"An Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability" with Karen Nakamura

“The related concepts of 
“giving up hope” and “a life in decline” 
were the most difficult for me to grasp. 
I still struggle to view them positively."

Karen Nakamura

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Beyond IRBs: Anthropology & Disability Studies

On October 22nd, 2015, Karen Nakamura spoke on "Cultural Madness: Notes on an Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability" at the Center of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. The event was co-sponsored by the English Department's Crip/Queer Studies programming and Disability Student Services. David Mitchell introduced Nakamura, noting her recent work, Disability of the Soul, and her upcoming project on Transgender in Japanese Culture. In front of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty, Nakamura opened with a call for more disability studies within the field of Anthropology, especially projects focused outside the United States. The speaker subsequently discussed her work with Bathel, an intentional Christian community in Japan that supports a wide variety of peoples with psychosocial embodiments, including schizophrenia and depression. While Nakamura ended up writing a book on her research, she first approached the group as a documentarian, living with the subjects of the film for an extended period of time in order to get to know them as distinct persons as she filmed and edited the work.

The choice of film-making came as a creative response to problems with restrictive ethics board guidelines. Such International Review Boards were developed for the medical sciences to police practices of human experimentation, including electro-therapy and the administration of experimental drugs. Since then, IRBs have been expanded in the social sciences, setting tight restrictions on the methodologies for interviewing human subjects. In addition to making data collection more difficult, IRBs have been criticized for protecting research institutions and universities from lawsuits rather than assuring the safety of interview subjects. As a result, vulnerable populations are often less willing to agree to interviews because they fear signing away their rights in perfunctory consent forms. In answer to these problems, Nakamura turned to the creative arts and humanities to further her work with and on disability communities. While sociological articles require IRB regulations a film does not but it is regarded as art not research, notes Nakamura. The speaker defended the use of such loopholes because it recognizes a critical difference between sociological research and the work of the Humanities: research looks at data in order to generalize the information into universal principles while the humanities and arts tend to focus on the particularity of texts and persons.

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The Bethel Community

The subject of Nakamura's documentary, "Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan," was a group of neuro-divergent and neuro-queer persons living in a small town attached to a hospital and university. For years the hospital treated patients with a variety of psychosocial disabilities, offering institutionalization for many who lived in the facility as well as out patient assistance for those living nearby. It was from this population of outpatients that the Bethel intentional community arouse to promote mutual support and dialog. As the name suggests, Bethel was sponsored and founded by a Church group who wanted to affirm non-privatized, non-medical alternative forms of care in order to compliment and contrast the medical practices of the hospital. Modeled on programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Bethel members would meet, share stories, offer assistance and accountability, and consider their relations to society and the wider world. Indeed, outreach and advocacy became a corner stone of the program. Bethel members were eager to show their faces and stories with Nakamura as part of a mutual desire to deepen and spread a more complex understanding and visibility of lives with diverse psychosocial disabilities.

For the film, Nakamura chose to live with the Bethel community and attend meetings. She shared her own personal stories, particularly her experiences of depression. The decision to participate, she explains, came from a desire to witness Bethel from the bottom up (cultural) view rather than from a top down (administrative) perspective. To aid in this commitment, Nakamura did not research psychosocial disorders in any medical archives beyond a basic level of comprehension. She did not want to consciously or unconsciously diagnose any of the community members. Instead, she allowed the individual persons of Bethel to express and define themselves to her through community encounters. Nakamura recounted that at first members of Bethel kept her at arm's distance, habituated to the coming and going of outsider observers. Over time, however, sincere friendships formed as Nakamura made herself vulnerable and dwelled together in the collective life of Bethel.

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Critiques and Benefits

While many academics might be suspicious of non-medical, Christian programs working with disabled communities, Nakamura found numerous positive alternatives that the socio-religious model offers over the privatized medical model. Part of what makes Bethel so beneficial for its members and what allows Bethel to function is that the Japanese government offers people with mental disabilities a living income, housing, and free healthcare. This is unthinkable and hard to duplicate in the United States where social welfare and universal healthcare are hardly comparable, admits Nakamura. Yet other aspects of Bethel are transferable. Rather than drug away the power of those with psychosocial illnesses or incarcerating (or otherwise institutionalizing) them in ways that isolate them and limit their agency (as is prominent in the United States), Bethel stresses social and cultural methods that reaffirm relationships. After persons with psychosocial traits become alienated from friends and family either by symptoms or by medical and legal agencies, Bethel works with the person to help bring them back into community, reestablish social bonds, and creating a sense of family.

Nakamura offered critiques as well. As a "total institution," the Bethel community creates a kind of dependency on its programming. There are few options to take some but not all of the assistance the institution offers. You are either all in or all out. Furthermore, following a kind of "Christianized Buddhism" (of the non-Hindu inflected variety), Bethel promoted a world-view of suffering oriented towards a release into oblivion. Affirming "giving up hope" and an acceptance of a "life of decline," where no matter who bad things are today, they will inevitably get worse, Bethel's more nihilistic philosophy was difficult for Nakamura to embrace positively. Furthermore, the Bethel community remains fairly conservative in its view of gender and sexual politics, limiting the forms of relation and embodiment of its members. Finally, Nakamura explained, the Bethel model is difficult to duplicate due to its ready made population drawn from the hospital's outpatients and inpatients.

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Other Crip/Queer Events at GWU

"Why I am Bioconservative" with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

"Disability Comes of Age at the George Washington University"

"Crip/Queer Studies at the George Washington University"

"Composing Disability Conference 2014"

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Proffessor Karen Nakamura is an American academic, author, filmmaker, photographer and Associate Professor 

of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at Yale University

DeafLibrary.org

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"Why I am Bioconservative" with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

“Who gives dignity? 
Humans or God?"

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

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Pro-Life Disability Politics

On September 17th, 2015, Rosemarie Garland Thomson spoke on "Why I am a Bioconservative" to a packed lecture hall at the George Washington University. The event was coordinated by the GWU English Department as part of its Crip/Queer Studies programing. David Mitchell introduced the speaker, praising her as a foundational figure in Disability Studies, authoring such influential texts as Freakery, Staring: How We Look, and Extraordinary Bodies. In an hour and a half, Thomson spoke on the important but often unspoken alliance between religious conservatism and non-religious disability activists around "Pro-Life" issues, specifically the abortion of fetuses to be born with physical or mental impairments, euthanasia, and the assisted suicide of the disabled.

Historicizing the systematic elimination of disabled bodies, Thomson traced many recent and current practices to the eugenics of the early 20th century, citing proto-holocaust programs in Germany where gas chamber technologies were pioneered through the mass incarceration and killing of peoples with disabilities. While eugenics has since changed names and strategies, the bio-technologies that eliminate or impair socially undesirable lives continue to multiply. Such medical mechanisms target the youngest and oldest groups but cluster around those lives marked as impaired or chronically ill. Critical to the continuation of eugenic ideology are the cultural assumptions and values that encourage society to believe that persons are "better off dead than disabled." 

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Unexpected Allies

By opposing not only the use but the cultural indoctrination of eugenics, disability activists find themselves joining forces with religious conservatives. Thomson contends that while religious and non-religious "bioconservatives" may disagree in first principles, these groups join together in their conclusions. For instance, "dignity" is a key issue within bioconservatives of either ilk. In this context, dignity designates a life worth living and deserving of "moral personhood" (rights and duties) as well as a "quality of life" (well being in medical care, politics, and employment). Religious and non-religious groups may disagree in the source and authority that bestows dignity: humanity or God. Nonetheless,  persons of different belief systems can come together to preserve the dignity of those marked as undesirable: those who are "too expensive" in relation to their social worth.

Despite a history of shared political agendas, the cooperation of religious and disability activism is an uncomfortable and often controversial topic in the University setting. "Using the word 'God' tends to tick off liberal academics," Thomson admits after carefully defining the diversity of those who might be considered bioconservative. In the light of increasingly partisan politics and rhetoric, many liberal scholars overtly or indirectly oppose suggestions that any part of the Pro-Life agenda might be worthy of consideration by non-religious fields - as academia is often imagined. A shift towards less reactivity at words such as "God" or "conservative" as well as a willingness to see reasonable middle grounds or overlaps in Pro-Life and Pro-Choice movements is necessary to critical, thoughtful engagement in the preservation and improvement of disabled lives. Indeed, Thomson admits, the goal of "preserving" rather than "eliminating" lives implicit in disability activism suggests within it a kind of "conservatism" - even as it may be distinguished from religious extremism.

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Rituals of Care

Besides legal and medical initiatives, Thomson stressed the important cultural work of bioconservatism that promote a culture of life. In particular, ritual practices such as the washing of bodies are acts of care common among religious and non-religious communities. Washing in hospitals, elderly care facilities, families by caregivers, as well as the sacramental blessing of children, the sick, and the dead are all examples of rituals that recognize the dignity of the bodies they encounter. Such rituals recognize the dignity of embodied experiences, Thomson argued. Through repetition, rituals directly create the conditions for a quality of life while affirming moral personhood. If washing (including toileting) were more openly a communal practice where the reception of care is a sign of dignity rather than shame, fewer people would be instilled with the belief that they would rather be dead than unable to clean themselves. Fewer people with disabilities, including the elderly, would be associated with wallowing in filth if indeed fewer would be left to wallow. Ritual practices would bond care givers and care receivers, instilling a culture of life in the community.

In her conclusion, Thomson fielded some questions about other fields that share similar values as the disability activists who may have reason to rethink the old opposition to bioconservative politics. One example offered was the case of HIV+ gay men, lesbian, and transgender persons. During the AIDs outbreak of the late 20th century, there developed a similar culture of death where the death of LGBTI communities by the disease were seen as excusable even laudable by those who saw non-normative gender and sexualities as abominations against God or Nature. In this time, images of caregivers washing the sick and dead bodies of AIDs victims became politically charged. Such acts gave dignity of those dying and stated that despite the high cost of care, LGBTI lives were worth preserving. Thomson affirmed that many peoples, especially the subjugated, have reason to reexamine their positions on bioconservativism and work towards creating a culture of life.

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Other Crip/Queer Events at GWU

"An Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability with Karen Nakamura"

"Disability Comes of Age at
the George Washington University"

"Crip/Queer Studies at
the George Washington University"

"Composing Disability Conference 2014"

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Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University, where her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, inclusion and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy. She is the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current book project is Habitable Worlds: Disability, Technology, and Eugenics.

RosemarieGarlandThomson.com

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The Island of Hermaphrodites: On Mapping Intersex & Disability

“First-world feminist discourse locates 
[intersex politics] not only ‘elsewhere’ 
...but also 'elsewhen' in time"

Hermaphrodites with Attitude
Cheryl Chase

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Dis-Orienting the Place of Hermaphrodites

Crip theory asserts that the location of disability is in the environment, not in the body. Disability is how biopolitics limits, manages, and marginalizes the diversity of embodiments. It determines who has access to where - what bodies may move through space and what bodies are relegated to specific out of the way places. To illustrate how this works, I begin with a recent story from my life. I am standing in a private room after being pulled aside by airport security in Washington DC - the USA's political epicenter, a national loca sancta. Two TSA agents are staring blankly at me. They share coded messages between the two of them before explaining to me that the body-scanner on which their usual screenings depend was unable to read me. I learned that these scanners have two settings: male and female. The machine effectively reads you, produces an essentially naked image of your body (much like the images of heremaphrodites and amazons found in medieval exempla and maps). The machine then compares it to standard body maps looking for anomalies. It turns out that I failed to pass either scan on both the male and female setting. I was unreadable to the TSA's biopolitical machine. As a result, the TSA would have to "more intensively" search my body by hand. For a while they just stood there, waiting for me to submit to a further policing of my gender. The TSA stared blankly at me. The machine stared blankly (unknowingly) at me. I was unmappable to them, off the pioneered and civilized world of gender, and here there be monsters.

In “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism,” Cheryl Chase asks, “Why… have most first-world feminists met intersexuals with a blank stare?” [i] To answer this question of tacit uncomprehending exclusion, Chase examines the spatial logic that has literally and metaphorically marginalized and provincialized intersex biopolitics, locating it in foreign places, out of the way of the globalized, mobile, western community. While the compulsory surgical reconstruction of intersex children ebbed in the 1990s, afterwards seeing a decline in intersex visibility and activism, at the same time the publication on such practices still occurring in colonial and post-colonial places such as in Africa were pervasive. “First-world feminist discourse locates [intersex politics] not only ‘elsewhere…’ but also “elsewhen” in time,” notes Chase. As a result of the western public slowly erasing intersex in the shared global space, it is being re-imagined as a provincial problem of another time and another place. In the next few minutes I will chase after Chases’s “hermaphrodites with attitude” supposed to be located in the past, in another place, to argue that modern marginalizing structures of power have roots in the genealogy of pilgrimage as a narrative and social practice. As a genre, pilgrimage features crip and gender non-binary bodies coming from the margins of the geopolitical world towards centers of authority, the “loca sancta,” to pay deference to material and symbolic powers. In return pilgrims were promised healing and betterment, to become more whole, more like people of privilege.[iii] I consider these motions of social erasure alongside alternative modes of pilgrimage as narrated in John Mandeville’s "Travels," where central bodies who find themselves in positions of power (i.e. able-bodied cis-gender men) travel to the margins and on the way become more crip and intersexual, and returning to the center to bend maps of space, power & embodiment.[v] 

The concept of “places” itself as a relatively stable categories of locating persons, has historically worked to confine crip and intersex bodies on the margins by taking them out of the shared “space” of gender conforming persons and placing them in special sites. Eli Clare considers this in Exile and Pride, where he proposes “the Mountain” as the loca sancta par excellence, a metaphorical place that by its centrality, places difference on the margins.[ii] "The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people. How many of us have struggled up the mountain, measured ourselves against it, failed up there, lived its shadow?” asks Clare. A metaphor for our various “loca sancta,” the Mountain functions as an over-determined orientation point, structuring the flow of power from the margins to the center & associating centrality with normate embodiment. For medieval Christian pilgrims, the Mountains of Jerusalem functioned as the center point in the circular map of the Christian Mappa Mundi that positioned all other places, including the island of the hermaphrodites, as monsters on its margins.[iv]  In comparison to centralized movements of the body, crip and intersex lives create crises of category that are combatted by the making of places of exception (freak shows, islands, prisons, medical theaters) where they are contained. “The history of freakdom extends far back into western civilization,” Clare recounts on the practices of showing lives and their places of exclusion as points of interest on the margins of the normate world. Over time the motions of marginalization are copied over and again, and the crip & intersex internalize a place in the world as monsters and freak-shows on the margins of society. “To myself, I was a freak, incapable of loving or being loved, filled with shame about my status as a hermaphrodite and about my sexual dysfunction,” writes Chase on the de-globalization of herself as a self-exile from her body; a provincializing, a freakening.

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Two Pilgrimages: On the Anti-Loca Sancta

Thus  while pilgrim narrators often work as “showmen,” exhibiting social mobility to maintain distance & difference from the limits of place set on the shown, the monstrous crip & intersex bodies, pilgrimages reveal that these boundaries aren't stable enough to maintain this difference, leading to lives existing, interacting and shaping one another in what Michel de Certeau calls the dynamism of shared space. [vii] Moved from a circumscribed “place” in the margins into the shared space, crip and intersex pilgrim narratives bend the map of geopolitics, opening lines of flight & biopower around the world (197). “We seek to create an environment in which many parents of intersex children will have already heard about the intersex movement when their child is born,” writes Chase. “Such informed parents we hope will be better able… to find their way to a peer support group and counseling rather than to a surgical theater” (203).  In the history of pilgrimage in marginalizing disability and intersex, Mandeville’s travels both follows and undermines the structures of movement and place. This dual effect is evident in the text’s two half, representing two pilgrimages. The centralizing structure of Jerusalem’s as loca santca can be seen in the first half of his pilgrimage text, on his journey from England to Jerusalem. Yet numerous scholars have noted, in the second half of his pilgrimage and world mapping, Mandeville swerves. Instead of going back to England, Mandeville starts a new pilgrimage, from the center of Christianity to the margins and back. In the process, his body is transformed, his privileged mobility is infected, and he brings the effects of the margins back to the center. Mandeville starts with a model of place that puts crip and non-gender binary bodies on the margins of his world map yet after visiting the place of hermaphrodites, his sense of his body and map break down, overwhelmed by experiences of interconnected difference.

The island and bodies of hermaphrodites inscribe a challenge to the project of mapping space by resisting easy boundaries of gender or embodiment. Around this cast-off place, “beth peple that beth bothe man and womman, and have membres of bothe." The monstrous here is not simply a metaphor but a material and social body. These are at once hybrid bodies with two natures, man and woman, represented by the repetition of the word "beth," as well as whole beings that exist between definable states. While the hermaphrodite remains an object on the margin to be glimpsed at by not identified with, to share a place in his world but not share his space, by traveling to an island on the margins, the farthest possible distance from Jerusalem (in the center), Mandeville suggests that hermaphrodites exist in and as an anti-loca sancta, a center of their own that possesses the power to draw people away from the center on new winding paths. Unlike the “first world feminists” who look at intersex with a blank gaze, Mandeville’s body is redirect and changed by his pilgrimage to the margins. On his return, Mandeville and his text come to embody of the diversity that is erased and marginalized when he travels to Rome to present himself and his text to the Pope as evidence of the worlds diversity, "marvels I had seen in different countries." Referencing a Mappi Mundi in Rome as authorizing his body and account, Mandeville affirms the role of pilgrim narratives in deferring to central loca sancta as governing the geopolitics of those on the margins. In the process, he affirms his own privilege as a sign of that central power, as a cis, Christian male with the mobility to exercise spatial power. Yet this 2nd pilgrimage from the centers of the Christian world to the margins and back, sustains a tension with a heterodox provincialism that keeps its story open at its ends.

Becoming embodying the margins on his pilgrimage, Mandeville brings its monstrosity, its freakishness, back to the loca sancta. By the end of the book, after several chapters in which dozens of diverse lands and peoples are viewed very quickly almost as though Mandeville is speeding up in his travels, his narration becomes an orgy of difference, trying to jam as much in as possible, almost gasping for air: "There are many countries and marvels I have not seen, therefore I can’t describe them correctly." By his travels, Mandeville loses the ability to speak. In the Cotton manuscript, he writes that he has lost the ability to walk because of "arthritic gout." The pilgrim’s ableist attempt to be everywhere and all things proves impossible. Mandeville concludes his travels leaving room for other pilgrim narratives. "I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe." In an alternative there & then, crips and Hermaphrodites look back at the blank stare of white feminism & western patriarchy waiting to break into the shared space of here & now.

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[i] Cheryl Chase. "Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Activism." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 1998. pg 207.
[ii] Eli Clare. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. 199.
[iii] Sabine MacCormack. "Loca Sancta: The Organization of Sacred Topology in Late Antiquity." The Blessings of Pilgrimage. 1990. pg.1.
[iv] Hereford Mappa Mundi. Hereford Cathedral. c1285.
[v] The Book of John Mandeville. c1357.
[vii] Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. pg. 71.

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Check out the Medieval Disability 

Glossary on Hermaphrodites

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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Disability's Digital Pharmacy: On Accessible Writing

"The leaves of writing act as a pharmakon

to push or attract out of the city
the one who never wanted to get out"

Plato's Pharmacy
Jacques Derrida

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Digital Accessibility

It is the goal of many writers and the challenge of many academic writers to be accessible. Yet it is an open secret that the ivory tower policies of university work and scholarly publications set up many levels of gatekeeping. Thus, even when our prose approaches wide-spread readability, able to be comprehended by those in and outside out specialties, those who are able to access our books and articles are relatively exclusive due to copyrights, high prices, and library subscription limitations. Add on to this the compounded divisions of audiences by language proficiency, the availability of translators, and geographic region and it may be surprising that anyone is able to read our work. Indeed, the echo-chamber of academic writing is a significant factor in what drives many, like myself, into the digital humanities and public scholarship. Through websites, such as www.ThingsTransform.com, I am able to share educational resources, works in progress, and lesson plans on transgender, disability, and medieval studies with a wider audience. While currently such digital platforms rarely count for hiring or tenure considerations, such digital humanists feel that we are extending our work in the academy into the realm of public intellectualism, getting information to those who need it, want it, or can challenge it, beyond the circumscription of the ivory tower.

Furthermore, such online databases and writing platforms allow us to continue an ongoing project of increasing the accessibility of education to those physically or socially disabled. The utopian dream of such digital humanists of disability is that the internet might offer a virtual answer to the long sought but elusive goal of a "universal design." We see universities taking up the flag to encourage us to promote, engage, and share classes, lectures, and conference experiences with those who cannot make it to the physical space. Blackboard, blogs, streaming video, skype, live-tweeted conferences, and Massive Open Online Courses urge on the desire that no matter your mobility, geographic isolation, time limits, or sensory modes that we might all be brought together in the digital classroom. Within this tantalizing technological revolution lays the fantasy that perhaps at last the digital pharmacy might offer a virtual cure to disability's limitations.

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The Pharmakon of DH

At the suggestion of virtual transcendence of physical embodiments, a disability studies advocate, or perhaps any practicing humanist, should start back and pause. For those of us who have read our Derrida know to mistrust any promise of technological cure for difference, seeing every cure as also a poison. For however Disability's digital pharmacy presents itself, as an accessible writing platform or a virtual classroom, the age old dialectic is at work. After all, what is online scholarship except an extension of the same technology that Socrates considered to be a deathly cure for matter and meaning; that is, writing itself. "Knowing he can always leave his thoughts outside or check them with an external agency, with the physical, spatial, superficial marks that one lays flat on a tablet, he who has the techne of writing on it will come to rely on it," writes Derrida. "He will know that he himself can leave without his tupoi going away, that he can forget all about them without them leaving his service. They will represent him even if he forgets them" (437-438). And here we begin to see the double movement of digital writing for disability. The "ghost" of disability serves the argument for the Digital Humanities, even as the presumption of accessibility leads to the forgetting of those to whom access is supposed to serve. 

In other words, the grander the accessible digital classroom becomes, the less we concern ourselves with making the physical classroom accessible. Online interfaces that are supposed to give another way for people to get access to the academic community becomes the only way for some to enter the conversation. When we praise the technology that allows the boy in a wheel-chair who can follow along from home, or the deaf girl to read the transcript, we give room for the suggestion that the historical struggle to bring more people into the physical space of the classroom is not longer necessary. In a sense, we give them a virtual presence at the expense of their physical presence. Digital Access reveals itself to be a Pharmakon, where "the leaves of writing... push or attract out of the city the one who never wanted to get out" (429-430). The dream of the digital pharmacy reveals itself an ableist dream, where physical embodiment and difference is transcended. Disabled bodies are eschewed from public space, forgotten. Only the sign of disability remains.

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Digital Disability

In light of the dream and nightmare, cure and poison, of virtual accessibility, what might we as disability advocates in the digital humanities do to make sure that more persons are not excluded from coming into the academic community while we bring our work out to the online public? We remember the ethical and social lessons of the humanities as we venture into the digital realm at the same time that the teaching of the humanities takes on a more digital form. Even if there are those who want us to surrender "the humanities" part of "digital humanities," we will never accomplish, as C.S. Lewis writes, An Abolition of Man. For the techne of digital writing is not totally other and external to humanity, but merely an enactment of age long operations of power. "Each new power won by man is a power over man as well," writes Lewis. "Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger... [Technology] can be withheld from some men by other men — by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods." The digital portal then is not an escape from the problems and promises of our world but an extension of it; full of old problems we've face in the humanities presenting in new ways.

If we in the humanities believe that something special happens when people come together in a room and share their thoughts, then writing technology, analog or digital, cannot replace the challenging and uncomfortable task of making an accessible community space. What our digital tools can do is remind us of the diversity of ways that we teach and learn, read and communicate, so that we can adapt the classroom environment to better serve those who show up - rather than predetermining who can show up by how we build our environment. As one blind student once told me: there are plenty of problems with technology that is supposed to be accessible. Screen readers have trouble with blackboard and PDF articles scan only as images without text. Yet technology will always have problems. We will always need the human factor because people can adapt; adapt our technologies, adapt our practices, and adapt our many intersecting worlds.

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Shemales: Desiring Transgender through the Porn Industry

"Is he gay!? Or courious!? 

Or just a freak!?"

Topix.com

*Note: if you are a church member or search committee,
please, actually ready the scholarship and don't jump to conclusions based on visuals.
The thesis of the argument is about thinking critically and not judging on first glance.

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Defining Tranny-Chasers

“We’re the taboo, and where does taboo usually happen?" asks Wendy Williams, a trans performer. "Behind closed doors.” This is the reason, says Williams, that most of the consumption of Shemale porn and sex toys happens online. The viewers want that disconnect. They want the fantasy, not the reality. Ironically, Williams goes on, this separation is asserted by gay men as well as straight men. “Even if you go into the [gay] clubs, transsexuals and drag queens are primarily there for entertainment... It’s not really inclusive. We’re kind of in limbo, we’re in between both worlds.” In the end, gay and straight men work together to secure the patriarchy from trans bodies that they want to enjoy and discard. As such, they want Shemales to embody "the Best of Both Worlds," which is another way of the audience saying, they don't want trans women in either world. They want them to be an exception to the rules they set so they can do what they want without answering either to their homophobia or sexism - in their place, transphobia consumes them both. While in part 1 of "Shemales" I examined the way the Porn Industry Defines Transgender, in part 2, I will examine how the Porn Industry Defines Attraction to Transgender. As in the prior case, where the term Shemale functions as an understanding of transgender defined largely by the fantasies of straight cisgender men, here the attraction to trans persons is not structured through the loving (bisexual, pansexual, queer, gay, lesbian, straight) partners in the trans community but by those who define themselves as ardently outside the community and constitute their attraction as a form of fetishizing based in subjugation and shame.

Under names such as "Tranny Chasers," the consumers of Shemale Porn define themselves as separate from the partners of trans persons in ways that pathologize their own attraction yet displace this corruptions of desire by establishing trans persons as hyper-sexual and predatory in their entrapment of innocent straight cisgender men. This self-definition often occurs online. An illustrative example comes from the Encyclopedia Dramatica, which at once pokes fun at the online arguments around Shemales at the same time as it reports and imitates the genuine backlash the community receives. The Encyclopedia explains the focus on shaming or degrading trans women more than trans men as stemming from patriarchal sexism. According to such a definition, "Shemales" are "the inferior type of transsexual. Unlike their FTM counterparts who seek self improvement through means of masculinity, MTFs degrade themselves and all mankind by lowering themselves to the disgraceful level of a woman." This line of argument is unfortunately neither fictive nor new. Christian theology running back to Augustine's City of God testify that "hermaphrodites" or other person existing in a gender non-binary state should be assigned masculine because it is closer to human perfection. This follows an Aristotelian understanding of human generation wherein men were the Platonic ideal of humanity and females were males who were underdeveloped in the womb. As such, Shemales or trans women are doubly shameful. "It is popular opinion," continues the Encyclopedia, "that God made these people for the lulz of all mankind, as there is no bigger joke than wasting half your life as an emo faggot, only to some day, after a shitload of agonizing surgery, look vaguely girlish and have a fake pussy." Invoking divine as well as natural authority, the patriarchy positions trans women as existing outside even the subjugated position of women, put in a state of exception outside of human dignity and respect. In the end, the Encyclopedia concludes, "MTFs that are attracted to men are most likely just gays in total denial, and they are willing to go through all that surgery and change as their warped way to justify the fact that they crave hot cock." Thus both by nature and by an exemption from nature, Shemales both deserve and want subjugation by men. This puts the patriarchy in the position not of fulfilling their own taboo desires by executing the desires of Shemales, nature, and God. 

A key problem for the treatment of trans persons and the defaulting on the taboo treatment that accompanies Shemale pornography is a lack of terminology and critical thought on the attraction to trans persons. Broad surveys turn up a variety of affirmative language, such as pansexual, transsenual, transamorous, and trans* erotic. Then there are the technical terminology proposed by the sciences, such as gynemimetophilia and andromimetophilia. Here the language reflects an attempt to categorize trans persons as woman-like or man-like and the attraction to them to be the desire for artifice. For this reason, it has not caught on among either those in the trans community, their fans, or their partners. Other terms stress a commercial and media appreciation, such as transfan, admirer, and tammyfan. Others reflect the often aggressive mode of relations that many men assert when encountering trans persons, such as trans catcher, tranny chaser, and tranny hawk. The aggressive way that tranny chasers (those attracted to the fetish of trans bodies) has been well recounted in the trans and cross-dressing community. Helen Boyd attests to the social and political problems that tranny chasers cause for the trans community. "Tranny chasers are the big bugaboo in the crossdressing community, because their very existence suggests that crossdressers are not all as straight as they claim to be," attests Boyd. This relationship, however, can breed cooperation as the trans community is often in need of the social and financial capital the straight men offer. "Chasers are willing to give crossdressed men the kind of attention they desire, and that attention (a drink, a compliment) validates the crossdresser's experience, and completes the fantasy of feeling like a woman." These gifts come at a price. These real life bribes reflect the cultural work of Shemale Porn: trans persons are given a place in the patriarchy but only if they are willing to be defined by the fantasies, shame, and subjugating power of straight cisgender men.

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(Un)Desiring Transgender

To understand how "Tranny Chasers" fetishize and pathologize their own behavior and excuse it by pinning the blame on predatory hyper-sexual trans persons, it is helpful to close read the narratives that such Chasers and Reformed-Chasers tell themselves. Accounts of straight cisgender men living out their fantasy and then pathologizing trans women as well as their own attraction to them are common on the internet. A representative example of such a narrative comes from Reddit.com, where one user, "a 21 year old straight male," recounts having Been free from shemale porn for two years. Using the language of medicine, the goal of such narratives is openly to mark the attraction to Shemales (Trans women) as an illness that can be cured. "I've decided to do a post aimed at those who's recovering from watching / abusing transsexual /shemale / ladyboy porn," writes the author, promising to walk others through the ways he "rewired" his brain so that he no longer desired trans women. "[A] recovery towards your real sexuality is possible" he claims, appropriating the Trevor Project anti-LGBT bullying slogan, "it it gets better. Oh boy, it does." In fact, he comes close to affirming trans-orientation as a form of sexual identity. "I also want you to learn to accept yourself no matter what your true feelings are," he says. But he adds that these feelings should be abandoned as hopeless and kept in the past. "[F]eel no shame in the past. You're here for a reason, and that is because you've learned from the it" he concludes. "There's no shame in yesterday. There's only the hope of tomorrow." The structure of the reform story testifies to a narrative that imagines the attraction to transgender as an unnatural disease that is not inherent in straight men but imposed on them by Shemales must be overcome by shamefully eschewing the trans community after they have been thoroughly used and exploited. 

True to the cure-narrative form, this story begins by admitting (as if to a doctor or rehab discussion group) that the man not only desired trans women, but the porn revealed that he desired to become a trans woman. "Somewhere along the line I began to dabble in porn featuring transsexual women," he writes. "I won't go into too much detail, but I didn't really find it interesting to imagine myself being the one who does the penetrating - I imagined myself being the 'girl." He characterizes the shift to an open desire for and identification with trans women a dangerous "form of escalation." Over time, he began to admit to himself what was going on inside himself around 2010. Yet the author does not pin the trans-orientation as stemming from natural or social causes, but because of an illness and overuse of mind affecting drugs. "I doubted my sexuality very heavily towards the end of 2010, and as luck would have it , due to consuming various illegal substances I fell into a drug psychosis," he writes. As a result of his psychosis, he writes,"I believed myself to be gay, and I lost any form of sexual drive towards women." Eventually, he says, the psychosis gave him a new disorder, "transsexual feelings." The author would eventually transition. He lived "my fantasy of being a 'woman'" for three months (he stresses that he did this "in public") before being assigned to a "psychiatric hospital." As a result of the counseling, he believes he was cured of the attraction to men and blamed Shemale porn and trans women for screwing up his life.

At this point, the author began his campaign to undesire transgender and to help others reject the trans-orientations connected with Shemale porn as well. "Upon finding NoFap," writes the author, "I said something to myself: "Never again." This referred to all and any pornography concerning trangenderism." In line with the mission of such websites, the author promises that it is possible to "rewire" the brain to undo the effects of transgender. This is a process, he warns, that may take time but will be effective if readers embrace the unnaturalness of trans-orientation. "You have to understand that arousal at transgender pornography is a form of fetischism - an acquired taste that is originally not part of nature" he writes. Transgender and the attraction to trans bodies he says is "something that was not originally part of human evolution" because certain transition technologies developed to their current state only recently in the 20th century. As a result, "[i]t is then impossible to assume that mankind as a whole has adopted to these inventions and that arousal from transsexuals is a sexuality you are born with." Based on this belief that trans bodies are only possible with modern technology, it is in essence artificial, the author argues that attraction or identification with transgender is unnatural. This rhetorically positions trans bodies are outside of natural affections and justifies why innocent straight men would be interested in them: "it makes sense that the curious mind would check it out and eventually escalate to masturbating to it." This, he continues, does not mean that he wants to have sex with trans people in real life. He admits that there are those who date trans people and express genuine affection but that does not describe most of the audience of Shemale porn, "It is rare in the grand scheme of things." In fact, he claims, 90% of people who watch Shemale porn claims they would not have relations with real trans people.

The author works hard to re-narrate his life to excuse his identification as a trans woman and his personal (not merely virtual) attraction to trans women. He admits that he had two "close-up encounters with transsexuals" but claims that both were "purely accidental," he was "drunk" and was effectively "trapped" by the overly sexual trans women who (like characters in a porn) were brutishly desiring of his straight cis-gender attention. Indeed, his narratives work hard to dehumanize trans women in order to divest the stories of any sense of real attraction. The first trans woman he met in a club. He calls her "fairly unattractive,"  but adds that he "drunk and we somehow maked out," as though it was her sexuality and not his that instigated the encounter. How could he desire such a woman. "Her lips felt very strange; very dull," he claims. "The kiss was very... lacking." Not only does she lack true womanhood or manhood, his body somehow seemed to affirm his belief that trans women are unnatural. He admits that "I did get some blood pumping in my member, but I didn't even get a semi-boner... It was nothing like the kisses I've had with a biological woman. It just felt wrong." The second story is nearly identical. It also happened in "a club" suggesting that the author in fact frequented locations that featured trans women and that he knowingly sought them out. Nonetheless, he claims it was not him who instigated this encounter either. "A "girl" came on to me. We talked. I got a reaction down there, as one would while being touched by somebody who looks like a female" he defends. As if sensing a momentary break in his revisionist history, he adds that he "later found out what she was" and "Lost any attraction that I had for her in that instant." Now that he has rejected his past, he claims that he has returned to a natural disgust of trans people. "While it makes me feel uncomfortable, I feel neither lust nor need for me to seek out pornography or get in touch with a transperson in real life," he claims, completing his cure narrative as a reformed tranny chaser. Having used and abused the trans community, the straight male wipes his hands clean and leaves trans women to wallow in the pathological and marginalized place imagined for transgender in the patriarchy.

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Disturbing Heteronormativity

In part 1, we found that Shemales are defined by the porn industry as an impossible contradiction of hyper-femininity and an aggressive penetrating phallus. Likewise, tranny-chaser society defines its attraction to transgender as a pathological interruption, that is nonetheless sustained within heteronormative culture. Rather than embracing pansexuality or queerness, heterosexuality remains seemingly secure and separate as part of the patriarchy by making Shemale Porn a place of exception where the rules and responsibilities of sexual relations do not apply. In other words, by marketing Shemales as "the Best of Both Worlds," the Porn Industry promises the straight world that it can have its cake and eat it too. This is an operation that is nonetheless run with the tension of anxiety. For many, the very possibility that gender is not so simple offers the terrifying possibility that their straightness may not mean what be what they imagined. For women such as WorriedCatherine, "Your Brain Rebalanced" offers an outlet for heteronormative couples to play out their anxieties about transgender. In a November 2013 post, Catherine posts that "it turns out that [her husband] has been spending a lot of time (an hour or two or three) many evenings a night watching transsexual porn." This behavior causes a crisis for women such as Catherine because they fear that their control over sexuality is not complete. "[H]e possibly has desires I can never even fulfil," Catherine laments. Many like Catherine point to Shemale Porn and other trans media as infecting heteronormativity, as  Netmums  and  Topix.com  threads evidence.  These posts worry whether this challenges her boyfriend's sexuality. "Now does make him wanna know what's its like to be with another man or shemale," wonders one. "Is he gay!? Or courious!? Or just a freak!?"

The power of the Shemale's exceptionality is epitomized by online traffic but is sustained even in face to face relations by eschewing these encounters to taboo spaces in clubs and bars where drug-use is common. For Catherine's husband, as with others, the virtual trans-orientation directed and defined his lived experiences. "He was a member of BDSM and transvestite and transsexual meeting communities," she writes, "and every few months he would even pay money... to visit mistresses or, particularly in the last year or so, pre-op transsexuals and/or transvestites for anal sex." As in the case of other narratives, excuses other than sexual orientations and the attractiveness of trans bodies are invoked. "He'd combine this with drug use," she claims. "[S]o he'd arrange it all online, go and get high and then act it out." Here, as in the previous self-narrative, the use of drugs is used to explain how a supposedly straight and healthy person could possibly be attracted to a trans person. "[H]e says that he's not attracted to shemales, that he couldn't even get an erection most of the time," claims Catherine. [I]t was more a compulsive and addictive activity, a search for a high like he would get with drugs. That the anticipation involved was akin to drug use and he explains the transsexual stuff by saying he just got dragged into more and more extreme things." Catherine's story affirms a growingly popular narrative of trans-orientation being an unnatural psychosis formed by drug use. This associates one kind of artificial, taboo state with transgender. Nonetheless, the damage is done, she claims. "That this is part of his sexuality now" she writes, "and it'll always be there." In the patriarchal structuring of space, the "there" of the transgender is always already "here" in the midst of things. While eschewed to the margins, the danger of transgender is that its influences run across the sexual divisions of place like a drug in the bloodstream.

The anxiety about Shemales who are everywhere and nowhere suggests that problem that is trying to be located is in the fantasies that work to organized transgender rather in trans bodies themselves. As a result, the search for trans bodies to blame runs amuck and sees transgender everywhere. In a warped self-reflexive motion, narratives turn trans-attraction into evidence of male homosexuality or trans-identification. "I've had a very similar thing happen in the past to me," writes one response to the stories. "After lots of investigating and questions I found out my boyfriend was gay. He now lives with a cross dresser. Chances are so is your man." Another responder to the Netnum post says that her husband also shared trans identification. A few weeks into the marriage, he confessed to her, "he liked to dress in womens clothes but that he absolutely didnt want to become a woman!" This woman also worried that the presence of Shemale Porn suggested that he may be gay. Each of these responses at once repeat the conclusions of the others and extend them with their own stories. The majority of responses end up taking some form of this reasoning: given the belief that trans women, including shemales, cross-dressers, and transvestites, are men and not women, then their partners must be gay. Their responses are damning of the relationship if not the partner. Numerous suggest that if the boyfriend can be cured of his attraction to trans women, their heterosexuality may stay in tact. "[T]his guy is sick as all gays," writes one response, "get him help'put a block on pc 'they make meds for ppl like this they need to take them." As the pathological language evidences, while the tranny chase that turns back on the tranny chasers may seem like self-reflection, bringing a suspension of tension, instead it is rather a folding back in on itself. The system becomes so paranoid of transgender that it turns its own fetishistic desire for trans bodies into the proof positive that transgender is shameful.

Despite the heated violence repeated throughout the culture of Tranny Chasers, at times these dialogs turn into sincere self-reflection as alternative models of gender and sexuality begin to break through the Shemale Hermeneutic with life-giving as well as dangerous possibilities. Such narratives suggest that an attraction to trans women should not be conflated with a lack of attraction to cis women, often citing personal experiences. "I have always been curious about transsexuals even to an erotic degree so long as they were passable and at least feminine," he writes, suggesting that his orientation towards the feminine was elastic enough to include a wide variety of women. "95% of men have looked at [trans porn] once," claims another response. "Doesn't mean he's gay." While these narrative do not embrace trans-attraction as legitimate, they nonetheless do not think the assumption of homosexuality needs to stem from an interest in trans porn. In this negative space, the lack of definition opens up onto a host of alternatives, some affirmative and others offering yet another way to objectify trans bodies establish a distance between the Shemale and her audience. "[P]erhaps he is just into the 'weird' factor rather than actually getting off on it," writes on post. "I mean people watch slasher/horrors without actually wanting to kill people." Such comparisons, having sex with a trans woman and murdering people reveal the shadowy background to which the patriarchy eschews all bodies and desires it pathologizes. It is the space where pathologized love looks a lot like murderous hate. It is the fantasies (evident in such games as Grand Theft Auto) where you can fuck someone, assault them, and leave without consequences. As the real life abuse and death of trans women attest, these fantasies practiced in games and pornography daily become real violences.

What then are the alternatives? As of yet, it seems as though Shemale Porn and Tranny Chaser culture cannot yet imagine in itself an arrangement where trans lives matter. From outside, people comment and educate. Rarely, the occasional voice chimes into the forums, such as one commenter who suggests that the surprised partner of the trans-oriented man openly and honestly explore these desires in the bedroom. "Buy a strap-on and surprise him," she writes. If such alternatives were ventured, straight cisgender men and heterosexual couples might begin to admit that the erotic pathology that they ascribed to trans bodies has more to do with their own violent desires rather than locatable in the trans body itself. Through these open dialogues and exploration of possibilities, hetero culture may begin to reform their own violence systems of desire and shame. This self-conscious self-attention will liberate the trans community from the shackles of having to embody the fantasies and fears of patriarchal heterosexual culture. As a result, more trans people will live safe from the violence of the Shemale Porn industry and Tranny Chasers. And in time, perhaps, there can be a reconciliation were former tranny chasers can engage trans bodies they desire with care and dignity. In this hoped for alternative, new relations can be formed and olds ones reformed. Shemales may yet be reclaimed as an affirmative gender construct and Tranny Chasing can turn into honest, safe, and respectful pansexual attraction.

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Return to Part 1:

"Shemales: Defining Transgender Through the Porn Industry"

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