Whither the transvestite? Theorising male-to-female transvestism in feminist and queer theory

Whither the transvestite?

Gayle Rubin’s ‘Thinking Sex’ (1984) has recently been hailed in a special issue of GLQ as an inaugural essay for queer thought and placed alongside the early work of Butler, Halperin, Sedgwick and de Lauretis in this respect (Love, 2010: 2). In this same issue, Rubin herself retrospectively celebrates the essay’s ‘protoqueerness’ (2010: 40), evident in its attention to a multiplicity of subject positions and its political focus on a coalition built on difference. Seeking to mediate between feminism and sexuality studies, ‘Thinking Sex’ reveals some of the gaps through which the transvestite escapes both the feminist scholarship to which Rubin responds and the queer theory that her own work prefigures. ⁷

In her essay, Rubin makes explicit mention of ‘transvestites’ but almost always places the term between commas, in long lists of other sexual minorities, many of which receive more explicit attention in the analytic portions of the piece. Rubin is painting with a broad brush in ‘Thinking Sex’ and accordingly cannot delve into any single minoritarian sexuality in much depth. A closer reading, however, suggests that the transvestite’s failure to appear in the more analytic sections may have more to do with the characteristics of Rubin’s social analysis itself than it does with the essay’s constraints of time, space or preference. ‘Thinking Sex’ emphasises a hierarchical view of sexual diversity, calls for a divergence in the studies of gender and sexuality and suggests a teleological approach to community formation for sexual minorities. By contrast, male-to-female transvestism does not fit easily in ‘hierarchies of sexual value’ (Rubin, 1984: 150), attests to the intertwinement of gender and sexuality and, as a largely private phenomenon, resists the type of community formation Rubin envisages

The transvestite first appears in Rubin’s list of ‘the most despised sexual castes’, namely ‘transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and [cross-generational lovers]’ (1984: 149). But the transvestite does not fit easily within her ‘hierarchical system of sexual value’ (Rubin, 1984: 149), especially the over-literalised versions of the system found in the essay’s diagrams. The famous ‘charmed circle’ diagram, for instance, depicts two concentric circles, each cut into twelve pie pieces (Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

The segments in the outer circle are filled with descriptors that Heather Love aptly labels ‘protoqueer’ (2010: 6). The descriptors in the inner ‘charmed circle’ could perhaps be termed, by analogy, ‘protoheteronormative’, detailing the characteristics of socially sanctioned sexual activity. The male-to-female transvestite who experiences an erotic response to dressing, however, flits in and out of the charmed circle. His erotic activity (qua transvestite) mostly occurs at home but relies heavily on manufactured objects. He may be married ⁸ and, in other contexts, may have precisely the kind of idealised sex that the charmed circle describes, but his erotic engagement with female clothing itself is non-procreative and may often happen alone. ⁹ Empirically speaking, he likely identifies as heterosexual but depending on the idiosyncrasies of his own circumstances, may or may not gain social cachet from a heterosexual identification.

The male-to-female transvestite, then, collapses Rubin’s charmed circle in on itself, presenting a conceptual puzzle for queer theory: how do concepts of queerness and heteronormativity map onto the largely private and predominantly heterosexual phenomenon of male-to-female transvestism? Cathy Cohen has famously issued a challenge to the ‘assumption of a uniform heteronormativity from which all heterosexuals benefit’ (1997: 452). More nuanced formulations of ‘heteronormativity’ do indeed seem capable of disarticulating heteronormativity as a social conglomeration of ‘institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations’ from the fragmentary mess that is heterosexuality on a cultural level, an analytic clarification that might accommodate a notion of queer heterosexual sexualities (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 548–552; cf. Schlichter, 2004: 546).

But as Annette Schlichter argues, ‘in most queer writings’ the concept of ‘“heterosexuality” remains a monolith opposite a rainbow of “queer” subjectivities, practices, and lifestyles’ (2004: 549). In other words, the illusory cogency of Rubin’s ‘charmed circle’ stands to be further refuted. Furthermore, the figure of the ‘queer straight’ in queer scholarship remains ‘elusive’, ‘paradoxical’ and contested, caught in a net of substantive concerns about the political allegiances of queer theory, the ‘co-optation’ of queer theory and the culpability of straights vis-à-vis forms of heteronormative privilege (Schlichter, 2004: 544–545). Male-to-female transvestism, then, as a predominantly private, heterosexual phenomenon remains difficult to locate with respect to the current subjects of queer theory despite its having a foot in Rubin’s ‘outer limits’ and a marginal status relative to the enshrined heterosexual ideals in the ‘charmed circle’. Its privacy threatens to render it irredeemably complicit with ‘the heteronormative privilege to privacy’ that has animated much queer scholarship and its relative straightness raises questions about the extent to which it can or could be theorised in a political-cum-academic project that emerges from gay and lesbian movements (cf. Schlichter, 2004: 551–554).

I would also argue that the split that Rubin proposes between the analysis of gender and the analysis of sexuality would fracture the study of male-to-female transvestites’ sexual experiences. ¹⁰ Indeed, for many male-to-female transvestites, gender and sexuality may not have a ‘separate social existence’ (Rubin, 1984: 179): the gendered experience of wearing clothing is precisely what is erotic. In the context of the feminist sex wars, Rubin’s desire to theorise sexuality apart from certain anti-porn, anti-BDSM and transphobic feminists is one with which I empathise. ¹¹ In addition, as Sedgwick notes, the uncoupling of gender and sexuality plays a critical role in gay and lesbian politics, specifically in the assertion, for instance, that ‘one woman, as a woman, might desire another’ (1991: 20, emphasis in original). And yet even as the political necessity of countering the deployment of sexuality as a ‘vector of oppression’ (Love, 2010: 3; Rubin, 1984: 164) remains clear, the analytic separation of gender and sexuality has since come under question (see for example Butler, 1994).

A rigid adherence to the analytic separation of gender and sexuality would also foreclose a different kind of coalitional possibility between transvestism and male homosexuality. Rubin’s coalition is built on a shared status of marginalisation among adults, hence the close attention paid to legal phenomena such as sodomy statutes, ‘sex offender’ laws and Supreme Court rulings. Legally speaking, male-to-female transvestism and male homosexuality are treated very differently. But, given Sedgwick’s reminder that ‘for any given adult gay man… the likelihood is disproportionately high that he will have a childhood history of self-perceived effeminacy, femininity, or non-masculinity’ (1991: 20–21), male-to-female transvestites and gay men may often share childhoods of marked gender non-conformity. ¹² Sedgwick argues that a too-thorough disentanglement of gender and sexuality may ‘eclipse… the effeminate boy from gay male discourse’, leaving him in the ‘haunting abject of gay thought itself’ (1991: 20–21). I would add that it might also eclipse the possibility of a rich theorisation of male boyhood effeminacy as a possible point of convergence between male-to-female transvestism and male homosexuality.

Rubin’s final mention of transvestites in ‘Thinking Sex’ calls into question their place in an analysis of marginalised sexualities that focuses on public manifestations of difference. Rubin places transvestites alongside ‘bisexuals, sadomasochists, individuals who prefer cross-generational encounters, [and] transsexuals’ as groups that, in contrast to the well-established gay community, are still ‘in various states of community formation and identity acquisition’, who have yet to ‘acquire social space, small businesses, [and] political resources’ (1984: 158). This passage suggests a teleological trajectory for sexual subcultures: they emerge, meet in public, accrue capital and undertake political campaigns. Ideally they will coalesce into a ‘unified and self-conscious coalition of sexual radicals’ (Rubin, 1984: 181). Male-to-female transvestism as presently practised, however, seems radically offset from this trajectory.

Decades after ‘Thinking Sex’, the phrase ‘transvestite community’ remains oxymoronic on a macrocultural level. These days, there are scattered support and meet-up groups that cater to male-to-female transvestites. Tri-Ess, the most famous, has a modest twenty-five chapters in the US (Tri-Ess, 2011). Online forums receive more traffic but these have high turnover: on crossdressers.com, for example, new members often post in a flurry before disappearing, only to re-emerge months or even years later. Furthermore, the majority of male-to-female transvestites have gone through at least one ‘purge’, the act of discarding one’s entire female wardrobe out of shame or guilt (Docter and Prince, 1997: 596) ¹³ and, as such, the male-to-female transvestite population (if such a term is even appropriate) fluctuates considerably as people embark on and return from ‘purges’. This instability aside, the secrecy of transvestism makes both community building and the thorough study of its culture a nigh impossible task; as one surveyor notes with evident frustration: ‘Populations of cross-dressers are notoriously difficult to identify, due partly to the clandestine nature of the activity itself’ (Schott, 1995: 313). Male-to-female transvestism is a geographically diffuse, radically compartmentalised and fluctuating subculture that is not amenable to the type of community formation that Rubin envisions in ‘Thinking Sex’.

Emergent, public, politically volatile groups are attractive objects of critical focus and rightly so, but male-to-female transvestism serves as a reminder that many sexualities and gender identifications are almost invisible from a broader, cultural perspective. Male-to-female transvestism, then, raises questions about the relationship of academia to minoritarian groups, namely, what are the conditions in which a group can become a subject of feminist and/or queer discourse? What combination of history, marginalisation, public visibility and coincidence puts a group on the radar? And, in the case of male-to-female transvestism, is it possible to simultaneously hold on to the valuable three-word assertion of the title ‘Sex in Public’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998) while also considering the bedroom of the transvestite?

The question of male-to-female transvestism’s relative domesticity also hangs over its brief appearance by association in Judith Butler’s canonical Gender Trouble (1990). In the conclusion, the drag queen’s public, parodic achievements overshadow the shy transvestite’s private re-stylisings of gender. Butler broaches the broader topic of ‘cross-dressing’ but delivers no explicit comment on transvestism per se (1990: 188). As Butler notes in Undoing Gender, part of the reason the drag queen serves as Gender Trouble’s performative mascot of choice is because Butler ‘spent… her evenings, well, at the gay bar, which occasionally became a drag bar’ (2004: 213). To be sure, however, the choice of the drag queen runs deeper than the circumstances of Butler’s graduate school social life. ¹⁴ In Gender Trouble, Butler’s critical investment in cross-dressing as a practice is the ‘parody’ of the ‘notion of an original or primary gender’ (1990: 188). This thesis may suit the drag queen: parody is in her job description. The drag queen is a theatrical figure that winks, even under the weight of her luxuriant false lashes. But the premium Butler places on parody hits male-to-female transvestism at an angle that is oblique at best and perpendicular at worst: as evidenced by their concern with passing in quotidian situations, many male-to-female transvestites are earnestly invested in the believability of their imitation. To position the male-to-female transvestite as a parodic figure, then, may be to claim that his theoretical utility is the mockery of his own aspirations.

Indeed, Butler’s theory of gender performativity in Gender Trouble ¹⁵ takes on a different resonance when considering male-to-female transvestism. Butler defines gender as ‘the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts… that congeal over time to produce the appearance… of a natural sort of being’ (1990: 45). Stylisation consists of gestures, movements and acts that, although ‘internally discontinuous’ (Butler, 1990: 192), nonetheless adhere in the gendered logic on which discourse itself depends. In one sense, the male-to-female transvestite who tries to pass lends confirmation to an understanding of gender as performative. Appearing as ‘a natural sort of being’ is often his goal. His bodily stylisation – a term I use here in a more literal way than Butler – is particularly demanding: at its most thorough it involves shaving, tucking, plucking and padding. It requires clothing, makeup and a wig. The male-to-female transvestite may also try to replicate the ‘internally discontinuous’ gestures and movements that together produce an illusion of femininity.

But Butler has an illocutionary investment in proposing a theory of gender performativity that may be at odds with male-to-female transvestism’s investment in the fiction of gender. Sedgwick observes that the conclusion of Gender Trouble is emblematic of a paranoid style of critical theory that places ‘an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure’ (Sedgwick, 1997: 17). Butler’s text places a high premium on the value of revelation, exposure and denaturalisation, the operative yet implicit assumption being that if people are made aware of the fact that gender is unnatural, they will become more tolerant of difference. It is strange that Butler undermines the authenticity of the doer behind the deed but nonetheless relies on the illocutionary force of labelling sex and gender as fictions. In other words, Butler contends that the notion of an authentic, extra-discursive human foundation is a spurious one but speaks from a position that derives its ethical impetus from the act of uncovering the ‘in-authenticity’ of gender. In Nietzsche’s characteristically pithy words: ‘Why couldn’t the world that concerns us – be a fiction?’ (1886: 237, emphasis in original). If almost every aspect of human sociality could be said to be based in fiction, then the particular claim that gender and sex are fictions loses its force. In other words, there is nothing more authentically human waiting in a world in which sex and gender have been successfully denaturalised. ¹⁶ Male-to-female transvestites, while challenging the link between sex and gender, are nonetheless invested in the performance of gender, not to subvert it or expose its ficticity, but to enjoy the show.

If ‘Thinking Sex’ and Gender Trouble both mention or implicate male-to-female transvestism without delving into its specificity, then Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, a widely read monograph on cross-dressing, promises to deliver a look ‘at rather than through the transvestite’ (1992: 129, emphasis in original). Garber, however, uses the term ‘transvestite’ in the broadest sense, applying it to heterosexual men with an erotic interest in cross-dressing, female impersonators, Shakespearean stage actors and a wide variety of female-to-male cross-dressers. Even Elvis, Liberace and Valentino are figuratively invited into the expansive transvestite fold (Garber, 1992: 353–374). A single chapter of Garber’s moves all too seamlessly from transvestism to male-to-female transsexualism to female-to-male transsexualism (1992: 93–117). On a simple terminological level, then, Vested Interests is a confusing obstacle in the specification of transgressive sexualities, a task that, as David Halperin notes, remains difficult in contemporary queer theory (2003: 341).

On a more theoretical level, however, I am struck by the asymmetry between the diversity of cross-dressing groups in Vested Interests and the univocality of Garber’s thesis on cross-dressing, which is Butler’s almost word for word. Garber contends that cross-dressing ‘[puts] in question the very notion of the “original” and of stable identity’ (1992: 16). Cross-dressing ‘challenge[s]… easy notions of binarity’ and questions ‘the categories of “female” and “male”’ (Garber, 1992: 10). I am concerned that, in the formulation of this thesis, the many reasons why people cross-dress and the many gender identifications that such people claim are placed in subservience to the single, theoretical goal of the radical subversion of gender. For instance, male-to-female transvestites do transgress gender categorisation but female norms of dress and appearance function as erotic ideals for many male-to-female transvestites. Conscripting the male-to-female transvestite into a universal fight against binarism then may be counter to his erotic interests. This is a question not of the veracity of Garber’s thesis, but of the thin yet crucial line between the observation of a group’s actual social effects and a critical co-optation of a group for a desired social effect. For me, this constitutes the difference between looking ‘at rather than through’ (Garber, 1992: 129, emphasis in original), between asking what a group does and asking what a group can do for an idea.

Whither the transvestite? As it stands, some of the most thoroughgoing, attentive and occasionally even sympathetic scholarship on male-to-female transvestism has been produced by a medical discipline that also unfortunately classifies it as a sexual paraphilia, marking it as a site of potential danger, a potential cause of ‘significant distress or impairment’ (Blanchard, 2010: 371). For obvious reasons, then, I am not pleased with the prospect of psychiatry (as presently constituted) maintaining theoretical ownership of male-to-female transvestism by default. But while feminist and queer discourses have come to provide affirmation for a wide array of non-normative gender identities and sexualities, the potential for a rich theory of male-to-female transvestism in both feminist and queer theory is as yet unrealised.

In the next section of the article, I move to consider male-to-female transvestism in a different light, through a different set of theorists, only one of whom (Silvan Tomkins) is commonly read in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In taking this brief vacation from thinkers traditionally associated with the study of gender and sexuality, I hope to escape – but only temporarily – some of the broader meta-theoretical issues discussed above and shift my analysis in scale to the granular details of the message board of the website crossdressers.com. In other words, rather than continue the attempt to speculate where the male-to-female transvestite might fit into critical theory from a bird’s-eye view, I want to instead move to a more localised concern with aspects of male-to-female transvestite culture and offer up details about passing and photography that I hope have value, if nothing else, in their close proximity to transvestism and in their newness.

Passing the Turing test

Alan Turing’s (1950) Mind article, commonly known as ‘The Turing test essay’, is an acutely self-conscious piece of speculative design. The Turing test is an imagined scenario in which a computer attempts to convince a human interrogator that it is also a human. Turing knows that this concept will seem fantastical to a reader in 1950; the essay is accordingly characterised by a tension between the loftiness of his vision and the scepticism he pre-emptively attributes to his readers. For instance, Turing pushes the expected date of the first successful Turing test fifty years into the future and further qualifies a successful Turing test as one in which the computer only needs to be able to ‘play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning’ (1950: 442). Beneath the confidence of his scientific prose, Turing seems to be quietly pleading with the sceptic: ‘If you cannot accept the notion of a computer that can think, then perhaps you can abide a (hypothetical) computer (in the distant future) that can (pretend to) think (for a few minutes with a modest chance of success)’.

Turing further prefaces his proposal of the Turing test with an analogy called ‘The Imitation Game’ that involves only human players – a man and a woman – who compete to convince a neutral interrogator that he or she is the only woman out of the two players. The players communicate with the interrogator via teletype from a separate room, the assumption being that ‘tones of voice’ and physical appearance would give an unfair advantage to the actual woman (Turing, 1950: 434). While the imitation game has proven to be provocative for scholars interested in its resonances for gender studies (see below) as well as for Turing’s biographers, ¹⁷ Turing himself simply seems to be reaching for an analogue to the Turing test that will be more relatable for a readership that has no access to complex computing machines. Men and women are readily understood as two different things with the capacity to communicate.

The central methodological tactic in the Turing test essay is to sidestep the profound philosophical problem of defining ‘thought’. For Turing, the ontological question of whether a machine can be a thinking entity is replaced with the interactional question of whether a machine can fool us into believing that it thinks (Turing, 1950: 433–434). For the passing male-to-female transvestite, the act of passing has the potential to perform a similar sidestep around ontological questions of sex, replacing the ontological question of whether or not a man is, in fact, a woman with the interactional question of whether he can fool an audience into believing that he is a woman. This seems to be part of its thrill. In observing this trading of the ontological for the interactional, then, I am not attaching a greater value to an interactionally-defined gender over either self-defined gender or even an ontology of gender. I am, however, observing that passing, like Turing’s imitation game, involves moment-to-moment social interactions in which gender, whether felt or perceived, is at stake. ¹⁸

A handful of scholars have taken up the gendered subtext of Turing’s imitation game. David Golumbia keenly observes that ‘the scene of detecting the gender of an unseen other has come to seem an especially resonant one’ (2003: 38) in the internet era that commenced several decades after the Turing test essay. In hindsight, as Golumbia suggests, there is irony in the relative fates of the imitation game and the Turing test: the phenomenon of gender imitation, which Turing offers as a mere appetiser to the Turing test, has become increasingly salient in the last sixty years whereas the goal of building a computer that can consistently pass the Turing test, despite present access to enormous computing power, remains a dream. Tyler Stevens reads the imitation game as not ‘just an example’ of the Turing test; rather, he contends that it contains the implicit judgement that ‘gender is, paradigmatically, the world knowledge that computer should know’ in order to appear human (1996: 425). The imitation game, then, speaks to the foundational relationship between gender and the concept of thought itself. Stevens also considers the implications of the imitation game for human interactions in virtual space. In message boards and avatar-based internet applications, literalised versions of Turing’s imitation game are constantly enacted in virtual space: people present as different genders online, altering the terms of their interactions with others and profoundly affecting the stability of gender in internet relationships. Stevens locates subversive potential in these online interactions, arguing that ‘such technology does disarticulate gender’ (1996: 425, emphasis in original), erasing its authenticity even as it transmits it further.

Like Golumbia and Stevens, I am taken with Turing’s imitation game for many of the same reasons, specifically its resonance with practices of gender imitation/passing as they pertain to internet sociality. While Stevens’ argument that online interactions can radically destabilise gender is compelling, my reading of Turing’s imitation game does not necessarily have any subversive aspirations. My aim is to read certain discourses and practices surrounding the act of male-to-female gender passing – the directionality of passing suggested by Turing – through an analytic lens informed by Turing’s theory of mind, the roboticist Masahiro Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley and Silvan Tomkins’s theory of affect. The practice of passing among transvestites when read through these theorists highlights the mutuality of affect, motion and gendered social interaction.

Turing’s rule that the players of the imitation game communicate remotely via teletype prefigures the advent of websites and online forums catering to transvestites. In these virtual spaces, the imitation game is played with stacked decks all around: everyone is pretending, the interrogators are your friends and they always choose you. The medium of the online message board preserves the illusion of interacting with other women as women by trading the telltale male larynx for a keyboard. On crossdressers.com, for instance, male-to-female cross-dressers typically post using carefully chosen photographic avatars of themselves en femme and refer to each other as ‘girls’, ‘gurls’, or ‘ladies’ in their messages. The message board, then, is a safe space in which everyone is allowed to pass.

But the limitations on the Turing test also resonate with male-to-female transvestites’ public attempts to pass as well. In particular, the five-minute limitation that Turing imposes on the proctor of the Turing test speaks to the typical brevity of male-to-female transvestites’ first forays into public. When posters on crossdressers.com share memories of their first time out of the house en femme, some common features emerge: these outings are typically solitary, short and nocturnal. One recent thread, for instance, contains several reminiscences of the ‘first time’. Of those members who were alone their first time out, ¹⁹ ‘first’ activities include: walking in one’s neighbourhood after midnight, driving around the block, making a withdrawal from an ATM, fetching the mail, ordering fast food, pumping gas at night and buying soda from a vending machine. Driving is by far the most common first outing and forum members are self-aware about this trend: ‘Like most others [I] went for a drive’.

For those members who continue to pursue the goal of public passing – and many do not, preferring to stick to less risky activities ²⁰ – the logical next step is an activity that requires more human interaction: ‘After I was able to go out and not have everyone turn their head to check out the CD [cross-dresser], my goals were to find things that caused me to interact with others’. One new member reflects on this escalation of interaction as one’s confidence grows:

Maybe stepping out for the first time is the biggest rush … but once you have done that … what is the next boundary you thought you’d never do? Is it driving? Then driving where you need to pay a toll to a toll taker? … Is it shopping? And then shopping … and using a debit card at a self-serve? Then buying something and paying a cashier in person?

These first ‘boundary crossings’ – as I will call them, taking a cue from this poster – are model Turing tests: the interrogators (toll takers, cashiers, waiters) are only given brief windows to ascertain the transvestite’s assigned sex and, as in many contemporary instantiations of the Turing test, topics of conversation are limited and predictable. ²¹

But the parallels between the Turing test and passing run deeper than the time constraint. Male-to-female transvestites in these ‘boundary crossing’ activities are in many ways charting a digital – as opposed to an analogue – course through the world. ²² ‘Boundary crossing’ outings seem to usually be planned in advance: they are pre-programmed. One member’s recollection of driving through a fast food restaurant uses suggestively computational language: ‘I had rehearsed my “script,” but I had to respond to unexpected questions…’. These outings involve discrete tasks, usually transactions, which render them comfortingly discontinuous, able to be parsed out into components that seem less daunting on their own: drive, stop, play script, receive item, drive. And they are at their least terrifying when they require only binary input: ‘Paper or plastic?’ ‘Would you like your receipt?’ Rather than continuously moving through human-to-human interactions in a free, intuitive and unexamined manner – a skill that can come with time – male-to-female transvestites tend to focus first on scripted activities that will allow them to navigate the world digitally. This is a strategic digitisation of human interaction that can both project and instil a feeling of continuous, analogue femininity; it is the Turing test flipped on its head.

The strategic self-digitisation that characterises ‘boundary crossing’ activities also involves a limitation of bodily motion, a limitation that I read via analogy to the idea of the ‘uncanny valley’, a principle of android design that is relevant to gender passing because it, too, describes the terms of an encounter between an observer and someone seeking recognition. Originally authored by roboticist Masahiro Mori (1970), the uncanny valley principle posits that androids with human qualities are endearing to humans up to a certain point at which intense lifelikeness becomes deeply unsettling (Figure 2). Mori further postulates that the addition of motion exaggerates both the familiarity of ‘safe’, semi-lifelike robots and the discomfort induced by too-lifelike androids: a moving stuffed animal is cute but a moving android that too nearly approximates human gestures would be incredibly disturbing (1970: 33–35). With the advent of computer-generated films, the notion of the uncanny valley has gained widespread popularity. Filmmakers struggle to produce computer-generated characters that audiences will find believable but not off-putting. For instance, many critics had an adverse reaction to the eerily lifelike CGI children in Warner Brothers’ 2004 Polar Express ²³ but the relatively ‘cartoony’ human characters in Pixar films have fallen on the safe side of the valley. OPEN IN VIEWER

Male-to-female transvestites invested in passing face an analogous problem: they tend to want to produce a familiar appearance while avoiding the negative repercussions of appearing unfamiliar. I have revised Figure 2, maintaining its skeletal structure but making changes to chart some of the anxieties surrounding passing that I observe online (Figure 3). OPEN IN VIEWER

The most important change is that the graph now labels the initial sloping curve (in which reception as female increases) and the parabolic ‘valley’ (in which reception as female becomes a riskier proposition) as representative of virtual and public space respectively. Also, the dashed line representing motion now only enters the equation in public space. These changes are intended to give the graph a temporal as well as a spatial inflection: today it is common for male-to-female transvestites to interact with like-minded individuals in virtual space before gathering the courage to go out. In photo postings on crossdressers.com, for example, one’s reception as female becomes increasingly positive as one’s photographs grow more convincing. While supportive, veteran board members can be direct with their feedback. The topic of age-appropriateness, for instance, can elicit brutal honesty: ‘Some of us just don’t belong in a mini skirt and tank top out in public’. When a member shares an impeccable photograph, other board members will respond positively: ‘Great pics, you look so girly!’ Sometimes other members will comment affirmatively on the member’s prospects for passing: ‘Lovely & very passable’. At this level of success, however, many male-to-female transvestites still have their eyes fixed on the peak of fully-fledged, public femininity. The women they emulate are outside and moving.

But venturing outside is a daunting prospect. However effusive the praise can be on crossdressers.com, members still know that mismatches between telling bodily morphology and gender presentation can be carefully obfuscated, even edited, in photographs but not in public. Outside, observers can see from all angles as the male-to-female transvestite moves continuously through public space. As I noted earlier, members’ initial trips outside often involve intense constraints on bodily movement: driving is sedentary and activities like pumping gas or using the ATM happen in close proximity to the car. ‘Boundary crossing’ activities, while more daring, also involve a minimisation and/or routinisation of movement: buying something in a store, for example, involves a small amount of walking, holding out a card or a bill and receiving an item. It is noteworthy, in other words, that forum members do not progress straight from the ATM to the dance floor. In this minimisation of movement, I see male-to-female transvestites’ genuine lack of access to a socially-inculcated style of feminine movement (see Young, 1980) engendering a real fear that motion will reveal their maleness or, in other words, that it will make the dissonance between their body frame and their presented gender more pronounced, landing them in the ‘public valley’.

If the thought of passing involves, as I observe, a seemingly concomitant anxiety about bodily motion, then what is the fate of affect if affect is, as Silvan Tomkins argues, primarily kinetic? In considering this question, I turn to the photographs shared by new members on crossdressers.com. These new members often share self-portraits in which they exhibit a stony expression that would make George Washington – coincidentally a fellow wig-wearer – frown with pride. As one member observes: ‘the more i see the picture section the more i notice how many poeple [sic] that post there look unhappy’. Veteran members take it upon themselves to apply some constructive criticism to these frowny photos: ‘You look great and if you smile, you will look even better’.

For affect theorist Silvan Tomkins, affect is ‘primarily facial behavior’ and secondarily ‘bodily behavior’. In Tomkins’s account of affect, affective states do not precede this behaviour; rather, we only become ‘aware of our affects’ as we likewise become cognisant of the movement of our faces and bodies (1963: 22). When repeated, this cognisance of facial and bodily movement reinforces the motile behaviour and further associates it with a particular affective state. Affect and movement, then, are inextricably intertwined in a constant feedback loop. Shame, in a very real sense, then, is the lowering of one’s head.

If the face is, as Tomkins asserts the affective ‘communication center’ (1963: 22), then what do these frowning faces in the picture gallery on crossdressers.com communicate? I read in these expressions an aversion to unregulated motion that manifests itself affectively. In other words, reducing motion as a strategy in a digital approach to passing scenarios – perhaps even a scenario as safe as sharing a photo with an affirming forum member – may inevitably involve a minimisation of affect, or of facial and bodily movement, as well. No matter how frequently veteran forum members counsel new members to look happy, smiling may be an inevitable casualty of the type of trepidation surrounding motion that adheres to the scene of male-to-female passing for transvestites.

Conclusion

I have tried to approach transvestism’s particularity problem from two different directions. In the second section of the article, I worked from within the particularities of an idiosyncratic slice of male-to-female transvestite culture. Taking a photograph, talking on a forum, planning to go out and finally leaving the house: all of these are complex experiences that speak to the mutual entanglement of affect and motion, to the pleasures of online community and to the thrills and fears associated with passing. In approaching transvestism from this perspective, I wanted to model something akin to looking ‘at rather than through’ (Garber, 1992: 129, emphasis in original) my object of focus, to accord more importance to what male-to-female transvestites in an online community do than to any theoretical work I might use them to undertake.

In the first section of the article, on the other hand, I was concerned with tracing particular challenges, the frictions and complexities that make the prospect of theorising male-to-female transvestism in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies a perplexing one. Male-to-female transvestism stands somewhat awkwardly next to much feminist and queer theory because of its earnest replication of female norms of dress and because of its tendency to be a private, heterosexual phenomenon in contrast to queer theory’s emphasis on public space and its historical roots in gay and lesbian political movements. Male-to-female transvestism is far from an enshrined heterosexual ideal but is also awkwardly situated in the disciplines that seem most ready to affirm it. Whilst I sometimes feel that it is tied up in knots that are too complex to untangle, I take heart in Cathy Cohen’s belief that ‘it is in these complicated and contradictory spaces that the liberatory politics that so many of us work for is located’ (1997: 462).