from a review essay by Heather Love

Odd. Had I held off on my last posting for a few hours, I'd have had all this useful cite-age I could have deployed. That said, this speaks very eloquently to reason #3 for abandoning that term that I'd used (in my previous post). I've added some bold to indicate the points that seem most pertinent. 

This is all taken from; 

"'The Right to Change My Mind' : New Work in Trans Studies" 

by Heather Love 

in Feminist Theory 2004 5:91

In the contemporary academy, it has become a reflex to sift all representations, behaviour, self-conceptions, political positions and ways of life into the rough categories of subversive and hegemonic. The struggles that trans subjects face serve as a stark reminder of the limitations – both methodological and ethical – of such habits of mind. In a recent article on transgender studies, Cressida J. Hayes writes,

. . . so much academic literature over-determines and erases the agency of the trans subject in favor of the grasp of technology, medical discourses, history qua regimes of power, or false consciousness. On the other hand, so much popular literature is clearly naively essentialist in its understanding of transsexual experience: tropes of wrong body, being ‘born that way’, ontological necessity and historical and cultural universality tend to be grossly under-theorized and easily feed into other essentializing discourses about sex and gender. (Hayes, 2000: 178–9)

In such accounts, critics fail to attend to the complex and often highly critical stance that transsexual and transgender subjects adopt in relation to both the medical establishment and the discourse of gender. Some of the most interesting recent accounts of the medical construction of sex and gender have come from the work of trans people who have been actively engaged in a struggle for agency with doctors and psychotherapists.

While I would not want to suggest that the project of thinking critically about trans subjectivity or politics ought to be abandoned, it seems clear that the epistemological pressure on the figure of the transsexual needs to be reduced. Academics will continue to interrogate the ideological stakes of transgender and transsexual identity; to ask questions about the meaning of belonging; to redefine the limits of materiality and the human. However, such questioning needs to be offset with an awareness of the kinds of self-questioning and lived experiments currently taking place in the trans community. The new work in transgendered studies has a great deal to teach contemporary criticism – not only about the ‘meaning of gender’, but also about finding a balance between the need to be exemplary in one’s identifications and behaviour and the need for survival, for authenticity and for an expanded sense of agency. (94-5)

Recanting & Mea culpa for "the trans effect"

"mea culpa"
google->image

In a couple of earlier posts, I used the phrase "the trans effect" and even made a label [meta tag thingy] for it. But, even as I offered up that term, and designated what I meant by it, I had some lingering and as yet unarticulated qualms. So, before I go on a brief stint of revisionist blogging (and either change it, or maybe just delete the label), I want to explore why this term deserves the recanting and the mea culpa.

So what was it that I was referring to? just that, because notions of M/F are so overtly and covertly foundational for so many small, medium and large scale bodies of knowledge and practice that the material being of trans people has the effect of unsettling that which had seemed so notionally solid. As I talked about this only a couple of night ago with my dear sister, "You take some body of knowledge that feels nice and solid" (right hand held out as if gripping a large invisible rock) "and you take a trans person" (left hand held out as if holding something) "not that you need an actual person, just the recognition that they exist… and you bring the one into close proximity - conceptually - to the other, and suddenly…" (making surprise face and wiggling right hand fingers) "…the supposedly solid one has gone all squishy."

This does seem to 'work'. Trans subjects do pose fascinating and complex challenges to all manner of knowledge-regimes. But, I do not wish to use the phrase any more for the following reasons, even while I still find the "effect" worth returning to again and again.

1. It risks sounding a bit cute, or worse, it risks giving the impression that this is what makes trans people value or meaningful or (ugh) useful for theory, rather than the inherent value they have as human beings, as subjects with desire, etc. 

2. Given 1, I'd rather not have that phrase linked to my name as I am interested in doing theoretical work which will have some relation to extant trans issues and theories.

3. As noted in an earlier posting, I do not wish to fall into the pattern (played out with many different sorts of subjects in academic, theoretical and philosophical history) of positioning trans people - as a group - as if they were in some specific sense "the privileged subjects of history."  I've argued against such claims in other areas and I do not wish to replicate that very tempting error. & most importantly, while it might be perceived by some as a positive valuation of their lives, it seems just as likely to put an unreasonable and ultimately coercive demand upon the choices of individuals such that each must accord with some unspecified radical and transgressive intent. Such a move, I would argue, both diminishes the worth of many activities that may have little political charge by themselves and further, it could also make recognizing that which truly is radical that much more difficult, through having a pre-existing template for what counts as socio-politically radical.

Mea Culpa sour cherry rakija
from Belgrade

So, to conclude and bid adieu to my unfortunate choice of terminology, let me say that while I think the term does point to something with a certain "reality" - that it is to be hoped that as time passes, it will seem harder and harder to discern this effect until there is no longer any referent for that phrase. Perhaps I am being utopian? it is not as if we have dispensed with racism or sexism or ableism or however any other biases. But, has no progress been made? To quote a source I rarely make use of (Allen Ginsberg);

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

...no need to limit to "America" tho...