Gender Diversity; Crosscultural Variations by Serena Nanda

I picked this up for the following reasons, i. it fits nicely with my current reading trajectory, ii. it was priced at $.01 + shipping on amazon, and iii. the author is also the author of the highly acclaimed  Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India  and so I thought it might be relatively solid.

& the book cover is so… 1970s or something. 

My copy has multiple university used book stickers on it and underlining from more than one previous owner. Usually I'd be a bit miffed about that, but somehow here it didn't seem that important. In spite of Nanda's credentials, this is sort of "academically breezy" and seemed to me to pick up the pace or move to the next section just at those moments when I wanted it to dig in a bit more.

Now, without looking back, what do I remember about it? Nanda looks at a select number of cultures and at gender diversity as presented by these. Now, what were they? Well, there is a south asian chapter discussing the Hijras of course, & there was another on Native Americans. The book discusses Brazil, but having already read Don Kulick's (fucking amazing) book Travesti, there was nothing new there for me. Then there was a chapter on Thailand, a chapter on Polynesia and… I am forgetting something. Grrr.

SUPEREGO says: Ha!

yeah yeah whatever

Ok, (book in hand) the Thailand chapter also covers the Philippines, and the other content chapter was on "Sex/Gender Diversity in Euro-American Cultures." I kind of remember that now, it goes back in history to find some more "anthropological" looking stuff in the european context but ultimately is more about contemporary stuff. I'd read Meyerowitz's history just before this and so was primed to notice places where Nanda makes a controversial claim or two. Somewhere in there she replays the (increasingly suspect) transsexual/transgender "debate" and sides pretty clearly with the transgender construction she's made, and is critical of transsexuals that seek SRS. 

Oh, and there is a list of "Selected Films" which begins with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Really? It's a feel-good movie and sort of cute but as a supplemental for a college level class on gender diversity? But most of the others on the list look more useful for that purpose (I still have not seen Ma Vie en Rose). 

I suppose that the index of this book is as useful as the text though. If one had heard nothing about any of this stuff this might serve a useful purpose, but even where I knew nothing at all (the polynesian chapter) it never really went deep. 

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).

Tango by Justin Vivian Bond

Tango is a memoir by Mx Justin Vivian Bond. You might know Bond from Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006). Or maybe you know V's music, or performance? Or, maybe you are wondering about the V and Mx, have no idea who I am writing about at all, in that case - try, if you want, this video (V tells a few stories that are in the book so you get a feel perhaps for that) or if in a readerly mood you can have a look at this interview with V in the New Yorker to get clear on that pronoun and prefix stuff and get more about the book than I am going to tell you here (Bond suggests T for trans as a designation alongside M and F for official documents with the quip that for V to identify as man or woman would be a lie, a statement that might trouble some while being applauded by others. & Bond has no issue with using the "T word" either, though for those in doubt I suggest extrapolating from who is able and who isn't to use the "N word"). 

a n y w a y

I picked the book up in the local malevolent mega-chain book store and bought a coffee and started it - none of the links or any of that stuff above are needed to appreciate the book at all and you won't even have any pronoun stumbling. Sometime later it was a buy it or steal it moment and we left together, the book and I, only for me to finish reading it an hour or so later in a more congenial coffeeshop in Decatur (my train ride between filled by… readingreadingreading). The central relationship that the text is in a sense about - between Justin and this relatively evil neighbor kid - is pretty gripping, weirdly twisted and yet somehow emotionally comprehensible in Bond's telling, for me at least. Which might just be to say that it feels real, not in the lacanian sense of course, I capitalize then (and someone called me an idealist for doing that, go figure) ((though, there is something to think about with the Real in aesthetics) but that's not in the cards right now).  The book is in the other room on the shelf now, and I am unable to remember the name of the other kid 

[*export to self-analysis, parapraxis, forgetting of name]

but at the end there is a detail about how he was arrested as an adult and that links to the name Tango and back to the childhood storyline - Tango is a code name I think - and this provides an effective sort of partial closure for the narrative even if many questions remain about the other kid's thoughts and of course - what else happened? what does Justin do next? the book is so short and I wanted more. It was somehow exactly the right book for me to have picked up at that moment (and I'd looked at half a dozen before I opened it). I'd cheerfully read another of V's books when another just right moment arrives.

My Reading vs reading the encyclopedia

I sometimes fantasize about annotating everything I read - especially so when I am in a period where (as now) I am soaking up information at a pretty intense rate. About this fantasy for a moment…

What, you still haven't read me?
Get crackin'!

During my analysis, a story from my childhood, replete with paternal demand and thus Oedipal dynamics a'plenty, emerged at one point and it came back up now and then at moments that felt significant. Here is how it went. My dad knew these other folks, a family, he'd done some kind of work for them I think and my dad liked the other dad - they played tennis. The kids were boy and girl and both in high school, I was in late elementary. The parents of these teens talked to my dad and I about how amazingly smart their teens were, how well they did in school, etc. These parents - and the teens who were present at the time - attributed how smart they were and how well they did in school to each having very diligently read an entire set of Encyclopedia Britainica. Seemingly instantly, an entire set of the regular Britainica and the Britainica Junior arrived at our house. For the next few years I dreaded when my father would next ask me how many volumes of the Britainica Jr. I had read yet. Some years later, when I was a high school student myself, he began demanding that I read the regular "grown up" Encyclopedia Britainica, advising me on how much better all things related to school would be if I did, of course noting that I would have learned so much more already if I had read the Jr. when I was younger, but it was not too late, especially if I gave up reading those stupid science fiction books (I believe I was reading Delaney's Dhalgren at one of these moments with great secret glee and excitement). I am perhaps making this sound somewhat funny. It is in hindsight I guess. At the time this was often enough one aspect of a power dynamic utterly brutal in its hegemonic hold on the household, but whatever. I never could imagine back then that reading the entire Encyclopedia Britainica was even possible, much less that I myself would ever do so. Now I recognize that it is surely possible, though it looks amazingly dull to me and I have no illusions that it makes anyone smarter to read encyclopedias. But of course I really do! Otherwise I wouldn't have the fantasy at all, I wouldn't own The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (in 24 volumes!). &….

Google -> Image:
"The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud"
and this still from Rey Parla film came up.

I wouldn't dream of somehow processing, digesting, and writing about, everything that I read that I find fascinating. Another way of saying this is that the unspoken demand that the repressed master makes in the Discourse of the University (per Lacan in Seminar XVII), that everyone, endlessly, obsessively Keep On Knowing More and More, can, at times, given the background above (and other stuff I could include) make of that very impossible demand itself, a lure for my ego, an enticement, something desirable... 

This too came up with the same search that found the film still,
perhaps I could joke that google image searching performs
the same function as the fantasy that I am discussing? in that
searching for Freud's SE, I get a film still that appeals to me as art
and a photo of a beautiful young woman, this would be
the impossible demand presenting itself as desirable
through the mechanism, the automaton of language(s)
. . . or maybe it's just an excuse to post babe pics?

But whatever, I'm more self-aware than that aren't I? I can take up a different stance with regard to the incessant push of that desire.

Well, then - take that stupid fantasy! 

I will now begin making utterly cursory references to books that while I did read them, I haven't rewritten them with a third book of my commentary to prove to the Superego that I know, am and have all that they contain! 

Google -> Image: Superego (all kinds of fun stuff shows up)

SUPEREGO says: hmph. you have escaped nothing!

Inner Analyst Voice says:  "...prove..." (and it might have been a question but might not have been...)

My Reading Habit

Someone asked me some questions about my reading habits yesterday. I surely have thought about them now and then, but at the same time, I tend not to think about what I am reading and why (even as that cuts against good grad student practice). Rather, I follow my interests. 

But in order to answer the questions asked of me, I assembled every book that I am currently reading, where "currently reading" means that sometime in the last month I have been reading it and that I have not given up and consigned it to the shelves as something that I might get back to. It also means (this may be obvious) that I have not finished reading it (as with Schwartz & Begley's book that i posted about yesterday). There are eight titles here...

Richard Totman's THE THIRD SEX

This is pretty good but only if I forget about how fabulously interesting Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes by Don Kulick was. I stalled when some other book looked more immediately engaging, but chances are I'll finish this one before another month goes by. 

Mark Solms' and Oliver Turnbull's THE BRAIN AND THE INNER WORLD

I just started this two days ago. This is neuroscience + psychoanalysis, or neuropsychoanalysis. I am curious to see how this plays out, but also have my skeptical glasses on.

Jean-Michel Quinodoz's READING FREUD; A CHRONOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF FREUD'S WRITINGS

This is a handy book. I'd love to have been able to take Quinodoz's three year course on the entire Standard Edition, but he isn't at GSU and no one would let him teach that here. This is nearly a textbook and does not cover everything in the SE, but it is interesting to see what he highlights are the most important milestones and while I now and again do not entirely agree with his opinions about certain matters, the man obviously knows his stuff very well. 

Bhante Gunaratana's MINDFULNESS IN PLAIN ENGLISH

I already know Vipassana meditation, I practiced it for some time back in my 20s. But as I am trying to get back into the practice again, I thought I'd get this book as a refresher. It's a quick read and I am almost done with it now. [On a side note, the idea that I would ever utter a phrase like "I'm trying to become more mindful" makes me want to hit myself, hard, repeatedly - feel free to apply that rule to me should I ever say something so full-of-shit sounding]

Levi Bryant's THE DEMOCRACY OF OBJECTS

I read through several chapters (with one out of order, for a reason, but still, that sometimes throws me off) and will get back to it, I got sidetracked when I went to NC a few weeks back. What I read was pretty great though.

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine's TOTAL NUTRITION: THE ONLY GUIDE YOU'LL EVER NEED

At 800 pages or so, I'll likely never read this entire book. But, the opening three chapters "The Basics of Healthy Eating" was more interesting than I had expected and I read the chapter on "Dietary Fiber" which was also useful to me. Chances are I will never crack the chapters on nutrition for blood disorders or kidney disease, but it still seems like a useful book to have around. Did you know that Vitamin C tablets include only half of the balanced Vitamin C you get from an orange or grapefruit? They have only ascorbic acid and that isn't enough, ergo you piss it out later. & did you know that studies of the health of those who eat well and take no vitamins or supplements vs those who eat well and take them religiously indicates that the health impact of supplement is zero? 

Gerd Gigerenzer's GUT FEELINGS, THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

This is an odd book. I am not done yet and I could imagine setting it aside and forgetting about it. Though the author uses words like "unconscious" and even "superego" there is nothing psychoanalytic about this at all. His real topic is "gut feelings" or "intuitions", particularly those which strike you quickly and those things which we know how to do but cannot explain how know how we do. 

An edited collection of poetry by René Char, FUROR AND MYSTERY & OTHER WRITINGS

Super great! I am savoring, with both a bookmark that moves steadily forward and the option to browse around and reread or look ahead. At this rate I may spend another few months on this book.

Markos Zafiropoulos' LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS, OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951-1957)

Not sure why I started this and I may shelve it (or rather close it, as I have this electronically) but before I do my comps the chances are that I will read this just to help flesh out early Lacan's debts to Levi-Strauss and structuralist thought.

So, there you have my reading habit - if that is, I exclude stuff I read online, as news, on blogs or in magazines and journals - and I am bracketing the poetry that I read every Wednesday night at the weekly APG meet.