Thesis chapter outline September 2006

'A traveller across the boundaries of sex': transness, travel and transnationality

    Introduction

  • The aim of the thesis: Understanding the imbrication of gender variance in global dynamics of exchange and transnational capital; using travel as an archive of discourses, practices, identities, questions, conflicts, contestations that shed light on that imbrication
  • Mobility/ movement/travel: mobility’s double meaning (spatial and social) opens the door to thinking travel in relation to capital, not only gender
  • Theoretical frameworks: Foucauldian discursive analysis of power/subjectivity, highlighting the importance of observing practices and the historical specificity of categories of identity. Thus, ‘transsexual’ works in the thesis as a category differentiated from ‘gender variance’ by its medicalisation and its simultaneous regulation as a legal category, involving the prescription of a fully surgical move from one ‘sex’ to the other ‘sex’.
  • Geneaology, subjectivation, provincialising ‘Europe’ and marking the specificity of ‘Euro-American’ experience/theory/historiography
  • Theorising gender: I argue that gender is not ‘binary’ in practice, but the discursive realms that frame thinking about gender assume it is so. Gender is performative; interpretations of gender are also historically and geographically different, enabling a certain slippage between geographical spaces in terms of how genders are ‘read’. This point is central to an analysis of how geographical travel can enable gender variant practices.
  • Lit review: perspectives on transness and travel, travel as a site of theorisation; etc etc etc
  • Thesis structure: each part of the thesis looks at a particular site, but uses the chapters to invert the focus (or look through the ‘wrong’ end of the telescope).

PART I: INROADS TO THINKING GENDER MOBILITY

    Chapter 1: Sexual/Transnational Modernities and the Emergence of the Transsexual (Historical context)

  • Why it’s important for studies of gender variance to rethink the relationships between transsexuality and modernity
  • Previous articulations of transsexuality as related to capital and modernity: a dialectic between gender variance thought as flight, self-creation, autonomy (Trans ‘activist’ theory’) and on the other hand, as ‘false consciousness’, dupe of capitalism (Billings and Urban, anti-trans readings) – neither is sufficient
  • Understanding transsexuality’s imbrication in modernity by looking at the emergence of ‘transsexuals’ in the 50’s, and a discourse of gendered transformation as social mobliity, becoming a ‘proper citizen’ rather than a freak through technology’s transformative power. Christine Jorgenson archive.
  • Relating transsexuality’s emergence to political economy: at the transition between fordism and post-fordism, an increased emphasis on individual transformation, reinvention, and the globalisation of ‘American Dream’ ideology.
  • Geographical movement as both the metaphor for talking about that transformation, and the material instrument of reinvention.
  • The modernity/transsexuality discourse defines itself spatially, in opposition to an ‘elsewhere’ space, sometimes written as racially or culturally ‘other’ (or premodern), but also as a radically othered, futuristic or postmodern gendered indeterminacy.

    Chapter 2: Trans Citizenship and Travel Practices (Geographical Context)

  • An attempt to map an overview of material gender variant travels: what would this look like? Look at only ‘transsexual’ but gender variant, related to practices rather than identity.
  • Questions to ask: where do people travel? For what reasons? How? What patterns emerge? What discourses are used to account for how travel works on gender variant subjects, what it ‘does’? Gender Travel questionnaire as the method.
  • The need to examine these questions in the context of citizenship techniques – mediation between state and capital, biopolitical power. The field of this biopolitics is (often) ‘trans citizenship’, as discrete laws and regulations but also as a transnational discourse about the spread of rights.
  • Trans citizenship elements: medical/legal/bureaucratic/administrative/economic (interlocking and inconsistent, interdependent); a textual map of the contingencies and inconsistencies of trans citizenship globally
  • Travel as potential or imagined route to freedom: how does travel facilitate escape? How does travel facilitate the production of oneself as a legible citizen? (Examples from survey.)
  • Taking into account the simultaneous accounts of travel as risk, and impossibility, is travel more of an imagined route to freedom than a material one? Examples from questionnaire.
  • Trans travel as ‘grey market’ wherein capitalism recuperates the desire for freedom and autonomy by positing travel as a normative solution to the problem of ‘not-yet freedom,’ or not-here freedom? Displacement of desire into the future, into the elsewhere. Fulfilment only possible if one can go somewhere else (and not even then...)

PART II: REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER MOBILITY: TRAVEL/MIGRATION

    Chapter 3: The traveler and the gender migrant: mobility in transsexual memoirs

  • How does travel in autobiography produce a particular sense of transsexuality? What is travel a metaphor for, and what political work does it do?
  • Previous readings assume transsexuality, autobiography and travel are all unmarked categories: this reading departs from that.
  • The specificity of autobiography as a Euro-Americanised literary form, amongst trans narratives, and as a form tracing the ‘standard narrative’ of transsexuality
  • Spatial mapping of transsexuality signifying home and normality, against ‘elsewhere’ as a domain of indeterminacy in which transformation takes place
  • The “imperial travel” model: Casablanca as the site of transsexual feminisation in Jan Morris’ memoir Conundrum -- reproducing the colonial boundaries of exchange
  • The “modern migrant” model: reappropriation of ‘migrant’ discourse to account for trans experience in Deirdre McCloskey’s memoir Crossing -- adapting the ‘imperial travel’ model to the fragmentations of transnational globality

    Chapter 4: Would the ‘real’ 'gender migrant' please stand up?

  • A brief history of gender variant travel on film
  • While ‘transgender road trip’ movies are an emerging Hollywood genre, documentaries are equally interesting and may offer more to talk about around subaltern representations
  • Documentary form as the postmodern replacement for the ‘real narrative’ of autobiography (?), allowing an imagined access to ‘the real’, and a spectatorship of first-person narrative
  • In this chapter I attend particularly to representations of migrant, non-white, poor gender variant bodies, to map the differences between these representations and those in trans memoir
  • Paper Dolls, Travesti: representations of mobility as enabling but simultaneously policing/violent; gender variance as ‘other’ to the nation;
  • construction of Israel (or the ‘West’) as ‘liberal’ in opposition to Phillippines or Brazilian ‘backwardness’ or pre-modernity,
  • Gender variance and affective labour. Gayness/bakla-ness as accepted in Paper Dolls because in the logic of global capitalism, Asian-ness is already feminised and marked as ‘domestic worker’.
  • Critique of the representation of migrant gender variant people as torn between modernity and premodernity, “family” and “self-expression”.
  • ??En Mi Piel (On My Skin): the second generation migrant’s journey back to Mexico??
  • Where is the ‘real’ gender migrant? What is she/he/ze? Yet another reflection, but that reflection is also smashed at moments by something entirely other, which confuses the boundaries between ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’, ‘west’ and ‘non-west’, and does its 'own thing'. Expand upon this 'otherness' here.

PART III: BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND THAILAND (CASE STUDY)

    Chapter 5: Gender Variant Medical Tourism in Cyberspace

  • Case study: Australian transwomen who have obtained GRS in Thailand (interviews, surgery journals, internet forums)
  • the Internet enables detouring around the limits of place by making it possible to ‘browse’ and compare surgeons in different countries
  • Australian dissatisfaction with quality of surgery, procedures for assessment, lack of comprehensive information: In Australia, patients are locked into a model where they are patients being treated at the discretion of a psychiatrist.
  • Resistance to this model; offshore surgery enables ‘freedom’ but also constructs trans subjects as patient-consumer, wherein body modification becomes a service available for a fee.
  • Travel for GRS from Australia (and the US, the UK) to Thailand for surgery interpellates gender variant subjects as both consumers of surgery, and consumers of tourism
  • A micopolitics of ‘information’: informal information economies, ‘information’ as the currency for marketing surgeons and their skills, but also as a desire: transwomen hungry for ‘comprehensive information’, virtual technological mastery of the process of surgery beforehand

    Chapter 6: The Feminising Factory: Race, Labour and Affect in Thai Gender Reassignment Clinics

  • History of Thai economy, the economic crisis and govt policy response in terms of tourism and health
  • Racialised/global economies of service – intersection between Thai marketing of ‘culture’ and service/affective labour
  • Racialisation of immaterial labour and exchange that actively supports a particular gendering
    • technology/subjectivation.
  • Affective, feminised labour here means not only the material labours of nursing, care and ‘cosseting’ that aid the process of healing and recovery, but the process wherein Thai cultural ‘femininity’ is modelled for the benefit of the (overwhelmingly Anglo) patients
  • Does a/the Thai clinic act as the metaphor for my argument, which is that travel/transnational exchange is central to the construction of transsexuality as a viable subject position?
  • How the development of a farang GRS economy has displaced the previous clientele, kathoey, and the non-relationships between kathoey and farang transwomen. (If that's a claim I can make.)
  • Exceptions to what I've argued: M***, a Vietnamese transwoman who had migrated to Melbourne and went to Thailand for surgery, and V****** who was Thai and lives in Australia, so very different dynamic: visiting home, rather than tourism.
  • The self-relfexivity of the people I interviewed about the effects of this market and their role in it.

Conclusion: ‘Decolonisation,’ Citizenship and the Politics of Gender Variance



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