My "Dissertation"? b/w How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz

In recent months I have been reading a lot books and articles and blogs and so on and so forth pertaining to trans(gender) broadly conceived. Meyerowitz's book had been given positive reviews in a few places and looked to be historically very rich with detail and so I got a copy and I'll say more about that below (though not much).

So, the scare quotes around "dissertation" (and that is what they are) what is that all about? could it be my inability to imagine such a thing in any but the most abstract of terms? maybe just the utter lack of a precise topic? yes, it could be that. it could very easily be that. 

I know of course that it'll have a fair amount of Sigmund and Jacques, and thus also undoubtedly a small boat load of lacanians and semi-sorta-lacanians that I find important. That much I know. Some degree of pull from all the reading in ideology (detailed on this blog last summer) and from Marx and certain marxists is also possible, but I am at the moment not really looking there (though I would be a delighted to find an ideological critique of the DSM generally or of the GID [gender identity disorder] diagnosis and other gender-connected diagnoses - someone direct me to that now please, thank you).

& I've been nibbling at a number of different scholarly zones pertaining, at their broadest, to the body… with an eye to what my sort of psychoanalytic thinking might find there or bring to those discussions or bring back from those discussions etc. So, neuro brain stuff (and the neuropsychoanalysis folks), and corporeal philosophy, a touch of phenomenology (don't tell on me), and much of the stuff about affect and emotion that got stirred up by the Laclau class back in 2010 and comes and goes as a specific site to focus on for me (affect is so hot topic right now! but i'm kinda meh on it myself, depending on the day)… body maybe also includes much of the stuff about voice that has been nagging at me as a place where maybe I have something to say. 

is voice a body thing or not?  either way, I have so many small notes and collected references to things about voice that surely voice could be a productive zone to work through. Aside from the interesting work on voice already from Dolar and that other Slovenian guy everybody reads (the one with all the nervous tics), I'd seen some abstract when I was taking classes in linguistics back in 2008 or so, it talked about subvocalizations taking place below the person's conscious awareness which were very very reduced versions of the same or initiating muscle motions involved in speaking aloud that which one was reading "silently". That got me to thinking about the automaton-like, machinic aspect of the unconscious in Lacan's understanding and as well to how here it seems that the Symbolic is actively reinscribing itself in the flesh (this subvocalization stuff I need to find out more about and also track down the article I saw again). Then there is a lot of stuff about gay voice that I researched back in that linguistics class. There are aspects of voice that seem interesting to think of wrt trans people as well in that voice is a somewhat unique 'behavioral set' (sorry, crappy term) to make alterations to, it being so heavily coded as the mark of authenticity, etc. It seems to me that the perilous fragility of the voice is not utterly unlike that of the subject per Lacan. There is in that last line a paper that could be written. 

& then most recently trans stuff has become interesting to me for a bunch of reasons, many of which have links back to the things discussed above. At the same time, articulating those linkages has largely not been done yet (by me that is), and I need to start making the links or at least trying to state where they might be.  

As with homosexuals, psychoanalysis, specifically the institutional psychoanalysis of North America and England (tied to psychiatry, medicine and state) has not got a very positive record in its interactions with trans people. The downside of this is predictable, Freud and Lacan and others who might have some useful things to say are all collected in the stink file with Charles Socarides and (judging from what scattered things I have read) Catherine Millot, possibly Saffouan as well. I'm likely to try and argue for the usefulness of lacanian thought to trans persons, of course to do that, I'll finally have to bite the bullet and try to get clear on what the fuck Lacan is really taking about when he refers to sexuation. That is, I confess that I have read much of this in a sort of surfacey way and tried to wrap my head around the distinctions being put forth. But all too often when I attempt this I feel like I am exerting more energy keeping sexual difference from slipping toward socio-cultural 'gender' or now and then (not as often) sliding back into a sort of bonehead anatomical marking, hm, looks like a penis, check the M box would you? and thus one is marked!  (though today I read something in Elliot's book [Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites] which gave a lacanian developmental narrative in which the ascription of a sexed position relates to the oedipus and lacan's symbolic 'castration' etc and I need to think through her understanding because she certainly is saying that Lacan's concept is neither of those annoying options of the binary. & I sort of see what she is saying, but I wonder whether, if I understand her reading of Lacan correctly, that perhaps one is making a conceptual error even speaking of sexual difference and gender at all, maybe these concepts operate at angles to one another such that while they intersect, reigning those points of intersection into one or the other's discursive plane distorts what they are for the other beyond much use. But I digress.

One thing that I find fascinating in a very general way about all things trans is that it is as if the trans person, however they identify themselves, however they relate to the contesting ways that they are conceptualized in the social realm etc, simply by existing, (… damn, I am stretching for a metaphor… nothing coming …)… 

… If we use lacanian terms it seems that in a great many realms of the Symbolic (there is no single Symbolic after all, but a whole bunch of them interpenetrating and so forth) the crispy clean M/F binary is mapped very tightly with other pairs of traits and that many of these symbolic structures are immediately problematized by the very existence of the trans person. It seems that one can, in a very real sense, pick a disciplinary discourse and then 'add trans' and sudden rifts open up, questions so long settled as to be reflexes, to be naturalized ideologemes, appear suddenly inadequate and as if under a spotlight. That is to say, the trans body has the potential to act as the Real for some given symbolic. I do not easily say The Symbolic here because it is not total,  there are folks striving to find ways of letting trans people inhabit the language itself more easily - of course here too there are splits and rifts and suggesting new pronouns be adopted meets with a resistance that seems to me to be beyond any intellectual objection and to be of a piece with the affective investment that we have even in the way that pronouns contribute to the "gendered" structure of our worlds. But to the extent that there are trans and non-trans people speaking about trans persons and attempting more and more to do so in socially sensitive, non-pathologizing, non-eroticizing, and non-objectifying ways - one can see these practices as generating new signifiers for a Symbolic in obvious need of refurbishing. I'll call, with some misgivings but no better idea, what I have been talking about here the trans effect.

I do not wish to be read as posing the trans subject as inherently radical or disruptive or as otherwise "exceptional." My position here would be better stated as; trans people are people just like red headed people are people, or cat people are people. Rad, huh? But, that said, it also seems that the Symbolic of late (over the past century and very much so now) is in a bit of Imaginary turmoil because the trans person, however conceptualized (Symbolic) or pictured (Imaginary) is also Real in a way that "doesn't stop being written" to use Lacan's line from somewhere, but here we might hear that tiny quote as referring directly to the way that this Real requires, compels more and more writing, more and more attempts to reign it back into existing categories or to expand those categories or to abolish those categories. Thinking about the Real in this sense shows the way that, in spite of the typical tropes of negativity that are used to designate it, that the Real is actually the condition of possibility for the Symbolic and the Imaginary, that it inspires and compels the subject, via the resources of the other orders, to attempt to keep up with it. So, if there is something apparently exceptional about the trans subject at this moment in history, I think that this is an effect which will, at some point, be viewable as a history and that a time will come when the Symbolic and Imaginary, in a broader way, will have become more livable places for trans people and the effect I am writing about here will have ceased to be so filled with seeming paradoxes. 

Joanne Meyerowitz

So, in finding trans people and many ways that they might be seen to contest the extant Symbolic and Imaginary resources, interesting and potentially pertinent to my dissertation required of me that I start soaking up information. The book I that chose in hopes that it would give me a sense of the history was How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz, Now, if you would prefer a better review of that text, I suggest reading Dallas Denny on it here. I do not have the depth of knowledge that Denny has, but the two thumbs up response to the book is the same as my own. It is chock full of all manner of fascinating details and I found it very hard to put down. There were also too many things in it that I felt compelled to underline for me to even consider giving it a more careful write up just yet, though surely I should do that stuff (superego would agree).