Here are a couple of paragraphs of what I’m working on right now. Comments please!

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In this part of the chapter, I want to explore the logic behind posing, as I’ve done, a distinction between two subtly different ways of articulating resistance to gender variant patient subjectivation. On one hand, as we’ve seen, a sense of disempowerment frames the experiences of subjects who come into tension with modes of gender variant patient subjectivation in Australia, but have no other option to fall back on. On the other hand, the transwomen interviewees who obtained GRS with Thai surgeons enunciated their disposition to gender variant patient subjectivation in terms of dissatisfaction. Initially it seems obvious that of course, gender variant individuals who were able to do what they wanted were happier with the overall outcome. This is the case even given that many of the transwomen I interviewed in Thailand and Australia, intent on journeying to Thailand, were either midway through a number of surgeries and revision work, or had yet to undergo any procedures at all. (more…)

Fangirl tagged me for this:

The rules are as follows: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what you are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your post “Meme: I can’t believe it’s not a passion quilt!”.* Link back to this blog entry. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

In the archive of LTTR (which is perfect for a Saturday afternoon web browse and inspirational for all sorts of reasons, those homos know how to make art and shit) I found this piece by Boots, about an extremely awesome Pudding Tits Project, illegibility and language. Here’s an extract:

Right after I got surgery, I felt strange. I felt strange that I spent so much money on something so self-indulgent. And I felt really strange about my place in the world. I called a friend who, like me, is not taking testosterone, gets read as female fairly frequently, and who had chest reconstruction surgery. I tried to articulate the fact that all of a sudden, it felt as if I didn’t exist in the world, save for in the presence of a few people that understood my wonderfully freakish, spectacularly monstrous gender. He both reassured and disappointed me with his reply: “We’re illegible. But everyone is, it’s just that most people are never confronted with the situation of really realizing it.”

I know this experience of feeling as if I don’t exist. I’d articulate a little differently, though — in the sense that since I’ve begun to be read as unproblematically male, everyday life is a little ‘easier’, but I lose the power of making my own freakishness visible.

For example, I don’t think many of this year’s crop of gender studies students know that I’m trans. A couple of them expressed fairly transphobic sentiments earlier in the semester, along the lines of, “If someone wants to be called a woman, fine. I’d use female pronouns to their face. But to me they were born men and they’ll always be men.” I encouraged other students to deconstruct or challenge those sentiments, and was impressed when the other students in the class rose effortlessly to the challenge. But somehow I could not say, “So I guess that to you I would count as a woman?” Partially this is because being an educator (at least in gender studies) is about dismantling the reliability of students’ individual experiences of their worlds, and offering them a toolbox with which to read the abstract, the invisible. But it was also about protecting myself from surveillance, and not allowing the class to become a space in which my gender performances were scrutinised. I wanted to retain a space in which my identity was unimportant, and where I remained effective as a conduit for learning. Also, I couldn’t think of how to describe my gender, how to account for it, to them. Remaining illegible has its uses.

Perhaps my students would learn just as much if I were ‘open’ about being trans as not. But since I don’t know how to ‘come out’ to them, I’ve tried to teach them that none of us has a stable gender (or sexuality or ethnicity or identity), and that we are all being misrecognised, all the time. If I am passionate about anything, this is it.

Anyhow, since I’ve been back from North America, I’ve been experimenting with style. Long ago, I decided that tight jeans and tight-fitting sweaters would probably make it more difficult for me to pass as a guy. No, worse — because let’s not diminish the homophobia implicit in this arithmetic around tightness and bagginess — it seemed easier to pass as a straighter-looking white boy than a queer. The excuse I gave myself was that my bum was too big for tight jeans. I’ve always felt uneasy about it, but at Transsomatechnics my whole structure of passing anxiety crumbled into dust. No-one cared. Or, people did care, but in an encouraging and nourishing way. So why is it different in Melbourne? We are still operating in reactionary response to a medicalised system in which anyone who wants to modify their bodies surgically or hormonally must engage with the ‘true transsexual’ narrative. The stakes of not passing as a true transsexual at the clinic are high — people self-harm, destroy their relationships, kill themselves. Even in the spaces made to resist this poison, we are still so psychically alert to the prevailing pressures of passing as ‘trans enough’ everywhere else that we cannot entirely innoculate ourselves against it. Lately I have been wearing flamboyantly skinny jeans, pink-streaked 80s ties and cornflower blue sweaters. Eyeliner, too. The world needs more boys with eyeliner. For now, this will be my innoculation.

Tag!: Ika, Jonathan, Craig, Wildly Parenthetical and Mattilda.

PS Today I had breakfast with a friend. After our Minor Place bagels turned out not to fill our stomachs, we went wandering through Brunswick on a mission to find baklava. On the way, we discussed what, if it were not for how the last month has been chock full of brain-shatteringly exciting things for me, would certainly be the most exciting project ever. It makes me shiver with barely repressed glee. Good things are going to happen, I just know it.

In a bar the other night someone was explaining how some Duke University psychologists in the 1930s developed this instrument for measuring how happy people were. The instrument was a Euphorimeter, and they called the units of potential happiness ‘euphors’. Apparently, when people with very low euphor levels were shown how lots of people had really high euphor levels, the low-euphor people suddenly stopped being as depressed.

Maybe this is not the best metaphor to describe the last week, but it does come close. Transsomatechnics was by far the best conference I’ve ever been to. So little of the usual competitiveness and depoliticised intellectual wankery; so many people humbly offering their ideas in the spirit of collaboration and shared resistance. It was especially refreshing for people not to have to do the ‘trans 101′ spiel at the start of papers; here was a space in which some things were already known, and critical conversations could begin right away (rather than question time being full of random people whose contribution is “OMG that is so INTERESTING!”). A lot of fruitful things will come out of this conference, I think.

And then there was the brilliant high school dorkiness of the after-party, which was just like Trans Prom, and hanging out in Vancouver parks and streets and this tiny slice of beach, and catching up with people I never ever see enough, and making a whole crew of new beautiful friends. Seriously, if someone could measure my euphors right now, I might break the machine.

Travel: the time when you reflect on what happens when you’re at home. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of days about what I want to do when this trip is over. About what’s important, politically. I had this feeling in Thailand in January — a sense of dissatisfaction, maybe some regret about not giving energy to the political practices that I feel are most important. But then I came home and everything resumed. A good example of this: last year I wanted to start an autonomously-run gender/trans drop-in centre, and so did other people. That vision was rejected by some of those who got involved, leading to a huge conflict (as yet unresolved) about the vision, but the project itself has kept running, even in the absence of a clear manifesto. What I originally envisaged was a shopfront with genderfucked banners everywhere, a zine library, skill shares on all sorts of crazy shit, art making, computers for people to use, a one-day-a-week counsellor and a space for ‘activism’ to incubate, initiated for and by the lumpen queers and trannies. A place where bodies can be temporarily free from gender regulation, but which acknowledges that gender regulation is all about other forms of regulation, too. A lot of the other people involved in this gender centre project envisage something really different, something far less politically confrontational. Most recently, it looks like the project will be moving into an office space rented out by one of Melbourne’s mainstream gay and lesbian charities. This is not a bad thing, but it may not be what I want to make.

Perhaps part of the issue is that within identity-based organising, it’s hard to have conversations about class, or race, or strategies for coalitional resistance, or gentrification, or how and why the state sucks and should be avoided if possible, or how we need to rethink the concepts we use to talk about healthcare itself. (This is so even within ‘trans*’ networks, despite making an effort not to police participation along identity-based lines.) But maybe I need to be working on a project that deals with those larger issues, as well. Maybe I need to work with more people who can challenge me, rather than me trying to challenge others.

This is all a bit vague, but I just know that I’m not sitting right with my current level of political engagement. It’s not a panic along the lines of ‘omg we’re not doing enough, we have to act or die!’ either. What I’m feeling doesn’t issue from that black, icy despair everyone expressed around 2002 when the War of Terror really got started, that sense of absolute hopelessness. The world is getting more fucked up by the day, it’s true. But there are already so many people working in the cracks of the glittering cold machine-edifice. I just want to make more cracks. Sex-positive, genderfucked, sequiny, ebullient, hard-edge marxian cracks.

Anyhow, here are some things I’ve been doing in North America so far: talking trash in fag metal bars with new friends; taking a tour of Mattilda’s beautiful 7th floor view and comparing our experiences of global gentrification and rent craziness; cooking up ideas for kink skillshares back home; getting my tarot read by a posse on a ridiculously expensive kitchen floor in the Mission; meeting people I’ve known online for years who tempt me into eating amazing icecream, and having great conversations; not writing conference paper much, but feeling like I have my shit together enough to wing it.

Finally, have an awesome May Day. When I arrived in Seattle this morning I noticed big signs on the airport bus — apparently on May 1st a large march will be disrupting downtown traffic. Yeah like that. Or maybe like this: hundreds of topless taxi drivers converging on the city, demanding an end to [often racially-motivated] violence:

It’s actually impossible for me to watch this. I keep pausing it, switching tabs, going back to the clip only to be astounded by another of Oprah’s really fucking odd statements. Apparently until not too long ago, gay teenagers understood themselves as being ‘in the wrong body’, genderwise. There’s other stuff, which you can see for yourselves. Mostly, I can’t watch the clip because I identify with Thomas Beatie, his nervousness, his desire to please and be seen as sympathetic — even the attempt at which is sure to be coded as ‘feminine’, because a ‘real man’ never explains, never apologises. I relate to the attempt to tell a complex story publicly that in the soundbite logic of the medium, winds up seeming implausible. And I relate, more than a tiny bit, to his desire to bear a child.

Of course, while the mainstream media has a poke, ftm email lists and communities are going just as crazy, if not more so. First, you have the transmen who respond with pure disgust, rage and a flat dictate: “Men don’t have babies; therefore Thomas Beatie is a woman.” The more interesting arguments touch on the politics of visibility and invisibility. A lot of transmen seem to think Beatie should have just borne his baby quietly without making a stink. Some of these arguments are conservative: the logic that as long as a pregnant transman ‘does it’ in private, it’s acceptable; when it’s public, it becomes unacceptable, because it tarnishes the image of transmen as authentically male. The other argument against visibility is far more precise: given the swing of public aympathy against Beatie, law-makers will use this example as a way to argue for regulating access to change of gender markers even more than they already are, possibly requiring infertility as a condition of any rights. I am a fan of clandestinity, at times; I don’t think visibility or recognition is necessarily always the right answer. But I’m wondering how in this case, various transpeople’s desire for a clandestinity which facilitates more freedom seems to be collapsing into the logic that all ‘authentic’ transpeople desire to remain stealth, and that stealth (passing as ‘real’ men and women) should, in fact, be a condition of recognition. When does a radical clandestine politics mutate into a conservatism that simply preserves the status quo?

So a friend was asking around for some info and resources on transfag sex the other week. I had no idea where to direct him. Until I found this:

Primed: The Back Pocket Guide to Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them (pdf)

Well written, sexy, engaging information with hot artwork. Nice.

Some more punning on this in the comments, please.

(via infinite thought, who got the punning off to a fine start with ‘dermatological materialism’)

Browsing back through the ‘After Sex’ edition of South Atlantic Quarterly, I found this excellent excerpt from “Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex?” by Michael Moon:

To begin with, I remember standing with Tony before the magazine counter in the local grocery store when I was about eight, and not long after he had learned to read, and peering at a line of glossy news magazines that all had cover stories that week about “sex on campus.” I might be vague about sex, but I was already fascinated with “campus”; in our Victorian-size family, we already had an eldest brother away at college. Here was something else that sounded possibly enticing, but remained opaque to me as a concept. “Sex,” I remember musing aloud, “what could it be?” “I don’t know,” Tony replied, with more wisdom than he knew, “but I think it must be something that’s sort of everywhere, like the weather.”

That may not seem like much to work with, but it was a start. Later that same year, Tony pragmatically redefined sex when our teenage sister Eleanor asked him if he liked the red shirt she had given him for his birthday. “Yes, it’s so sexy!” he cheerfully responded. Our sister, surprised, countered, “What do you think that word means?” “Bright-colored!” Tony, unfazed, shot back improvisatorially. Now all we had to figure out was, what was bright-colored and sort of everywhere like the weather?

And from the same essay:

“What is the use of being a boy,” Gertrude Stein asks in her lecture, “What Are Master-pieces,” “if one is going to grow up to be a man?” ….[N]estled within the cry of futility that I first heard Stein’s utterance as being—“What is the use?”—there is interlining it something I soon began to hear quite otherwise than as a counsel of despair: overdetermined as the process of “becoming a man” must be in our society with a myriad of toxic contents, it doesn’t always take—no, it doesn’t.

Yes, quite. Why not be a boy always? (Or something else entirely?)

At Recording Surface (back posting again!), Eric uses a Yo La Tengo lyric to prise apart the propertarian nature of intimate knowledge:

The get in the title of Yo La Tengo’s “Sometimes I Don’t Get You” should be taken in its double sense, as understand and as possess. The two are really inseparable. Complete understanding is an attempt to possess, just as possession requires a high degree of understanding. Under the rule of capital, the axiom of interpersonal relationships demands that the flows between intimates represent the totality of possible flows. Nothing should escape and nothing should stay a mystery. If some bit of history or a feeling remains a secret, if it is not shared or revealed, that is an infidelity. It is in fact the definition of unfaithfulness. Secrets are always dirty little secrets. In the Yo La Tengo song, the feeling of not understanding the other is also the sense of losing possession of the other and the discovery of something new only induces crisis:

Sometimes I don’t know you, it’s like we never met
The way it seems to me is that you’re having regrets
Am I clinging to something that’s past?
That was never intended to last?

Lately, fiction-wise, I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin. I’ve been working back through the canon, from Voices and The Telling to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. While the former feels as if it should resonate, in its experimentation with writing a differently gendered world through an interlocutor whose universe is distinctly binary gendered, The Dispossessed continues to fold me back into a consideration of its philosophical undertaking. It’s still the best fictional example I can remember of an attempt to think outside capital. But Le Guin attempts something more ambitious, as well: to critique the subjectivity of capital itself from a place entirely other. (more…)

Ridley Scott: I went to art school in west Hartlepool in the north of England, alongside the Durham steel mills and the Imperial Chemical Industries plant. The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it’s steel, and it’s probably particles, it’s not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you’d be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire. Later, I spent a little time in New York, which always seemed to be a city on overload, and Hong Kong at the time it was wonderfully medieval — pre-skyscraper, when the harbor was filled with junks. When it came to deciding whether to go Hispanic or Asian for what seems to be the majority culture on the streets in San Angeles, I opted for Asian. And I felt I knew what it would be like to ride in a spinner. In the years when I was doing a lot of TV commercials, once a month I’d fly into New York. I’d get off the plane at JFK and take a helicopter, which cost $20, to the top of the Pan American building. Winter or summer, high wind or balmy evening — it was hairy. I did that for almost two years. Then, one stormy winter evening, a chopper nearly missed the top of the building because of the wind gusts. It perched perilously on the edge, and they nearly lost it. And that was the end of that. There were no more helicopters; they just closed them down. But I always remembered that.

Ridley Scott is about to release his final cut of Bladerunner.

(via nulldevice)

I haven’t had time to write a coherent response to Tampa 2007 yet, other than more expletives and hair-tearing. So let me direct you to more articulate commentary. Influxus has been drawing attention to some important points about the Cape York Institute, the militarisation of ‘aid’ to indigenous communities, and how that relates to contracts. S0metim3s has been writing similarly great stuff. Meanwhile, Wildly Parenthetical reacts to Howard’s plan for policing indigenous childrens’ bodies with her own affective register, talking about guilt and innocence.

There’s this article in the Village Voice this week about ‘the genderqueer scene’, featuring the story of a lesbian throwing a benefit for her top surgery. On one level, it’s kind of awesome that trans surgery stuff has become visible as a possibility for people who don’t want to go though a whole medico-legal transition, or who don’t see themselves as ‘changing sex’. On another level, I can’t quite bring myself to approve of the article itself without knowing whether people were misquoted or their pronouns were messed with. The NYC trans/genderqueer scene has been the subject of similar mainstream media attention before, with pronoun mistakes and associated errors, along a similar theme of, “Look at the crazy genderqueers! Whatever will they think of next?”

But the internal politics this article sets up are kind of weird. On one hand you have people raising money for surgery because they’re poor; you have genderqueer folks doing surgery; and then, as the voice representing the older, more conservative FTM perspective, you have Buck Angel:

Not everyone thinks the benefit parties are a positive—or necessary—thing. One of the world’s most prominent trans men, porn star Buck Angel, thinks that benefit parties only lessen the seriousness involved in transitioning to a new gender. “Ugh, don’t get me started. That’s my hugest pet peeve,” he says. “You wanna be a man? Act like a man. Men take care of themselves. Very rarely do they fucking beg for money. Get a fucking job and save your money, and save money like a man. Asking a handout for surgery—it really bothers me. It’s just wrong, and it adds to that element of trendiness. It’s ‘Let’s have a boob-removal party!’”

Sure, this is coming from a transman who commodifies his own body in porn films to make a living. I can see how the refusal to participate in gendered capitalist behaviours like saving money and ‘doing it all yourself’ would be galling to someone whose everyday life must totally enmesh consumerism/commodity fetishism with the fact of being trans. But it’s pretty odd how that ‘pet peeve’ — I assume addressed more to transmen and ftm’s doing surgery benefits, not merely genderqueers/dykes who don’t identify as men — sounds here like it’s making a more exclusionary point about how everyone getting top surgery should identify uncomplicatedly as a man. Later in the article, it turns out that Buck is ‘old-fashioned’ about gender and disapproves of the quote unquote ‘ftm fad’. Which as we know, is a ridiculous narrative used to differentiate ‘respectable’, ’serious’ transmen from those supposedly frivolous ‘genderqueer’ wannabes who are just playing with their genders and bodies when they articulate their own complex relationships to desiring or inhabiting masculinity. This makes me glad I never bought any of Buck Angel’s porn.

Reading:

• Wildly Parenthetical.
• Slaves of Academe on interracial marriage and miscegenation politics.
• Kpunk and Poetix on Lee Edelman, a crossover of theoretical fields (queer theory-freud vs high-philosophy mondopostlacanian-badiouism) that has resulted in some unintentionally amusing claims. Like, ‘the queer event’, assuming there was only ever one and we can know it: Stonewall, or Freud? People are seriously debating this.

  On the other hand, Kpunk’s musings on Rebecca are serendipitous (as well as interesting), as I’ve been rereading that novel this week, enjoying the slow build of our unnamed heroine’s desire for this hauntingly beautiful, but curiously also genderbent, object of desire: “I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the strong and clever hands.” Mmm, gotta go watch the film again soon.

This weekend just gone was Camp Betty, a queer DIY/autonomist festival of workshops, performances, parties and lots of other stuff. It was a bit like Queeruption if it was in Melbourne, but connected to reviving the 70’s local tradition of holding a queer picnic on the Queen’s Birthday weekend (don’t ask why in Australia the Queen’s Birthday is this weekend in June, it just is, even if it’s not actually her birthday.) There’s so much to write about. I wrote this on Monday night when it was still fresh in my head, and even now, on Thursday, I still feel excited about how good it was. And this, coming from me, who has been off the scene of all sorts of squatted/autonomously organised events over the last four years, and pretty critical of some, too — maybe I’m mellowing out in my old age.
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At Somatechnics back in April, I was lucky enough to meet the fabulous Susan Stryker and hear her present about her latest research project, on Christine Jorgenson’s career-cum-hobby as a film maker. The project relates Jorgenson’s visions of herself behind the camera, making films, with her production of a public self as the ultimate, perfect, man-made woman. Along the way, Stryker makes some great links to the racialisation of that vision of Ultimate [Trans] Womanhood, and talks about the production of ‘transgender whiteness’. Really exciting stuff. I also met Eliza, who’s writing on trans pornography at the Uni of Amsterdam and has been making queer/trans porn with various collaborators all over the world forever. Along with Zoo, we went swimming at Coogee Beach, just as a thunderstorm was breaking overhead, in the craziest downpour. Eliza gave this quite stunning paper relating Walter Benjamin to transness, with the result that maybe we can talk about ‘gender affinity’ as a concept rather than ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender role’ or gender… binary? Affinity as in affinity groups, but also affinity as in a space permitting the micrological difference of everyone to each other. Pretty damn fun. Actually, the number of trans theorists at Somatechnics was really heartening — it’s the first time I’ve ever felt surrounded by people who were at least on a pretty similar wavelength, politically and theoretically, and I’m hoping to be enjoying conversations with them for a long time to come.

Eliza also alerted me to the awesome, AWESOME cinematic talent of Oakie Treadwell, director of Phineas Slipped and a feature called Maggots and Men. Maggots and Men is a trans/masculine re-telling of the Kronstadt sailor rebellion. Gender anarchy, alright. Phineas Slipped, a short, is about an English class in a boy’s school. As the teacher asks questions about a homoerotic novel, the boys/bois flit off into porno fantasies about Phineas and what happened when they met him.

Finally, an article by Emi Koyama from Intersex Initiative about the change from talking about ‘intersex’ to ‘disorders of sex differentiation’, covering the intersections between intersex activism, disability rights work and disability theory. I’m not sure I agree with her on some points — ie, it seems a mistake to return to a model of activism that works mainly for people who feel they embody a ‘normal’ gender, rather than taking gender apart altogether. Then again, different battles, different strategies.

PS I accidentally closed the tab I was writing this post in just now, and thought I’d lost it. Then I realised Firefox has a ‘recently closed tabs’ option in the History menu. It’s like a magic ‘restore’ spell. One more reason to convert to Firefox, folks. I also have a ‘light’ bout of pneumonia and have been mostly bedridden since Friday. Bedridden and rediscovering the internet. Wish my lungs luck with their struggle against the nasty bug.

Un Chant d’Amour (1950), Genet’s only film, from UBUweb.

You could say that it’s a pornographic film, and it is. But if it was only that, you would be discounting how it’s also a film about the grief of lost love, not only sex. Genet lovingly and ruthlessly catalogues the multiple surfaces that one comes to substitute for the feel of another person’s skin/mouth/cock: the wall, a tattoo, a cigarette, a straw, smoke blown through a straw. A toenail, a shoulder, a nipple, the bedclothes, one’s own hand on the back of one’s neck. A singlet. Feet. An eye pressed to a spyhole. Flowers.

Even as it doubles as a weapon of the prison, of colonialism, the gun also expresses desire and loss. Despite its violence, the gun is an instrument of corporeality. It only becomes useful when the panopticon is too alienating even for those who claim the privilege of surveillance. This is why Genet is ruthless: he refuses to compartmentalise ‘violence’ and ‘love’, ‘good desire’ and ‘bad desire’. It’s all about need. And that’s why the film makes you (me) cry. Just a little.