthermore, such shields came to be adorned by the coat-of-arms. These shield symbols sub-divide the knightly class further as these coat-of-arms signified the great families, martial orders, and deeds of its user. Thus, a shielded Amazon might be marked further by "gret lynage," even from those other shielded Amazons. The whole apparatus of the shield functions physically and symbolically to defend the structure of the Amazon's body, as well as the island as a physical and cultural place.

Mandeville goes on of the lower classes, “ȝif it be a womman on fote þei don awey the riȝt pappe.”[13] The description of the second class of Amazons as those "on foot" is telling of their relationship with the first class. Evidently, the reading that those Amazons of “gret lynage " and holding "a scheeld" are indeed a reproduction of medieval mounted knights is confirmed by describing those supposedly not born into privileged families as those in Europe who fight unmounted, on foot. In this respect, these Amazons represent a supposedly less wealthy class, lacking a horse, and thus more likely to be killed in combat. Furthermore, it puts them on a physically lower position than the mounted Amazons, suggesting subordination. Thus, while Amazons as a people evidence what Lochrie calls a “self-determining desire,” the liberation from patriarchal social divides is not complete.[14] Rather, gender and class distinctions between the bodies and social positions of Amazons are reconstructed rather than simply deconstructed. As in patriarchal readings of a woman’s lack of a penis, particularly trans women, the lower order of Amazons becomes signified through physical and social castration. The foot soldier class is first defined by a lack of the right breast and the lack of a horse. Because the removal of the left breast facilitates using a shield, the left breasted Amazons likely do not carry shields or the accompanying coat-of-arms; especially as archers. Likewise, the removal of the right breast is supposed to have a material as well as social function, "for to scheten with bowe turkeys."[15] The tactical role of archers in medieval warfare was as quick and lightly armored attack force drawn from the lower classes. As an enforcer of the physical and social structure of the place of the Amazons in the world, these archers are at once the most vulnerable and the most distant relationship to the shared political space of the battlefield.

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II. Contingent Places

As the surgical refiguring and reinscribing of the Amazon shows the potential for hierarchical divides to be reconstructed in trans embodiments, so too do descriptions of the Amazon’s physical environment suggest ongoing contingent relations to patriarchies. In the Travels of John Mandeville, the author tells of a second pilgrimage to the margins of the world after the pilgrim made to the center of the Christian mappa mundi, Rome. On the margins, Mandeville does what most cannot. He arrives at the Isle of Amazons. “Besyde the lond of Caldee is the lond of Amazoyne,” writes Mandeville. [16]  “This lond of Amazoyne is an Ile aƚƚ envirouned with the see saf in II places where ben II entrees .” [17] Looking upon the isolated place of the Amazons, his descriptions suggest that part of the difficulty of penetrating into the Amazonian world is that it is nearly cut off from the rest of the world by water. Unlike the Isle of Hermaphrodites, which is bordered on all sides by water, by land bridges Amazonia retains a shared space with the continent. In his descriptions Mandeville seems to suggest significance between the Amazon’s relation to patriarchal forms of gender and the Isle’s relation to the continent. Mandeville writes, “ beȝonde þat water duellen the men þat ben here [the Amazons’] paramoures & hire loues, where þei gon to solacen hem whan þei wole.”[18] Using the land bridges, the Amazons continue contingent relations with the patriarchies, keeping them as socially close as they are physically. The physical relations of the island suggests contingency in two ways. First, as points of material coextension, given that contingency comes from the Latin con- (“together with”) and –tangere ("touch"). [19] Second, the contingency of the land bridges reflect how the social relations between Amazons and the patriarchies occur only in highly controlled and limited ways.

The contact between the isle and the continent at land bridges shows a kind of pseudo-symmetrical reflection, even inversion of the patriarchy on the Amazon’s side. “In þat lond þei haue a queen þat gouernetℏ aƚƚ þat lond & aƚƚ þei ben obeyssant to hire,” writes Mandeville, “And alweys þei maken here queen by electioun þat is most worthy in armes.”[20] The land and people of Amazon are oriented towards the governing of one monarch, as in patriarchies. Yet this subordination comes through an act of collective will. This was the ideal in many patriarchies as well but often the realities were otherwise. Such a hierarchal system, especially one based on group agency, demands the constant expression of physical and social power. The Amazons power, as evidenced by their bodies, is predicated on the contingent ability of violent authority, “[f]or þei ben rigℏt gode werryoures & orped & wyse, noble & wortℏi.”[21]

The matriarchy of the Amazons at once replicates the patriarchal and undermines it by revealing its social construction. The place and identity of the Amazons are not as naturalized some patriarchies but must continually constitute itself by enacting its power through war and economic success. “And þei gon often tyme in sowd to help of oþer kynges in here werres for gold & syluer as otℏere sowdyoures don,” writes Mandeville. “And þei meyntenen hemself right vygouresly.”[22] These exercises of physical strength “meyntenen” the embodiment of Amazon's physical power while also reaffirming their social powers and contingent alliances with other lands. These exercises are not radically different from other patriarchies but because of relative newness and seeming artificiality of the Amazon society these performance may be more necessary. This reflects how other trans persons and communities are continually called on to hyper perform binary genders, that trans women enact high femme dress or trans men demonstrate physical butchness.

The emphasis on the Amazon’s replication or ongoing contingent relations with patriarchal ways of life is heightened by the relatively isolated, singular, and abridged descriptions Mandeville gives the Isle of the Hermaphrodites. For the author, intersex bodies seem to contain the multiplicity of gender, disproving the theory that men and women exist in utterly different and incomparable spheres. "In another ile beth peple that beth bothe man and womman, and have membres of bothe," writes Mandeville.[23] The repetition of the words, “beth” and “bothe,” emphasizes how Mandeville is struck by the double-ness of their being. The dangerous power of these bodies seems to fascinate and repulse Mandeville, who examines their bodies in only three sentences over four lines without noting anything of their culture or history, compared to the nearly twenty lines the Amazons are given. In effect, the Hermaphrodites are isolated from the ongoing marking of time as they are imagined on an island, disconnected from public space.

The greater emphasis on the Amazons may be considered a result that just as the land bridges make the place of the Amazons an incomplete island so too the trans figures seem to be more able to be integrated (back) into the patriarchal forms of life. As Lochrie observes, medieval texts often imagine the potential for “the Amazon’s [re]assimilation into courtly femininity, as unstable, even queer, as that assimilation may be.”[24] The act of transition for the Amazon’s body suggest that at one time they were bodies that could have potentially been submitted to normative gender hierarchies. Likewise, contingency of the land provides the means for request of the Amazons. Indeed, the history of ongoing flow of blood, money, and semen from patriarchal lands through the passage of the land bridges into the Amazon’s land seems to reflect how this trans society reproduces itself through the continual intercourse with and replication of the patriarchy. 

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III. Reconstructed Histories, 

Contingent Futures

Just as the Amazons were once in a patriarchal system, they may be again. Unlike the Isle of the Hermaphrodites, imagined as a naturally segregated place and people, the Isle of Amazon is denaturalized by Mandeville providing a history of how the Isle and the form of gender came to be. Mandeville distinctly contradicts certain readers opinions about the Land of the Amazons, “þat reme is aƚƚ wommen & noman, Nogℏt as summe men seyn þat men mowe not lyue þere, but for because þat the wommen wil not suffre no men amonges hem to ben here souereynes.”[25] The Isle did not naturally generated the Amazons. They were socially constructed out of change and political will. “For sum tyme þer was a kyng in þat contrey,” writes Mandeville, until the kingdom was embroiled in a war where most men of power were killed, “kyng higℏte Colepeus… & aƚƚ the gode blood of his reme.”[26] In many senses of word, it was a revolution, a turning of Fortune’s Wheel, which brought the rise of the Amazon as a land and people. Mandeville’s history suggests that it was the undoing of the patriarchy, not simply men, that gave rise of the matriarchy. “And whan the queen & aƚƚ the othere noble ladyes sawen þat þei weren aƚƚ wydewes & þat aƚƚ the riaƚƚ blood was lost,” writes Mandeville, “þei armed hem & as creatures out of wytt þei slowen aƚƚ the men of the contrey þat weren laft.”[27] The bloody birth of the Amazons evidence that it was not a popular movement but the work of matriarchs - led by the queen and noble women - against the remaining men of lower birth. While the rise of the Amazons changed the orientation of space and society, it replicated patriarchal hierarchies. There remained a monarch and a ruling class as well as a lower class, their bodies reflecting the structure of the island as a divided and subjugating space where each body has its place or else is excluded.

Rather than simply being a movement of liberation, breaking down barriers, the Amazons’ power comes through the continual exclusion of genders viewed as too male. Mandeville writes, “fro þat tyme hiderwardes þei neuere wolden suffren man to dweƚƚ amonges hem.”[28] The Amazon’s first self-definition came from expelling men and continues to serve as central to the personal and collective power of the island by allowing men to enter only to send them away again. When the Amazon’s chose, “þei drawen hem towardes the londes marchynge next to hem. And þan þei haue here loues þat vsen hem & þei duellen with hem an .8. dayes or 10 & þanne gon hom aȝen.” [29] The travel of the men into and out of the island reflects the goal of their visit: the penetrative entrance into and out of the body of the Amazon. This sexual intercourse (the movement between gendered places) is instigated and structured by the Amazons as not only an insistence on the need for consent but as an expression of the power to exclude. Mirroring the transition children identified as girls into one of two kinds of Amazon, the island ejects children identified as boys from the Amazon’s body and island. “And ȝif þei haue ony knaue child,” writes Mandeville, “þei kepen it a certeyn tyme & þan senden it to the fadir whan he can gon allone.”[30] The child who would be a boy (like his father) enters the Amazon's body, stays for a time, and leaves. In being birthed and removed, the child becomes a boy. It is a process of unbecoming-Amazon just as his sisters undergo one of two processes of becoming-Amazon. For a moment, before their gender and place in the world is assigned, they occupy the liminal space of the womb, like the Island's land bridge, dwelling for a time at the transition towards one of several possible genders. In a sense, this movement and transformation marks even the boys of the Amazon's with a contingency and transgender relationship to embodiment and space.

There is dangerous power—power even to create something new—in erasing the past and excluding undesired elements of gender, as modern transgender studies knows. Reading personal transgender histories, Stone explains how transitioning “makes the world safe” for the new gender “by erecting and maintaining an impenetrable barrier” between the new and the old, “reinforced again and again.”[31] What Mandeville presents in the Land of Amazon’s history is a vision of the public, collective practice of the same kind of building borders and denying mixture in order to secure the new forms of gender. The power of the patriarchy was to subjugate female bodies and deny access to spaces of influence and if trans movements fall into the groove of change by exclusion, “[t]he highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase his/herself, to fade into the ‘normal’ population as soon as possible.”[32] In effect, the matriarchy becomes a mirror image of the patriarchy. The trans masculine is attained at the cost of the liberation of other genders.

The continued reproduction of patriarchal access, bodies, and social systems is at odds of the Amazon’s movement, meaning that it needs to cover over aspects of its past and operations; making history safe for future politics. “Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history— learning to lie effectively about one's past,” writes Stone.[33] Transgender studies needs to take responsibility for all of its history and practices of denial, the putting up of walls around the past or around identity only replicate the practices of subjugation and exclusion that has and continues to be used against trans persons by the patriarchy and Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminism (TERF).[34] Scholars, feminist utopias, or Isles of Amazons, can set defending turf/TERF against male impurity and rejecting identification with trans bodies at the expense of liberation and histories; be they butch or Amazon, transgender or intersex, modern or medieval.

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Loca Sancta: 

Becoming Foreign in Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives

Anti-Loca Sancta: 

John Mandeville's Second Pilgrimage

Becoming Crip, Becoming Hermaphrodite 

in Mandeville's Travels

The Island of the Amazons: 

the Place of Transgender in Medieval Pilgrimage

The Island of Hermaphrodites: 

Bending the Map of Intersex and Disability

Children of Hermaphroditus: 
Intersex in Medieval Pilgrimage

The Sites of Hermaphrodites: 
Intersex in the Greco-Roman World

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[1] "Amazon, n." OED Online. December 2015. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com.

[2] John Mandeville (Cotton) XVIII. 1.103. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/

[3] Sandy Stone. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. (New York: Routledge 1991).

[4] Stone 14.

[5] “Touch” from Carolyn Dinshaw. “Touching the Past.” Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999). 1-2.

[6] “Coextensive” from Lynne Huffer. Mad For Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, (New York: Columbia University, 2010).

[7] John Mandeville. Mandeville's travels : translated from the French of Jean d'Outremeuse, ed. from Ms. Cotton Titus C.XVI. XVIII. 1.103. Ed. P. Hamelius. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Service

2003). quod.lib.umich.edu

[8] Karma Lochrie. Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t. (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota 2005). 103-4.

[9] Lochrie 118.

[10] Lochrie 131.

[11] Mandeville 1.103.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Lochrie 121.

[15] Mandeville 1.103.

[16] Ibid. 1.102.

[17] Ibid. 1.103

[18] Ibid.

[19] "contingent, adj." OED Online. Dec 2015. Oxford University Press, www.oed.com.

[20] Mandeville 1.103.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] John Mandeville. The Book of John Mandeville. XIII. 1892-3. Ed. Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson. (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications 2007). d.lib.rochester.edu/

[24] Lochrie 116.

[25] Mandeville 1.103.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Stone 7.

[32] Stone 11.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Cristan Williams. “You Might Be a Terf If…” 24 September 2013. The TransAdvocate.com. www.transadvocate.com/you-might-be-a-terf-if_n_10226.htm

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