why genders aren’t like nations, part ten million
Tonight I’ve been reading an essay by David Eng on transnational adoption and queer diasporas. At the beginning of the year, I’d thought I might research transnational/queer adoptions as a way into talking about the relationships between sexuality, capitalism, globality — reading Eng makes me glad I dropped it, because this piece is so much better than anything I could have come up with. A short (and confronting, for would-be parents) excerpt:
The desire for parenthood as economic entitlement and legal right (transnational adoption requiring immigration visas, along with the termination and transfer of parental rights for naturalization and citizenship) not only by heterosexuals but also, and increasingly, by homosexuals seems to stem in large part from an unexamined belief in the traditional ideals of the nuclear family as the primary contemporary measure of social respectability and value. This enjoyment of rights is, of course, ghosted by those queers and diasporic subjects—unacknowledged lovers, illegal immigrants, indentured laborers, infants left behind—consigned to outcast status and confined to the edges of globalization; they have attenuated, and often no, legal claims to “family,” “home,” or “nation.”
Eng talks about how transnational, particularly Asian, adoptions perform a ‘consumptive labour’ (a form of labor that organises/produces social community as a ’supplement’ [or a different form of] capital) by triangulating and detouring the situation in the US where white parents might feel uncomfortable adopting an African-American child. Thus, white parents can feel good about helping the needy someplace else, rather than addressing the failure of the domestic nation to look after its own disenfranchised children, who are overwhelmingly disenfranchised on the basis of ‘race’.
A tangent: Lately I’ve been fumbling at the edges of a critique of a really common discursive move in trans memoirs and some trans theory to speak of immigration as the ‘proper’ metaphor for transitioning from one gender to another. The metaphor takes various forms. At some moments, transpeople are said to be ‘like refugees’, in the sense that citizenship is tenuous and we often don’t have the right papers. Deirdre McCloskey talks about transness as the sense that one has been born ‘French’ in the American mid-West: transitioning, then, is like going ‘home’ to France (or having surgery to become properly mid-Western!?). Meanwhile, Jay Prosser talks about immigration as the “appropriate analogical frame” for transsexuality: “a move to a new life in a new land, allowing the making of home.”
Instead of focusing on how that relates to transsexuality, I’ve been wondering at the universalisation of a particular discourse of migration happening there. David Eng illustrates perfectly what’s wrong with the picture by speaking of experiences of immigration and assimilation as based in what he calls ‘racial melancholia’. If melancholia (via Freud) is a state in which mourning for a lost object/place/ideal is suspended, indefinitely, precisely because the lost object cannot be avowed or spoken of, racial melancholia denotes the experience of migration where not only is the object or place lost, but status as a ‘foreigner’, and the need to assimilate, reconstruct oneself as ‘American’ or ‘Australian’ prevents one from avowing the loss and thus resolving the melancholia.
I don’t want to follow Eng into theorising racial melancholia as a universal migrational experience, and anyone who wants to argue on this point should do so. But it seems clear that this articulation of immigration would fail if it were applied wholesale as a metaphor to explain gender transition. It doesn’t work as a narrative to explain transsexuality: and yet it’s a powerful way to talk about migration.
So, to invert the focus: What work does the representation of ‘happy’ immigration as gender transition accomplish? Whose interests does it serve? And if a happy migratory experience would be one where the move into one’s new gender/nation proceeded without complication, would this not be a kind of perfect assimilation? In a complicated way, the equation of gender and nation is wholly nationalist: its mode of thinking migration or crossing is assimilationist. It refuses to avow the possibility of melancholia. And in that sense, it’s overwhelmingly the reflection of whiteness, or global imperialism, about itself.
(Tomorrow I will think about how I got here. Right now, the lesson seems to be: don’t try to equate gender with nation.)
Enjoying your thinking in the new home Az! If I read you correctly, it seems that the issue is that people’s idea of belonging is interpellated by cultural nationalism, and so diasporic culture is always taken into the nation-state frame. Of course, it is possible to talk about attachment/belonging/inhabitation without using the nation-state, and those senses of movement and there are analogies that seem useful to complicated sense of “home” in trans discourse. The nation fixes the border into a bureaucratic and absolute line - are you saying then that the problem is trans analogies incorporating immigration fall into the trap, unwittingly reifying the gender border? So then does a theory of culture of cultural nationalism become necessary for making the journey analogy work?
Comment by danny — October 9, 2005 @ 11:58 pm
Hey Danny — thanks for the comments, it seems that you are putting it far more clearly than I was able to. I’m at the library, more later!
Comment by az — October 10, 2005 @ 7:11 am
Awesome post Az!
For me I question why changing genders gets equated with “movement” or “moving” at all.
I find myself more comfortable with the “onion.” As in, I simply peel away layers to reveal yet more….
I understand that we believe movement is occuring. We separate men and women through bureaucracies, reify them, and then claim they cannot be crossed.
So any analogy that reinforces this notion simply supports our fictional creation.
What if, instead of moving, we told everyone we simply decided to remain still and let everything wash over us?
I’ve manipulated documents, papers, even my body and yet, I am still let with a feeling that I have become more me….
Ultimately, any attempt to explain transsexuality using common analogies won’t work. We must find new ones or use ones that force us to think (ala Haraway’s Cyborg….)
Comment by Jay Sennett — October 10, 2005 @ 5:58 pm
hi Az,
Great stuff, all of which I haven’t thought enough about. I just want to comment on the quote you pulled out, about unexamined beliefs in traditional ideals. I’m still reconciling myself to admitting that I do want kids, just like it took a while to admit that I did want to get married. Having examined those beliefs, they were still intact. Transfigured in my and my partners’ heads, but it’s not clear that they are for other people’s perceptions of us. That’s neither here nor there, though. What I really wanted to say is that I don’t think it’s just a matter of beliefs. It’s also a … ‘more material’ issue (can’t think of a phrase w/out vulgar marxist baggage, sorry) of how people get access to certain things. Cutbacks in welfare and downward wage mobility in younger generations all act on familial patterns. Everyone I know who is 30 or under in the US and who went to university has had to navigate massive corresponding familial power struggles over proving themselves financially independent to the state or getting their parents to help them financially to pay for tuition, student loans, and (now that there’s no jobs) to help them pay rent and weather emergencies. All this stuff also enters into choices about how to cohabitate and so on, and money becomes a way for parents to encourage and discourage different lifestyle choices. Ramble ramble.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 11, 2005 @ 5:14 am
Jay, I totally agree. I don’t particularly experience my various gender identity experiences as moving, either. Or maybe moving, but moving in a very different way to crossing boundaries or travelling transnationally.
I feel I should add something here about my own ‘travel’ experiences, or non-travel experiences. One of the ironies of the last 3-4 years is that my own transition stuff, and associated inabilities to work/function for a while, frustrated a series of overseas travel plans. Four years ago, I was convinced that my gender transition could only happen properly if I went somewhere else: there didn’t seem to be a community here that could support what I needed to do; and I thought that if I lived someplace like NYC or SF for a year or so, I would find the radical trans communities I’d been dreaming about. But I could never save up enough money for a plane ticket. As it happens, the networks I needed have grown up around me over that time — or maybe they were here all along, emergent and invisible. I’m glad I stayed. So ‘change’ is not just movement, but a gradual shift (or maybe a sudden shift) in place at times?
And Nate, you’re absolutely right. I (think sometimes that I) want kids too, and am watching many of my friends begin a process of settling down, having children, buying houses. Many of them are queer, and are struggling with those very things: how to convince their families that the kids won’t be ‘weird’ because they’ll have two mums; how to accept financial support with the additional moralistic lectures, etc. I posted that quote not to point the finger at prospective parents but to think through the ways in which even to think consciously about ’starting a family’ is a contextual, rather than universal, experience, and it involves all sorts of complications if you’re not hetero, if you don’t have citizenship, if you have no home, etc. Or if, like me and A., you’re stuck between adoption and one of us carrying a baby for which we would have to find a sperm donor, go through the requisite weird adoption and role-identification processes. (Would I be a baby’s father? Even if I carried it? Could I do that? If I didn’t, how would adoption work when my bureaucratic gender ID is so complex? Let’s just forget it until we both have stable incomes, something that will never, ever happen!)
Comment by Administrator — October 11, 2005 @ 6:03 am
“So ‘change’ is not just movement, but a gradual shift (or maybe a sudden shift) in place at times?”
100% agreement with you.
I thought more about your post last night. And I keep coming back to an overwhelming feeling of rigidity with this whole “transitioning is migration” stuff.
Also, McCloskey and Prosser address mainly non-trans audiences in ways that make everyone’s gender okay.
What interests me are the stories we share with each other, one trans person to another. There is where we might find new metaphors and analogies.
Jay
Comment by Jay Sennett — October 11, 2005 @ 3:47 pm
hi Az,
Sorry if I seemed to say you were making accusations by posting that quote. Not my intent. I think this touches on what you’re other post about the journal article (congrats, by the way!) talked about too, about big theories and small complex contexts. I’ve had a really hard time recognizing that disjunction, as well as admitting that my beliefs don’t map neatly onto my big Ideas and that the tension was a real one. As a side note, I read something once about reproductive freedom being a very radical demand but one that has to be about more than access to abortions, as demand that those of us who want to have kids but can’t for various reasons get what we need to make that happen. I thought that was pretty cool, extending liberal ideas until they break and become sharp.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 12, 2005 @ 1:00 pm
Hi, I just found this! I was going to comment on your post above and say that our broad intellectual foci are incredibly similar [immigration, trans-ness]. But I’m posting on this entry instead :) Eng, although obviously a detailed thinker, often makes me uncomfortable, and the casual conglomeration of “queers and diasporic subjects - unacknowledged lovers, illegal immigrants, indentured laborers, infants left behind” is a good example of the moments in his writing that make me start scribbling in the margins. There are *so*many* structurcal premises of sameness in that grouping, swiftly removing a whole lot of specificity to the experience to a bunch of folks. And yes, the conflation of nation with gender is entirely a problem. It speaks to why it’s important not to over-parallel various oppression theories. In a big way. ! I enjoyed your ramblings here :)
Comment by funnylookinknight — October 16, 2005 @ 7:34 am
Nate — I like that “until the break and become sharp” phrase a lot.
And FLK, yeah, I get you about the weird grouping-together of that list. I felt slightly uncomfrtable about his claim that all migration involves melancholia. Unacknowledged lovers and illegal immigrants! Oh, what things in common they have. I’m wondering, also, if it’s a US thing, but Eng’s phrase ‘illegal immigrants’ seems odd to me. Here people talk (dumbly) about “refugees”, which introduces a dividing line between those are are actually found to be refugees and those who aren’t, or (better) about undocumented migrants or people without papers — is ‘illegal immigrants’ an unproblematic usage where you Americans hang out?
Comment by Administrator — October 16, 2005 @ 7:05 pm
Oh jeez, no, “illegal immigrants” is the most value-laden term ever, and certainly a pejorative sense! It is found most commonly in conservative scare- rhetoric in support of [already mostly] closed borders.
Also, I’m not an American! Pakistani and British dual citizen! Hence my fascination with ‘hybrid’ [lol] identities and immigration :)
Comment by funnylookinknight — October 16, 2005 @ 7:21 pm
hiya Az,
Thanks for the kudos on the phrase. I’ll have to copyright it doublequick. :)
“Illegal immigrants” is a phrase that still gets used a lot at least in the midwestern US, though in politically correct circles (not meant perjoratively) and I think in policy/government circles the growing phrase of choice is “undocumented”. I can’t really remember the term refugee being used, except in connection very big public stuff, waves of ‘boat people’ or whatever. The last time I was in the UK “asylum seeker” was used a lot, I don’t think the term really exists in the US.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 16, 2005 @ 10:57 pm
Hey FLK — I was just thinking before I looked here, “Geez, why did I write, ‘You Americans’ when FLK is not one?” My only excuse it that it was about 5am.
Comment by Administrator — October 17, 2005 @ 5:02 am
Conformity and Transsexualism
My pal Az at going somewhere has a great post about the failure of nationalistic metaphors to describe transsexual experiences.The value of his efforts recently came home to me. A non-trans friend and I discussed acceptable metap…
Trackback by Jay Sennett — October 19, 2005 @ 3:01 pm