Susan Stryker (2006). (De)Subjugated Knowledges An Introduction to Transgender Studies.
Most broadly conceived, the fi eld of transgender studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specifi city of the sexually diff erentiated human body, the social roles and sta tuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specifi c confi gurations of gendered personhood. Th e fi eld of transgender studies seeks not only to understand the contents and mechanisms of those linkages and assumptions about sex and gender, biology and culture; it also asks who “we” are—we who make those assumptions and forge those links—and who “they” are, who seem to “us” to break them. Th e f i eld asks why it should matter, ethically and morally, that people experience and express their gender in fundamentally diff erent ways. It concerns itself with what we—we who have a passionate stake in such things—are going to do, politically, about the injustices and violence that oft en attend the percep tion of gender nonnormativity and atypicality, whether in ourselves or in others.
Transgender studies, at its best, is like other socially engaged interdisciplinary academic fi elds such as disability studies or critical race theory that investigate questions of embodied diff erence, and analyze how such diff erences are transformed into social hierarchies—without ever losing sight of the fact that “diff erence” and “hierarchy” are never mere abstractions; they are systems of power that operate on actual bodies, capable of producing pain and pleasure, health and sickness, punishment and reward, life and death. Transgender studies has a deep stake in showing how the seemingly anomalous, minor, exotic, or strange qualities of transgender phenomena are in fact eff ects of the relationship constructed between those phenomena and sets of norms that are themselves culturally produced and enforced. Transgender studies enables a critique of the conditions that cause transgender phenomena to stand out in the fi rst place, and that allow gender normativity to disappear into the unanalyzed, ambient background. Ultimately, it is not just transgender phenomena per se that are of interest, but rather the manner in which these phenomena reveal the operations of systems and institutions that simul taneously produce various possibilities of viable personhood, and eliminate others. Th us the fi eld of transgender studies, far from being an inconsequentially narrow specialization dealing only with a rarified population of transgender individuals, or with an eclectic collection of esoteric transgender practices, represents a signifi cant and ongoing critical engagement with some of the most trenchant issues in contemporary humanities, social science, and biomedical research.
1 A LITTLE BACKGROUND
In Feinberg’s usage, transgender came to mean something else entirely—an adjective rather than a noun. Feinberg called for a political alliance between all individuals who were marginalized or op pressed due to their diff erence from social norms of gendered embodiment, and who should therefore band together in a struggle for social, political, and economic justice. Transgender, in this sense, was a “pangender” umbrella term for an imagined community encompassing transsexuals, drag queens, butches, hermaphrodites, cross-dressers, masculine women, eff eminate men, sissies, tomboys, and anybody else willing to be interpolated by the term, who felt compelled to answer the call to mobili zation. In the wake of Feinberg’s pamphlet, a movement did indeed take shape under that rubric; it has gradually won new civil and human rights for transgender people, and has infl uenced the tenor of public debate on transgender issues for more than a decade
Feinberg’s call to arms for a transgender liberation movement followed close on the heels of another watershed publication that laid an important cornerstone for transgender studies, Sandy Stone’s 1991 “posttranssexual manifesto.”9 Stone wrote against a line of thought in second-wave feminism, common since the early 1970s and articulated most vehemently by feminist ethicist Janice Raymond, which considered transsexuality to be a form of false consciousness.10 Transsexuals, in this view, failed to properly analyze the social sources of gender oppression. Rather than working to create equality by overthrowing the gender system itself, they internalized outmoded masculine or feminine stereotypes and did harm to their bodies in order to appear as the men and women they considered themselves to be, but that others did not. In this view, transsexuals were the visible symptoms of a disturbed gender system. By altering the surface appearance of their bodies, such feminists contended, transsexuals alienated themselves from their own lived history, and placed themselves in an inauthentic position that misrepresented their “true selves” to others. Stone called upon transsexuals to critically refi gure the notion of authenticity by abandoning the practice of passing as nontranssexual (and therefore “real”) men and women, much as gays and lesbians a generation earlier had been called to come out of their self-protective but ultimately suff ocating closets. Stone sought to combat the anti-transsexual moralism embedded in certain strands of feminist thought by soliciting a new corpus of intellectual and creative work capable of analyzing and communicating to others the concrete realities of “changing sex. “ To a signifi cant degree, Feinberg’s “transgender” came to name the ensemble of critical practices called for by Stone’s “posttransexual” manifesto.
2. PERFORMATIVITY
The model of linguistic “performativity,” whose general applicability to the fi eld of gender has been popularized most notably by the work of Judith Butler, has been tremendously infl uential within transgender studies precisely because it off ers a non- or postreferential epistemological framework that can be useful for promoting transgender social justice agendas.33 Th e notion of performativity, which is derived from speech act theory and owes an intellectual debt to the philosophical/linguis tic work of J. L. Austin in How to Do Th ings With Words, is sometimes confused with the notion of performance, but this is something else entirely.34 Butler in particular, especially in her early work in Gender Trouble and Bodies Th at Matter, has been criticized in some transgender scholarship and community discourse for suggesting that gender is a “mere” performance, on the model of drag, and therefore somehow not “real.”35 She is criticized, somewhat misguidedly, for supposedly believ ing that gender can be changed or rescripted at will, put on or taken off like a costume, according to one’s pleasure or whim. At stake in these critical engagements is the self-understanding of many transgender people, who consider their sense of gendered self not to be subject to their instrumental will, not divestible, not a form of play. Rather, they see their gendered sense of self as ontologically inescapable and inalienable—and to suggest otherwise to them is to risk a profound misrecognition of their personhood, of their specifi c mode of being.
Speech act theory holds that language is not just, as the structuralists would have it, an abstract system of negative diff erences; rather, language is always accomplished by and through particular speech acts, the intent of which is communicative. Speech is social. It necessarily involves specifi c speakers and audiences, and can never be entirely divorced from extralinguistic contexts. A performa tive is one type of speech act. In contrast to a constative speech act—which involves the transmission of information about a condition or state of aff airs, with which its correspondence is demonstrably true or false (e.g., “Th e apple is red.”)—a performative “constates” nothing. It is a form of utterance that does not describe or report, and thus cannot be true or false. It is, or is part of, the doing of the action itself. Examples of performative speech acts would include vowing (“I do.”), marrying (“I now pronounce you man and wife.”), or being bar mitzvahed (“Today I am a man.”). To say that gender is a performative act is to say that it does not need a material referent to be meaningful, is directed at others in an attempt to communicate, is not subject to falsifi cation or verifi cation, and is accomplished by “doing” something rather than “being” something. A woman, performatively speaking, is one who says she is—and who then does what woman means. Th e biologically sexed body guarantees noth ing; it is necessarily there, a ground for the act of speaking, but it has no deterministic relationship to performative gender.
3. DESUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES
A useful terminological distinction can be made between “the study of transgender phenomena” and “transgender studies” that neatly captures the rupture between modern and postmodern epistemic contexts for understanding transgender phenomena, the diff erent types of language games that per tain to each context, and the diff erent critical practices that characterize each project.38 Th e “study of transgender phenomena,” as noted below, is a long-standing, on-going project in cultures of European origin. Transgender studies, on the other hand, is the relatively new critical project that has taken shape in the past decade or so. It is intimately related to emergent “postmodern conditions” for the production of knowledge, and is as innovative methodologically as it is epistemologically.
Transgender studies considers the embodied experience of the speaking subject, who claims consta tive knowledge of the referent topic, to be a proper—indeed essential—component of the analysis of transgender phenomena; experiential knowledge is as legitimate as other, supposedly more “objective” forms of knowledge, and is in fact necessary for understanding the political dynamics of the situation being analyzed. Th is is not the same as claiming that subjective knowledge of “being transgender” is somehow more valuable than knowledge of transgender phenomena gained from a position of exteriority, but is rather an assertion that no voice in the dialog should have the privilege of masking the particularities and specifi cities of its own speaking position, through which it may claim a false universality or authority.
This critical attention to questions of embodiment and positionality aligns transgender studies with a growing body of interdisciplinary academic research in the humanities and social sciences. Transgender studies helps demonstrate the extent to which soma, the body as a culturally intelligible construct, and techne, the techniques in and through which bodies are transformed and positioned, are in fact inextricably interpenetrated. It helps correct an all-too-common critical failure to recognize “the body” not as one (already constituted) object of knowledge among others, but rather as the contingent ground of all our knowledge, and of all our knowing. By addressing how researchers oft en fail to ap preciate the ways in which their own contingent knowledges and practices impact on the formation and transformation of the bodies of others, transgender studies makes a valuable contribution towards analyzing and interpreting the unique situation of embodied human consciousness.39