trans historiography: critiquing the progress narrative, part i
Back in full-blown thesis mode. In an effort at treating this blog like the laboratory it was once intended as, I’m going to explore some ideas here. Feedback and questions are welcome, as always.
At the meeting to confirm my candidature a year ago, one of my supervisors suggested I dig deeper into historiography in answering the question of how (I think) discourses of travel are central to the emergence of practices of transsexuality. At that stage — at the initial stage of rejecting transhistorical narratives that place transsexuals in every era and locale — it seemed fairly obvious that transsexuality was a specifically ‘modern’ thing. The particular technologies that enabled hormonal and surgical transition were only just developing in the early 20th century; they didn’t become legitimate medical practices until the 1960’s. And it was only at the beginning of the 1920’s that European sexologists split off same-sex object choice from cross-gender identification, arguing that just as there could be homosexuals who did not present as inverts, there could also be ‘transvestic’ persons who were not to be categorised in the same class as homosexuals. Hirschfeld locates what he refers to once as Transsexualismus on a continuum with homosexuality, but argues it’s a fundamentally different order of identification/desire to homosexuality. This is part of what enables ‘transsexuality’ to emerge as its own sexological category, with its own set of diagnostic procedures and (at that time, extremely speculative) treatments.
At least, that’s the standard explanation. But I’ve been reading my Chakrabarty, and I want to argue against a narrative that locates the causality of that emergence in scientific, medical and sexological development. Ie, I’m trying to reject historicism. This could be considered an odd move when there isn’t even really a trans history movement (let alone discipline) in which historicism is hegemonic. But almost all the narratives framing transsexual history perform that historicism in some variation — even Susan Stryker, who argues that ‘the transsexual’ is a sign of postmodernity: the ultimate performance of self-construction. (Which, as Felski argues, performs its own progress narrative.) On the other hand, Joanne Meyerowitz performs a kind of historicism from below, focusing on mass media and the enormous number of people who wrote to advice columnists and sexology magazines requesting information about how to change one’s sex because they’d heard of Lili Elbe or someone similar. Both readings — in fact, almost all historical accounts of the emergence of transsexuality — rely on readings of Christine Jorgenson, the New Yorker who went to Copenhagen for a sex change and reinvented herself as a public figure on her return in 1953. Stryker claims Jorgeonson as the ultimate postergirl of postmodernity. Meyerowitz, more carefully, argues that part of Jorgenson’s appeal was how her story resonated with the post-war American dream of liberal individualism: a tale of “individual striving, success and upward mobility.” Plus, of course, better living through science.
It’s that resonation with a dream of upward mobility, success and individual self-transformation that I think is quite central to understanding the prehistory of transsexuality. In Meyerowitz’s reading, it’s Jorgenson whose story folds together the American Dream ideology with discourses about the new potentiality to transition gender. It’s a localised historical moment — individualised, even. But it seems to me that the emergence of transsexuality itself as an identity is also localised, specific to the United States, and reliant on discourses of potentiality, self-transformation, upward mobility and striving for success.
Chakrabarty argues that the chronological signification of ‘modernity’ performs a spatial separation between Europe, where modernity (and democracy, and development) happened first, and other locations which were told they were not ready to be modern. The very meaning of modernity relies on spaces outside it, that are not yet modern. Thus it performs a historicism: there’s a progress narrative attached to any thinking of modernity, even concepts of uneven development. If transsexuality performs a similar kind of historicism, it seems to me that the progress narrative is doubled internally and externally. On one hand, transsexuality as a narrative promises individual ‘progress’, movement, riffing on the potential for an individual to consume ’self-transformation’ as a commodity in late capitalism. On the other hand, transsexuality is presented as the logical step forward from the ‘passing’ stories of the 18th and 19th centuries. Doubtless, more people are taking advantage of surgical technologies to live in different genders now than they were even 50 years ago. But the progress narrative depends on the stability of a binary gendered world: the most dominant markers of trans success were, and still are, ‘perfect’ passing, successful performance of traditional gender cues.
Next time: What does this have to do with travel?
Az, you rock.
Your summary helps me think about a number of things, but what comes to mind by way of comment is: does Spivak’s recovery of anthropological method (”open-plan fieldwork”) offer the potential for a comparative reading between the transexuality of US/Settler/Euro modernity and other sex/gender systems? By that I mean not to perform the historicist thing of using plot summaries of “other” sex/gender systems as the basis for articulating the legitimacy of LGBT in the “West”, but instead reading the
specific transsexuality of the West in terms of another system. If this analogy held, then learning other sex/gender systems in terms that make sense to themselves (even to a limited extent) instead of to a Euro-US perspective might be some of the most useful work that can produce equivalents to Chakrabarty’s work in this space. Of course, such a learning will also be constituted by constant failure and becoming, as working across cultural difference is. In here, perhaps, an ethic of travel that is different than how travel usually thought?
Comment by danny — February 1, 2007 @ 2:56 pm
Ooh, that essay you link to is gorgeous ::bookmarks to read when I’m not so dopey::
I know there’s quite a lot of work on African modernities which does similar things to (what it looks like) Chakrabarty is doing, but I can’t dig out the references from my brane/incredibly messy study atm. If I come across them & they seem relevant, I’ll bung them over.
I have to organize events to do with classics over the next few years, and I was thinking of doing something about ancient trans and intersex - the priests of Attis who castrated themselves, the story of Iphis and Wossname (girl raised as boy, miraculously changed into a boy on his wedding day, story is in Ovid), and of course Tieresias - and my Classics department is passionately anti-historicist, and I wonder whether between them the British Classical Reception Studies Network and the Australian CRSN could pay your fare over to a conference in a few years’ time? Even if not, can I pick your brains about this once I start thinking about it seriously?
Comment by Ika — February 1, 2007 @ 3:09 pm
i have been getting my foucault freak on for the last couple of months writing up the diss and this is an interesting problem of how to avoid writing a determined history of something that appears to not have much of an actual official history in the first place. some basic points that you have probably already thought of:
1) where are the contingencies? the multi-serial histories of what happened. this is a general history point
2) is there a set minor knowledges? which is a slightly different way of making Danny’s point i think regarding “learning other sex/gender systems in terms that make sense to themselves (even to a limited extent)” but also not in terms of complete cultural system, but in terms of status, too. like knowledges of the body, e.g. the way that ‘you’ know ‘your’ body. There is a different knowledge here than an official medical discourse (power/knowledge). I am not sure how you could study this as a history. Maybe the status of this knowledge in the context of trans/medical discourse? not the same thing, but dunno. ANyway, the point is that if you are connecting the potential* of upward mobility, etc with a potentiality of transsexuality then would that potentiality be ‘known’ in different ways in these different forms of knowledge, etc?
what has this got to do with travel? indeed! (travel as a potential?)
*I am not sure how you mean potentiality, but I am using it in the specific sense of a reorganisation of singularities that Massumi talks about in _Parables of the Virtual_, ie an event, which fits but may be not the angle you want to go in
Comment by glen — February 2, 2007 @ 11:38 am
does Spivak’s recovery of anthropological method (”open-plan fieldwork”) offer the potential for a comparative reading between the transexuality of US/Settler/Euro modernity and other sex/gender systems?
Danny,that’s in interesting question and I wish I could say I’ve more than skimmed that Spivak book! At one point, I thought I’d be arguing that modern, ‘Western’ transsexualities partially defined themselves in opposition to non-’western’, or ‘pre-modern’ sex/gender systems: in the sense that being modern itself was an important ideological marker. In the thesis and in more general political terms, though, I’ve never been a fan of any unilateral ‘transsexuality’: the idea of surgical and hormonal gender-modifying practices travel everywhere, and become something else every time they shift, and every time someone appropriates the practices/technologies for their own purposes. At the same time there is a concept-cloud called ‘transsexuality’, and it has affects/effects. Learning Euro/Western gender morphing practices from somewhere else, though — that interests me. And actually it reminds me of a couple of things in Heather Worth’s work on fa’afafine where her informants are talking about their relationships to transsexuality.
Ika, SQUEE! Yes, let’s pick brains about classicist trans and intersexness! And I’d love to come over, obviously. The conference idea sounds great.
That concept of ‘minor knowledges’ is interesting. What I’m trying to ‘reveal’ is really quite outside the traditional sexological-medical discourse on gender: it’s far more associated with stuff like the affective dimensions of realising one has the potential to make such a change — ‘thinking differently than one thinks’, to quote Foucault back at you. I don’t know, I’m working on it.
Comment by Az — February 2, 2007 @ 1:38 pm