Abstract
In this essay, I discuss the subtle discursive shifts which have made transgenderism in the USA and Europe into simultaneously a mark of the historically specific definitional cleaving of homosexuality from gender variance, a trendy and stylistic shift from gender androgyny within lesbian communities to gender variance within gender-queer communities, a sign of an internal split within feminism between the stabilization of the category of woman and the undermining of the coherence of the category within queer theory. At the same time, I show how transgenderism has been installed within a “global gay” system as part of the hegemony of US taxonomies – the addition of “T” to the acronym “LGBT” allows for the neat division and explanation of a very wide range of translocal phenomena in terms of the US model. So, how are we to understand and explain the impact of transgenderism upon not only traditional gendering but also upon queer communities and even on the ebb and flow of sexual and gender definition globally?
This article is divided into three sections. In the first, I survey the work of Judith Butler, and in particular her theories of transgender identification, to consider the parochial nature of discussions of gender variance in North America and in Europe. My aim in this first section is to show how contradictory the politics of performativity can be and how much confusion there is in a US/European context in relation to thinking about gender stability and gender flexibility and their relations to gender normativity. Having localized a set of debates about gender variance in a US/European context, I turn to a global context and trace the way that these very local debates about gender variance become stabilized and universalized when they form the basis for studies of gender variance elsewhere. In the final section, I survey some recent films that take the diversity of global transgenderism seriously. Throughout the essay, I am hoping to establish links between notions of “proper” identity, citizenship and global circulations of labels, names and ideologies of gender.
Localizing transgender politics
Transgenderism has some contradictory functions in the USA. Sometimes transgenderism tests the limits of any given gay or lesbian’s community’s tolerance for non-normative gendering and the divide between gay and lesbian politics and transgender recognition might be a sign of new forms of homonormativity (Duggan, 2004); but at other times, transgender claims for recognition (often presented to gay and lesbian communities rather than on heterosexuals or even the state) resolve into new and counter-productive forms of identitarianism; at their best, transgender politics are part of a larger form of queer critique that destabilizes the foundations of heteronormativity and questions the relays of stability between gender, family and nation. As a symptom of these very contradictory tendencies within transgender politics, we can turn to the status of transgenderism within Judith Butler’s work and think through the provocations it has offered and the contradictions it has produced.
Transgender/transsexual objections to Butler’s work have had to do with a recommitment to essentialism and realness within transsexual theory – Jay Prosser (Prosser, 1998), Ki Namaste (Namaste, 2000), Henry Rubin (Rubin, 2003) and even Stephen Whittle (Whittle, 2000) and others associate performativity and constructivism with playfulness and abstract theory while they want to claim serious and deep commitments to the gendered body. Obviously, there is a strong disagreement between queer and trans activists about the meaning of the gendered body that should not be glossed over – trans activists, particularly in England, have committed themselves to a reading of transsexuality that understands gender as an ideological framework but also as a set of practices and behaviors that depend upon the stability of the sexed body. Trans activists therefore tend to defer to an almost empirical understanding of sex and the sexed body or else, in recent context, there is a kind of neo-liberal model of gender queerness in which we are supposed to see as many genders and sexes as there are bodies. In either case, whether we are talking about a transsexuality that emerges from the mismatch of sex and gender or a transgenderism that announces itself as an infinite array of gendered bodies, we are not really using a Butlerian framework.
Transgender suspicion of Butler also draws upon what is now a rather long history of mutual distrust between transgender/transsexual people and academic researchers. Jacob Hale at one point actually produced a rubric for non-transsexual researchers writing about transsexuals to follow (Hale, 1997). Henry Rubin changed his ethnography of transsexual men numerous times over the course of writing and researching it in response to objections from his own informants (Rubin, 2003). And numerous trans community forums have featured admonitions to researchers and theorists about the dangers of theorizing about and across transgender bodies. More recent work on transgender bodies by Aren Aizura (2009) and others, however, has side-stepped these proscriptive formulations and has managed successfully to link questions of gender flexibility to issues of migration, globalization and citizenship.
The most complex articulation of transsexual suspicion of Butlerian gender theory occurs in the chapter in Jay Prosser’s book, Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality, where he asks what the effect of a theory of gender performativity has been upon our understanding of transsexuality; he also argues that for all our talk about “materiality” and “embodiment,” it is precisely the body that vanishes within ever more abstract theories of gender, sexuality and desire (Prosser, 1998). Prosser comments specifically upon the close relationship between queerness and gender performativity and situates transsexuality as that which is at odds with precisely such understandings of the body:
queer’s alignment of itself with transgender performativity represents queer’s sense of its own “higher purpose,” in fact there are transgendered trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to what this scheme devalues. Namely, there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be non-performative, to be constative, quite simply to be. (Prosser, 1998: 32)
Since Prosser wrote this critique of Butler more than a decade ago, the much contested relationship between transgender and transsexual and queer has lost much of its rancor and the contemporary landscape of gender in US/European gender-queer communities is immensely more complicated than the opposition between “real transsexuals” and “playful, performative queers” can conjure. Which is not to say that skirmishes do not continue to break out between trans people who favor surgeries and medical interventions and gays and lesbians who feel that transgenderism might be a capitulation to gender binarism. Indeed, at the Frameline LGBT film festival in 2007 a controversy broke out about a 20-minute film titled Gendercator. The film, a dystopian fantasy, is described by director Catherine Crouch on her website as: “a short satirical take on female body modification and gender. The story uses the ‘Rip van Winkle' model to extrapolate from the past into a possible future” (Crouch, 2006). Crouch, unfortunately, merges two rather distinct issues around body modification – namely plastic surgery and sex reassignment surgeries – in her nightmare vision of a gender normative future. She writes by way of explanation:
Things are getting very strange for women these days. More and more often we see young heterosexual women carving their bodies into porno Barbie dolls and lesbian women altering themselves into transmen. Our distorted cultural norms are making women feel compelled to use medical advances to change themselves, instead of working to change the world. This is one story, showing one possible scary future. I am hopeful that this story will foster discussion about female body modification and medical ethics. (Crouch, 2006)
Crouch also notes on her website that the film is supposed to be satirical, and that it imagines a world where “[s]ex roles and gender expression are rigidly binary and enforced by law and social custom … one where butch women and sissy boys are no longer tolerated – gender variants are allowed to choose their gender, but they must choose one and follow its rigid constraints” (Crouch, 2006).
Crouch hoped that her film would provoke discussion, and so it did, but probably not in the way she imagined. Blogs and chat sites quickly took up the controversial film and expressed dismay that LGBT film festivals would program such a trans-phobic film. Frameline actually cancelled its screening of The Gendercator in response to a petition signed by 150 people calling for the film’s removal from the program. Transgender historian Susan Stryker explained on a public blog why she had signed the petition:
I decided to support this petition because Frameline, as an LGBT inclusive organization, is not the appropriate venue for this sort of work. The film expresses a long-familiar anti-transgender polemic: the idea that transsexuals are anti-gay, anti-feminist political reactionaries who collude with repressive social and cultural power; furthermore, that transsexuals are complicit in the non-consensual bodily violation of women. (Stryker, 2007)
Stryker goes on to refer to a history of anti-transgender feminism and to the problem of projecting dangerous desires onto an “alien other” and then casting that other as a threat to “our” way of life. In this case, Crouch makes transsexuality complicit with a program of gender conformity (which in her film is promoted by Christian fundamentalists as well as transsexuals) and casts the gender variant subject as a victim of new medical technologies within which the body always has a gender and that gender must always be clearly expressed.
The Gendercator will doubtless prove to be a storm in a teacup given that it is not a very good film and it seems to have a premise that may well depend much more on stupidity than malicious intent. Unlike Janice Raymond’s well-received diatribe against transsexuals, The Transsexual Empire, which was written in 1979 but continues to spark outrage today (Raymond, 1979), The Gendercator will probably not outlive its five minutes of infamy. But the responses to the film, ranging from pure outrage to calls for censorship or counter demands for full engagement with the issues the film raises, reveal the confusion that persists within conversations about transsexuality in terms of its relationship to gender norms, victimization, other forms of body modification, cosmetic surgery, marginalization, gender transgression and so on. The controversy also reveals how important it is to have complex, theoretical discussions about gender in circulation in queer communities given the propensity for discussions to fall quickly into for or against modes of argumentation. The impulse to tag various media as trans-friendly or trans-phobic also shuts down the possibility of more nuanced discussion, discussions within which one might express uncertainty about the meaning of transgenderism or concern about the circulation of hormonal therapies without being labeled “transphobic.” And finally, the castigation of one short film as the site of pernicious trans-phobia might overlook other problems in the film, namely the way it subscribes to a kind of neo-liberal understanding of identity (one shared, by the way, by countless films in festivals like Frameline’s LGBT festival) as something that one should be able to freely choose and cultivate and of gender as a set of free-floating custom options for embodiment that must be protected and not submitted to a regime of forced decision making.
The controversy over The Gendercator is a good place to examine the legacy of Butler’s work in relation to the vexed topic of gender transgression precisely because it illuminates just how confused we are about gender fixity and gender flexibility and the relation of each to normativity and transgression. For some, gender fixity is the sign of the stubbornness of identification and for others gender flexibility is the indication that discourse has its limits and that some basic human instinct for variation always escapes gender ideologies. Indeed, Butler’s own opus is inconsistent about the question of limits, constraint, expression, and activation. In her early work in Gender Trouble, in 1990, Butler rewrote liberal feminism and even parts of western philosophy by making the gender variant woman the subject of each. While the masculine woman, she claimed, was unthinkable within French feminism because of its commitment to a gender stable and unified conception of womanhood, masculinity was similarly unthinkable as female for continental philosophy and for psychoanalysis. And in Gender Trouble (1990), gender was a site of constraint not flexibility. In the book that followed, Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler responded to various misreadings of her earlier work, precisely around the topic of flexibility and attempted again to emphasize the inflexibility of the gendered condition, its resistance to voluntary action, but its availability for only discrete re-significations. While in Gender Trouble the butch body represented the trouble with a stable understanding of “woman,” in Bodies That Matter the butch body represented the trouble with a stable understanding of masculine power (the phallus) that could not conceive of masculinity without men. In both books, however, gender was not flexible, rather it was the inflexibility of a female commitment to masculinity in each case that signified the thorn in the side of feminism and psychoanalytic conceptions of the phallus. And finally, in Undoing Gender (2004), Butler returns to the entwined interests of transgenderism, intersexuality and transsexuality to argue that gender stability plays a crucial role in the production of the category of the “human.” Indeed, many of our understandings of the human proceed from and presume gender normativity as a foundation for other modes of being. In this book she calls for “recognition” for trans modes of being.
Butler’s work from the last 15 years presents us with a formidable archive of writings on gender, myth, narrative, desire, embodiment, agency, structure, kinship, materiality, disruption, disorder, action, reaction, unpredictability and sexual melancholia. No one narrative about gender emerges from this archive, no single theory of transgender, no singular pronouncement on identity, no unitary position about gender transgression. In fact, in considering Butler’s work as a whole, we might learn from Lacan’s famous “return to Freud” and think about what it means to contemplate the opus of a major thinker and how we might do so without forcing the work into one narrative. In his return to Freud’s work, one of Lacan’s motivations was the disruption of the tendency to cast Freudian psychology as a unified field, as the statement of one consciousness, issued over time but as a singular statement. Lacan’s contribution, in a way, was to refuse the representation of the Freudian archive as a complete and total text and he sought, through dense and complex interpretations, to make the archive fluid again, to free it from the inertia that often sets in once a complex body of work has been consumed, absorbed and seemingly understood. Lacan wrote:
What such a return to Freud involves for me is not a return of the repressed, but rather taking the antithesis constituted by the phase in the history of the psychoanalytic movement since the death of Freud, showing what psychoanalysis is not, and seeking with you the means of revitalizing that which has continued to sustain it, even in deviation. (Lacan, 1977: 116)
Because Butler’s work is so widely read, so widely deployed, in her own time, there is a tendency for readers to situate the work as a monumental set of writings that are united in relation to her own existence as a living, writing, speaking subject. Indeed, the very insights that Butler works from in her own work – insights about the “trouble” of being, about the fragmentation of self, refusals of unified identities and categories – are discarded when it comes to the characterization of her work as a whole. So, in place of the notion of a Butlerian text filled with expressive moments that can be traced back to a unified subject, let’s work instead with its contradictions, its discontinuities and its inconsistencies. And let’s do so not to catch Butler out, within some model of intellectual labor which understands phallic power to be the product of the lack of the other, but rather to recognize the structure of the archive itself as always a field of historically located speech that means something different in its moment of utterance than it might mean later in its moment of interpretation or circulation, now as opinion, now as truth, now as consequence.
And so, it is important to recognize that Undoing Gender and the lexicon it has produced for Butler’s students and adherents is actually engaged in a theoretical project that is quite at odds with the project she began in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter and that the difference between these rather different theorizations of gender has to do with her turn to ethics in the later work and particularly her interest in the recognition of gender variance as an ethical project. As stated earlier, Butler has sometimes been cast as the embodiment of a version of queer theory that dismisses transsexuality as false consciousness while casting transgenderism as the apex of queer subjectivity, and she has often been positioned as a queer feminist with questionable views on trans politics. In Undoing Gender Butler goes to great lengths to dispel this particular characterization of her work and she places gender transitivity at the very heart of political life. She writes:
The suggestions that butch, femme, and transgendered lives are not essential referents for a refashioning of political life, and for a more just and equitable society, fails to acknowledge the violence that the otherwise gendered suffer in the public world and fails as well to recognize that embodiment denotes a contested set of norms governing who will count as a viable subject within the sphere of politics. (Butler, 2004: 28)
In Undoing Gender, Butler returns to the topics of intersexuality and transsexuality and transgenderism but, this time, her focus is not upon the ways in which the transgender body represents a permanently troubled relationship to stable identity, but rather she turns to the concept of “livable lives” and talks about the exclusion of trans bodies from the category of the “human.” In Gender Trouble, the human emerged as a bloody consequence of the abjection of non-normative bodies; in Undoing Gender, the human is the category to which we all aspire and Butler articulates a politics of survival and recognition and calls for us to think about “how to create a world in which those who understand their gender and their desire to be non-normative can live and thrive not only without the threat of violence from the outside but without the pervasive sense of their own unreality, which can lead to suicide or suicidal life” (Butler, 2004: 219). This linked for Butler to a “politics of freedom” but all this also presumes the impossibility of living as an “unreal” person without wanting to kill oneself – of course, all kinds of people live removed from the authenticating assurance of the real, many do much more than survive, many refuse and resist the notion of the real. There is a sort of heroic and liberal narrative at work here that really backs off from the earlier Butler work that wanted to expose a kind of false expectation of liberation lurking in the project of naming and recognition.
Recent debates between Butler and Rosi Braidotti perhaps highlight the tension in Butler’s own work between humanist and anti-humanist strands. When Butler takes on a version of gender normative feminism in Gender Trouble, she, like Braidotti, is arguing for a non-unified, non-teleological politics and subjectivity, she recognizes the instability of the project “woman”; but, when she argues for almost normative forms of justice and recognition in Undoing Gender, and when the transgender subject becomes more unified than “woman” ever was in her theoretical schemas, or when she remains completely bound to psychoanalytic frames of being and becoming and so can only see the mechanism of gender and ignores race and class, an incipient humanism creeps into the discourse. Rosi Braidotti (2006) has accused Butler of cultivating a “theology of lack” and of rejecting a Deleuzian reading of psychoanalysis as the installation of the law of the father. But Butler prefers to see herself as someone focused on “the labor of the negative in the Hegelian sense” and as a philosopher who is deeply interested in questions of “survival” (Butler, 2004: 195). And here, I think we see clearly the contradiction at work in Butler’s discourse on gender – “the labor of the negative” pulls her thinking in one direction and the ethical questions about “survival” and “livability” pull in a very different direction. While Braidotti accuses her of a “theology of lack,” I would say that the problem lies less in “lack” and more in the notion of restitution that follows.
But, when Butler shifts out of the purely ethical reading of gender and inhabits the position of what I would call a theorist of the counter-intuitive, this is when she is at her best: when she theorizes the butch desire (the desire of the butch and for the butch) that prevails despite the oppressive ideologies of sexual difference, when she theorizes in the spirit of what she calls “critical ambivalence” – a tag she applied recently to Hannah Arendt in a review of Arendt’s “Jewish Writings,” (Butler, 2007). This critical ambivalence can be discerned in some of her work when she casts queers and trans as surviving, and more than that as thriving; at such moments, she becomes a theorist of the possible, not utopian, but ever ambivalent about both the totality of power and the ability to resist.
Global transgenders
The critical ambivalence that underwrites most of Judith Butler’s work is the feature of her work that should be most influential in a global discussion of gender. In other words, rather than transposing notions of performativity or gender trouble, the critical ambivalence that Butler models about identities and their fragile claims on legitimacy could provide a method for the analysis of gender variance in a variety of contexts. In a recent book on Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, editors Saski Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya propose to “decolonize global queer studies,” by paying careful attention to the local forms of gender and sexuality regimes in Asia and by resisting the tendency to cast Asian sexualities as simply variations on the model of North American and European queer formations (Wieringa et al., 2009). When we refuse to verify the seemingly inevitable priorness of US/European sexual economies, the volume promises to show, it becomes possible to recognize and learn from other modes of gender identification embedded in other kinds of sexual practice and productive of alternative forms of sociality and community and identity. The goal is commendable to say the least but the collection of essays itself has a hard time maintaining the localness of the US/European forms and an even harder time imagining the potential globality of Asian gender and sexual practices. While the editors of the collection and many of the authors use the term “female masculinities” to describe some of the non-lesbian, gender variant practices between women and transgender men that they study, the US/European understanding of “lesbian” keeps creeping back into the framework as a foundational term of liberated subjectivity against which all other sexual subjectivities must be measured. In her own essay on “Women’s same-sex practices in Japan,” for example, Saskia Wieringa argues that “the Japanese language does not even have its own word for ‘lesbian’” (Wieringa, 2009: 24). This notion that other languages should have a word that signifies female sexual variance in a way that corresponds to the English term “lesbian,” repeats the very global hierarchy that the book says it wants to avoid by moving away from the term queer. As Gayatri Gopinath shows in her work on South Asian same-sex sexualities, anthropologists have been all too quick to scan South Asian languages for words that correspond to “lesbian,” and, when they do not find them, they quickly move to the ludicrous proposal that same-sex sexualities do not exist there (Gopinath, 2005). But this is not to say that anthropological work on sex and sexuality inevitably sustains global hierarchies – indeed, there is a wide archive of work available, particularly on male same-sex relations, which is seriously attentive to questions of traveling theory and categories (Boellstorff, 2007; Manalansan, 2003).
Despite this anthology’s failure to live up to its decolonizing promise, I want to think with the work it showcases, about the true potential of the term “female masculinity” (as opposed to “lesbian”) in a global frame and about the ways it can be used to undo the hegemony of the global gay/lesbian and now, global transgenderism. What I mean by global LGBT, is the way that a set of categorizations and the framing logics they imply have been circulated and exported around the globe, at least in part by well-meaning anthropologists, and have subsequently blotted out other logics, other names and other sexual economies. So, in this section, I discuss the subtle discursive shifts which have made transgenderism in the USA and Europe into simultaneously a mark of the historically specific definitional cleaving of homosexuality from gender variance, a trendy and stylistic shift from gender androgyny within lesbian communities to gender variance within gender-queer communities, a sign of an internal split within feminism between the stabilization of the category of woman and the undermining of the coherence of the category within queer theory. At the same time, I show how transgenderism has been installed within a “global gay” system as part of the hegemony of US taxonomies – the addition of “T” to the acronym “LGBT” allows for the neat division and explanation of a very wide range of translocal phenomena in terms of the US model. So, how are we to understand and explain the impact of transgenderism upon not only traditional gendering but also upon queer communities and even on the ebb and flow of sexual and gender definition globally?
Let me start by considering the function of transgenderism in relation to global importations of US models of sexual and gender definition. As many queer anthropologists have shown, cross-cultural models of sexuality and gender can be extremely useful in denaturalizing Euro-American notions of embodiment, community and relation but, unfortunately, as we all know, they are too often used to cast Euro-American models as contemporary and liberated while registering queer forms of desire elsewhere as anachronistic. In the liberal Euro-American context, modern gay and lesbian history has favored a narrative about progressive enlightenment within which the same-sex couple emerged into liberation towards the end of the 20th century by throwing off the tyranny of inversion (tyrannical because it presumed heterosexual structures of desire) and by inhabiting normative gender identities and refusing role play. When Euro-American medical discourse, under the influence of a psychoanalytic focus upon sexual aim and object choice, shifted gender variance out of the category of homosexual and recognized a new subject position in the transsexual, the continued link between gender variance and homosexuality was cast as anachronistic and pre-political.
Today, in the USA and Europe, particularly in white gay and lesbian communities, “same sex” is a reassuring description of the happy stability of the sex-gender system. And so, when US researchers find evidence of cross-gendered homosexualities elsewhere, they have a tendency to interpret it as wholly different from Euro-American models and as pre-modern. This has the strange effect of erasing the centrality of cross-gender identification within western homosexualities and projecting it onto other sexual formations, local and global, as a “pre-political” phenomena.
Much of the transnational discourse about gender variance has emerged within anthropological studies of sexuality and gender definition. And much of this discourse is indeed guilty of constructing some kind of global scale for the measurement of sexual “progress” by using the US model as a gold standard for the integration of sexual minorities and as a mark of the level of liberal tolerance in any given national context. For example, some researchers have explained female to male transgender identifications elsewhere as characteristic of the absence of a feminist consciousness that supposedly limits the reproduction of conventional gender norms (Blackwood, 2002) and others have cast same-sex desire itself as wholly absent from non-western contexts (Seizer, 1995). At the same time, new work on “toms” in the Phillippines (Fajardo, 2008), Thailand (Sinnott, 2004) and Taiwan (Martin, 2007), onnabes in Japan, marimachas in Mexico and enforcers in Puerto Rico (some of which can be found in the aforementioned anthology: Wieringa et al., 2009), provide a rich and complex picture of alternative sex-gender systems.
In Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, the editors sometimes also fall into the trap of comparing a standard of “social and sexual egalitarianism” in “Western gay and lesbian relationships” to relationships in Asian between masculine women and their partners which “conform to the dominant gender regimes in their societies” (Wieringa et al., 2009: 9). Wieringa and Blackwood elaborate: “In this case gender regimes produce a gendered subjectivity that does not proffer any explicit opposition to dominant ideologies; the lack of opposition preserves these gender identities through outward compliance with gender hierarchies” (2009: 9). So, where we see masculine women partnered with conventionally feminine women, apparently, we can speak of conformity to gender hierarchies; but when we see two outwardly conventionally feminine or softly androgynous women together, we should understand that we are witnessing “social and sexual egalitarianism.” All kinds of work on butch/femme US and on gender variance under the influence of Foucault, Butler and Rubin would strongly contest this opposition of sameness/equality and difference/hierarchy not to mention the ascription of gender conformity to the couple who “mimic” dominant gender regimes. Here the use of the term “female masculinity” may well steer us away from the hegemonic imposition of the category of “lesbian,” but instead of signaling a sexual arrangement that may elude conventional western liberal feminist wisdom, the authors merely read their own understandings of “dominant gender regimes” through the couples they meet. All gendered behavior on the masculine–feminine model, they imply, partakes in the continuation of conventional gender. And all same-sex activity that lacks the masculine–feminine frame should be read as escaping it. In an era when the image of two white, wealthy feminine lesbians raising a designer baby can be deployed in financial planning commercials among other advertising, this kind of assumption requires some careful rethinking (Eng, 2003).
Some of the mistakes made by anthropologists of gender and sexuality when studying gender and sexual variance in non-western contexts could be avoided by using different methods and frameworks for gauging the similarity or differences between the various models; we could avoid being trapped by the area studies or national model, for example, and might look for repeating logics across different national scapes. For example, while we might want to be careful about reading sameness into a range of “tomboy” or “tomboi” or “boi” or “tom” formations in Asia and elsewhere, we should at least study the category cross-culturally to look for both continuities and distinctions. If we use a standard for comparison other than the national – like, for example, “urban gender variance” or “rural gender variance,” “tomboy” forms – we may find that certain structural similarities do exist outside a national framework. For example, a number of different studies show that many rural communities in Russia, India as well as many in Eastern Europe feature girls who get raised as boys when the labor of the farm or family business demands male labor. These “men” or “husbands” should be studied in relation to each other, or in relation to other roles that are produced “of necessity” rather than in relation to “trend stimulated” roles such as urban transgender bois in the USA.
Anthropological studies have both over- and underemphasized gender variance in their studies and this has, again, had the effect of rendering US models as more stable and coherent than they really are and of both exoticizing and down-playing transgenderism in other contexts. Let me amplify.
Anthropological fascination with gender deviance
This has had the effect of over-representing and exoticizing gender variant individuals when researching minority sexual identities or practices. The fascination with hijaras in India for example or bakla in the Phillippines or onnabe’s in Japan or travestis in Brazil has had several deleterious effects – first it has cast such gender variant groups as representative of transgender practices in those places but second it has linked gender variance to sex work making it unclear when a cross-gender identification has been made for the purpose of selling sex and when it has other kinds of motivations. Anthropologists seem to have been less interested in transgender identifications outside of sex-work contexts.
Anthropologists have often focused on gender variant ‘women’ rather than female to male transgenders
Again, the relationship between sex work and gender variance (which really needs to be theorized in relation to how anthropologists find their informants) dominates the research field. Sex workers are a little easier to find than say passing women or masculine women in any given community. Why has there been so little research on female-bodied transgender subjects (Megan Sinnott’s book Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same Sex Relationships in Thailand (2004) is a recent welcome addition to the field). What is the connection between research funds and sex work/AIDS research and so on and what kinds of funds have been and are available for researching “women” where there is no connection to health concerns per se or informal economic circuits? What are the particular problems faced by queer female researchers studying queer sexual practices? Are there different problems for diasporic researchers versus North American researchers? Antonia Chao, for example, has written eloquently about her problems as a Taiwanese anthropologist returning to Taipei to study T-Po relationships (Chao, 2001). As a Taiwanese lesbian, Chao was expected both to be familiar with the T-Po system and to fit into it. When neither was true, her informants positioned her as a “big sister” in order to resolve the dissonance between her identifications and theirs. Here we might think not just about the strategies used by the anthropologist to work with her informants but also the strategies and deliberations of the informants who want to and have to deal with the researcher. What happens when a context of “suspicion” mediates between the informants and the researcher? What is the effect of an overly structured methodological approach and how does it actually break down more intuitive relations between any given community and a researcher trying to learn about that community.
In the case of female masculinity, for example, it may make a difference in the ethnographic work if the USA/Europe-based researcher is butch. I know from my own travels in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan that I was welcomed into certain gender-stratified communities because I was recognizable as a masculine person within those contexts. In all of these places, I was told of gender normative researchers who had been met with suspicion because they had asked what were taken to be “stupid” or “patronizing” questions about gender, questions which, by the way, would also be heard as uninformed if they were posed to a USA/Europe-based butch or transgender man. The gender identification of the researcher, in these cases, matters; it matters greatly that a US butch can be read as a T or a tomboy, and it matters greatly, as Antonia Chao was gracious enough to realize, when her gender identification cannot be pinpointed.
The feminist problem
Has “feminist” anthropology impeded the work on gender-variant female-bodied people by “looking for lesbians”? For example, when masculine women and trans-men have entered the field of research in contemporary queer anthropology, they have often been cast as examples of pre-feminist “lesbian” formations. Some researchers have read these queer contexts only through a North American understanding of “lesbian” as “feminist,” “same-sex” and “androgynous” and have rendered them as dupes of patriarchy (Blackwood, 2002). In many contexts, feminist networks actually facilitate the research on same-sex desire in any given region and so access comes through an educated and politicized group rather than through contacts that lie outside of academic networks. Furthermore, in many places, there is a loudly articulated set of conflicts between feminists and cross-gendered queers and so the gender-variant subjects are continually interpreted through and by their recalcitrant relation to feminism. And so, the research that emerges from “looking for lesbians” or constructing a feminist framework can be and should be cast as a helpful record of the identifications and commitments of the researcher herself but it tells us very little about gender-variant subjects elsewhere. And so, for example, Evie Blackwell’s fascinating work on Indonesian “tombois” is a complex account not of the tombois but of Midwestern white lesbians.
Global transgenderism
While the tendency to read gender variance in non-western contexts as a sign of anachronism has not been particularly productive, nor has the new tendency to read all gender variance as “transgenderism” – this practice, fairly new given the very recent rise in popularity of the term TG – has had an immediate impact. When I was in Zagreb at a Gender Conference in October 2006, activists from Slovenia and Croatia were complaining about having to use “transgender” in their funding applications rather than any local terms for gender variance. One presentation at the conference by activists from Kyrgystan was about the different terms they use for gender-variant people. The terms were calibrated by age as well as by class status and degree of gender variance and there were at least four terms in use. These terms were explained by the activists but then promptly discarded in favor of the term of “transgender.” In making the switch to “transgender,” the local terms and specific referencing of pre-marriage age and post-marriage age gender identities was lost. This is important because the post-marriage age categories implied a kind of free space for contrary gender and sexual identification. Once a female-bodied person is past her reproductive prime, the social scrutiny of her sexual activities and gender identification may lessen.
Transgender film in a global frame
By way of conclusion I want to draw together the two foregoing parts of this article, the analysis of the multiple meanings of transgenderism in US/European and beyond, and I will do so by thinking very briefly about three recent films, one a German feature film another a North American New York based documentary, and the last a Swiss-Israeli documentary on Philipino transgender guest workers in Tel Aviv. All these films feature transgender material but treat transgenderism as part of a complex matrix of identification rather than as a singular feature of embodiment that can determine livability or unlivability by itself.
The Aggressives: Made by Daniel Peddle (2005)
Until very recently, representations of and research about and by transgenders and gender-variant people in the USA has focused almost exclusively on white subjects. What difference does it make when we consider TG and its lived contexts in relation to race and class and how does this allow us to challenge the hegemony of US definitions and accounts of gender variance? One film, The Aggressives, for example, focuses upon a group of transgender/butch Puerto Rican and Black “studs” in New York City and follows them for a period of five years. As a documentary, The Aggressives is not particularly interesting formally, but, as an account of the very different experience of gender variance for women/men of color, it is crucial. Calling themselves “aggressives,” these butches readily distinguish themselves from both “women” and “transsexuals” and they talk about their sexual practices, their early childhood experiences, their relationships, their work lives. But they also discuss their relation to the law, to drug cultures, to money, poverty, hardship, their very negative experiences with the medical world and their complete lack of social support.
Over the course of the five years, one aggressive has an unexplained hysterectomy, one goes to jail, one joins the army and then goes AWOL when commissioned to go to Iraq, one struggles to keep a job and does drugs. Some have children, some live with their parents. Being trans, this documentary shows, just opens up another and different channel for punishment for the Black or brown body. The Black aggressive who gets a hysterectomy, goes into the hospital for some unusual bleeding and is not informed why she has had her uterus removed – this episode highlights a very different relationship between the trans subject and medical technology than the one that is often highlighted in relation to transsexuality. Here it is the history of the sterilization of Black women that haunts the transgender body, not the history of sex changes. Another subject ends up in jail and she remarks quickly upon the sex lives of prisoners. As an ‘aggressive,’ a jail term, she is placed high in the hierarchy of sex/gender roles inside the jail but, she comments, sex means something different in prison, as do prison genders. Unlike conventional transgender documentaries in the USA that focus on the struggles of an individual with his gender issues and the response to them by his family and friends, The Aggressives shows that transgenderism cannot be separated out from the complex constellation of social pressures that converge on the Black body in the USA. It reminds us of the futility of discrete analysis, and of the importance of what Rod Ferguson calls “queer of color critiques” (2003) which bind studies of sexuality and gender to considerations of class and race. The documentary also marks the whiteness of the category “transgender” and implies that other terms exist in other communities and that these other terms indicate the function of gender in relation to a specific set of life experiences.
Fremde Haut/Unveiled: Directed by Angelina Maccarone (Alles Wird Gut)
On the website for Angelina Maccarone’s independent film Unveiled (2005), the film’s original German title, Fremde Haut, is explained with reference to the UN term for asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are spoken about as “fremde Haut” or “in orbit,” the website explains, “because they can actually find legal domicile nowhere at all.” This film, about an Iranian woman who leaves Iran and her female lover upon fear of legal punishment and then passes as a male in order to seek asylum in Germany, addresses a complex host of issues about gender, sexuality, migration, labor, exile, language, culture, race and location. Literally translated, “fremde Haut” means “foreign skin” but this notion of asylum seekers as “in orbit,” as lost in space or in perpetual motion frames the film quite differently than the English title. While the English title Unveiled fits comfortably into hegemonic US constructions of the closet and visibility it also links the discourse on visibility to one of freedom by playing on western anxieties about the meaning of various forms of head coverings for Muslim women. The German title, Fremde Haut, in its metaphoric meaning, “in orbit,” refuses both the easy logic of visible/invisible that is implied by the notion of veiling and the inside/outside logic that the idea of being in a “foreign skin” prefers; instead, it places the emphasis upon motion, transition, flight, precariousness and inbetweeness.
Fremde Haut tells the story of Fariba Tabrizi (Jasmin Tabatabai), a queer Iranian who fears that she will be jailed or worse if her relationship with another woman becomes public. Fariba arrives in Germany after a long plane ride and then stays in a refugee center with other asylum seekers, among them Siamak (Navid Akhaven), a young political activist. Siamak’s application for asylum is granted but he kills himself in despair over his family in Iran. Fariba’s application is denied because “lesbianism” is not a valid excuse for leaving Iran and so, when she finds Siamak’s lifeless body, she makes a decision to take on his persona. Burying his body respectfully, she now dresses as Siamak, takes his papers and assumes the responsibility for writing to his family. As Siamak, Fariba finds work illegally in a cabbage factory and begins a romance with a German woman, Anna (Anneke Kim Surnau). The film’s English title then, Unveiled, stresses the themes of disguise and disclosure, deception and truth, body and performance but it misses the much more active frameworks of labor and leisure, motion and confinement, desire and space. In the developing relationship between Fariba/Siamak and Anna, the film manages to address the queerness not only of the relationship but also the queerness of the precarious life of the asylum seeker. Balanced as s/he is between nations, identities and legibility, the asylum seeker traces a queer orbit as she passes back and forth between legal and illegal, man and woman, citizen and foreigner. By naming this space in between as queer, we begin to see the importance of mutual articulations of race, nation, migration and sexuality.
The film, on account of the way it weaves a story about veiling and unveiling through a narrative of sexual otherness and transnational migration, pulls together some of the most provocative topics in a European context. Addressing sexual citizenship, queer Muslims, the new politics of visibility, sexuality and religion, space/location and desire draw our attention to the radically transformed European landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries where we find new forms of queer activism and queer identity and community arising in new immigrant communities and their relations to heteronormative demands of state and family and in opposition to stable conceptions of nation, citizenship and identity. As we see in Fremde Haut, Fariba’s decision to cross-dress and pass coincides with her desire to seek asylum – the fact that asylum depends literally upon her being someone else implies the pressures to conform, assimilate and integrate that attend to every effort to relocate for people moving from certain parts of the world to Europe. And as we also see in that film, the gender politics of crossing are inflected by new geometries of desire that become animated precisely by the coincidence of cultural identity, gender performance, labor, and location. The specificity of the desire that arcs back and forth between Siamak and Anna has everything to do with Siamak’s radical unlocatability, his foreignness, his non-German masculinity and his quiet incongruence. That desire, significantly, works quite differently once Siamak has been “unveiled.”
Since sexuality studies and queer theory in a European context has not often addressed itself to issues of political economy, racial formation and the politics of immigration, this film actually directs attention to the limited framework for thinking sex in Europe. At a screening of the film at the 2006 London LGBTQ Film Festival, viewers had a hard time understanding the film’s critique not of Iran but of Europe. And so when the actress who plays Siamak stood up to take questions, despite the fact that she is a German woman born to Iranian parents in Germany, she was asked questions exclusively about how it is for queers in Iran. The film is about how dire it is to be a queer, passing immigrant in small-town Germany, something the actress may actually know something about, and yet this was not seen as a topic for conversation.
In his oft-quoted work on refugee status and the “state of exception,” Georgio Agamben speaks of the contradiction whereby international human rights should be crafted for those “in orbit,” asylum seekers, but which actually works by excluding all such people from access to rights at all (Agamben, 1998). Agamben is interested in naming and putting into relation all those people who lie outside the representational capacities of the state and he identifies Jews and Gypsies as examples. Here we could advocate for a queer alliance of the dispossessed and the precarious, the Jews and Gypsies in some historical moments, the Asian migrant laborer in another, the Muslim activist in one moment, the diasporic queer in another. We might argue for the queerness of the coming community or the multitudes as Hardt and Negri term them (Hardt and Negri, 2005), the queer outsiderness of those who are lost, those who will be lost and those who were always already in orbit.
Paper Dolls: Directed by Tomer Heymann
Finally, the focus on race, immigration and labor has been addressed by Tomer Heymann in an Israeli production about male-to-female transgendered Filipina care-givers who travel from the Philippines to Israel to take work looking after Orthodox Jewish men. While the film addresses the role of the Philippines in providing nurses for First World countries, it also looks at the ways that Israel recruits service workers after closing its borders to Palestinian workers. Paper Dolls locates transgenderism as part of the shifting meaning of social identities in the wake of globalization: the small but bonded community of male-to-female transgender care-givers spend their free time performing in drag as the Paper Dolls in Tel Aviv bars – they receive mixed responses from the Israeli queer clubs – sometimes they are orientalized and asked to perform in drag as other Asian exotics, like Geishas, other times they are warmly welcomed, but their presence in Israel—in the Israeli queer community, in the homes of elderly Jewish men—always marks them as outsiders and as vulnerable not to transphobia in particular but also to deportation, poverty, unemployment or incarceration. The transgender aspect of the film, highlighted both in the drag performances and in the performances of the TG women as care givers, illustrates the complex expansion of the meaning of gender in these elaborate global economies (Manalansan, 2008). As a moving, intimate love relationship develops between one of the workers, Sally, and her employer, an old Orthodox man dying of cancer, these new configurations of gender, desire, intimacy and kinship momentarily eclipse the more familiar arrangements of nation, home, family and domesticity. By the end of the documentary, all of the Paper Dolls have had to leave Israel and as they begin again in other global cities as care givers, performers, transgender women and queer immigrants, they remind us of the limited arenas within which transgender politics have been developed in the USA and call for a wider transgender discourse, one that links transgender identifications – temporary, partial, opportunistic ones as well as permanent and total forms – to globalization, transnational migration, poverty, prison politics and post-national ethnography.