Monsters, Time-Travel, and Aliens: Tracing the Genealogies of 'Trans' through Feminist Science Fiction Writing
and Film
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities
2020
Sabine R. Sharp School of Arts, Languages and Cultures 2
Table of Contents Table of Figures ...... 4 Abstract ...... 5 Declaration ...... 6 Copyright Statement ...... 6 Acknowledgements ...... 7 Introduction ...... 9 Why Feminist Science Fiction? ...... 16 Tracking Trans Debates ...... 23 From ‘Transgender’ to ‘Trans*’ ...... 29 Trans as Counter-Discourse ...... 37 A Genealogy of Trans ...... 45 Structure of the Thesis ...... 48 1: Tracing the Monstrous Birth of ‘Trans’ through the Frankenstein Origin Myth of Science Fiction .. 53 The Feminist Science Fiction Origin Story ...... 58 Generic Reproduction and Male Appropriation ...... 62 Radical Feminist Readings of Frankenstein...... 68 Reclaiming Monstrosity ...... 74 2: Monstrous Textual Reproduction: Race, Gender, and Genre in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Hiromi Goto’s ‘Hopeful Monsters’ ...... 82 The Racial Legacy of Frankenstein’s Monster ...... 87 Monstrous Pregnancies and Other Bodily Transformations...... 92 Racialised Gender, Gendered Race ...... 98 Monstrous Generic Mixtures ...... 108 3: History as Time-Travel: Trans Historiography and the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference ...... 114 History as Time-Travel ...... 117 ‘Trans’ as Anachronism ...... 122 Alternate Histories ...... 126 Dangerous Anachronisms ...... 130 Unintended Erasures ...... 132 The Instability of ‘Lesbian’ ...... 135 Envisioning Alternative Futures ...... 141 4: The Colonial Politics of Time-Travel: Orlando, The Sticky Fingers of Time, and Conceiving Ada.... 144 Feminist Time-Travel...... 149 Non-Linear Temporalities ...... 154 Time-Travel’s Colonial Connotations ...... 168 3
5: Untranslatability: Towards Critical Utopia in Debates on Trans Terminology as Alien Language .. 181 A Brief History of Alien Language in Science Fiction ...... 194 Trans Terminology Guides as Alien Language ...... 201 The Gender-Critical Backlash ...... 206 Untranslatability as Critical Utopia ...... 211 6: Troubling Recent GRA Debates through the Alien Languages of Friendship’s Death and the Native Tongue Trilogy ...... 215 Gender Recognition Act Reform ...... 225 Performativity and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis ...... 233 Making Language Alien ...... 240 Conclusion ...... 251 Resisting Progress Narratives ...... 262 Bibliography ...... 270 Online Sources ...... 291 Filmography ...... 303 Word Count: 78,809
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Table of Figures
Figure 1 Sharp increase in use of ‘trans’, Google Books Ngram Viewer,
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Abstract The past three decades have seen the term ‘trans’ circulate more widely in Britain and the United States, moving from the obscurity of activist and legal discourses in the 1990s into the spotlight of mainstream media, cultural production, and national politics. In popular discourse, this increased visibility is thought to confer a sense of legibility to ‘trans’. By contrast, this thesis understands ‘trans’ as a conceptually unstable category that obscures certain tensions between the subcategories it supposedly merely includes. Combining historicization of media, political, and legal discourses with close readings of feminist science fiction writing and film, I examine the complexities and contradictions that continually trouble attempts to hold ‘trans’ as fixed or coherent, particularly as this pertains to racialisation and colonial histories. In order to better navigate the fraught debates triggered by the new cultural visibility of ‘trans’, I ask if feminist science fiction might offer alternative approaches for thinking about this category. Contributing to an emerging body of trans scholarship questioning the liberatory promise of visibility and representation, my thesis critically analyses the assumptions that underpin calls for better trans representation and the liberal politics of legal recognition. This thesis traces the emergence of ‘trans’ across the shifting formations of sex and gender over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I investigate how three science fiction tropes – monsters, time-travel, and alien language – inform the discursive production of ‘trans’ through scholarly, political, legal, and media discourses. The six chapters of my thesis are organised in pairs around these three tropes. The first chapter of each pair examines how this trope figures in contemporary ‘trans’ debates: the effects of references to Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) in feminist and trans scholarship, the role of time-travel in historical narratives of the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, and the positioning of trans terminology as an alien language in recent debates. The second chapter of each pair explores how feminist science fiction film and writing might offer new ways to approach ‘trans’. My analysis of monstrosity moves from reworkings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in feminist and trans scholarship to examine how Salt Fish Girl (Lai, 2002) and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ (Goto, 2004) explore the racialisation of monstrosity. I then move on to analyse 1990s feminist time-travel films, including Orlando (Potter, 1992), Conceiving Ada (Leeson, 1999), and The Sticky Fingers of Time (Brougher, 1997). The thesis concludes by analysing how the Native Tongue trilogy (Haden Elgin, 1984; 1987; 1994) and the film Friendship’s Death (Wollen, 1987) explore ideas of constructing a feminist ‘alien language’. Combining a genealogical approach with close readings of feminist science fiction also prompts a reckoning with the emergence of science fiction itself in order to grapple with the racist and colonial discourses with which this genre has historically been entwined.
Over the six chapters of this thesis, I explore the science-fictional qualities of contemporary trans discourse and the possibilities feminist reworkings of the genre offer for trans cultural analysis beyond the liberal model of representation and visibility. This thesis argues that the discursive terrain out of which ‘trans’ has emerged as a new social form is steeped in science fiction; attending to this science fictionality can allow us to grasp the conceptual instabilities of this identity category. Moreover, feminist science fiction works offer imaginative tools with which to reimagine ‘trans’ in light of these instabilities: as a monstrous multiplicity of texts, as historically and geographically located, and as radically unintelligible and untranslatable. 6
Declaration No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
Chapter One builds upon ideas I explored in an essay titled ‘Mother Frankenstein: Revisiting Feminist Science Fiction History-Telling’ appearing on the blog Uneven Earth in April 2018, available online at: http://unevenearth.org/2018/04/mother-frankenstein/
Chapter Two is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Contemporary Women's Writing following peer review. The version of record [Sharp SR, Salt Fish Girl and “Hopeful Monsters”: Using Monstrous Reproduction to Disrupt Science Fiction’s Colonial Fantasies, Contemporary Women's Writing 2019; 13 (2): 222–241] is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/13/2/222/5699868; doi:10.1093/cww/vpz022
Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and they have given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.
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Acknowledgements I am profoundly grateful to Jackie Stacey and Kaye Mitchell for all the detailed guidance and wide-ranging assistance they have given me as this project has developed from proposal to finished thesis (and beyond). Their enthusiasm for my ideas helped me envision what this project would become, their encyclopaedic knowledge of the field pushed my research further, and their attentive critical gaze sharpened my writing. Just as vital for the writing of the thesis and my overall research experience has been the emotional support they have shown me as I faced various challenges, whether difficulties with the affective dimension of writing, my rocky health, or gender transition. My deepest thanks also to Monica Pearl, whose insights and advice in the panels strengthened my work substantially. I feel immensely lucky to have had such a supervisory dream-team. This project would not have been possible without a studentship from the University of Manchester, for which I am deeply grateful. My parents, Ruth and Jeremy Sharp, provided generous financial support, encouragement, and patience in the crucial write-up stage, enabling me to continue working. I cannot thank you enough. This thesis has been greatly enhanced by feedback and stimulating discussion at various reading groups, conferences, and events over the past four years, in particular the Feminist Library Project, in Yerevan, Armenia, and the 2018 CES Intimate Summer School on ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Monster’, in Coimbra, Portugal. Helping to organise the Sexuality Summer School each year over the course of this project has been an honour and a delight. I cherish the memories of sitting on the grass outside the SALC Graduate School in gorgeous May weather, sharing ideas and growing friendships with other postgraduates, academics, and artists. Thank you to Jackie, Janelle Hixon, Oscar Lister, and Clara Bradbury-Rance for making the magic happen. For offering a course-changing perspective in the early stages of the project, my gratitude to So Mayer, who urged me to stick with the ‘key problematic’ to find ‘the answer to the whole project’. They were absolutely right! I would also like to thank the members of the #WIASN and Trans PhD Network Facebook groups for their ongoing support, advice, and suggestions along various stages of the PhD journey. Special thanks also to Laura Doan, whose phone call urging me to come to Manchester for my MA set off the chain of events that led to this project. My enormous gratitude to Tessa Harris and George Bickers who read and gave encouraging feedback on parts of the thesis when I was struggling. Huge thanks also to everyone involved in Queer Research Network Manchester (especially Lois Stone, Sarah-Joy Ford, and James Slattery), No Matter (especially Nell Osborne), Theory After 2000, the SALC TA Committee, the PGR online writing group, as well as Chris Vardy, Dave Hartley, and Mariah Whelan. Your efforts have made the research environment at Manchester a network of care, transforming the famously lonely experience of writing into a wealth of collaboration and solidarity. Thanks also to the staff in the SALC postgraduate office for all their assistance along the way. 8
Thank you to Eloise Cresswell, Charlotte Sisman, Amy Whitby-Baker, Rosie Higman, Alice Bell, Cevdet Özgöçmen, Jack Prestt, Nikita Gill, Steph Muldoon, Adam Casey, and Marion Dawson for friendships that sustained me during the PhD. Thanks also to Ganymede and Catfriend, furry writing companions who offered the sage advice to take more naps. My appreciation and love to the Sharp and Gower families for your unwavering support. Many years ago, Caroline Gower gave me a copy of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time – you can trace the journey of this much-loved gift through the thesis. Jacob Gower planted the seed of a science fiction PhD in my mind during the first few weeks of our getting to know each other. The foundations of this project lie in the conversations about gender and genre that have been sparked by watching films together and sharing our favourite books. Thank you for your love and care and company.
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Introduction In 2014, TIME magazine announced ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’, a decisive cultural moment in the struggle for trans people’s civil rights.1 The publication’s cover featured a full-length portrait of Laverne Cox, a transgender actor and activist who rose to fame in the
Netflix prison drama Orange is the New Black (Kohan, 2013-19). Almost one year later, former Olympic athlete Caitlyn Jenner made international headlines with the public announcement of her transition on the cover of Vanity Fair, leading Vogue magazine to describe 2015 as ‘the year of trans visibility’.2 Jenner used the spotlight on her transition as the springboard for her own TV show, I am Cait (Jenner, 2015-2016). In the years since this supposed ‘tipping point’, several other popular US TV shows have featured prominent trans characters and storylines, including Transparent (Soloway, 2014-2019), Sense8 (Wachowski,
Wachowski, and Staczynski, 2015-2018) and Pose (Murphy, Falchuk, and Canals, 2018- present).3 Likewise, in cinema, trans stories have garnered critical acclaim, with the Chilean film A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián, 2017) winning Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th
Academy Awards in 2018, and the Belgian film Girl (Dhont, 2018) winning the Caméra d’Or and the Queer Palm at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. As poet Manuel Arturo Abreu writes,
‘trans is trending’.4 The increased cultural visibility and apparent legibility of ‘trans’ indicates the need for scholarly analysis of the term’s genealogy, effects, and limits.
1 Katie Steinmetz, ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’, TIME, May 2014
When this research project was in its infancy, the popular discourse on trans was dominated by calls for trans actors to be cast in trans roles and for trans writers to be hired to write their own stories. At the start of the twenty-first century, these discussions have become increasingly fraught. As Jack Halberstam writes, a 2016 screening of Boys Don’t Cry (Peirce,
1999) – a biopic about the life and death of trans teen Brandon Teena – was disrupted by student activists who ‘took offence at the film and accused the filmmaker of making money off the representation of violence against trans people’.5 Many of the students’ complaints centred on the film’s non-trans director Kim Peirce having cast a non-trans actor (Hilary
Swank) as the film’s protagonist. These debates continue to be highly charged, but in the past few years trans activists have had some success in persuading filmmakers to recast when non-trans actors are assigned trans roles.6 With trans actors and writers now receiving prestigious nominations and awards for their work, it seems that activists’ calls for better trans representation are finally being heard.7
Yet this cultural shift has also entailed a growing awareness of the limitations of visibility and authenticity as a political strategy. At the end of writing this thesis in the summer of
2020, Netflix released the documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (Feder, 2020), for
5 Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), p. 101. 6 Benjamin Lee, ‘Scarlett Johansson Drops out of Trans Role after Backlash’, Guardian, 13 July 2018
which Cox served as both executive producer and key interviewee. The question of visibility troubles Cox and the documentary as a whole. In recent years, many scholars in trans studies and beyond have begun to critically interrogate the ‘transgender tipping point’.8
Eliza Steinbock has highlighted that the unprecedented new visibility of trans people on screen has done little to abate the disproportionate levels of violence and murder faced by trans people, and trans women of colour especially.9 Moreover, as trans activist Miss Major
Griffin-Gracy points out, the increased visibility of trans people on media platforms may even have caused the increased violence faced by trans people of colour, with transphobic viewers redirecting their fury at trans people on screen towards the trans people they can reach in their locality.10 A tacit acknowledgement is emerging that visibility cannot live up to its promises of greater safety and acceptance.
Cox and her fellow talking heads in Disclosure frame the problem with trans representation in terms of a backlash: for them, better representation is still the means to improve trans lives; this strategy just needs new platforms, more voices, and even greater visibility to reach its goal. Such calls for better literary and film representation of trans lives are invested in the idea that supposedly accurate and authentic depictions of trans people’s experiences play a significant role in improving trans people’s quality of life or access to political rights and freedoms. This investment relies on the notion that ‘trans’ is a fixed, stable, and knowable object, a definite thing simply reproduced or portrayed in writing or on screen.
8 Burns, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–7; Ruth Pearce, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, and Igi Moon, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of “Trans”’, Sexualities, 22.1–2 (2019), 3–12 (p. 6); Stephanie N. Berberick, ‘The Paradox of Trans Visibility: Interrogating the “Year of Trans Visibility”’, Journal of Media Critiques, 4.13 (2018), 123–44. 9 Eliza Steinbock, ‘Framing Stigma in Trans* Mediascapes: How Does It Feel to Be a Problem’, Spectator, 37.2 (2017), 48–57 (p. 48). 10 Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, CeCe McDonald, and Toshio Meronek, ‘Cautious Living: Black Trans Women and the Politics of Documentation’, in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. by Reina Gosset, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (London: MIT Press, 2017), pp. 23–37 (p. 26).
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However, as Gayatri Spivak highlights in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1983), representation is itself a slippery notion, referring to ‘representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation”, as in art or philosophy’.11 By collapsing these two meanings, we task those who create what might be termed ‘trans culture’ – actors, performers, writers, journalists, and artists – with trans activism and advocacy. Those who create representations of trans lives and experiences are forced to function as political representatives for the community as a whole. Eliding the difference between, as Spivak puts it, ‘a proxy and a portrait’ unfairly places the onus on trans creatives to secure better futures for their community through their cultural work.12 Moreover, it obscures the power structures by which some trans people and not others are able to stand as ‘representatives’, occupying positions of relative cultural influence.
This idea of trans representation also tends towards the now much-critiqued reflectionist model: the idea that cultural representations of marginalised groups should be judged on the accuracy or transparency with which they depict or express ‘real’ experiences. In The
Burden of Representation (1988), John Tagg writes that cultural representations do not refer to ‘a prior (though irretrievable) reality’, but instead produce new realities.13 Seen in this way, trans characters or storylines ought not be assessed on their fidelity to lived trans experiences, but rather on how they contribute to the ‘present meanings’ of ‘trans’ and the
‘discursive systems’ in which this category circulates.14 The primary aim of this thesis is to
11 Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 66–111 (p. 70). See also Raymond William’s unpacking of the word ‘representative’ in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Ed (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 266–69. 12 Spivak, p. 71. 13 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 3. 14 Tagg, p. 4. 13
provide this attention to the various and contradictory meanings of ‘trans’, by examining how ‘trans’ is produced through a collision of different discourses that I show to be suffused with science fictional ideas.
In queer theory, representation and visibility have long been challenged as suspect aims of intellectual and activist work. ‘While there is a deeply ethical appeal in the desire for a more inclusive representational landscape and certainly under-represented communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility’, Peggy Phelan writes, ‘the terms of this visibility often enervate the putative power of these identities’.15 The mainstream demand for visibility as the route to trans liberation is founded upon the assumption that representation will dismantle harmful stereotypes and prejudice, leading to empowerment. ‘Visibility is a trap’,
Phelan warns us: instead of meeting these desires for inclusion, visibility can play its own role in oppression.16 Building upon this premise, the essay collection Trap Door: Trans
Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017) explores how ‘trans people are offered many “doors” – entrances to visibility, to resources, to recognition, and to understanding’, doors that ‘are almost always also “traps” – accommodating trans bodies, histories, and culture only insofar as they can be forced to hew to hegemonic modalities’.17
Over the past few years, trans scholars, artists, and activists have started to draw attention to the paradox of the present moment, in which heightened visibility seems to bring heightened violence.
15 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 6. 16 Phelan, p. 9. 17 Reina Gosset, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, ‘Known Unknowns: An Introduction to Trap Door’, in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (London: MIT Press, 2017), pp. xv–xxvi (p. xxiii). ‘Trap’ is a derogatory term for ‘trans woman’; for a detailed analysis, see: Contrapoints, ‘Are Traps Gay?’ (YouTube, 2019)
Other recent contributions to trans studies have also begun to problematise or to move away from the mainstream emphasis on representation and visibility. Joshua Bastian Cole has offered a practice of rereading queer cinema, building on Halberstam’s idea of the
‘transgender look’.18 Likewise Cáel M. Keegan’s book Lana and Lilly Wachowski (2018) presents close readings of the Wachowskis’ oeuvre in terms of their transgender aesthetic, rather than the presence of identifiable transgender figures.19 Continuing this emphasis on trans aesthetics, Steinbock’s Shimmering Images (2019), refuses to reproduce ‘a history of the changing or static representation of trans* people in visual media’, describing such a project as ‘restricting’, and neither ‘compelling – nor necessary’.20 Instead Steinbock argues that the embodied experience of transness can be conceptualised through the various disjunctures of film, ‘shimmers’ that allow ‘for thinking/feeling in a non-binary way’.21
My thesis contributes to this emerging body of work troubling the primacy of representation and visibility in mainstream trans discourse and offering alternative frameworks for thinking about trans. Rather than describing trans aesthetics or adding to a trans canon, this thesis urges us to focus on the problematic premise that underlies the political investment in trans representation: that we already know and can recognise ‘trans’. Although this thesis does offer close readings from a trans subject position, the films and writings I return to are not objects of trans re-readings, new interpretations that revisit texts through the lens of trans theory. Instead, it might be said the inverse is true: through my close readings, I reread
18 Joshua Bastian Cole, ‘Passing Glances: Recognizing the Trans Gaze in Mulholland Drive’, Somatechnics, 8.1 (2018), 79–94; Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (London: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 76–96. 19 Cáel M. Keegan, Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 20 Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment and the Aesthetics of Change (London: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 5. 21 Steinbock, Shimmering Images, p. 3. 15
‘trans’, asking, what key assumptions shape how we commonly talk and think about this category? Rather than visibility then, this thesis is concerned with what trans discourse tends to elide or leave unexamined.
This focus on thinking ‘trans’ as a ‘category of identity’ follows the work of queer theorist
Judith Butler, who calls us to view ‘identity categories’ or ‘signs’ as sites of permanent risk, trouble, and instability.22 This entails disentangling the category’s complexities, attending to its internal contradictions, tracing its slippages and erasures. I trace the cultural narratives that produce the sense of ‘trans’ as a supposedly legible category of identity, placing pressure on these narratives to understand the unacknowledged conceptual work that
‘trans’ carries out. Butler’s own analysis of conceptual instability in relation to the category
‘lesbian’ reminds us that there is a risk here: for some scholars and activists, challenges to the normative conception of trans as identity might seem an unhelpful abstraction or the expression of internalised bigotry.23 But holding onto ‘trans’ as a ‘site of necessary trouble’, as Butler would put it, is crucial in the face of normalising regimes such as medical diagnoses for gender dysphoria or the various legal frameworks for gender recognition or asylum claims on the basis of transphobia.24 If, as Butler writes, ‘identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes’, what regulatory function do fixed definitions of identity categories such as ‘trans’ serve?25 And how might we instead hold onto the conceptual instabilities of ‘trans’ as a form of resistance to this regulation?
In order to address these questions, I present close readings of feminist science fiction
22 Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. by Diana Fuss (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13–31 (p. 14). 23 Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, p. 14. 24 Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, p. 14. 25 Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, p. 13. 16
works, both film and writing, alongside analyses of shifts in trans debates over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These trans debates range across different discourses, including feminist and queer history; mainstream and social media; medical and legal frameworks; and activist and community resources. A frequent refrain among prominent trans activists is that ‘trans lives are not up for debate’, but frustratingly, this continues to be the mainstream framing of trans issues, pitting trans people against ‘women and girls’.26 At the risk of affirming that binary framing, my research analyses materials from trans-affirming and anti-trans groups. My argument is that the conceptual field of trans debates draws upon science fiction’s cultural imaginary, constraining the ways in which we think and talk about trans.
Why Feminist Science Fiction? Feminist science fiction presents a uniquely suited set of texts with which to problematise the coherence and stability of ‘trans’. Feminist interventions into the supposedly masculine genre of science fiction challenged conventions regarding the kinds of stories that could be told, while also experimenting with how those stories could be told. Feminist writing redefined the genre, even unsettling how we understand genre to operate as an organising framework, troubling the idea that genre consists of known and recognisable characteristics that authors simply recombine. I will explore how some feminist science fiction works destabilise genre in more detail in Chapter Two, but this thesis as a whole explores how the questions feminist science fiction has posed about genre might inform a reconceptualization of ‘trans’. I suggest an approach to genre in terms of falsely unifying categories might offer a
26 Munroe Bergdorf, ‘Munroe Bergdorf: “Trans Lives Matter - This Cannot Continue to Be a Debate”’, Stylist, May 2019
rethinking of ‘trans’ as a similarly unstable form.
Moreover, feminist science fiction occupies a similar timeframe to that of the various discourses that produced the categories of ‘transsexual’, ‘transgender’, and ‘trans’, taking shape over the latter half of the twentieth century. While the early twentieth century saw critical engagement with the broader category of science fiction, feminist science fiction only came to be considered in its own right with the publication of anthologies and critical works in the 1970s and 1980s. Short story collections by and about women helped emerging authors reach a wider audience; notable examples include Pamela Sargent’s Women of
Wonder (1975) and Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine (1988). Meanwhile, collections of criticism and theory, such as Marleen Barr’s Future Females (1981) and Jenny
Wolmark’s Aliens and Others (1994), created the sense of a legible literary subgenre worthy of study. This scholarship helped to spotlight authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Marge
Piercy, Joanna Russ, and Octavia Butler, whose works are now frequently analysed in prominent science fiction journals and have won numerous awards. Parallel to discursive shifts out of which ‘trans’ emerged as a seemingly legible category, feminist writers made their own creative interventions in science fiction.
But beyond this, feminist science fiction and trans discourse have also occupied the same discursive terrain, even when contributions to the subgenre have not explicitly engaged with trans issues. Key works of feminist science fiction reimagined sex and gender: Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) played with ideas of gender indeterminacy and societies organised along gender neutral lines, while Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) envisioned a race of androgynous humans only assuming a binary sex as part of sexual reproduction. Such works explored the possibilities of bodily or social transformations of 18
sex/gender, albeit to think through problems of feminist alternatives to patriarchy, rather than to engage with the marginality of gender variant communities. Feminist science fiction has provided space to imagine alternative embodiments, hierarchies, and means of reproduction; I ask, what then has this space offered the formation of ‘trans’ as a category?
How might these works suggest we approach ‘trans’ differently?
Life writing has long figured as the dominant genre of trans cultural production, with a range of trans studies research from Jay Prosser’s Second Skins (1998) to Rachel Carroll’s
Transgender and the Literary Imagination (2018) focussing heavily on the role of biography, autobiography, and memoir in the construction of transsexual and transgender subjectivity.
However, as author Torrey Peters writes, the fantastic is a mode particularly suited to trans experiences.27 This thesis joins other scholars who have drawn links between ‘trans’ and speculative or science fiction. Transsexual theorist Sandy Stone famously framed her response to Janice Raymond through a pun on Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes
Back (1980). More recently, Steinbock and Keegan have read science fiction films for their trans aesthetics.28 In literature, Patricia Melzer has analysed trans bodies in queer science fiction erotica, and Cheryl Morgan has examined representations of trans characters in science fiction and fantasy.29 The connections between trans and science fiction are blossoming, with the emergence of new trans-authored creative science fiction work in
27 T Clutch Fleischmann and Torrey Peters, ‘On Trans Essays’, Essay Daily, 2016
anthologies and online magazines.30
This thesis heeds trans materialist Karen Barad’s warning about the dangers of analogic thinking. In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Barad critiques the use of Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle as an analogy in Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen. Through this example, Barad explains the problem with drawing analogies between objects that we assume to be separate: simply put, there is no such separation, because objects are mutually constituted, in complex relationship with each other.31 Although I do not adopt
Barad’s terminology of ‘diffractive reading’, my work similarly emphasises that ‘trans’ and science fiction are not wholly separate entities.32 Exploring how science fictional ideas suffuse trans discourse, this thesis complicates their assumed relationship.
The chapters of this thesis urge us to move away from thinking of ‘trans’ as science fictional in essence, but rather as emerging out of a nexus of discourses that invoke science fictional ideas. This approach follows science fiction author and theorist Samuel Delany, who proposes that we understand the genre – and genre in general – as a way of approaching any text through a particular lens. According to Delany’s notion of the ‘reading protocol complex’, genre is a mode of reading that discerns which texts start new conversations when placed in dialogue with other texts. This approach is a kind of reading for interesting intertextual resonances and the generativity of ideas. With the Reading Protocol Complex in hand, we can conceptualise how genres rub up against each other, leaving texts open to
30 See for example: Meanwhile, Elsewhere, ed. by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett (New York, NY: Topside Press, 2017). See also the controversy around Isabel Fall’s short story ‘I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter’ (2020), Conor Friedersdorf, ‘The Talented Victim Is Not the Point’, The Atlantic, 2020
different readings that attend to different details, different histories. While many of the aforementioned critical works look for the ‘trans’ in science fiction – whether aesthetics, bodies, or characters – there is not yet work exploring how science fiction imaginaries give shape and texture to the discourse of ‘trans’. This is the gap my thesis seeks to address.
Using Delany’s approach to genre to rethink ‘trans’, we can replace the prevailing conception of the category as defined by a set of identifiable traits with a mode of reading attuned to the friction and flying sparks of competing discourses.
In this thesis, I look to both literary and filmic works of feminist science fiction, because both forms of the subgenre are concerned with reimagining the world. Both feminist science fiction film and literature construct what Jackie Stacey terms ‘fantasy landscapes’ though experimental new forms and languages, albeit in vastly different ways.33 The works in my corpus include films, novels, and short stories, formats with different histories in relation to the consolidation of feminist science fiction as a genre. As mentioned above, short stories had their own particular significance to the emergence of feminist science fiction as an identifiable subgenre, with their publication in magazines and anthologies launching the careers of key authors. While novels might appear the obvious content of any study of feminist science fiction literature, as Melzer notes, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a coherent subgenre of feminist science fiction film had yet to be established.34
While the 1990s saw the publication of many works employing feminist film theory to analyse science fiction films – Alien Zone (Annette Kuhn, 1990), Close Encounters (Constance
Penley and others, 1991), and The Monstrous-Feminine (Barbara Creed, 1993), to name but
33 Jackie Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene (London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 8. 34 Patricia Melzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), p. 9. 21
three – critics struggled to amass a body of feminist science fiction films.
In recent mainstream discourse, the sense of a coherent feminist science fiction cinema has been bolstered by reboots of popular science fiction film franchises with female characters in starring roles usually reserved for men: Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
(Abrams, 2015), Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015), and Ghostbusters: Answer the Call
(Feig, 2016) even faced boycotts from male fans of the series enraged by the prominent position of women in their newly released films.35 As Marianne Kac-Vergne highlights, such blockbuster films do little to address feminist topics or sexist tropes though, offering instead only ‘active sidekicks’ and ‘action heroines’ that feed a postfeminist narrative.36 That said, the success of these mainstream films has helped to further discussions regarding what might constitute a feminist science fiction cinema and to increase demand for such works.
With the advent of home streaming services, feminist science fiction may in the end have greater success on the smaller screen, with Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed dystopian novel
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) adapted for television on the online service Hulu in 2017 and talks underway for adaptations of Octavia Butler’s works.37
Between 2016 and 2018, feminist academic and broadcaster Sarah Dillon offered a course on Feminist Science Fiction Film at the University of Cambridge. The syllabus covers over twelve ‘films drawn from across historical periods and national cinemas, both features and
35 Jess Denham, ‘Star Wars: Men’s Rights Activists Claim Boycott Cost the Force Awakens $4.2m’, Independent, 4 January 2016
shorts’.38 The films range from documentary-style dystopia Born in Flames (Borden, 1983) to experimental short We The Others (Borg, 2014), a ‘cinematic poem’ set in 2030 that examines the feminist debate around Down syndrome and abortion.39 Rather than relying on the film industry’s construction of generic categories, this thesis understands feminist science fiction film to be critically constituted. I contend that there now exists a body of feminist science fiction film that demands critical attention, works that offer new tools with which to explore key topics of feminist debate.
Starting from the premise that feminist science fiction participates in, rather than simply reflects, debates in feminist theory, I understand works of this genre to provide an imaginative toolkit for disassembling ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality. This sense of feminist science fiction as an array of tools builds upon Carl Freedman’s argument that science fiction shares an affinity with critical thought.40 For Freedman, academic writing and science fiction are different genres available for critical theory, and both are invested in transforming the world. I look at feminist science fiction as a theoretically engaged discursive realm, an arena or laboratory in which thought-experiments derived from feminist analysis can be tested out. This approach to feminist science fiction extends Donna
Haraway’s use of what she terms ‘speculative fabulation' in her critical writing. 41 Haraway’s playfulness with science fiction, from her ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985) to Staying with The
38 Sarah Dillon, ‘Feminist Science Fiction Film (Criticism and Culture)’, University of Cambridge, 2016
Trouble (2016), engages techniques from feminist science fiction writing in order to think through problems of technoscience, ecology, and feminism. Haraway invites us ‘to participate in a kind of genre fiction committed to strengthening ways to propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows’, an urgent task in the face of impending climate collapse. 42 In Haraway’s introduction to a reprint of Le Guin’s essay ‘The
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1988), she writes that ‘the burning question is how to join in telling the needed stories, building the needed worlds and muting the deadly ones’.43 Taking inspiration from this, I view the creative works I examine in this thesis – novels, short stories, films – as tools with which to unbuild the present and build in its place the world we need.44 This is a vital project at this juncture in which some trans lives are so vulnerable to violence. Before moving on to explain my approach, it is necessary in the next section to outline key trans debates and terminology.
Tracking Trans Debates Over the past few decades, the term ‘trans’ has circulated widely, moving from the obscurity of activist, community, and legal discourses in the 1990s into the spotlight of mainstream media, cultural production, and national politics. Frequently scholars and activists refer to ‘trans’ as an ‘umbrella term’ or ‘catch-all’ encompassing all forms of embodiment and lived experience that go against dominant societal norms of sex and gender. In the preface to Leslie Feinberg’s pathbreaking work Transgender Warriors (1996), zie notes that ‘trans’ was already gaining popularity as the preferred ‘term uniting the entire
42 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 136. 43 Donna Haraway, ‘Receiving Three Mochilas In Columbia: Carrier Bags for Staying with the Trouble Together’, in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota, 2019), pp. 9–22 (p. 18). 44 For more on ‘unbuilding’ see: Jack Halberstam, ‘Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures in and beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark’, Places, 2018
coalition’ at the time of writing (the mid-1990s).45 Meanwhile, trans legal scholar Stephen
Whittle notes that ‘“trans” as a stand-alone term did not come into formal usage until it was coined by a parliamentary discussion group in London in 1998, with the deliberate intention of being as inclusive as possible when negotiating equality legislation’.46 Cristan Williams, however, contends that ‘trans’ has been in use as an ‘umbrella term’ since the 1970s, ‘to describe all crossdressers and/or transsexuals’.47 For Williams, the move to claim the 1990s as the origin of ‘trans’ as a collective term signals a problematic disavowal of earlier political alliances.48 The history of ‘trans’ in political organising is thus complicated and contested, crossing different discourses.
Whatever the term’s contested origin, in the twenty-first century, ‘trans’ has decidedly shifted into new and more mainstream discursive fields, often meeting with intense hostility. At a London Critical Sexology symposium in February 2019 titled ‘Trans over Time’, journalist Jane Fae described the marked increase in mainstream media attention on trans issues in recent years, noting a significant shift in the tone of articles away from sensationalism in the 1990s towards antagonistic narratives of ‘concern’ in the twenty-first century.49 Likewise, recent research conducted on behalf of trans children’s charity
Mermaids by corpus linguistics expert Paul Baker finds that UK news outlets have more than
45 Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), p. xi. Feinberg’s website states that ‘Leslie preferred to use the pronouns she/zie and her/hir for hirself’, so I follow that usage here. Leslie Feinberg and Minnie Bruce, ‘Self’, Leslie Feinberg, 2014
tripled their coverage of trans issues in the last six years.50 As Baker highlights, much of this press attention has been negative, often revolving around proposed changes to the law, medical guidelines, and public policy. In particular, the 2017 NHS consultation on Gender
Identity Services and the 2018 government consultation on the Gender Recognition Act
2004 (GRA) sparked fierce debates across traditional and social media platforms – as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter Six. At the time of writing this introduction, anti-trans agitators appear to have successfully lobbied the government to drop plans to reform the
GRA.51 These examples all trouble the notion that increased visibility necessarily brings political progress, indicating the need for research that offers alternative models for grappling with these debates.
The cases above are all from the UK context, but similar developments have taken place across the West. In Europe and Central Asia, there has been a slight increase in the number of countries providing non-discrimination protections on the basis of gender identity, but many states still require a mental health diagnosis, sterility, or divorce as part of legal gender recognition (Ireland is one notable exception).52 Both Australia and New Zealand have seen debates similar to those in the UK over proposals to simplify gender recognition legislation, with strong opposition from conservatives, religious organisations, and some feminist and lesbian groups. In Canada, a bill enshrining protection against discrimination for trans people in the Canadian Human Rights Act was met with particular resentment from
50 Paul Baker, ‘Representing Trans People in the UK Press - A Follow-up Study’, ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), 2019
one right-wing public intellectual, generating international attention.53 Meanwhile in the US,
Republican lawmakers have put forward various forms of anti-trans legislation across the country and the Trump administration has sought to deny trans people access to homeless shelters and healthcare.54 Such moves to restrict trans people’s access to public services have not gone unchallenged though: in 2018, over 1,600 scientists signed an open letter rejecting the US Department of Health and Human Services’ new definition of sex as binary and immutable, and after a long struggle, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2020 extended employment anti-discrimination protections to transgender employees.55 Across these debates, conservatives and religious organisations have banded together with certain feminist and lesbian groups – sometimes internationally – claiming that the expansion of rights and protections for trans people will threaten the safety of non-trans women and girls.56 Despite the gains made in some areas, this coalition is continually putting up new obstacles to the expansion of trans rights.
Countries on the borders of East and West have become particularly hostile battlegrounds for these debates.57 In Central and South America, while many countries have introduced
53 Jessica Murphy, ‘Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson Takes on Gender-Neutral Pronouns’, BBC News, 2016
progressive legislation to recognise gender change (some as far back as the 1970s), countries like Columbia, Brazil, and Costa Rica have seen presidential campaigns
‘weaponise’ the idea of ‘gender ideology’ in attacks on women and LGBT people’s rights.58
‘Gender ideology’ has a specific meaning in feminist sociology and anthropology, referring to ‘the prevailing cultural ideological environment regarding gender (which is to say gender stereotyping in general)’.59 However, the term has come to assume much the same function as ‘the gay agenda’ did during debates on same-sex marriage in the US in the 1990s. Both phrases play upon fears that extending cultural acceptance to marginalised communities will threaten traditional family values. As Anna Nikoghosyan has noted, ‘gender is geopolitical’: in Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, ‘gender’ has come to refer to all deviations from traditional gender roles. 60 The same hysteria over ‘gender ideology’ – combining critiques of left-wing, feminist, queer, and trans politics – is taking hold across
Europe.61 Much of the anxiety around ‘gender’ has centred on the changing place of women in society, the changing meaning of the category ‘woman’, and the consequences of these changes for ideas of nation and tradition.62 In these debates, ‘trans’ has become a
58 Gillian Kane, ‘“Gender Ideology”: Big, Bogus and Coming to a Fear Campaign Near You’, Guardian, 30 March 2019
flashpoint, a new scapegoat for social and cultural tensions.
Despite the heightened visibility of ‘trans’ in these worldwide conflicts over gender, the category lacks conceptual stability across time and space. Broadly speaking, ‘trans’ is used to describe certain lives in which gender does not follow from sex and the self-evident facticity of sex as binary or biologically determined is in question.63 Yet considerable disagreement continues over who does and does not count as ‘trans’, including drag performers, non- binary people, and other cultural terms for gender variance. As Ruth Pearce identifies, there is an important distinction to be made between competing notions of ‘trans’ as an ‘umbrella term’ (referring to a defined set of other categories) or as more open-ended.64 The former sense, Pearce notes, is more commonly used in medical and legal contexts, ‘[d]iscourses of trans as condition [that] frame ‘trans’ as fixed and fixable’.65 The latter sense of ‘trans’ has emerged from trans theorists, activists, and community groups, ‘[d]iscourses of trans as movement [that] recognise the potentiality and actuality of changes to theory, subjectivity, embodiment, space and time taking place through continual creation, fluidity, and world- building’.66 We might therefore think about not just who ‘trans’ includes, but how ‘trans’ includes: whether as a category encompassing a defined set of terms or as something more amorphous and indefinite. This thesis can be thought of as a critique of discourses of trans as condition, while also interrogating the investment in all-inclusivity that mobilises discourses of trans as movement.
63 For more on the relationship between sex and gender, see: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 141–46, 173. 64 Ruth Pearce, Understanding Trans Health: Discourse, Power and Possibility (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018), p. 4. See also Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, ‘Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36.3–4 (2008), 11–22 (p. 11). 65 Pearce, p. 9. [Author’s emphasis] 66 Pearce, p. 9. [Author’s emphasis] 29
From ‘Transgender’ to ‘Trans*’ ‘Trans’ has to some extent inherited this definitional trouble from ‘transgender’, a somewhat older term more popular in the 1990s.67 As with ‘trans’, scholars and activists have attributed an expansive meaning to ‘transgender’, often, as David Valentine has pointed out, in ways at odds with the usage of ‘transgender’ in some gender variant communities.68 Feinberg writes that zie ‘uses [transgender] in its most inclusive sense: to refer to all courageous trans warriors of every sex and gender – those who led battles and rebellions throughout history and those who today muster the courage to battle for their identities and for their lives’.69 Likewise, Susan Stryker’s Transgender History (2008) ‘uses
“transgender” to refer to the widest imaginable range of gender-variant practices and identities’.70 Both Stryker and Feinberg’s uses of ‘transgender’ are implicated in projects of historicization: constructing ‘transgender’ as inclusive and fluid enables a retrospective glance at bodies and behaviours historically categorised in other ways. A more capacious concept of what constitutes the object of transgender history seemingly offers more historical subjects and material to cover. Yet this desire for ‘transgender’ to be a category inclusive of all forms of gender variance – across time and space – has posed significant problems.
While the focus of this thesis is primarily on ‘trans’ as distinct from ‘transgender’, these terms are not so easily disentangled: ‘trans’ is often deemed a contraction or synonym of
67 Feinberg attributes the neologism ‘transgenderist’ to activist Virginia Prince in the late 1980s, whereas Williams notes usage of this term by transgender judge Phyllis Frye and activist and lecturer Ari Kane as early as 1975 and 1976 respectively. Feinberg, p. x; Cristan Williams, ‘Tracking Transgender: The Historical Truth’. 68 David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (London: Duke University Press, 2007). 69 Feinberg, p. xi. 70 Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), p. 19. 30
‘transgender’, with the terms commonly used interchangeably.71 The relationship between
‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ is more complicated than synonymity: the assumed inclusivity of
‘trans’ both obscures and responds to ongoing tensions between ‘transgender’ and other terms for gender variance. As Patricia Elliot notes, feminist, queer, and trans theorists have engaged in fraught debates over the relationship between ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’.72
Feinberg writes that ‘[t]ranssexual men and women traverse the boundary of the sex they were assigned at birth’; ‘[t]ransgender people traverse, bridge, or blur the boundary of the gender expression they were assigned at birth’.73 Yet zie also notes that ‘not all transsexuals choose surgery or hormones; some transgender people do’, positioning hirself as transgender, despite having taken hormones and undergone surgery as part of hir transition.74 Meanwhile performance artist and author Kate Bornstein identifies themself as both transsexual and transgendered in their 1994 book Gender Outlaw, indicating that these are not mutually exclusive categories.75 While Julia Serano views ‘transgender’ to be a term encompassing ‘transsexual’, she holds onto the latter as an analytical category to distinguish those with experiences of hormonal and surgical transition.76 That ‘transgender’ can mean both something distinct from and something inclusive of ‘transsexual’ leaves considerable tensions that the substitution of ‘trans’ does not resolve.
Some transsexual theorists have criticised feminist and queer theorists for positioning
71 See for example: Whittle, ‘Foreword’. While I have tried to avoid this in my own writing, this is a difficult task and not always possible. 72 Patricia Elliot, ‘Engaging Trans Debates on Gender Variance: A Feminist Analysis’, Sexualities, 12.1 (2009), 5– 32. 73 Feinberg, p. x. 74 Feinberg, p. x. 75 Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 7–14. Bornstein uses the pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’, and ‘their’. 76 Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 2nd Edn (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2016), pp. 77–78. 31
‘transgender’ as more radical or progressive than ‘transsexual’. Such critiques often focus on
Butler’s book Gender Trouble (1990), widely considered one of queer theory’s inaugural texts.77 While gender has commonly been thought of as the cultural reflection of the biological truth of sex, Butler argues in Gender Trouble that sex can also be understood as
‘always already gender’.78 Certain transsexual or transgender contributors to queer theory, such as Halberstam, Bornstein, and Stone, have also come under fire.79 Pioneering transsexual sociologist Viviane Namaste has criticised queer theorists for instrumentalising transsexuals in their work – using the figure of the transsexual to make claims about sex and gender that have little relevance to the often highly vulnerable material existence of transsexuals.80 Likewise, Prosser troubles queer theory’s tendency to celebrate
‘transgender’ as inherently transgressive, highlighting the implicit dismissal of many transsexuals’ desire to live safe and ordinary lives.81 For some scholars and activists, relegating ‘transsexual’ to a subset of ‘transgender’ erases the specificities of transsexual experience.82 These problems continue even as ‘transgender’ is increasingly replaced by
‘trans’: in Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager’s provocative critical dialogue ‘After
Trans Studies’ (2019) they emphasise the problems with queer theory’s influence on trans studies, arguing that ‘the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her’.83 Trans studies has
77 Viviane Namaste, ‘Undoing Theory: The “Transgender Question” and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo- American Feminist Theory’, Hypatia, 24.3 (2009), 11–32
somewhat struggled to emerge from under queer theory’s shadow, straining to articulate the specificities of non-queer transsexual experience with a vocabulary and methodological tools more suited to the subversion of rigid identity categories.
A further shift from ‘trans’ to ‘trans*’ has been proposed by some theorists to signify ‘not only identities such as transgender, transsexual, trans man, and trans woman that are prefixed by trans- but also identities such as genderqueer, neutrios [sic], intersex, agender, two-spirit, cross-dresser, and genderfluid’.84 Halberstam, for instance, ‘uses the term
“trans*” […] specifically because it holds open the meaning of the term “trans” and refuses to deliver certainty through the act of naming’.85 As a Boolean query modifier in internet searches, the asterisk functions as a wildcard, ‘a character that will match any character or sequence of characters’.86 The inclusion of the asterisk thus supposedly confers greater inclusivity and anti-binarism to the term ‘trans’, but as Avery Tompkins points out this ironically fails given the difficulty of using ‘trans*’ as a search term.87 The fact that ‘trans’ is frequently used as an abbreviation for ‘translate’, and is therefore included in the citation for any translated text, causes considerable problems when searching for ‘trans’ in academic journals.88 Moreover, the enjambment caused by the layout of text on the page
In Grace Lavery’s recent interview with Stryker, she states that ‘the print journal received a lot of responses to Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager’s “After Trans Studies”, some of which will be published in a special section of TSQ 7.3 (third quarter of 2020), some of them quite polemical – as polemical as Chu and Dreger’s [sic] critique of the field’. ‘An Interview with Susan Stryker by Grace Lavery’, TSQ*Now, 2020
may mean that ‘trans-’ as a prefix is separated from stems such as ‘fuse’, ‘figure’, or ‘scribe’.
This problem is only exacerbated with ‘trans*’. According to Pearce, ‘“transgender” is often used for cataloguing academic work within contemporary online databases and search engines’, so researchers must search for ‘transgender’ even when the content they seek refers to ‘trans’ or ‘trans*’.89 For simply practical reasons then, ‘trans’ or ‘trans*’ cannot simply replace ‘transgender’, but must continue to operate alongside it depending on the context.
Where ‘transgender’ failed to unify different groups, ‘trans’ is hoped to succeed, and so on with ‘trans*’. This shift of political investments from one term to the other echoes that of the discursive shift Robyn Wiegman identifies from ‘women’s studies’ to ‘gender studies’ over the turn of the twenty-first century. In Object Lessons (2012), Wiegman describes this shift in political investments as a progress narrative that retrospectively positions ‘women’ as ‘an analytically singular, insular category of analysis’ in order to claim that ‘its exclusivity can be corrected by addition or substitution, such that gender will be capable of giving us everything that women does not’.90 In much the same vein, the inclusivity with which
‘transgender’ was once tasked is now assigned to ‘trans’, implying that previous identity categories were more rigid than they actually may ever have been. This thesis posits, however, that ‘trans’ does not secure this longed-for unification of different categories of gender variance, nor can it bring any greater inclusivity: instead, the term obscures the tensions between the categories it purports to include. The tensions between ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ (as well as ‘transvestite’, ‘intersex’, ‘genderqueer’, ‘two-spirit’ and so on)
89 Pearce, p. 18. 90 Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (London: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 42. 34
cannot be resolved simply by producing a new category and asserting its inclusivity.91
Google Ngrams: usage of 'trans' over time 0.0020%
0.0018%
0.0016%
0.0014%
0.0012%
0.0010% Mentions 0.0008%
0.0006%
0.0004%
0.0002%
0.0000%
Figure 1: Sharp increase in use of ‘trans’, Google Books Ngram Viewer,
‘trans’ as a prefix demands further consideration: ‘trans-’ neologisms are opening up new discursive possibilities, new debates, and new fields of study. As Figure 1 shows, there has been a rapid increase in the use of ‘trans’ as a prefix over the latter half of the twentieth century. This graph uses data taken from Google Books’ NGram Viewer, a tool which shows the frequency with which a chosen search term appears in Google’s text corpus over time, in this case Google’s collection of digitised English Language books.92 The results show a steady increase in the use of ‘trans’ from the mid-1940s onwards, rising steeply from the
91 See also Wendy Brown’s work on the shift from ‘woman’ to ‘gender’: ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’, in Women’s Studies on the Edge, ed. by Joan Wallach Scott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 17– 38. 92 A similar diagram tracking the frequency of ‘transsexual’, ‘transexual’, ‘transvestite’, ‘transgender’ and ‘genderqueer’ appears in Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, ‘Introduction: Transgender Studies 2.0’, in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–12 (p. 2). 35
1980s and mid-1990s. Likely this increase reflects the attractiveness of ‘trans’ as a prefix for contemporary writers: ‘trans’ can form new terms that explore concepts at a meta level. As
Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore discuss in their introduction to the 2008 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on ‘Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?’, ‘trans-’ now has numerous suffixes in academic research: ‘-gender, -national, -racial, -generational, -genic, - species. The list could (and does) go on’.93 The growing popularity of ‘trans’ as a prefix more generally might suggest why ‘trans’ has been such a successful alternative to ‘transgender’, suggesting as it does ideas of ‘categorical crossings, leakages, and slips of all sorts’, rather than those only pertaining to gender.94 To some extent, ‘trans’ has seemed a prefix with infinite possibilities for generating new concepts.
One such concept is ‘transfeminism’, a neologism popularised by scholar and activist Emi
Koyama in her ‘Transfeminist Manifesto’ (2001).95 This much celebrated new compound word refers to a new branch of feminism actively inclusive of – even led by – trans people.
In its sense of ‘crossing boundaries’, ‘trans’ seems to convey a sense of a new feminism characterised by openness and flexibility, in contrast to the supposed rigidity of other feminisms. In effect the term implies that the feminisms of the mid-to-late twentieth century were inherently exclusionary of trans people – a narrative that I will explore in more detail in Chapters Three and Four. ‘Transfeminism’ seems to promise that conflicts between feminists and transsexual, transvestite, and transgender people can now be resolved with the emergence of ‘trans’ as a category: ‘trans’ marks this moment of possibility. Trans-
93 Stryker, Currah, and Moore, p. 11. 94 Stryker, Currah, and Moore, p. 11. 95 Emi Koyama, ‘The Transfeminist Manifesto’, in Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2003), pp. 244– 59. For more on ‘transfeminism’ see Susan Stryker and Talia M. Bettcher’s introduction to the TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly special double-issue on the concept: ‘Introduction: Trans/Feminisms’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3.1–2 (2016), 5–14. 36
exclusive feminism is thereby relegated to the past, its continued presence rendered an anachronism. As Clare Hemmings examines in Why Stories Matter (2011), progress narratives of feminist history such as this ignore the messy details of feminist history; a return to history’s tensions and contradictions refutes simplified characterisations of entire movements as ‘essentialist’ or ‘exclusionary’.96
In marked contrast to the welcoming of transfeminist politics, the combination of ‘trans’ with the suffix ‘racial’ has sparked bitter controversies, particularly in relation to the frequent comparisons made between Jenner’s highly publicised gender transition with the furore around the racial deception of Rachel Doležal.97 The latter obfuscated information around her racial heritage in order to gain a leadership position at her local NAACP chapter; following the well-publicised discovery that Doležal’s parentage was in fact white, she claimed to ‘identify’ as black, seemingly borrowing a transgender vocabulary. While sociological works such as Rogers Brubaker’s Trans (2016) have argued that ‘transgender’ offers a new model with which we might think about the complex and changing situation of race in contemporary Western culture, such comparisons provoke fierce disagreement from some quarters. In 2017, the publication of an article titled ‘In Defense of Transracialism’ in the journal Hypatia attracted a highly critical response, with a public letter circulating among trans and critical race scholars that called for the article’s removal and a review of the journal’s peer review system.98 ‘Racial’ is thus perhaps one limit of the possibilities of
96 Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 38–40. 97 Rogers Brubaker, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 1–11. 98 Rebecca Tuvel, ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, Hypatia, 32.2 (2017), 263–78. For an overview of the controversy see: Justin Weinberg, ‘Statement from Hypatia Board Regarding Tuvel Controversy’, Daily Nous, 2017
‘trans’ as a prefix.
Not all ‘crossings, leakages, and slips’ are available then: the ease with which ‘trans’ may combine with categories of identity belies the different construction of these categories and their mutual implication in each another.99 As Stryker, Currah, and Moore argue, trans or transgender phenomena are entangled with other forms of difference, such that crossing the boundaries of race and class can also mean crossing the boundaries of gender.100 A growing body of trans studies work addresses this inter-implication of identity categories, with key trans studies works highlighting the complex historical relationship between the construction of race and the construction of sex/gender. C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both
Sides (2017) examines how the construction of binary sexual difference as a biological given is embedded in the history of the enslavement of Africans. In part, my thesis examines how the dimension of race so often forms the excess that ‘trans’ cannot contain, asking how histories of racist pseudoscience and colonial oppression might disrupt the political investment in ‘trans’ as a universal or transhistorical phenomenon.
Trans as Counter-Discourse The heightened attention to ‘trans’ over the past few decades responds to the development of activist and scholarly work in resistance to the longstanding juridico-medico discourse that has constructed non-normative sex/gender as pathology and/or criminality. Since the late nineteenth century and across the twentieth century, the discussion of gender variant phenomena was dominated by sexology, a field of scientific study combining legal, medical, and psycho-therapeutic disciplines. As Michel Foucault famously described in The History of
Sexuality (1976), these disciplines came together in a sexological project that created new
99 For more on this messy entanglement of categories of identity, see: Brown, pp. 24–25. 100 Stryker, Currah, and Moore, p. 12. 38
‘species’: categories such as ‘invert’, ‘third sex’ or ‘intermediate type’ that described a kind of person rather than acts or behaviours.101 Early sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-
Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter created detailed taxonomic systems to distinguish deviations from the prevailing norms of sex and sexuality. While these sexologists might now seem part of one classificatory project, as Laura Doan reminds us, they held different aims and shifting opinions.102 Against a backdrop of moral and legal discourses that posited non-normative desires and behaviours as moral weakness or criminality, sexology put forward various theories of perversion, congenital degeneracy, and abnormal types.
Sexologists constructed the category of the ‘transvestite’ or ‘transsexual’ as distinct from homosexuality only at the start of the twentieth century. Inventing new terminology, these sexologists sought to distinguish inverts with same-sex desire but little cross-sex behaviour from those with no same-sex desire but strong impulses to dress or be perceived as members of the other sex. In 1903, von Krafft-Ebing devised classifications of homosexuality, such as ‘antipathic sexuality’, ‘psychical hermaphroditism’, and ‘gynandry’, to describe examples (given in case studies) of various degrees of cross-sex identification and behaviour.103 Dissatisfied with the way this language conflated sexual desire with self- identification, Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term ‘transvestite’ in 1910 to describe those with the urge to dress or live as members of the other sex: ‘taken from the Latin “trans” = across and “vestitus” = dressed, used also by the Roman classical writers as
101 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 43. 102 Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 126–63. 103 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis [1886] (12th Edn, 1903)’, in Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 77–90. 39
“transvestism”’.104 Similarly, in 1928 Ellis proposed ‘Eonism’, following the pattern of
‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ in using famous examples to name a sexological category of person.105 The categories of ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ are thus historically embedded in sexological discourses that constructed sexual deviation in terms of types of abnormal person.
From the distinction between ‘homosexuality’ and ‘transvestism’, sexologists further distinguished ‘transvestism’ from ‘transsexualism’. Hirschfeld first used the phrase
‘seelischer Transsexualismus’ (psychic transsexualism) in 1923, and this was further popularised by his colleague Harry Benjamin in his 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon.
Benjamin elaborated on the distinction between transvestites and transsexuals, arguing that transsexualism required a negative affective relationship with the sexual organs, and desire for physical changes through hormones and surgery. Benjamin maintained that transvestites’ desires were instead directed at changing societal attitudes towards rigidly defined roles for the sexes.106 This distinction came to be of painful importance, with medical practitioners restricting access to medical treatment only to those who met their diagnosis of transsexualism.107 As trans poet and critic Harry Josephine Giles explores in their manifesto Wages for Transition (2019), such medical gatekeeping continues to limit
104 Magnus Hirschfeld, ‘The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 28–39 (p. 38). 105 Havelock Ellis, ‘Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VII: Eonism (1928)’, in Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 257–59 (p. 257). 106 Harry Benjamin, ‘Transsexualism and Transvestism as Pyscho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 45– 52 (p. 52). 107 Serano, pp. 115–26. On the further ramifications this medical gatekeeping has for other cultural categories for gender variance, see: Alvaro Jarrin, ‘Untranslatable Subjects: Travesti Access to Public Health Care in Brazil’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3.3–4 (2016), 357–75. 40
access to sometimes lifesaving transition resources for trans people.108
Activists and scholars have long fought against the rigid and pathologizing classifications of
‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ in texts such as the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or the World Health Organisation’s International
Statistical Classification of Diseases.109 However, a decisive shift in the discursive construction of sex/gender deviance occurred in the 1990s, with the emergence of the field of Transgender Studies. This shift was secured in the 2000s with the publication of two volumes of The Transgender Studies Reader (2006 and 2013), followed by the founding of new journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2014. These publications built upon the model of earlier, smaller-scale trans-created magazines such as Transvestia (1960-1980) and
TransSisters (1994-1995), producing knowledge about trans people, by trans people, for trans people. TSQ’s editors describe the journal as ‘contest[ing] the objectification, pathologization, and exoticization of transgender lives’; with this aim, the journal offers trans scholars a platform to share their research and to engage in academic debate in ways that refute the historically dominant discursive frame.110
This shift has seen a flourishing of creative and critical engagement. In the summer of 2020,
TSQ’s editorial collective launched TSQ*Now, a blog featuring non-peer reviewed
‘interventions, special dossiers, communiques, interviews, and collaborative projects’,
108 Harry Josephine Giles, Wages for Transition (Edinburgh: Easter Road Press, 2019), p. 8. 109 Serano, pp. 116–60; Sandy Stone, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 10.2 29 (1992), 150–76; Dean Spade, ‘Mutilating Gender’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 315–32; Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 75–101. On the different treatment of transsexual men and women, see: Henry Rubin, ‘The Logic of Treatment’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 482–98. See also the controversial category ‘autogynephilia’, discussed in: Serano, pp. 131–32. 110 Susan Stryker and others, ‘About the Journal’, 2020
enabling ‘a quicker response to a rapidly changing world’.111 This new companion website appeared in the wake of discussions on the Trans PhD Network Facebook Group, which has over 1,500 members. This social network represents trans scholars and students at different levels from around the world, not only engaged in trans studies, but in various other fields across the academy sometimes wholly unrelated to trans issues. With the rise of the internet and social media platforms, trans people have been empowered to analyse their own experiences and communities, and to critique the policies and institutions that directly affect them.
The groundwork for the emergence of trans studies is often attributed to Stone’s
‘Posttranssexual Manifesto’ (1987), which argued for a ‘counter discourse’ in which transsexuals ‘seize upon the textual violence inscribed in the transsexual body and turn it into a reconstructive force’.112 This notion of counter discourse or reverse discourse derives from Foucault, who describes in The History of Sexuality how ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’.113 In
Stryker’s introduction to the first volume of The Transgender Studies Reader, she writes that
‘transgender studies exemplifies what Michel Foucault once called “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges”’.114 The project of this emerging field of study, according to
Stryker, is to use traditional scholarly tools to produce new insights into trans lives and experience. For both Stryker and Stone, this is a project of ‘renarration’, examining,
111 Stryker and Lavery. 112 Stone, p. 165. 113 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 101. 114 Susan Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–17 (p. 12). 42
critiquing, and reciting differently the stories society tells itself about trans.115
The rise of trans studies as a field might suggest that this counter-discourse has emerged only in the late twentieth century. However, the backlash against sexologists’ regulation of transsexualism through rigid medical definitions is indebted to the work of communities of transsexuals and transvestites in the 1960s and 1970s. As Stryker notes, across this period, several transsexual and transvestite activist organisations formed, some in the wake of uprisings such as the Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall Inn Riots in the late 1960s: in 1964,
Reed Erickson founded the Erickson Educational Foundation; in 1968, Mario Martino founded Labyrinth; and in 1970, transsexual activist Angela K. Douglas founded the
Transsexual Activist Organisation and transvestite activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P.
Johnson founded the organisation Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.116 These examples show that it is not only the emergence of ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’ that marks the emergence of a political resistance to pathologizing discourses of sexual deviance or gender variance.
Moreover, sexological terminology was never just imposed, but rather negotiated. As
Claudia Breger notes, ‘at the turn of the twentieth century, the notion of the third sex was used not only as a way of theorizing sexual preference and/or as cross-gender identification, but also with regard to women’s emancipation’.117 David Cauldwell’s 1949 essay
‘Pyschopathia Transexualis’ helped to sediment ideas of transsexuals as psychotically delusional. Cauldwell viewed ‘transexualism’ (his own preferred spelling) as a psychopathic
115 Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges’, pp. 13–15; Stone, p. 164. 116 Stryker, Transgender History, pp. 59–89. 117 Claudia Breger, ‘Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Representations of “Female Inversion” at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14.1–2 (2005), 76–106 (p. 80). 43
disease caused by inherited mental weakness and an unhealthy upbringing.118 While
Cauldwell’s ideas have shaped clinical and cultural attitudes towards trans people as deluded and potentially dangerous, the abandoning of Cauldwell’s spelling suggests the significance of patient involvement in the production of new vocabularies to discuss non- normative sex behaviour.119 Notably, in 1994, Riki Wilchins repurposed the term in naming the activist group ‘the Transexual Menace’, reworking a pathologized category for political aims.120
Sexologists and the communities they studied were not always definitely separate categories either. While Hirschfeld’s vocabulary of ‘transvestites’ and ‘transsexuals’ might now seem the cold technical jargon of an outsider, he was himself deeply engaged in the communities he studied.121 For Hirschfeld, transvestism was a matter of human diversity to be embraced, rather than a mental disorder to be cured, and he was troubled by the limits of the language he had constructed, because of its emphasis on external appearance over the subject’s ‘limitless’ interior world.122 Sexological discourses of sexual deviance and gender variance have thus never gone wholly unchallenged, involving instead a complex interchange of ideas between the supposed objects of study and their researchers.
Literature – as well as other cultural forms – have offered ways to negotiate or navigate these sexological discourses. Prosser describes Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928)
118 David O. Cauldwell, ‘Psychopathia Transexualis’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 40–44 (pp. 40–41). 119 Cauldwell, p. 40. 120 Stryker, Transgender History, p. 141. 121 Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2017). 122 Hirschfeld, p. 38. 44
as a crucial text within a ‘genre of transgendered narrative’.123 As Doan points out, having
Ellis write the introduction to The Well gave Hall’s work the stamp of scientific veracity, but
Hall was by no means faithful to Ellis’ theories, appropriating them for her own aims.124
Likewise, Aimée Duc’s Sind es Frauen? (Are These Women, 1901), adopted sexological ideas of inversion to reclaim a marginalised feminist political status.125 The discourse on inversion emerged during a period of social upheaval, in particular regarding ‘the Woman Question’, which included issues of women’s suffrage, dress reform, and admittance to formerly inaccessible institutions.126 Creative works offered ways not only of disseminating sexological terms to a wider audience, but of reconfiguring those terms for political aims, aims that extended beyond what we might think of today as ‘trans issues’.
If ‘trans’ does not signal the start of a reverse discourse in response to sexological discourses, perhaps what the emergence of this category responds to is another discursive strand: feminism. In Stone’s manifesto, she writes that ‘the epistemologies of white male medical practice, the rage of radical feminist theories, and the chaos of lived gendered experience [meet] on the battlefield of the transsexual body’.127 Stone’s essay famously reacted not only to sexological discourses, but to radical feminist attacks on transsexuals – including personal attacks on her position in the feminist collective Olivia Records. As I discuss in more detail in Chapters One and Three, the 1970s saw fierce debates ignite among feminists over transsexuals, through activist meetings, conferences, and the publication of radical feminist works. Stone responded to these debates by affirming that ‘a
123 Jay Prosser, ‘“Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition”: The Transsexual Emerging from The Well’, in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, ed. by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 129–44 (p. 132). [Author’s emphasis] 124 Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, pp. 160–61. 125 Breger, pp. 84–93. 126 Breger, p. 79. 127 Stone, p. 164. 45
critical perspective’ on the patriarchal nature of the prevailing medical model of transsexualism was indeed urgently needed, but that by blaming transsexuals themselves, feminists were missing the real target of critique.128
At the end of the twentieth century, where feminist and queer scholars engaged with the categories of ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ more positively, these works tended towards figurative uses, as symbols of the fluidity of postmodern identity or technologically- enhanced futures.129 Stone’s intervention was to suggest a new approach that adopted feminist, queer, and poststructuralist ideas for the political and material liberation of trans people. As I examine in more detail in Chapters Three and Four, ‘trans’ is not easily disentangled from feminist and queer (specifically lesbian) histories.130 In recent years, conflicts have sparked over which group can claim which historical figure or fictional character as their own, but often these are shared histories, the property of both and neither.131 Following Stone’s approach, this thesis emphasises that ‘trans’ emerges at a cultural juncture, at the collision of various discourses.
A Genealogy of Trans Despite the significance of Foucault’s concepts of counter-discourse and subjugated
128 Davina Anne Gabriel, ‘Interview with the Transsexual Vampire: Sandy Stone’s Dark Gift’, TransSisters: Journal of Transsexual Feminism, 8 (1995), 14–27. 129 See for example: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, ‘Scenes from The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies’, in The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies, 1993, pp. 1–19. 130 For more on the tension between ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’, see: Clara Bradbury-Rance, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 131 See for example the debates over how to refer to Anne Lister, Dr James Barry, and Stephen Gordon, the protagonist of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness: Helen Pidd and Patrick Greenfield, ‘Plaque for “First Modern Lesbian” to Be Reworded after Complaints’, Guardian, 3 September 2018
knowledges to early contributors to trans studies such as Stone and Stryker, Foucault’s concept of genealogy has not received the same degree of attention among trans scholars.
Where researchers have adopted a genealogical approach, the studies are engaged in ethnography and sociology, rather than literary, film, or cultural studies. Valentine’s
Imagining Transgender (2007) presents an ethnographic study examining how the category
‘transgender’ circulated through different discourses in 1990s New York. A decade later,
Pearce’s Understanding Trans Health (2018) examined the shifting discourses around transgender healthcare using social theory and autobiography. In 2019, Pearce joined Igi
Moon, Kat Gupta, and Deborah Lynn Steinberg in co-editing an essay collection on trans genealogies titled The Emergence of Trans (2019), the outcome of an ESRC funded seminar series that took place at the University of Warwick between 2012 and 2014.132 While cross- disciplinary, the contributions to this book and seminar series are heavily weighted towards the social sciences and psy-disciplines; where cultural studies is included, the focus remains within the frame of representation.133 While my research shares their genealogical approach, I extend this to include the study of film and literature.
Foucault outlines his genealogical method in the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’
(1977), which argues that the focus of ‘effective’ history should be to historicise supposedly ahistorical concepts, in order to reveal their precarious emergence at the collision of different discourses. Genealogy, according to Foucault, ‘must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising
132 Economic and Social Research Council. 133 Clare Bartholomaeus and Damien W. Riggs, ‘“Girl Brain . . . Boy Body”: Representations of Trans Characters in Children’s Picture Books’, in The Emergence of Trans: Cultures, Politics and Everyday Lives, ed. by Ruth Pearce and others (London, 2020), pp. 135–49. 47
places, in what we tend to feel is without history’.134 Providing a genealogy of ‘trans’ then, involves understanding identity categories as discursively produced and thus historically and culturally specific. A genealogical approach apprehends ‘trans’ in terms of its ‘emergence’, not as ‘the final term of a historical development’,135 but rather as ‘a place of confrontation’ between different discourses, different interpretations and contradictory meanings.136
Alongside close readings of feminist science fiction films and writings, I offer analyses of the sites from which ‘trans’ has emerged, interrogating how science fiction tropes feed into the different discourses that produce ‘trans’ as a seemingly stable and legible concept.
These genealogical analyses work to historicise ‘trans’. This in and of itself is a science fictional approach: Darko Suvin famously described the genre as characterised by what he termed ‘cognitive estrangement’, a process of creating distance from the familiar.137
Likewise, my genealogical approach seeks to read recent events historically, examining how these events are constructed through parliamentary and mainstream media debates, public protests, social media posts and zines. In so doing, my research examines ‘trans’ in terms of
Lauren Berlant’s concept of the situation: ‘a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life’. 138 This project stages an encounter with ‘trans’ as that something: potentially mattering and unfolding, important to have some handle on, yet unstable – still in the process of happening. My project follows
Berlant’s concern with ‘conceiving the contemporary moment from within that moment’, likewise grappling with the contemporary moment in which ‘trans’ has come to take on new
134 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139–64 (p. 139). 135 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 148. 136 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 150. 137 Darko Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, College English, 34.3 (1972), 372–82 (p. 374). 138 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 5. 48
prominence.
Like Berlant, my line of thinking is also indebted to Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’, a sense of cultural change as something known in the realm of feeling before it can be fully articulated.139 According to Williams, social forms are felt before they are formulated in language, a kind of ‘embryonic phase’ before they are articulated in the past tense as ‘a finished product’.140 Williams argues that the emergence of a new social form is indicated by ‘forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming’.141 These semantic figures express a way of feeling or experiencing meaning before they are reduced to fixed forms; they have an internal ‘structure’ that is partially incoherent or discontinuous, in tension and in process. Taking ‘trans’ as one such developing structure, my thesis looks to feminist science fiction film and literature to understand the category’s emergence. While
William writes of ‘forms or conventions – semantic figures’, my thesis looks at three science fiction ‘tropes’, key thematic figures or ideas that recur across the genre: monstrosity, time- travel, and alien language. Instead of tracing these tropes through feminist science fiction in order to find ‘indications’ of this new structure’s emergence, my project examines how the invocation of these tropes in scholarly, activist, and media discourses contribute to a shift out of which ‘trans’ emerges as something seemingly stable and coherent.
Structure of the Thesis The thesis is comprised of three pairs of chapters, each addressing one of the three themes around which the pairs of chapters are organised: monstrosity, time-travel, and alien
139 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 128. 140 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 130–31. 141 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 133. 49
language. The first of each pair examines the place of the trope in the conceptual field of
‘trans’, appearing at the nexus of conflicting discursive constructions of the category. The second chapter of each pair present a series of close readings of my chosen feminist science fiction texts and films; I examine how these works experiment with the trope in new ways, framing this in the context of contemporary trans debates.
The first chapter of the thesis explores the emergence of ‘trans’ through ideas of monstrosity. Returning to Frankenstein at its 200-year anniversary, I critically interrogate references to the novel by anti-trans feminists and trans theorists alike. I ask what role
‘monstrosity’ plays in trans and feminist scholarship. Chapter Two then unravels the history of (feminist) science fiction to explore the genre’s implication in colonialist discourses. This chapter offers close readings of two works of Asian Canadian science fiction: Larissa Lai’s
Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Hiromi Goto’s short story ‘Hopeful Monsters’ (2004). I use these works’ rearticulation of monstrosity in relation to racist pseudoscience and colonial histories to rethink ‘trans’ in relation to ‘monstrosity’.
In Chapters Three and Four I engage with debates on temporality and historiography from queer and feminist studies, to consider the strange relationship between trans and time. I ask how different approaches to trans history might be understood in terms of science fiction’s different time-travel rules. Chapter Three interrogates the dominant narrative of trans history through a close analysis of accounts of the 1973 West Coast Lesbian conference. This moment is usually invoked in trans histories as exemplary of trans exclusion from feminism. However, I draw attention to contradictory details which emphasise the contingency of the present antagonism between trans and feminist activists.
I advocate a more ambivalent conception of this moment in trans history, an approach that 50
engages with the various debates of the 1970s between the women’s liberation movement and transsexuals and transvestites. In Chapter Four, I analyse three British and American independent feminist films of the 1990s: Sally Potter’s Orlando (1993), Lynn Hershman
Leeson’s Conceiving Ada (1997), and Hilary Brougher’s The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997). My close readings of these feminist time-travel films examine the desires that mobilise recuperative history projects. I ask how these films’ alternative temporalities and the history of non-linear temporality in feminist filmmaking more generally might enable us to rethink trans as a historically and culturally specific category.
In Chapters Five and Six, I turn to the trope of alien language. Chapter Five explores how the proliferation of new terminology related to ‘trans’ is constructed in media and activist discourses. In the conceptual landscape of contemporary trans debates, science fiction’s alien languages – including extraterrestrial and artificial languages – function to present
‘trans’ in terms of threat or hope. I ask how the unintelligibility of some science fictional languages might inspire a more ambivalent approach that attends to the troubling role
‘trans’ plays in human rights discourses that perpetuate colonial dynamics. In Chapter Six, I offer close readings of Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987) and Suzette Haden Elgin’s
Native Tongue Trilogy (1984, 1987, 1994), comparing how their different approaches to constructing a feminist language rework the science fiction trope of alien languages. By bringing together feminist science fiction film and writing in this chapter, I conclude the thesis by thinking about what the genre offers for reimagining ‘trans’ across different forms.
The feminist science fiction writing in my corpus represents a wide historical spread.
However, these works are not introduced chronologically: the thesis does not provide an overview of the genre but rather a map of the points at which feminist science fiction ideas 51
are invoked in trans debates. Like Barr, I am interested in expanding what feminist science fiction can refer to and in disrupting tendencies towards canon-formation.142 My first chapter opens the thesis by disturbing the status of the genre’s supposed originary text, moving on to examine two little-known works of Asian Canadian science fiction from the twenty-first century that trouble science fiction’s boundaries with myth, fantasy, and magical realism. I conclude the thesis by reading Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy, putting a spotlight on an underappreciated author of the so-called New Wave of science fiction. Barr has experimented with new terminology – such as feminist fabulation – to describe the texts she engages with; though I stick with ‘feminist science fiction’, I seek to hold the category open, offering close readings of works which resist easy generic classification.
Instead of mainstream blockbusters, my thesis focusses on independent films that engage more closely with debates in feminist theory. These lesser-known films engage more closely with the feminist and queer debates of their time, namely those around history and language. Often made under tight financial and practical constraints, these works offer inventive ways of thinking through ideas of sex and gender. For the purpose of this thesis, I have focussed on narrative films over more experimental works because my research is interested in storytelling, namely, how science fiction stories relate to the stories we tell about ‘trans’.
Science fiction film and literature have distinct histories and trajectories; I hold them together in this thesis in order to think about what the emergence of feminist science fiction in a new format might tell us about how we can tell stories about ‘trans’ differently. This
142 Marleen Barr, ‘Revamping the Rut Regarding Reading and Writing about Feminist Science Fiction: Or, I Want to Engage in “Procrustean Bedmaking”’, Extrapolation, 41.1 (2000), 43–50. 52
thesis asks: In what ways does the discursive construction of ‘trans’ draw on ideas from science fiction? What constraints does this place on the conceptual field of trans debates?
What would a genealogy of ‘trans’ look like, and how might science fiction help us imagine this? What insights do feminist science fiction film and literature offer for how we might approach trans liberation differently? Exemplifying how the thesis will proceed in responding to these questions, the first chapter of my thesis analyses how trans studies emerged in part through ideas of ‘monstrosity’. I explore how trans theorists have used the figure of the monster to reclaim the abjection of the transsexual body, at the cost of neglecting monstrosity’s historic racialisation. Returning to Stone’s configuration of the
‘transsexual’ as generic mixture offers perhaps another way of approaching the tendency to presume the whiteness of ‘trans’. 53
1: Tracing the Monstrous Birth of ‘Trans’ through the Frankenstein Origin Myth of Science Fiction In late 2018, a video circulated online in which Portland-based trans activist Trystan Reese described the viral media visibility that accompanied his experiences as a pregnant man:
People would tell me that I wasn’t a man at all, I am just a really ugly, hairy woman, and that I was going to give birth to a monster. And then, one woman sent me a message that said, ‘As a Christian, I hope that you give birth to a dead baby, because that baby would be better off than a baby that has to be born to someone like you’.143 The threat that Reese would ‘give birth to a monster’ is thick with echoes of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818), in which the eponymous protagonist experiments with creating new life. Victor Frankenstein even describes his relationship to his creation as like a father to a child, yet upon beholding the creature brought to life, proclaims him a ‘monster’ (p. 59). In a further echo of the novel, the Christian woman’s infanticidal desire resonates with the monster’s murderous rage. In response to his social ostracism, the monster takes the lives of Frankenstein’s infant brother William and childhood friends, driving Frankenstein to destroy his ill-conceived creations in return. Hate and rage towards a new kind of life – a trans life – find expression in fantasies and would-be curses of foetal deformity and stillbirth that replicate these images of monstrosity and death in Shelley’s novel.
Reese describes how these transphobic messages eventually resulted in a nightmare,
‘where I was giving birth, not to a baby, but to a monster with two heads, and a forked tongue and a tail’.144 Reese’s account is reminiscent of the idea from teratology – the study of ‘monsters’, abnormal births, and deviant desires – that thoughts and dreams during
143 Trystan Reese, ‘I Didn’t Think Being a Pregnant Man Was a Big Deal. Then I Went Viral.’, Huffington Post, 14 November 2018
pregnancy have the power to cause birth defects.145 Both Frankenstein and his creator,
Shelley, also describe sleep ‘disturbed by the wildest dreams’ (p. 59). The night after the completion of Frankenstein’s experiment, he has a nightmare of holding his beloved
Elizabeth in his arms as she turns into the corpse of his dead mother. Likewise, in Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she famously explains that the novel’s inspirational spark was a waking nightmare: the imagined scene of ‘the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together’.146 Shelley’s journal entries also reveal an earlier dream of resurrecting her first child, a baby who died days after birth.147 The hateful messages Reese receives are internalised as visions of birthing monsters, weaving together long-existing anxieties about new forms of pregnancy and parenthood with the language of supernatural horror. Nightmare becomes Frankenstein becomes transphobia becomes nightmare.
In this chapter, I explore how the discourse on ‘trans’ draws on ideas of monstrosity from science fiction, focussing specifically on references to Frankenstein in the works of both trans theorists and anti-trans radical feminists. This opening chapter demonstrates the method I will continue to use in subsequent chapters, mapping the discursive fields out of which ‘trans’ has emerged and highlighting the cultural and historical formations that have shaped its development. Here I trace the myth of Frankenstein as science fiction’s originary text across feminist science fiction criticism and feminist science studies, interrogating the conceptual moves that underpin this claim. My analysis finds that the promise of science fiction as being always already feminist science fiction slides uncomfortably into a radical
145 Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 93. 146 Mary Shelley, ‘Author’s Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition (1831)’, in Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. by Maurice Hindle, Revised Ed (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 5–10 (p. 9). 147 Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter, 2nd Edn (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 317–27 (p. 324). 55
feminist imaginary of male womb envy, monstrous bodies, and the spectre of the predatory transsexual. Responding to these radical feminist critiques, transsexual and transgender theorists writing in the 1990s reworked the monster as a figure representing political rage and queer multiplicity. I argue that these elements would come to be crucial in the emergence of ‘trans’ as a standalone term encompassing various forms of gender variance.
As this chapter explores, the connections between monstrosity, pregnancy, and transphobia that Reese articulates are the latest form of a longstanding anxiety about unnatural reproduction and the transitioning body. Transphobia did not begin with trans pregnancies, nor is it the emergence of the category ‘trans’ in the late twentieth century that makes men’s pregnancies possible. This form of reproduction is not new, despite media outlets recently claiming coverage of ‘the first pregnant man’.148 Anne Fausto-Sterling records an example of a hermaphrodite living as a man giving birth in 1601.149 Moreover, works on
‘transgender history’ such as Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors and Susan Stryker’s
Transgender History collect the lives of many people across history who lived as a sex or gender they were not assigned at birth. The frequency of this phenomenon suggests there may have been many ‘pregnant men’ or ‘men giving birth’ across history. It is however not the purpose of this chapter to search for such examples; as Abram J. Lewis argues, the
‘damaged’ queer archive cannot simply be repaired through the recovery of once-hidden or forgotten histories.150 A recuperative project collecting ‘pregnant men’ under the sign of
148 Pablo Pérez Navarro, ‘On Ne Naît Pas Queer: From The Second Sex to Male Pregnancy’, in Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the Simone de Beauvoir Society, ed. by Andrea Duranti and Matteo Tuveri (Newcastle- upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 327–37 (pp. 335–36). 149 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), p. 35. 150 Abram J Lewis, ‘“I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care”: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History’, Radical History Review, 2014.120 (2014), 13–34 (p. 17). 56
‘trans’ would do its own epistemic violence.151
Nor does the arrival of the category ‘trans’ instigate the horror of the monstrous pregnant body. Barbara Creed’s now legendary work The Monstrous-Feminine explored the representations of women in horror films. Creed demonstrates that pregnancy has long been a site of cultural anxiety expressed through the concept of monstrosity. Building on
Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection, Creed argued that films such as Alien (Scott, 1979), The
Exorcist (William, 1973), and The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979) explore unconscious fears about motherhood and reproduction.152 Likewise, Luce Irigaray’s famous formulation of the category ‘woman’ as the ‘sex which is not one’ suggests anxieties about the female body as simultaneously absent from and exceeding the classificatory structures of the dominant phallogocentrism. 153 The pregnant body poses one such paradox of female personhood as neither singular nor clearly divisible, the subject as multiple and multiplying. In Teratologies
(1997), Stacey examines how these anxieties about the female body take on new dimensions in medical discourses, through ideas of cancers, cysts, and ectopic pregnancies as monstrous forms of reproduction. As this chapter will explore, these anxieties heighten around debates about the transsexual or transgender body.
According to feminist theorist Judith Roof in her book Reproductions of Reproduction (1996), new reproductive technologies – both in the sense of cultural production and human procreation – indicate a shift in the Symbolic order, a cultural and linguistic shift in emphasis from metaphor to metonymy, from substitution to deferral. In order to quell anxiety about
151 Abram J Lewis, p. 27. 152 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 7. Horror films continue to revisit the monstrous pregnancy body, see for example: Prevenge (Lowe, 2017). 153Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 23–33. 57
new disruptive forms of reproduction that this shift might produce, the dominant order reasserts its power through images of male mastery, ‘multiplying and extending creative paternal power’.154 Roof describes Frankenstein as one of the earliest among these
‘compensatory’ responses to this shift in language and culture, helping to resecure patriarchal dominance and thwart the threat of unauthorised forms of reproduction.155 How then might we understand references to Frankenstein and monstrosity in the different discourses out of which ‘trans’ has emerged?
My exploration of Frankenstein’s afterlives in radical feminist and trans theory will not resolve the problem of the science fiction origin story. While Thomas E. Bredehoft offers up
C. L. Moore’s short story ‘Shambleau’ (1933) as an alternative origin story for specifically feminist science fiction, this chapter does not offer up its own suggestion.156 As Clare
Hemmings argues in Why Stories Matter, telling new stories about feminist history is not enough to displace the old ones: we need to examine how these stories repeat themselves, how they come to be understood as common knowledge rather than one partisan version of events. By showing the development of the science fiction origin myth, its relationship to feminist thought and trans theory, this chapter interrogates the assumptions and slippages of this narrative: What conceptual work does this origin story do? What incompatible details and internal tensions does it obscure? What can the feminist investment in a certain narrative of science fiction history tell us about the political investments in the stability and legibility of ‘trans’?
154 Judith Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), p. 10. 155 Roof, p. 10. 156 Thomas A Bredehoft, ‘Origin Stories: Feminist Science Fiction and C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau”’, Science Fiction Studies, 24.3 (1997), 369–86. 58
The Feminist Science Fiction Origin Story This moment of heightened attention towards the pregnant trans male body also saw a resurgence of interest in Frankenstein. 2018 was the 200-year anniversary of the novel’s first publication, celebrated in various forms across academia and popular culture, including
Frankenreads, an international mass public reading event; numerous conferences, journal special issues, and critical work; and the release of Frankissstein (Jeanette Winterson, 2019), a reworking of Shelley’s novel in light of technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence, and digital consciousness. The commemoration of Frankenstein’s first edition obscures, however, that the better-known version of the text is the later 1831 edition, this being the version that has historically been more cheaply available.157 Moreover, since the
1820s, more people have known the story through its many stage adaptations (and in the twentieth century, film adaptations) than through the novel itself.158 As Anne K. Mellor points out, there are significant differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions, which shifted the novel’s social message from moral responsibility to pessimistic fatalism: changing the novel’s descriptions, characters, and therefore themes, Shelley reflected her own changing philosophical views.159 Stage adaptations have also rarely adhered to the novel, tending towards vague ideas of hubris and the dangers of new technologies.160 The confusion about these differences between the texts’ editions and adaptations means that
Frankenstein is flexible to various politically invested interpretations.
In both mainstream and scholarly discussions about Frankenstein around the novel’s
157 Anne K. Mellor, ‘Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 204–11 (p. 211); Chris Baldick, ‘The Reception of Frankenstein’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 242–48 (p. 247). 158 William St Clair, ‘Frankenstein’s Impact’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 248–62 (pp. 259–60). 159 Mellor, ‘Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach’, pp. 209–11. 160 St Clair, pp. 256–61. 59
bicentenary, an oft-repeated idea resurfaced with intensity: that the novel is the first science fiction novel. As science fiction journalist Thal Sneddon phrased it, ‘You, a literate: if females want science fiction they should go & write it! Me, a nerd: wow if only a woman had written the first sf novel’.161 This tweet speaks to the continued assumption that science fiction is a male-dominated or typically masculine genre, while also indicating an important division in the genre’s readership: those who view women’s creative role in the genre as a relatively new or impending intervention, and those that view women’s writing as inaugurating the genre, namely, with the publication of Frankenstein. This latter stance is first expressed in Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (1973), a lengthy study of science fiction’s history. Eventually, Aldiss’s name drops from citations though: critics begin describing
Frankenstein’s status as the first science fiction novel as simply ‘generally accepted’, or even
‘conventional’.162 The mythology of science fiction’s birth gradually becomes common knowledge.
To justify science fiction’s rightful place in academia, its late twentieth-century critics sought to provide an account of the genre’s literary origins. Frankenstein was thus a useful text to claim as the genre’s foundation, given that the novel had not long been judged a work of science fiction, previously identified as a work of Gothic or Romantic literature.163 At the time of publication, the novel was considered in terms of its politics rather than its generic status: Sir Walter Scott’s 1818 review of Frankenstein described it as a novel at the intersection of ‘marvellous romance’ and ‘political satire’, while other reviewers were
161 @thalestral, ‘"You, a Literate: If Females Want Science Fiction They Should Go & Write It! Me, a Nerd: Wow If Only a Woman Had Written the First Sf Novel "’, Twitter
preoccupied with the novel’s dangerous associations with radical politics.164 The term
‘science fiction’ would only be invented in 1929 by pulp magazine publisher Hugo
Gernsback, whose republication of nineteenth-century stories by H. G. Wells and Jules
Verne helped to establish them as the joint fathers of ‘science fiction’.165 The retrospective categorisation of Frankenstein as the first work of science fiction enabled critics to produce a prestigious canonical backstory for the genre. This new narrative offset the genre’s association with pulp fiction, while also switching the joint paternal pairing of Wells and
Verne for a single female root.
This move followed a time of upheaval in the genre: in the 1960s and 1970s, female authors won science fiction awards as they had never done before, while female readers fought for panels on women and science fiction at conventions.166 As I mentioned in the introduction, it was during this period that critics and fans began to recognise feminist science fiction in its own right, as a subcategory of the broader genre of science fiction. As Robin Roberts describes, ‘the first critics of feminist science fiction had to establish that such a genre existed and that it deserved study’.167 Anthologies played a key role in securing this recognition, with Pamela Sargent’s oft-cited introduction to Women of Wonder (1975) marking an important shift. While critical essays by prominent feminist science fiction authors Joanna Russ (1970) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1975) had explored the genre’s problems with the representation of women, Sargent provided an overview of the genre’s overlooked
164 Sir Walter Scott, ‘From Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1818)’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 219–37 (p. 219. 221); Baldick, ‘The Reception of Frankenstein’, p. 243. 165 Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 48. 166 Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), p. 7. 167 Robin Roberts, ‘It’s Still Science Fiction: Strategies of Feminist Science Fiction Criticism’, Extrapolation, 36.3 (1995), 184–97 (p. 192). 61
female authors. Beginning with Frankenstein, Sargent mapped key texts in the history of a feminist science fiction. Presented together with a collection of female-authored short stories, this introduction produced the sense of an existing body of feminist science fiction writing in need of popular and scholarly attention.
In effect, feminist critics claimed Frankenstein as the first feminist science fiction novel.
From the 1970s onwards, a multitude of feminist science fiction critics cited the
Frankenstein origin story of science fiction, with Robin Roberts (1993), Jane Donawerth
(1997), and Debra Benita Shaw (2000), even referencing the novel in the titles of their works.168 While many prior reviews and adaptations of Frankenstein had emphasised the text’s warning against man playing God, these late twentieth-century feminist critics read the novel as warning against specifically men playing God.169 The reinterpretation of
Frankenstein enabled feminist critics to carry out a further move: to place feminist concerns at the heart of the entire genre.
In Michel Foucault’s essay, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, he urges historians to be wary of neat origin stories such as this. The search for origins, in Foucault’s view, ‘is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things’, subscribing to an understanding of epistemology and
168 Pamela Sargent, ‘Introduction’, in Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women, ed. by Pamela Sargent (New York, NY: Vintage, 1975), pp. xiii–lxiv (pp. xvi–xvii); Susan Gubar, ‘C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 7.1 (1980), 16–27 (p. 16); Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu, ‘Introduction’, in Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, ed. by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), pp. 1–8; Robin Roberts, ‘The Paradigm of Frankenstein: Reading Canopus in Argos in the Context of Science Fiction by Women’, Extrapolation, 26.1 (1985), 16–23; Cranny- Francis; Robin Roberts, ‘Post-Modernism and Feminist Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 17.2 (1990), 136–52; Robin Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Jane Donawerth, Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Veronica Hollinger, ‘Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 1980- 1999’, Science Fiction Studies, 26.2 (1999), 232–62 (pp. 235–36); Debra Benita Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance, 2000, pp. 10–11. 169 Baldick, ‘The Reception of Frankenstein’, pp. 247–48. 62
ontology derived from Plato’s Theory of Forms.170 The claiming of Frankenstein as the origin of science fiction is thus also the attempt to install certain qualities as the genre’s ‘essence’; subsequent texts that also exhibit these qualities present a return to the pure form of the genre. Claiming Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel and a work of feminist science fiction thus positions the genre as always already – originally, essentially, and thus properly
– feminist science fiction. This slippage between genre and subgenre through the
Frankenstein origin story results in tensions between different narratives of women in relation to science fiction: Are works by female authors necessarily feminist? Does a female generic forebear necessarily make the genre women’s terrain? Do more recent works of feminist science fiction signal an intervention in or a retrieval of the genre? In feminist science fiction criticism, these tensions are never fully resolved, and as I will show, the slippage between them allows for an uncomfortable narrative to take hold in wider feminist thought.
Generic Reproduction and Male Appropriation In Why Stories Matter, Hemmings dissects three key narratives of recent feminist history: progress, loss, and return. These narratives are frequently repeated in journal articles through rhetorical devices that suggest their status as widely accepted facts rather than highly contested versions of events. Hemmings uses alternative citation practices, citing quotes only by journal and year instead of author, to encourage her reader to pay attention to the work that such refrains carry out.171 These narratives shape an affective orientation to feminism in the present and demand a specific feminist subject, speaking to their intended readers as ‘heroines’ of feminism, who rescue or protect the field from its misuse
170 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 143. 171 Hemmings, pp. 20–27. 63
by others.172 My own work in this chapter examines interconnected rather than competing narratives of feminist science fiction history and I do not deploy the same citation methods as Hemmings. However, I am similarly interested in the inadvertent consequences of the construction of a narrative of feminist science fiction history as generally accepted.
One problem that plagues all three narratives in Hemmings’ analysis is a tendency to segment feminist history into clear decades or waves.173 This division of time deploys a generational logic that Hemmings criticises as heteronormative and ageist:
Feminism is thus locked into a psychoanalytic dynamic of vigorous supersession (by the younger) and melancholic nostalgia (of the older), and figures both mothers and daughters as themselves always bound in antagonistic relation.174 Similarly, references to Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel tend to implicate
Shelley’s work in a project of generic reproduction, sometimes even referring to the text as the ‘mother’ of the genre and later feminist science fiction works as its ‘daughters’ or
‘inheritance’.175
The construction of Frankenstein’s relationship to twentieth-century feminist science fiction as that of mother to daughter appears less antagonistic than in Hemmings’ examples.
Nevertheless, the generational logic carries out similar conceptual work. Here the maternal metaphor implicitly genders science fiction: through these descriptions the genre is endowed with women’s power of reproduction, rather than a male patrilineage. While feminist science fiction critics popularise the Frankenstein origin myth, creative works such
172 Hemmings, p. 5. 173 For more on the problem of periodisation in queer and feminist history, see: Madhavi Menon, ‘Period Cramps’, in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, ed. by Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton, 1st edn (London: Routledge, 2009); Valerie Traub, ‘The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’, PMLA, 128.1 (2013), 21–39. 174 Hemmings, p. 148. 175 Eric S. Rabkin, ‘Science Fiction Women Before Liberation’, in Future Females: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Marleen S. Barr (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981), pp. 9–25; Donawerth; Shaw. 64
as Russ’s The Female Man (1975), James Tiptree Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
(1976), and Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986) explored the feminist potential of ideas of parthenogenic reproduction and single-sex procreation. In light of the popularity of these works at this time, claiming Frankenstein’s status as the genre’s mother effectively positioned female authors as the genre’s true offspring and rightful inheritors. Meanwhile,
Mary Shelley was reduced to her own maternal role and the novel reduced to a reflectionist reading in which the text plays out her own experiences with pregnancy and the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, while giving birth to her.176 Crucially, the vocabulary of mother-daughter relations posits anxieties about reproduction as a core concern of the genre from its outset.
Feminist science fiction critics adopted Frankenstein to explore critiques of science. ‘Victor
Frankenstein’s fault is not simply the pursuit of forbidden knowledge’, Anne Cranny-Francis writes, ‘but his failure to consider the consequences of his research, the dilemma faced by scientists in many areas of research today (for example nuclear technology, genetic manipulation, in vitro fertilization)’.177 Cranny-Francis’ reading reorients the Edenic,
Promethean and occult references in the novel, reconstructing Frankenstein’s moral message to emphasise the novel’s continued relevance as a warning against the sciences’ myopia with respect to wider ethical and social consequences.
Other feminist critics went further, using Frankenstein to explore ideas of science as patriarchal. Writing in North America and the UK between the 1970s and early 2000s, these feminist science fiction critics spoke to the wider context of the struggle for women’s bodily
176 See for example: Moers, p. 319. 177 Cranny-Francis, p. 39. 65
autonomy, and specifically to debates on reproductive justice.178 This period saw the emergence of the field of feminist science and technologies studies. Key works such as
Evelyn Fox Keller’s Reflections on Gender and Science (1985) and Donna Haraway’s
‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ crystallised ideas about the effect – and potentially apocalyptic consequences – of men’s domination of science. Readings of Shelley’s novel as a ‘critique of science as a form of male mastery’ or as ‘expos[ing] hierarchies of dominance embedded in the practice of science’ thus recast the story as prefiguring later feminist analyses.179
For some feminist science fiction critics, Victor Frankenstein does not merely represent male control, but male appropriation of female bodily functions, ultimately aiming to replace women altogether. According to Cranny-Francis:
In making his creature Frankenstein not only usurps the place of God, he also usurps the role of woman. Frankenstein’s creature therefore signifies the result of the masculinist attempt to appropriate and exploit this biological capability of women, which in a patriarchal society is their defining, and limiting, characteristic.180 In this reading of the novel, Shelley is portrayed as launching a scathing attack on scientific production as the expression of male envy of women’s reproductive power. Susan Gubar describes Frankenstein as a ‘satanic scientist who usurps female powers of procreation’,
Roberts writes that ‘Frankenstein dies as a result of his usurpation and abuse of female powers’, while Mary Ann Doane suggests that the novel deals with ‘a desire on the part of the male to appropriate the maternal function’.181 Going even further, Mellor writes that:
‘[b]y stealing the female’s control over reproduction […] Frankenstein has eliminated the
178 For more on reproductive justice in the American context, see: The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 179 Gubar, p. 16; Robin Roberts, ‘Post-Modernism and Feminist Science Fiction’, pp. 138–39. 180 Cranny-Francis, p. 39. 181 Gubar, p. 16; Robin Roberts, ‘The Paradigm of Frankenstein’, p. 18; Mary Ann Doane, ‘Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine’, in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. by Gill Kirkup and others (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 110–24. 66
necessity to have females at all’.182 The language of appropriation, usurpation and theft converts the novel’s ‘hostility to science’ into a criticism of men’s attempts to recuperate their supposed reproductive lack through science and technology.183
This narrative of usurpation combines with the origin myth of the first science fiction novel to present the content of Frankenstein as exemplary of the trajectory of the genre.
Following Foucault’s warning about origin myths, feminist critics’ emphasis on Frankenstein as science fiction’s originary text works to imply that female-authored feminist works come closer to the genre’s essential qualities. Just as Frankenstein is seen to misappropriate the supposedly female reproductive role, so too are subsequent male science fiction writers seen to misappropriate science fiction, failing to pay due respect to their maternal ancestry.
Roberts writes that feminist science fiction writers’ contributions to the genre in the late
1970s onwards constituted a challenge to ‘the male-dominated and sexist club of science fiction’, viewing their intervention as modelled on Frankenstein, a warning about ‘the dangers of excluding women from science’.184
Despite this sense of feminist science fiction constituting an intervention in the genre, feminist science fiction critics’ celebration of Frankenstein indicates a narrative less of takeover and more of taking back: Sargent spotlights underappreciated female authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Rhoda Broughton, Francis Stevens, and
C. L. Moore – presenting women as key contributors to the genre side-lined by sexist male authors and publishers.185 This inversion functions as a strategic move in stark contrast to
182 Anne K. Mellor, ‘Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 355–68 (p. 355). 183 Freedman, p. 4. 184 Robin Roberts, ‘The Paradigm of Frankenstein’, pp. 16, 17. 185 Sargent, pp. xvii–xx. 67
critics who read Mary Shelley as indebted to the men in her life (her father, her husband, her friends), her male literary contemporaries (Milton, Coleridge), and male-dominated traditions of literature and politics (romanticism, radicalism).186 Science fiction by men is in effect positioned as the true interloper in a properly feminist genre.
By positioning Shelley as the instigator of a feminist genre, such critics assert Shelley’s status as a feminist figure and Frankenstein’s status as a feminist text. This is despite the fact that the novel’s main characters – Frankenstein, the monster, Henry Clerval – are men, while the novel’s female characters function primarily as plot devices, lambs to the slaughter that progress Frankenstein’s character development. This claiming of Shelley as a feminist icon pays little attention to the differences between the original 1818 and revised 1831 editions, which indicate that Shelley became more conservative with time and renounced many of her more radical views.187 Indeed, Mellor points out that in the revised edition, the novel’s most prominent female character, Elizabeth Lavenza ‘has become a passive “angel in the house”’.188
In the late twentieth century, Shelley’s status as feminist is little debated; her credentials are guaranteed through references to her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).189 Yet Shelley has not always been considered a feminist in her own right: many feminists of the nineteenth century were embarrassed by
186 Chris Baldick, ‘Assembling Frankenstein’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 173–83 (pp. 176–82). This deference to male figures in Mary Shelley’s life or reading is sometimes taken to the point of erasing her own authorship. See: Germaine Greer, ‘Yes, Frankenstein Really Was Written by Mary Shelley. It’s Obvious - Because the Book Is so Bad’, Guardian, 9 April 2007
her and her ‘ghastly’ first novel.190 The positioning of Shelley as feminist is enabled through dubious biographical readings that merely replace Shelley’s male influences with a primary female one, collapsing the author into her mother.
Radical Feminist Readings of Frankenstein This view of science fiction as misappropriated by men re-enacts on a generic scale the reading of Frankenstein as a feminist tale of men’s theft of female (pro)creativity. This multilevel narrative, fundamental to the claiming of Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel, depends upon a view of women as inherently reproductive and men as inherently productive. This conception of a gendered division of labour was key to Marxist feminist analyses emerging in the middle of the twentieth century, such as the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s.191 These analyses understood reproductive/productive to be a hierarchical binary in which women’s housework, emotional labour, and reproductive capacities were routinely disregarded. The status of these activities as ‘work’ was ignored, and the hours left unremunerated. These analyses continue to be crucial for diverse areas of feminist analysis, including theories of intimacy, care, sex work, abortion, surrogacy, gestation – and, of course, transition.192
Hemmings argues that one problem with the reductive narratives of feminist history she examines in her book is their amenability to post- or even anti-feminist arguments.193
Likewise, my critical analysis of the problems with the dominant science fiction origin story raises questions about the ways in which this narrative may go beyond the intentions of its
190 St Clair, p. 256. 191 For more on the Wages for Housework campaign, see: Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-1977, trans. by Käthe Roth (London: Pluto Press, 2018). 192 For an overview of these interwoven categories, see: Sophie Lewis, ‘Cyborg Uterine Geography: Complicating “Care” and Social Reproduction’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 8.3 (2018), 300–316; Giles, Wages for Transition. 193 Hemmings, pp. 131–59. 69
architects. As one branch of a genre already considered lowbrow, feminist science fiction wields relatively little cultural influence. Yet Frankenstein is a powerful text. Originally circulating among the wealthy and used soon after its publication as a political tool, the novel has inspired countless stage adaptations and around thirty film and television series.194 The novel’s ideas have been elaborated in many other famous works of science fiction, including Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896); George Langelaan’s short story The
Fly (1957) (later adapted into two famous films [Neumann, 1958; Cronenberg, 1986]); the
Alien film series (created by Ridley Scott, 1979-), and the Terminator film series (created by
James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, 1984-). While feminist science fiction may not have much political sway in the mainstream, Frankenstein has served political aims that implicate its positioning as the genre’s origin in undesirable discourses.
Cranny-Francis’ analysis of Frankenstein does argue that it is patriarchy that reduces women to their procreative abilities. Nevertheless, the reiteration of this binary of male- productive/female-reproductive in many similar feminist critiques without this caveat, serves to consolidate a view of science as an inherently masculine realm, albeit a poor substitute for pregnancy and birth. Sargent’s introduction to Women of Wonder emphasised the problems of such a division for women’s engagement in science, technology and science fiction.195 As Russ points out in her essay ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’ (1985),
194 St Clair, pp. 249, 255; Susan Tyler Hitchcock, ‘The Monster Lives On’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 263–70; Elizabeth Young, ‘Frankenstein as Historical Metaphor’, in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, 2012, pp. 270–76. 195 Sargent, p. iv. The idea that science is the domain of men still proliferates today, among, for instance, male physicists at CERN and software engineers at Google: Pallab Ghosh, ‘Cern Scientist: “Physics Built by Men - Not by Invitation”’, BBC News, 2018
predominantly male authors have populated the genre with bizarre and sexist tropes, often about reproduction. 196 Certainly these clichés have dissuaded many women from participating in reading and writing science fiction. The supposed tainting of science – and consequently science fiction – by men’s desire to assume a role deemed proper only to women might suggest a contamination so strong that women cannot or should not participate.
More important for this chapter, however, is the amenability of this narrative of
Frankenstein to transphobia. As the case of Trystan Reese demonstrates, the view of reproduction as a capacity possessed solely by women throws up uncomfortable – even harmful – difficulties if we accept the existence of reproducing men, never mind many women’s inability or refusal to procreate; the role of reproductive technologies and surrogacy in assisting pregnancies; or the long-imagined and perhaps soon-to-be realised machinery of artificial wombs.197 The reinterpretation of Frankenstein as a feminist critique of technoscience took place alongside discoveries that would radically change reproduction, through visualising reproductive processes, mechanically assisting pregnancies, and offering genetic answers to questions of parentage, criminality, and sexuality.198 Roof argues that these developments in technology have followed the human imagination, as we attempt to extend our reach of knowledge in order to remove uncertainty.199 Yet as feminist science studies has explored, these developments produce new anxieties, as gaps in knowledge are
196 Joanna Russ, ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’, in Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, ed. by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), pp. 27–34. See also: Susan Wood, ‘Women and Science Fiction’, Algol/Starship, 16.1 (1978), 9–18. 197 Shulamith Firestone famously advocated the use of artificial wombs to remove the burden of reproductive labour on women in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), and the idea has been frequently reimagined in works of feminist science fiction, perhaps most famously in Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. 198 As the film Seahorse (Finlay, 2019) shows these technologies would become crucial to trans men’s pregnancies. 199 Roof, p. 25. 71
never fully closed.200 Following Guardian journalist Freddy McConnell as he undergoes fertility treatments, Jeanie Finlay’s 2019 documentary Seahorse demonstrates how these reproductive technologies would come to be crucial to trans men’s pregnancies. Even before this application of these scientific developments, some feminists were already connecting these technologies to anxieties about the transsexual or transgender body – through ideas of monstrosity.
The circulation of the Frankenstein origin myth in science fiction criticism dovetails with a branch of radical feminism emerging in the 1970s. This kind of radical feminism is critical not only of the patriarchal nature of science and medicine, but of a specific set of procedures: treatments for those identifying as transsexual or transgender. In her 1978 book
Gyn/Ecology, radical feminist theologian Mary Daly reads Frankenstein as ‘foretelling the technological fathers’ fusion of male mother-miming and necrophilia in a boundary violation that ultimately points toward the total elimination of women’.201 The novel’s critique of science takes on new relevance for Daly as a prophetic analysis of the problems with the contemporary medical establishment, which she views as an extension of patriarchy.
Frankenstein’s desire to produce ‘[a] new species, [that] would bless me as its creator and source […] [by] bestow[ing] animation upon lifeless matter’ functions for Daly as a premonition of modern scientific techniques including reproductive technologies, cloning, implants, prosthetics, genetic engineering, and medical treatment for transsexuals (p. 55).
Daly holds these techniques to be a masculinist intervention into a properly female realm, a transgression which will ultimately result in the eradication of women altogether, replaced
200 See for example: Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, ‘Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction’, Feminist Studies, 13.2 (1987), 263–92; Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene. 201 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 70. 72
by man-made monsters. Punning on the title of sexologist Harry Benjamin’s book The
Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), she calls this ‘the Frankenstein Phenomenon’.202
Of course, not all radical feminists subscribed to this critique, with Shulamith Firestone notably celebrating the liberatory possibilities reproductive technologies might bring.203 But a few other radical feminist works did follow Daly’s lead, in works such as The Transsexual
Empire (1979) by Janice Raymond (Daly’s doctoral student); The Whole Woman (1999) by
Germaine Greer; and Gender Hurts (2014) by Sheila Jeffreys. These latter works did not explicitly mention Frankenstein in their analyses of transvestite, transsexual, or transgender people. However, they did deploy phrases such as ‘transsexually constructed’ and
‘mutilation’ alongside ideas of transsexualism as ‘an exorcism of the mother’ or
‘appropriating [the female] body’, invoking the novel’s depictions of Frankenstein cutting up and sewing together body parts collected from ‘the dissecting room and the slaughter- house’ in order to ‘give life’ to his creation (pp. 54, 55).204 From the mid-1970s onwards, this anxiety about men replacing and eventually eradicating ‘real’ women also found expression in science fiction novels such as Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972; later made into a film:
Forbes, 1975), as well as films such as Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and Cherry 2000 (De
Jarnatt, 1987).205 The link between this anxiety about ‘constructed’ women and transsexualism was even made explicit in works such as Russ’ The Female Man and Pedro
Almodóvar’s film The Skin I Live In (2011), which feature male characters who are forcibly surgically altered to become women. Radical feminist critiques of transsexualism are
202 Daly, pp. 69–72. 203 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: Verso, 2015), p. 185. 204 Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 99, 104; Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (London: Transworld, 1999), pp. 81, 93; Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 68. 205 An even earlier non-science-fiction example of this anxiety is Norman Bates in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960). 73
therefore interwoven with science fiction narratives about men constructing monsters, which build upon the feminist reading of Frankenstein as a mad scientist usurping female powers.
Moreover, Daly’s location of transsexuals within a series of (sometimes fantastical) technologies supposedly motivated by men’s desire to invade women’s spaces and bodies is reminiscent of earlier criticisms of transsexuals by radical and lesbian feminists. As I will explore in more detail in my third chapter, in radical feminist Robin Morgan’s keynote address to the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, she described transsexual lesbian feminist performer Beth Elliott as being ‘an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer – with the mentality of a rapist’.206 Raymond notoriously argued that transsexuals ‘rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves’.207 For these radical feminists, merely existing as transsexual is tantamount to sexual violence.
The construction of Frankenstein as the literary foreshadowing of transsexual and transgender women’s desire to access women-only spaces reveals one way in which the transsexual predator has become central to the anti-trans radical feminist imaginary.
Raymond’s book frequently employs the language of ‘penetration’ to discuss transsexual lesbian feminists, echoing Shelley’s descriptions of her protagonist’s pursuit of knowledge.
Frankenstein is ‘imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature’; he is educated in the works of ‘men who had penetrated deeper and knew more’; and, in his search for the power to give life to the inanimate, he claims to have ‘pursued nature to her
206 Robin Morgan, ‘Keynote Address’, Lesbian Tide, 1973, pp. 30–34 (p. 32). 207 Raymond, p. 104. 74
hiding-places’ (pp. 41, 55). While Frankenstein claims to seek ‘in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world’, the language of penetration suggest ‘physical secrets’ of a more sexual nature (p. 39). Historically nature has been coded as feminine, and therefore for radical feminists Frankenstein becomes the archetypal sexual predator, the perverted infiltrator of women’s ‘hiding-places’.
Ironically, despite these anti-trans radical feminists’ preoccupation with transsexual and transgender women as symbolically rendering female reproductive processes obsolete, the development of reproductive technologies over the twenty-first century has instead carried greater significance for trans men. While womb transplants for trans women are still out of reach, new medical techniques and equipment have enabled more and more transmasculine people to give birth. Rather than transsexual and transgender people symbolising the imminent redundancy of the womb as a source of procreative power, they have instead reimagined what it means to have a womb. Extending the possibilities of reproduction beyond the female body, trans pregnancies turn the transphobic radical feminist interpretation of Frankenstein on its head: the narrative of male usurpation of female reproductive powers transforms into a surprisingly trans-affirmative statement of bodily autonomy and self-construction.
Reclaiming Monstrosity These allusions to Frankenstein in transphobic radical feminist writings follow similar figurative uses of Frankenstein that appeared not long after the novel’s publication. Susan
Tyler Hitchcock notes two divergent shorthand readings of Frankenstein that arose after the novel’s first adaptation for the stage in 1823: firstly, as a warning against change, against the catastrophic consequences of making a ‘monster’ through rash political reforms; and secondly, as a warning against social exclusion, expressing sympathy with the abandoned 75
‘wretch’ outside of political or social structures. The former use was first adopted in 1824 by
British Foreign Secretary George Canning to argue against the emancipation of West Indian slaves.208 Later in 1832 and 1833, this metaphorical use of Frankenstein and his monster was deployed by Tory politicians arguing against enfranchising the working class.209 Likewise in 1882, conservatives used the Frankenstein metaphor to criticise the campaign for Irish nationalism.210
Hitchcock points out that this sense of Frankenstein as a warning against social change has also had less reactionary applications, used to criticise mismanaged wars, imperialism, and the Confederacy.211 Nonetheless, this interpretation of the novel never fully extricates itself from its early associations with conservatism, racism, and class prejudice, resurfacing in late- twentieth-century critiques of feminism and LGBT rights, and continuing to shape the perception of black men as monstrous.212 As Hemmings notes, radical feminists such as
Daly, Raymond, Greer, and Jeffreys emphasise the ‘horror’ of the embodiment of transsexual or transgender identification rather than simply what this symbolises.213 Their arguments therefore remain ineluctably intertwined with reactionary politics that perpetuated stereotypes of the gigantic and animalistic working class, Irish, or black body.214
The second usage of Frankensteinian imagery that Hitchcock identifies, on the other hand,
208 Baldick, ‘The Reception of Frankenstein’, p. 246; St Clair, p. 262; Hitchcock, p. 263. 209 Hitchcock, p. 263; St Clair, p. 262. Notably, the year after Frankenstein’s publication saw the Peterloo Massacre, in which a peaceful demonstration for voting reform in Manchester’s St Peter’s Field held by political radicals ended with the local Yeomanry charging the crowd, killing fifteen and injuring between 400 and 700 others. The event was memorialised in Shelley’s husband’s poem, The Masque of Anarchy, published after his death in 1832, and so presumably Shelley was also aware of the political context in which her ‘hideous progeny’ was received. Shelley, ‘Author’s Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition (1831)’, p. 10. 210 Hitchcock, p. 265; St Clair, p. 262. 211 Hitchcock, pp. 265, 267–68. 212 Elizabeth Young, ‘Frankenstein as Historical Metaphor’, pp. 274–76. 213 Hemmings, p. 219. 214 Baldick, ‘The Reception of Frankenstein’, p. 246; Hitchcock, p. 265. 76
appeared in the works of nineteenth-century radical philosophers. She writes that these thinkers ‘picked up on the Godwinian strands in Mary Shelley’s story – the portrayal of the creature as a victim of social forces, antagonistic because powerless, hostile because unloved’.215 This interpretation of Frankenstein – which more closely follows the original and more radical 1818 edition of Shelley’s novel – reappears in key early works of trans theory. In the 1990s, often in direct response to transphobic radical feminists’ work, transsexual and transgender theorists reclaimed the language of Frankenstein and his monster. The Frankenstein metaphor became a way to identify with the supposed
‘monstrosity’ of transsexual or transgender embodiment that radical feminists had so pejoratively criticised.
Stryker addressed transphobic radical feminists’ use of Frankenstein head on: ‘My Words to
Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’ (1994) responds directly to Daly’s explicit and Raymond’s implicit construction of transsexuals as monsters.216 Stryker writes that ‘[l]ike that creature, I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life worth living’.217 Stryker thereby reconfigures monstrosity as a political tool with which to understand transsexual or transgender people’s experiences of hatred and hurt. Likewise, Jack Halberstam’s book Skin
Shows (1995) criticises feminist readings of Frankenstein, such as Mellor’s, which fold the novel’s homoeroticism into a critique of the male-dominated scientific establishment. Such readings, he argues, risk homophobia.218 While Halberstam’s book does not explicitly
215 Hitchcock, p. 267. 216 Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1 (1994), 237–54 (p. 238). 217 Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’, p. 250. 218 J. Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 42. 77
address radical feminists’ transphobic uses of the Frankenstein metaphor, he does connect the novel to fears around transvestism, transsexualism, and perversion in other popular filmic reworkings of the novel’s themes such as Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986), and Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991).
In Karen Barad’s article ‘Transmaterialities’ (2015), she connects Halberstam’s Frankenstein readings to Stryker’s, emphasising these theorists’ shared celebration of monstrosity.219 This affirmative stance signals another aspect of the investment in ‘trans’ as an alternative to earlier gender and sexual categories. Halberstam’s reading of Frankenstein also asserts that some feminists misunderstand the text by attempting to fix the monster to a single identity, for instance, reading the monster as Eve.220 Instead, Halberstam argues for an interpretation of the monster as ‘a symbol of multiplicity’, a ‘hybrid’ figure of ‘unstable gender’.221 This reconceptualisation of queer, transsexual, or transgender embodiment though the notion of monstrous multiplicity anticipates the emergence of a new linguistic mutation to signify multiple ways of living outside of sex and gender norms.222
Through identification with the socially ostracised monster, many of these theorists sought to rally their readership into activism through a shared affective response: anger. Stryker’s article is subtitled ‘Performing Transgender Rage’, and she concludes with a message to her reader: ‘May you discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it nourish
219 Karen Barad, ‘Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21.2–3 (2015), 387–405 (pp. 391–93). For more on the exploration of monstrosity in trans studies, see: Susan Stryker, ‘More Words about “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 25.1 (2019), 39–44; Susan Stryker, ‘Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10.2 (2004), 212–15; Harlan Weaver, ‘Monster Trans: Diffracting Affect, Reading Rage’, Somatechnics, 3.2 (2013), 287–306. 220 J. Halberstam, p. 36. 221 J. Halberstam, pp. 29, 32. This emphasis on the multiplicity of Frankenstein’s monster is further elaborated in other political works such as: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004), pp. 11–12, 195–96. 222 I expand further on the investment in ‘trans’ as uniquely and newly inclusive in Chapter Three. 78
your rage. May your rage inform your actions, and your actions transform you as you struggle to transform your world’.223 For Stryker, the rage of the ‘monster’ works as a useful catalyst for social change. In their ground-breaking book Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein wrote of – and for – a collective of political radicals united by shared oppression through gender norms. These ‘gender outlaws’ experience ‘a great deal of anger. Because, we’ve suddenly positioned ourselves in the area previously marked “freaks only”. We’ve chosen to stand with the oppressed’.224 Like Stryker, Bornstein discusses her anger as a generative affect, the identification of injustice providing the spark to ignite activism: ‘we snap; we begin to fight’.225 Although Bornstein does not explicitly mention Frankenstein or his monster, their book makes use of related terminology that evokes the Gothic, Romantic, and politically radical strands of Shelley’s novel: outlaws, freaks, rebels. Following nineteenth-century education and voting reformers’ use of the Frankenstein metaphor,
Bornstein indicates the negative potential consequences of the outsider’s unchecked rage alongside its more useful applications for activism.226
Dean Spade reworks the language of ‘mutilation’ in radical feminists’ critiques of medical transition, particularly in reference to transsexual men who undergo mastectomies.227
Spade rejects the transphobic radical feminist view of gender-affirming surgeries as akin to practices of genital mutilation, self-harm, eating disorders, or cosmetic surgery. Instead,
223 Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’, p. 251. 224 Kate Bornstein, ‘Gender Terror, Gender Rage’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 236–43 (p. 241). 225 Bornstein, ‘Gender Terror, Gender Rage’, p. 243. 226 Hitchcock, pp. 263–67. 227 Jeffreys, Gender Hurts; Sheila Jeffreys, ‘Transgender Activism: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1 (1997), 55–74; Sheila Jeffreys, ‘FTM Transsexualism and the Destruction of Lesbians’, in Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 122–43; Greer, The Whole Woman. 79
transition surgeries figure as part of a political arsenal for dismantling gender norms.228 ‘My project would be to promote sex reassignment, gender alteration, temporary gender adventure, and the mutilation of gender categories, via surgery, hormones, clothing, political lobbying, civil disobedience, or any other means available’.229 Spade presents medical interventions for transsexual and transgender people not as disfiguring the body, but as tools to deconstruct the systems that already do that body harm. In so doing, Spade evokes the repeated attempts by Frankenstein’s monster to navigate the society from which he is continually ostracised.
Significantly, Spade’s argument is mostly directed at the medical establishment’s normalising of gender and sexual categories. The medical gatekeepers of hormones and surgery for transsexual and transgender patients view these practices as helping rather than harming their patients. Yet they nonetheless construct their approach as ‘treatment’, healing the wound or illness of transsexual identification.230 Alongside Stryker and
Bornstein, Spade builds upon the work of Stone, whose pioneering ‘Posttranssexual
Manifesto’ critiqued the medical establishment’s deployment of sexist stereotypes in determining a diagnosis of transsexualism. Like Stryker’s essay, Stone’s manifesto was a direct retort to radical feminist attacks on transsexualism, specifically Raymond’s personal attacks on Stone’s position in the feminist recording collective Olivia Records. Stone notes that her first response to Raymond’s work was that ‘a book on transsexualism from a critical perspective is certainly needed, but this is not that book’.231 These trans theorists and their radical feminist opponents shared a critical view of the medical and scientific discourses of
228 Jeffreys, Gender Hurts, pp. 66–72, 112. 229 Spade, p. 321. 230 Spade, p. 321. 231 Davina Anne Gabriel, p. 17. 80
sex and gender: for both sides, men’s domination of the medical establishment took on a
Frankensteinian character.
Science fictional ideas of monsters and their makers thus seep into the vocabularies at play in late-twentieth-century debates on transsexual and transgender embodiment and the technologies that make this possible. More than this though: provoked by radical feminists’ transphobic reworking of the science fiction origin myth, transsexual and transgender theorists’ reconfiguration of monstrosity takes on a life of its own. Understanding monstrosity as a way to reconceptualise their experiences, these theorists produced ideas crucial to the emergence of ‘trans’ as a new identity category. Rejecting the abjection of bodily mixture, celebrating multiplicity and hybridity, and reorienting rage into political activism, transsexual and transgender scholars used the figure of the monster to imagine new possibilities for critical thought and social change. These reworkings of monstrosity take on a more defined form with the circulation of ‘trans’ in scholarly discourse.
While feminist science fiction scholarship and feminist science studies explored the continued relevance of Frankenstein for feminist thought, ‘trans’ was emerging. As I discussed in the introduction, activist discourses in the 1990s saw ‘trans’ take shape as a standalone term encompassing older categories of non-normative sex and gender. At this point in time, we might think of ‘trans’ as still ‘in an embryonic phase’, as Raymond Williams might put it, conceptually uncertain and politically malleable.232 Understanding ‘trans’ as taking shape amidst these debates, the investment in ‘trans’ as uniquely able to hold together different categories appears as the extension of transsexual and transgender theorists’ affirmation of monstrous multiplicity. The monstrous rage that Stryker and
232 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 131. 81
Bornstein reimagine as a politically useful force takes on new meaning in the wake of ‘trans’.
Shared affective experiences of legal, medical, and state oppression, as well as monstering in the media, provides the basis for a new critical consciousness expressed in trans theory. A new monster is born.
By historicising how Frankenstein came to be so widely accepted as science fiction’s originary text, this chapter has shown how Foucault’s genealogical method can illuminate the connections between trans discourse and science fiction. Long before mass media discourses present trans men’s pregnancies as the fantastic and spectacular achievement of modern science, feminist discourses link transsexual and transgender bodies to an array of medical technologies through the science fiction trope of the monster. The science fiction origin story that posits Frankenstein as inaugurating the genre is one thread with which some radical feminists weave a horrifying narrative: the transsexual or transgender monster who threatens to replace pregnancy with technoscientific necromancy, eliminating the female sex. Responses to this narrative from scholars in the then nascent field of transsexual and transgender studies identify with the figure of the monster. Out of this fraught exchange between anti-trans radical feminists and theorists of transsexual and transgender experience, the trope of the scientifically-constructed monster takes on new significance. In the process, ideas of mixture, multiplicity, and shared oppression come to the fore, ideas which shape the political investment in ‘trans’ as the improved successor to earlier categories of non-normative sex and gender. Taking this chapter’s historicization of science fiction further, my next chapter takes two feminist science fiction works that unsettle ideas of genre to discuss in more detail the relationship between monstrosity’s historic racialisation and ‘trans’. 82
2: Monstrous Textual Reproduction: Race, Gender, and Genre in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Hiromi Goto’s ‘Hopeful Monsters’ In the recent twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the journal GLQ, Susan Stryker returned to her oft-cited essay, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’
(1994) to reflect upon the uptake of ideas of monstrosity in trans studies. As the previous chapter detailed, many trans studies scholars followed (or, in the case of Jack Halberstam, anticipated) Stryker in turning to Frankenstein and notions of monstrosity to articulate transsexual and transgender experiences.233 Jolene Zigarovich even describes monstrosity’s popularity in trans studies as constituting a ‘genre of trans monstrosity’.234 As I have described already, Stryker and others in the emerging field of trans studies responded to radical feminists’ descriptions of transsexuals as the monstrous creations of power-hungry scientists. Repurposing the language of monstrosity, Stryker called on fellow transsexuals to join together in political activism.
In effect, this strategic move constituted a kind of ‘reverse discourse’, Michel Foucault’s term for the process of resistance to pathologisation by which a group adopts the dominant discourse’s terminology in the service of new aims.235 While Foucault describes the reverse discourse of homosexuality as seeking to assert its ‘legitimacy’ or ‘naturality’, trans scholars reclaiming monstrosity positioned themselves, as Stryker puts it, ‘against the natural
233 J. Halberstam; Weaver; Barad, ‘Transmaterialities’; Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris, ‘Monsters, Desire, and the Creative Queer Body’, Continuum, 30.5 (2016), 518–30; Jolene Zigarovich, ‘The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein’, Science Fiction Studies, 45.2 (2018), 260–72; Anson Koch-Rein, ‘Trans-Lating the Monster: Transgender Affect and Frankenstein’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 30.1 (2019), 44–61. 234 Zigarovich, p. 267. 235 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 101–2. 83
order’.236 By identifying with Frankenstein’s monster, trans scholars sought to interrogate why naturalness was ever the grounds for recognition in the first place.
Despite Stryker’s achievement in helping to birth an entire genre of trans scholarship, her reflection on ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein’ is predominantly self-critical. Specifically,
Stryker addresses her own failure to consider how her identification with Frankenstein’s monster is inflected by her whiteness. Stryker notes that Karen Barad and Katrina Roen have picked up on the racial connotations of her references to Frankenstein, and how these point to the wider problem of an ‘unstated whiteness norm of academic transgender theorizing’.237 As I will explore in more detail later, Barad problematises Stryker’s reliance on the figurative romantic language of ‘blackness’.238 Roen’s criticism of Stryker’s essay, meanwhile, argues that the failure to account for Frankenstein’s monster as a racialised figure exemplifies wider problems in trans theory: the authorial position of white subjectivity often goes unacknowledged.239 For all the rich theoretical generativity of
Stryker’s essay, the text foreshadowed the field’s tendency to leave racial and cultural difference undertheorized.
Black trans scholars C. Riley Snorton and Marquis Bey have highlighted that white contributors to trans studies have often ignored the ways in which the white gaze constructs people of colour as always improperly embodying gender.240 Bey goes so far as to claim that
236 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 101; Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’. 237 Stryker, ‘More Words about “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”’, p. 41. 238 Barad, ‘Transmaterialities’, pp. 417–18. 239 Katrina Roen, ‘Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalisation’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 656–65 (p. 659). 240C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Marquis Bey, ‘The Trans*-Ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4.2 (2017), 275–95. See also: Diane Detournay, ‘The Racial Life of “Cisgender”: Reflections on Sex, Gender, and the Body’, Parallax, 25.1 (2019), 58–74. 84
Blackness and transness are ‘nodes of one another’, exploring them as different ‘inflections’ of non-normativity.241 While I heed queer theorists’ warnings against blanket opposition to normativity, this chapter will explore further Bey’s ideas about the interrelatedness of non- normative race and gender embodiment.242
Snorton and Bey’s criticisms of trans studies suggest that not every trans person can respond to feminist transphobia by identifying with monstrosity. Anson Koch-Rein suggests that the monster’s availability as a figure of identification may be limited given its existing role ‘in racist, ableist, homophobic, and sexist discourses’.243 The adoption of the vocabulary of monstrosity risks reinstating the underlying assumptions of these dominant discourses, namely, reinscribing the abnormality of the racialised body. The growing body of trans studies work exploring (and often romanticising) ‘monstrosity’ rarely reflects upon this problem of the concept’s prior history in racist discourses – or for that matter,
Frankenstein’s trajectory into popular culture over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through political debates on race, colonialism, and slavery. The kind of Foucauldian ‘reverse discourse’ that Stryker called for with her reading of Frankenstein may thus be an undesirable or ineffective tactic for trans people of colour. As Roen puts it, ‘If we think of colonisation as a process of rendering racialised bodies monstrous, how might we approach differently the reclaiming of transsexual bodies as monstrous?’244 This chapter explores how feminist science fiction might enable us to formulate this new approach.
To do so, I turn to two works of Asian Canadian feminist science fiction published in the
241 Bey, p. 278. 242 See for example: Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, ‘Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 26.1 (2015), 1–25. 243 Koch-Rein, pp. 134–35. 244 Roen, pp. 663–64. 85
decade after Stryker’s ground-breaking essay: Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl and Hiromi
Goto’s short story ‘Hopeful Monsters’ from the collection of the same name. These two works disrupt science fiction’s historic whiteness.245 Unsettling attempts to distinguish between science fiction and other fantastical genres, Lai and Goto draw attention to science fiction’s role in advancing colonialist fantasies. I do not present works of science fiction by
Asian Canadian authors as a unique site for troubling science fiction’s boundaries or exploring the racial connotations of ideas of monstrosity. Instead, these works’ resistance to categorisation prompts questions about how other works of science fiction that interrogate the genre’s relationship to racist and colonial discourses might offer insight into the relationship between ‘trans’ and ‘monstrosity’.
Lai and Goto’s works problematise categorisation in multiple ways. Critics differ in how they describe Lai and Goto’s ethnicities,246 with Lai even claimed as an Asian American author, perhaps because of her birth in the US.247 Although critics often read their work through the language of postcolonial studies – Orientalism, globalisation, and the transnational – they are rarely read as postcolonial authors.248 Moreover, neither author produces work that is consistently read as science fiction, with their writing often read in terms of speculative fiction or utopian or dystopian literature instead.249 Lai and Goto explode generic
245 Elisabeth Anne Leonard, ‘Race and Ethnicity in Science Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 253– 63 (p. 253). 246 Nancy Kang, ‘Ecstacies of the Unloved: The Lesbian Utopianism of Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child’, Canadian Literature, 2010, 13–32; Rita Wong, ‘Troubling Domestic Limits: Reading Border Fictions Alongside Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl’, BC Studies, 140, 109–24 (pp. 110–11); Eleanor Ty, Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 89. 247 Sharon Tran, ‘Asian Sybils and Stinky Multispecies Assemblages: Ecofeminist Departures for Asian American Studies’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 21.3 (2018), 453–80 (p. 453); Michelle N. Huang, ‘Creative Evolution: Narrative Symbiogenesis in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl’, Amerasia, 42.2 (2016), 118–38 (p. 119). 248 Tran, p. 453; Ty, p. 90. 249 Rita Wong, p. 110; Tran, p. 455; Kang; Mónica Calvo-Pascual, ‘“The New Children of the Earth”: Posthuman Dystopia or a Lesbian’s Dream in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl’, ORBIS Litterarum, 2018, 405–17. 86
boundaries to reveal that the continued resistance to categorising works by authors of colour as science fiction depends upon the assumption that science and technology belong to white people alone.250 Through this unsettling of science fiction’s generic boundaries, these works also put dominant conceptions of genre itself into question. How science fiction works problematise common understandings of genre is a concern of this thesis as a whole.
Building on Lai and Goto’s monstrous intertextuality, I offer a critique of science fiction and its critical field near the end of this chapter. Concluding this first chapter pair, this section introduces a rethinking of genre as a way of rethinking ‘trans’, an idea I pick up in subsequent chapters.
Neither Salt Fish Girl nor ‘Hopeful Monsters’ explicitly engages with trans theory or features trans characters, and the authors’ works are usually read in terms of lesbian writing.251
Moreover, both were published years before trans men’s pregnancies became a mass- media spectacle, which, as I described in the previous chapter, reignited certain radical feminist ideas of the monstrous transsexual body. Nevertheless, these works engage in the same debates about gender and sexuality through which the category ‘trans’ has assumed legibility. Their contributions to these debates offer critical tools for imagining how we might productively address the issue of monstrosity’s historic racialisation in relation to
‘trans’.
I argue that both Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ use monstrosity to explore gender’s inextricability from race, linking feminist ideas of the monstrous-feminine to racist anxieties about the rampant reproduction of the colonised other.252 Instead of locating monstrosity in
250 Leonard, p. 253. 251 Paul Lai, ‘Stinky Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl ’, Melus, 33.4 (2008), 167–87; Calvo-Pascual. 252 Creed. 87
the (always already racialised) body, these works suggest how we might use ideas of generic mixture to rethink the turn to monstrosity. Both works explore monstrous reproduction through unruly intertextuality that foregrounds science fiction’s implication in racist and colonialist discourses. Combining medico-scientific discourse, history, current events, fantasy, and mythology, Lai and Goto’s works disrupt the generic boundaries of science fiction. By using textual forms of monstrous reproduction, these works show how we might counter the elision of race in the genre of trans monstrosity by thinking about ‘trans’ as emerging at the collision of different discourses, a monstrous patchwork of texts embedded in racist and colonialist histories.
The Racial Legacy of Frankenstein’s Monster To understand the relationship between monstrosity, race, and reproduction, it is worth pausing for a moment on Frankenstein. The history of how Mary Shelley’s novel became a cultural metaphor is entangled with ideas of racial difference constructed as monstrosity in popular culture. As I touched on in the previous chapter, Shelley’s monster has often been read in relation to ideas of race and nation in the Anglo-American context, deployed as a metaphor for the disastrous consequences of hubris. In Black Frankenstein (2008) Elizabeth
Young details how references to Frankenstein appeared from the 1830s onwards in political discussions on the potential enfranchisement of enslaved Africans; more recently, allusions to the novel have resurfaced in critiques of US foreign policy.253 In the North American cultural afterlife of Shelley’s novel, the monster has carried such strong connotations of
Blackness that a plethora of works have explicitly or implicitly reworked the story within the context of the United States’ racial politics.254 This includes Black writers’ reconfiguration of
253 Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2008), pp. 20–21; 1–2. 254 Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein, p. 5. 88
Frankenstein in order to come to terms with the lingering impact of slavery on Black lives, but also white writers’ attempts to grapple with feelings of guilt and anxiety about the role of their ancestors in the slave trade.255 Young’s detailed examination of how Frankenstein’s cultural legacy is deeply entwined with racial politics suggests that any reference to the novel or the figure of the monster carries this conceptual baggage.
Conversely, other critics of Frankenstein have emphasised the novel’s engagement with then emerging ideas of a single human ‘race’. Patrick Brantlinger argues that there is no reason within the story’s logic for the monster’s racial otherness, given that he is constructed from the body parts of those who have died in the Bavarian town of
Ingolstadt.256 Moreover, he dismisses critics who claim that the novel’s historic context positions the monster as a lascar or enslaved African.257 Instead, Brantlinger posits that references to ‘race’ in the novel gesture towards debates of the time. Nineteenth-century scientists disagreed as to whether the existence of different human races denoted different species of human, or if instead they constituted one human race: ‘In no case does “race” in
Frankenstein appear to designate some specific variety of human beings distinct from
Europeans’, he writes.258 The horror of Frankenstein’s creation, Brantlinger argues, derives from the fact that the monster represents ‘the blurring of the lines between the monster and humanity’, between the human and the non-human.259 He stresses that the novel is ultimately not about racial difference, but rather ideas of race in terms of an emerging scientific discourse of ‘species’. Yet the discourse of ‘species’ is still intimately bound up with
255 Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein, pp. 5–9. 256 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Race and Frankenstein’, in The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. by Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 128–42 (p. 129). 257 Brantlinger, ‘Race and Frankenstein’, pp. 130–33. 258 Brantlinger, ‘Race and Frankenstein’, p. 134. 259 Brantlinger, ‘Race and Frankenstein’, p. 135. 89
discussions of racial difference.
To suggest that race is crucial to understanding the cultural significance of Frankenstein’s monster is not to say that the monster can or need clearly be identified as belonging to a certain racial or ethnic category. In fact, the racial indistinctiveness of the monster goes against ideas of racial purity and the stability of racial categories that have underpinned racist projects. Instead, to consider the significance of race to Frankenstein and ideas of monstrosity more broadly is to recognise, as Young details in her book, how richly generative the figure of the man-made monster has been in discussions of slavery and colonialism. Conceiving ‘race’ in a literal sense, Brantlinger reads the monster in terms of the universal human. This move, of course, has its own history in the politics of race: as
Richard Dyer has noted, the universal is not open to all, but is a characteristic that whiteness claims for itself.260 The debates of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in natural science about race in terms of species are not so easily disentangled from the simultaneously emerging discourses of white racial superiority. It is this same problem of reading Shelley’s monster as already empty of racial significance that troubles many trans studies scholars’ deployment of ideas of monstrosity.
Brantlinger’s attempt to recuperate Frankenstein in universalising terms glosses over a key scene in the novel which draws upon racist fantasies circulating at the time of the text’s writing. The novel’s eponymous protagonist agrees to construct a female companion for his despairing and vengeful creation in exchange for the monster’s promise that the pair will flee to South America and live in isolation. Yet Frankenstein fretfully deliberates what it would mean to fulfil this pact:
260 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 38. 90
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.261 He imagines that carrying out his experiment anew will result in the two monsters’ uncontrollable procreation, ‘a race of devils’ emerging from ‘the deserts of the new world’ to destroy those that came before. Frankenstein justifies abandoning the construction of a second creature out of certainty that this will lead to their uncontrollable reproduction, producing ever-multiplying offspring that would ultimately overwhelm Europe.
This scene draws on two key, somewhat contradictory, narratives that underpinned colonialism, simultaneously justifying colonialism and recognizing its monstrosity. Firstly, through the reference to ‘deserts of the new world’, the novel gestures to the idea John
Rieder terms the ‘discoverer’s fantasy’: that the world beyond Europe is a wasteland empty of people or history, ripe for colonisation.262 This same discoverer’s fantasy resurfaces in
‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein’. As Barad has noted, Stryker’s pastiche of the monster’s monologue relies on the figurative language of ‘blackness’ and ‘darkness’, evoking the concept of ‘terra nullius – the alleged void that the white settler claims to encounter in
“discovering undeveloped lands”, that is, lands allegedly devoid of marks of “civilization”’.263
The romantic metaphorics of Stryker’s essay carry uneasy colonial connotations, suggesting that any turn to Frankenstein in order to reclaim monstrosity harbours the risks of reiterating the novel’s own problematic colonial logic.
Secondly, Frankenstein fears the monster’s potential procreation will relentlessly repeat the
261 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus, ed. by Maurice Hindle, Revised Ed (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 170-171. 262 John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), p. 31. 263 Barad, ‘Transmaterialities’, pp. 417–18; Stryker, ‘More Words about “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”’, pp. 41–42. 91
process he himself began. This could be understood as a critique of colonialism, warning of the potential harm Europe might cause by exporting its problems to far-away lands. Yet
Frankenstein’s concern also plays upon what Frantz Fanon identifies as the biological fantasy of colonized peoples as hypersexual beings.264 The supposedly rampant reproduction of the racialised Other is read as a sign of their proximity to the primitive, the animal, and the demonic, necessitating their ‘civilisation’ under the supervision of European colonial powers.
Frankenstein imagines his creatures to be inherently, excessively, and relentlessly reproductive: he cannot conceive that his creations might not be capable of or interested in creating new life, or that they might reproduce responsibly. In effect, Frankenstein anticipates the more recent white nationalist discourse of ‘the great replacement’.
Adherents of this conspiracy theory maintain that liberal migration policies, a low white birth-rate, and increased ethnic integration will lead to a demographic and cultural shift in which whiteness is no longer dominant.265 As Dyer notes in his book White (1997), reproduction is a key site of white anxiety: imagery of deathly or asexual vampires, zombies, and androids signal white reproductive failure, while the alien speaks to fears of ‘the unstoppable breeding of non-whites’.266 In contrast to Shelley’s own expressed willingness to relinquish control over her monstrous literary creation then, the text itself alludes to racist anxieties about the uncontrollable reproduction of the racial Other.267 With the racial connotations of Frankenstein’s fears of monstrous reproduction in mind, I turn now to Lai
264 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by C. L. M. (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 172. 265 A. Dirk Moses, ‘“White Genocide” and the Ethics of Public Analysis’, Journal of Genocide Research, 21.2 (2019), 201–13. 266 Dyer, White, pp. 215–17. 267 In the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley famously ‘bid [her] hideous progeny [the novel] go forth and prosper’ Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus, p. 10. 92
and Goto’s works to examine how they expose the conjoined anxieties of racial mixing and uncontrollable reproduction in the Western cultural imaginary.
Monstrous Pregnancies and Other Bodily Transformations Reproduction has long been a source of spectacular horror in popular culture: since at least the 1980s, feminist science fiction critics have examined scenes of monstrous reproduction and threatening hypersexuality in the genre. As Joanna Russ points out, over the twentieth century the spectacle of ‘weird’ pregnancies was a common trope in male-authored science fiction.268 Perhaps the most important critical work on this topic is Barbara Creed’s The
Monstrous-Feminine, in which she argued that ‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’, which terrify by threatening the male spectator with castration.269 Lai’s novel and Goto’s short story both play upon these anxieties about reproduction, foregrounding the racial politics to which such representations of monstrous pregnancy in science fiction allude.
In the history of science fiction, the changing body has figured as the site of nightmarish horror or fantasies of transcending limits. The disturbing power of these visions of bodily transformation, however, often derives from notions of racial hierarchy and anxieties about its disruption. Body horror films such as Alien Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997) and The Fly
(Cronenberg, 1986) revisit H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, invoking the horror of species mixture (human/alien and human/insect) in ways that suggest the miscegenation taboo. Superheroes and cyborgs on the other hand, evoke fantasies of future human evolution, often relying, as Donna McCormack has identified, on the ‘colonial evolutionary
268 Russ, pp. 29–30. 269 Creed, p. 7. 93
logic’ of more and less developed human races.270 In contrast to these works, the female protagonists of Lai’s novel and Goto’s short story present relatively mundane mutations alongside the ‘commonplace miracle’ of human reproduction271: a persistent and peculiar body odour and scaly skin in Salt Fish Girl; a vestigial tail in ‘Hopeful Monsters’. While the different metamorphoses caused by genetic mutations, medical intervention, and pregnancy in the two texts are certainly unsettling, neither sensationalises these transformations. Instead their representations of changing bodies function to link racist fantasies of pure reproduction to other forms of regulating bodily difference, heeding
Stryker’s call to trouble the idea that any body is normal or natural.272
In the 1970s, feminists challenged the notion of pregnancy and childbirth as ‘natural’.
‘Pregnancy is barbaric’ wrote Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), describing the process of gestation as ‘the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species’.273 The alternative, Firestone proposed, was to liberate women from the burden of childbearing through new reproductive technologies – artificial uteruses – thereby correcting what she saw as a biological imbalance between the sexes which perpetuated their inequality. Feminist utopian literature, such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, took up these ideas to explore the feminist potential of decoupling
‘woman’ from reproduction.274 Both Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ feature scenes of women pregnant and giving birth rather than reproduction assisted by artificial wombs. But
270 Donna McCormack, ‘Hopeful Monsters: A Queer Hope of Evolutionary Difference’, Somatechnics, 5.2 (2015), 154–73 (p. 161). 271 Hiromi Goto, ‘Hopeful Monsters’, in Hopeful Monsters (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), pp. 135– 68 (p. 137). Subsequent references in parentheses. 272 Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’, p. 250. 273 Firestone, p. 180. [Author’s emphasis] 274 For a more recent feminist approach to denaturalising the gestating body, see: Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (London: Verso, 2019). 94
reproduction in these works is not therefore ‘natural’: as Jackie Stacey explores in
Teratologies, biomedical discourses produce notions of unnatural reproduction through ideas of ‘monstrous births’ and teratomas.275 The strange pregnancies that Lai and Goto’s protagonists’ undergo critically engage with the history of medical science to unsettle ideas of women’s bodies as naturally reproductive.
Both works feature scenes of monstrous pregnancy and childbirth. In Salt Fish Girl, the ancient Chinese snake-tailed goddess Nu Wa is swallowed by a woman and reborn as a
‘bawling black-haired baby girl’.276 The novel’s second narrator Miranda Ching is simultaneously a further reincarnation of Nu Wa and the result of her postmenopausal mother consuming a mutated fertility-enhancing durian fruit. Miranda’s own consumption of an affected durian results in another parthenogenic pregnancy; the novel ends with
Miranda giving birth to a ‘black-haired and bawling […] little baby girl’ of her own (p. 269).
Meanwhile, the relatively uneventful pregnancy of the protagonist in ‘Hopeful Monsters’ results in the birth of a child with ‘a very minor superficial abnormality’, a small fleshy tail (p.
146). New mother Hisa must then come to terms with the revelation of her own concealed congenital deformity. ‘Hopeful Monsters’ presents a story of a strange pregnancy similar to
Goto’s earlier novel The Kappa Child (2001), in which the gender-ambiguous protagonist believes herself to be pregnant with a kappa, a creature from Japanese folklore. By connecting pregnancy to other bodily transformations – mutations and incarnations – Salt
Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ disturb notions of the ‘naturalness’ of reproduction. But beyond this, these works connect ideas of monstrous births to white anxieties about the
275 Stacey, Teratologies, pp. 91–93. 276 Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (Markham, ON: Thomas Allen, 2002), p. 48. Subsequent references in parentheses. 95
unruly reproduction of the racialised other.
In Goto’s short story, the tail evokes monstrous queer histories that resist the regulatory frameworks of the medical establishment and the heterosexual nuclear family unit. The offspring of the decidedly normative heterosexual union of Hisa and her husband Bobby is defiantly abnormal: the tail is ‘[w]arm. Firm. As thick as a pencil’ (p. 145) or a ‘finger’ (p.
153). Hisa even directly compares the tail to a penis, imagining the doctor’s suggested removal surgery as akin to a circumcision (p. 153), and perceiving Bobby’s erection as
‘[g]rowing hard, bony, like a thick tail’ (p. 158). These phallic substitutions unsettle the doctor’s simple sex assignment, declaring ‘[i]t’s a girl’ (p. 146). The obstetric team that attend Hisa’s birth advise her that her baby’s ‘skin abnormality’ (p. 149) can be corrected with a surgical procedure. This response is reminiscent of stories of the involuntary surgeries undergone by intersex children; visible variations of sex development, such as a newborn’s sexually ambiguous genitalia, are still today met with regulatory medical interventions in order to re-establish the norms of binary sex.277 The presence of the tail thus challenges the standard medical process of natal sex assignment, hinting at the long history of Western medicine’s policing of the hermaphroditic body.
Even before the presence of the tail is known, ‘Hopeful Monsters’ disrupts ideas of pregnancy and childbirth as natural. References to Hisa’s mother’s three miscarriages destabilize the idea that the female body is essentially procreative. The spectre of these infant deaths haunts the narrative, creating a sense of looming disaster that returns in moments like Bobby placing a ‘pillow in front of [Hisa’s] belly so that the baby wouldn’t be crushed in a car accident’ (p. 141), or the deathly silence immediately after she gives birth
277 Fausto-Sterling, pp. 45–77. 96
(p. 145). This sense of ominous suspense surrounding the birthing scene in ‘Hopeful
Monsters’ parallels the experience Stryker describes in ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein’ of accompanying her partner as she undergoes labour in a hospital delivery room:
Through my lover’s back, against the skin of my own belly, I felt a child move out of another woman’s body and into the world. Stranger’s hands snatched it away to suction the sticky green meconium from its airways. ‘It’s a girl,’ somebody said. […] Why, just then, did a jumble of dark, unsolicited feelings emerge wordlessly from some quiet back corner of my mind?278 Although it is not Stryker who undergoes labour, this scene similarly highlights feelings of confusion and unease following the non-consensual sex assignment of a newborn. Both birthing stories eschew any romanticism of this moment through references to the cold bedside manner of the hospital staff and abject bodily fluids: Stryker’s account mentions the baby’s ‘sticky green meconium’, whereas Hisa’s birth is bookended by ‘a squirt of residual fecal matter’ (p. 144) and the ‘enormous blood clot’ of her placenta (p. 145). For Stryker, this focus on the abject at a moment of compulsory gendering opens up space to contemplate the transsexual experience of abjection from a medical discourse that assigns bodies a fixed binary sex. By contrast, it is not the actual assignment of sex that unsettles
Hisa in ‘Hopeful Monsters’, but rather the certainty that something about her baby is
‘abnormal’ (p. 146). Nonetheless, by foregrounding the medical construction of normal and abnormal bodies, Goto’s story troubles ideas of bodily sex as simply natural and self- evident.
The tail also comes to signify ‘hopeful’ queer futures, mutations that enable new possibilities for experiencing the body. By the story’s conclusion, Hisa’s discovery of her own amputated tail sparks a desire to leave her husband to find safety for her baby with a
278 Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’, p. 244. 97
lesbian couple met through antenatal classes. As Hisa exits the hospital to embark on her new life of motherhood, she feels ‘something behind her . . . A graceful length’ (p. 168).
Hisa’s imagined tail resonates with cross-sex embodiments, bringing to mind queer theorist
Judith Butler’s description of transsexuals’ ‘imaginary participation in body parts, either appendages or orifices, that [they] might not actually possess’.279 Hisa’s phantom tail suggests the re-articulation of her post-partum body through new gendered terms and in relation to newly discovered bodily contours. The fantasized regrowth of this formerly abjected and castrated mutation indicates possibilities beyond the simple binary categorizations of monstrous/normal or female/male, whose regulation begins on the birthing table.
Mutation in Salt Fish Girl also presents the possibility of a queer future, in this case, through reproduction without men. Mónica Calvo-Pascual and Paul Lai read the novel’s mutated durian fruit in terms of its lesbian utopian potential, enabling parthenogenic reproduction.
Calvo-Pascual writes that the ‘ability to bear children free of the need of male genes can be seen as a lesbian dream of having children that are fully one’s own’, while Lai describes the novel as ‘representing the possibility of a reproductive futurity separate from heterosexual copulation (or even genetic material from men)’.280 The novel thus follows feminist science fiction works from the 1970s in imagining a future in which technologies enable the possibility of single-sex human reproduction. In The Female Man, Russ imagines a future feminist world called Whileaway in which a sex-specific disease has eradicated men, necessitating the development of genetic technology to merge ova. Similarly, Tiptree Jr.’s
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? imagines a future in which the female survivors of a plague
279 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 90. 280 Calvo-Pascual, p. 414; Paul Lai, p. 174. 98
reproduce through cloning.
Together these stories suggest why those who seek to use the durian’s power are met with brutal violence, on the orders of the Frankensteinian scientist Rudy Flowers. ‘You don’t know what monstrosities might have come of those births’, he says, ‘the fertility those durians provided was neither natural nor controllable’ (p. 256). As Stacey has explored, anxieties about cancerous cell-division parallel anxieties about lesbian sexuality, both signifying ‘an excess of sameness that goes against the natural order’.281 Women’s reproductive self-sufficiency in Salt Fish Girl threatens the prospect of male redundancy, evolutionary inadequacy, and potential extinction. What is monstrous about this new form of reproduction then is less the risk of abnormal births than the ‘neither natural nor controllable’ women who resist heteronormativity, becoming no longer ‘human’ (p. 255) and thus perhaps not even women at all.282
Racialised Gender, Gendered Race Monstrous reproduction in Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ also denaturalises gender.
Layered references to strange pregnancies and uncontrollable reproduction in these works point to ideas of gender’s constructedness. Through patterns of repetition, these works mimic femininity’s constitution, evoking Butler’s reconceptualization of gender a decade earlier. In Gender Trouble, Butler writes that ‘gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin’.283 Forms of gender parody, such as drag performances, can expose gender as the reproduction of
281 Stacey, Teratologies, p. 78. 282 For more on the debate on the relationship between heterosexuality and womanhood, see: Monique Wittig, ‘One Is Not Born a Woman’, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 103–9; Jacob Hale, ‘Are Lesbians Women?’, Hypatia, 11.2 (1996), 94–121. 283 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 175. 99
fantasized ideals through embodied gestures. Lai and Goto’s use of reproduction in excess through ideas of involuntary parthenogenesis and inherited mutations can be understood as a kind of parody that demonstrates the processes by which gender is produced.
In Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler details how this process of reproducing gender categories is interwoven with the construction of racial categories through taboos on miscegenation: the regulation of gender’s reproduction is simultaneously ‘the regulation of a racially pure reproduction’.284 Both Lai and Goto explore the racialisation of gender and the gendering of race by putting ideas of purity and mixture under stress. As clones,
Miranda and her love interest Evie might seem to realise fantasies of a racially pure reproduction, repetitions of the same genetic material that has come before. Yet Evie and her sisters are ‘point zero three per cent Cyprinus carpio – freshwater carp […] a patented new fucking life form’ developed to avoid laws around labour rights and human cloning (p.
159). A new human and piscine mixture, these clones prove to behave unexpectedly, resisting their exploitation and – true to monstrous form – destroying their maker, Rudy
Flowers.
Likewise, in ‘Hopeful Monsters’, the usual racist anxieties about miscegenation are inverted.
The story foreshadows the baby’s abnormality by reference to the science fiction horror film
Alien (Scott, 1979): ‘She could see her skin give, as if an alien was trying to burst out of her belly even while she watched: alive and horrified. Ridley Scott had a lot to answer for’ (p.
138). Yet the film’s exploration of anxieties about the monstrous reproduction of the alien/female body is inverted, as the reader experiences the pregnancy from the perspective of Hisa, the Japanese-Canadian protagonist. In Goto’s story, it is the West that
284 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), p. 123. 100
appears strange in this alien encounter: Americans are a mystery to Hisa (p. 138), and the delivery room nurse’s patronizing speech inflections confuse her (p. 141). Moreover, through free indirect discourse, Goto conveys Hisa’s gently mocking tone towards her white husband’s receding chin and adoption of yukata (p. 139). His keen emulation of Japanese culture and almost pregnant belly seem to echo Hisa, feminizing the white American order he represents (p. 136). His body becomes a site of cultural mixture as much as hers. In both texts then, imitation and repetition produce unexpected outcomes that disrupt fantasies of reproduction as securing racial purity and fixed binary gender.
The shared emphasis on matrilineal kinship in Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ suggests the protagonists’ ambivalent relationships to their cultural heritage. In The Psychic Life of
Power (1997), Butler posits that gender expresses the melancholic process by which we incorporate the lost and unacknowledged love for our same-sex parent, embodying that which we have been forbidden to desire.285 Extending Butler’s ideas of gender’s repetitions to queer temporality, Elizabeth Freeman writes that ‘drag can be seen as the act of plastering a body with outdated rather than just cross-gendered accessories, whose resurrection seems to exceed the axis of gender and begins to talk about, indeed talk back to, history’.286 If, like Butler, we ‘claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag’, this suggests that not only parodic performances of gender, but also genders themselves are in dialogue with history.287
In line with this thinking, both Lai and Goto foreground their female protagonists’
285 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 135–36. 286 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. xxi. 287 Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 85. 101
relationships with their mothers, with the daughters’ bodies bearing what we might think of as borrowed bodily ‘accessories’, unusual marks of their maternal inheritances: a scent, fistulas, a tail. As I will explain shortly, these ‘accessories’ speak back to histories of colonial oppression, specifically, key incidents in the history of relations between North America and
South East Asia. The femininities that these characters cite through their own gendered embodiments are thus linked to specific geographies and specific temporalities. The repetition of maternal traits in effect literalises the reproduction of racialised gender.
Combined with both texts’ emphasis on mutation, this suggests, as Butler puts it, ‘the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction’.288 These two works suggest the possibility of producing cultural awareness of gender’s relationship to race through forms of repetition.
The protagonists’ melancholic embodiments of racialised femininities speak to histories of racist and colonial oppression. Gender’s repetition in these two works thus resonates strongly with Freeman’s concept of ‘temporal drag’, by which she refers to the tug or touch of the disavowed past on the politics of the present.289 ‘Drag’ here suggests both the force of pulling back and the performed parody of gender’s imitative structure. By combining these concepts, Freeman suggests that the past’s hold over the present can be felt through drag’s parodic repetitions of gender. In Lai’s novel this temporal drag is synecdochally reenacted in a more literal drag performance: Miranda dresses up as her dead mother,
Aimee Ling, once a singer at the cabaret club The New Kubla Khan. An audience member describes Miranda as her mother’s ‘[s]plitting image’ (p. 192), a malapropism capturing the
288 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 179. 289 Freeman, p. 78. 102
gene splicing that led to Miranda’s miraculous conception and her being, in effect, her mother’s genetic twin. Miranda performs one of her mother’s famous songs to an adoring crowd at the club’s one-time reopening, celebrating humanity’s impending downfall through the spread of ‘the Contagion’ (p. 189). All the night’s performers have this mysterious condition, also known as the ‘drowning’ or ‘dreaming’ disease, which plagues its sufferers with memories of war, famine, and disease that can only be relieved underwater.
Miranda’s performance thus positions her relationship with her mother among various histories of violence. In this scene of cross-generational, if not cross-gender, drag, Salt Fish
Girl points to gender’s relationship to history as a process of continual reiteration. Miranda’s memory of her mother is written on her body, but so too are the terrible histories that those afflicted with the Contagion are compelled to remember.
In repeating her mother’s gender through a drag performance, Miranda simultaneously literalizes her body’s repetition of her mother’s genetics and the continued force of historic power dynamics in the present that produce racialized gender categories. Miranda wears one of her mother’s dresses, ‘that red sequinned cheongsam from the first time I had spied on her watching an ancient CD-ROM of an even more ancient cabaret performance’ (p. 190).
This outfit signals multiple repetitions, first to the scene of Miranda looking at her mother, while her mother looks at an earlier version of herself. Secondly, the dress takes the reader back to the very beginning of Miranda’s story, to a photograph of her mother from before
Miranda’s birth, in which ‘she wears a close-fitting dress patterned with irridescent [sic] dragonflies’ (p. 12). The misspelling of ‘iridescent’ here is suggestive of ‘irradiation’, while the sequins mimic one of the symptoms of the Contagion, in which the skin turns ‘shiny, scaly, sometimes a little bioluminescent’ (p. 164). In other parts of the novel, Miranda describes this symptom as a form of psoriasis, a condition which causes the skin to 103
reproduce uncontrollably. Miranda’s own racialized femininity is thus a recursive time loop, an imitation of an imitation that suggests ideas of reproduction gone rogue – as the novel puts it, ‘an imprint of what has gone before, but also a variation’ (p. 259). The novel’s celebration of monstrosity through its diseased and mythological protagonists encourages a view of gender and race that is open to mixture and contamination, rather than faithfully repeating the violence of the past.
Salt Fish Girl further emphasises this idea of gender as history repeating itself at the level of form. As Rita Wong and Michelle Huang have highlighted, the novel’s twin narrative structure alternates between the perspectives of Nu Wa and Miranda, intertwined stories that continually repeat and mimic each other.290 Huang even describes this structure as
‘parallel tracks’ that mimic the ‘double helix model of DNA’.291 Both characters undergo scaly transformations in contact with water (pp. 44-45, 48); they both fall in love with women who smell of salt fish (pp. 48, 161); and they are both lured, trapped, and then used by a white person representing a shadowy enterprise (pp. 123, 97). Each narrative echoes the other, a formal strategy that emphasizes history’s repetitions. As Butler writes, ‘the reproduction of the species will be articulated as the reproduction of relations of reproduction’.292 The colonial-era exploitation of Chinese workers as cheap labour is repeated in neocolonial capitalist practices of the Information Age.
To envision the future, Lai seems to draw on Donna Haraway’s outline of the late-twentieth- century feminization and racialization of labour in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’:
A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties,
290 Rita Wong, p. 112; Huang, p. 123. 291 Huang, p. 123. 292 Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 123. [italics in original] 104
and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance.293 Haraway’s description fits the novel’s imagined future economy, in which employee-citizens of the company towns Serendipity and Painted Horse work from home using virtual-reality tech and software that gamify the violence of capitalism. This existence is barely preferable to expulsion from the city walls, exposed to poverty and ecological danger in the
Unregulated Zone. Miranda’s half of the narrative fleshes out Haraway’s predictions, but in combination with the chapters on Nu Wa, the novel suggests this future’s foundations lie in the violent extraction of labour under past and present global industrial capitalism.
Miranda’s dystopia merely takes the nightmarish world of the novel’s other half to its logical conclusion. After Nu Wa and her lover, the Salt Fish Girl, flee their village, the pair find themselves destitute in the city. While Nu Wa is drawn to a life of petty crime, pickpocketing wealthy Western tourists and businessmen, the Salt Fish Girl is blackmailed into repetitive and menial factory work, producing rattan and paper homeware for an emerging middle class (pp. 117-18). The nature of the Salt Fish Girl’s work – in poorly lit conditions, inhaling chemicals, and with low wages – eventually drives many of the workers to hysteria,
‘screaming and howling and throwing themselves against the walls in sheer frustration with the dreariness of their toil and the damage it was exacting from their once young bodies and bright faces’ (p. 123). Nu Wa escapes this fate, but after the mysterious white woman
Edwina smuggles her into the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness, she must pay off her debt to her traffickers by either cleaning hotel rooms or engaging in sex work (p. 129). Alienated labour is thus shown to take on many different forms: the lousy working conditions of the
293 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81 (p. 169). 105
overseas production line are coextensive with the lousy working conditions of the trafficked migrant.
The racialized dehumanization of the underpaid or otherwise extorted worker continues in
Miranda’s narrative. The ‘Workers’ of the future are identical brown-eyed and black-haired clones, effectively imprisoned in factories, producing consumer goods at low cost for the profit of megacorporations (p. 160). Stripped of legal personhood and labour rights, the clones echo the poor working conditions of the Salt Fish Girl’s employment. The racialization of exploitative work is crucial here. The clones are sourced from genetic material rumoured to belong to a Chinese woman interned with her Japanese husband in Canada in the 1940s.
Evie remarks that the clones are ‘not designed for wits or willpower’ (p. 158), suggesting the racism of Rudy Flowers’ genetic selection. As Cho writes, when a new supply of cheap labour was sought after slavery’s abolition, ‘Asian labourers were specifically targeted for indenture because of their perceived docility or pacific nature’.294 While the loyalty of the clones’ genetic ‘mother’ to her husband might have been taken as indicative of the clones’ potential loyalty to their creators, it seems that what Sharon Tran describes as ‘Techno-
Orientalism’ is at play here: ‘The construction of Orientals as automatons, cyborgs, and replicants, where capitalist and technological expertise resonate as an “affectual absence” or “retrograde humanism”, serves to uphold the superiority and humanity of the West’.295
Lai’s novel suggests we might add clones to this list of ways in which the figure of the Asian is commonly imagined as less than human in the white cultural imaginary.
Likewise, genetic and gendered inheritance in ‘Hopeful Monsters’ links the narrative to the
294 Lily Cho, ‘Asian Canadian Futures: Diasporic Passages and the Routes of Indenture’, Canadian Literature, 199 (2008), 181–202 (p. 191). 295 Tran, p. 454. 106
recent history of Japanese North-American relations. The tail’s repetition over generations figures as the physical representation of inherited trauma, passed down from mother to daughter. Moreover, Hisa’s pregnancy echoes her mother’s pregnancies, emphasized by the latter’s sympathy contractions (p. 139-40). This generational and genetic connection provides hints to the story’s unacknowledged subtext: the 1945 atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fallout from the United States’ nuclear attacks on Japan resulted in sometimes fatal radiation sickness, a range of cancers, and other deformities.
The more than 400,000 hibakusha, survivors of the blasts, were ostracized and encouraged to be sterilized, for fear that their mutations would pass onto future generations.296
Although this was not the case, in utero exposure did cause smaller head size, mental impairments, seizure disorders, and cancers.297 The replication of Hisa’s ‘abnormality’ in her daughter is a repetition of gendered embodiment that inscribes on the body the unspoken anxieties around this event.
The subtext of what Aimee Bahng calls ‘atomic hauntologies’ in Goto’s story becomes clear if we consider one of its key intertexts, Judith Merril’s short story ‘That Only a Mother’
(1948).298 In Merril’s narrative, a mother’s love for her new-born child overrides her ability to notice the deformity caused by atomic radiation: her baby has no limbs. This Cold War narrative explicitly draws upon the nuclear bombing of Japan but imagines the impact on a white American family rather than articulating the actual effects experienced by the
Japanese. Goto’s story reverses the inversion, revising the scene of a mother’s relationship
296 Paul Smith and others, ‘The Fallout: Hiroshima: The Medical Aftermath of the Day That Changed the World’, Australian Doctor, 2015
to her mutated child from a Japanese-Canadian perspective. In so doing, the story connects the violent institution of medical norms of correct embodiment to the wider backdrop of the history of scientific practices and technologies developed to violently eradicate the
‘alien’ Other.
As Bahng points out, those affected by the US nuclear attacks on Japan were further exploited by American medical researchers, who studied the effects of the blasts on the victims’ bodies but did not provide medical treatment.299 ‘Hopeful Monsters’ extends this critique to the racist history of Western medicine more broadly. In the scene after Hisa gives birth, she inquires, ‘Does [the baby] have really slanted eyes?’ (p. 146). She refers here to signs of the genetic disorder trisomy 21, otherwise known as Down syndrome, which was originally labelled ‘Mongolian idiocy’ by English scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These scientists viewed the physical effects of this chromosomal anomaly as signs of degeneracy, a reversal of evolution from white to ‘Mongoloid’.300 Bobby responds with ‘perplexed’ hesitancy to Hisa’s question, to which she retorts, ‘Not slanted like mine!’ (p. 146). This exchange situates Goto’s story of unnatural reproduction within a nexus of discourses on miscegenation, medical science, and abnormality. That the hospital staff consider other signs of difference normal, such as the baby’s bruised face and ‘bigger than usual’ fontanelle (p. 148), while the tail is an ‘abnormality’ – albeit ‘very minor’ and
‘superficial’ (p. 146) – speaks to the arbitrary nature of the medical norms that regulate idealized sexed and racialized embodiment.301 Goto’s story gestures to the history of pseudoscientific constructions of sexual variation and racial difference as signs of human
299 Bahng, pp. 670–76. 300 O Conor Ward, ‘John Langdon Down: The Man and the Message’, Down Syndrome Research and Practice, 6.1 (1999), 19–24 (p. 21). 301 Fausto-Sterling, pp. 57–58. 108
species decline.
In Goto’s short story, this inherited mutation troubles ideas of species hierarchy.
Descriptions of Hisa’s baby emphasise the human as animal, connecting the protagonist and her daughter to their mammalian cousins and watery evolutionary ancestors. The ‘caudal appendage’ with which Hisa’s daughter is born is a ‘slender pink length’ (p. 162), reminiscent of a rat’s tail (p. 150). Hisa first describes the baby as slithering out like a fish (p.
145), and the first sound she makes is a ‘[s]quawk’ (p. 145). As Huang points out, Charles
Darwin believed humans to have evolved from ‘hermaphroditic fish’.302 Likewise, in Goto’s story the inherited tail queers the heteronormative lineage imagined in tales of human’s evolutionary history. As Tran has discussed in an essay on Salt Fish Girl, popular science often confuses Darwin’s theory of evolution with the scala naturae, mistaking evolution for
‘a linear, progressive process toward higher levels of complexity that culminates with our human species, Homo sapiens’.303 The caudal mutation in ‘Hopeful Monsters’ similarly signifies the resurgence of humans’ evolutionary past in the present, disrupting the presumed hierarchy of humans and animals.
Monstrous Generic Mixtures Lai and Goto’s stories emphasise the integral role played by the development of science and industry in histories of gendered and racialised oppression. Through formal strategies of repetition – a kind of textual monstrous reproduction – both Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful
Monsters’ speak to science fiction’s emergence in dialogue with medical and technoscientific discourses that were deployed in support of colonialism. In so doing, these works expose the colonialist implications of science fiction’s foundational assumptions.
302 Huang, p. 133. 303 Tran, p. 464. 109
Their rich intertextuality disrupts generic expectations, shifting the reader away from still widespread notions of science fiction as distinct from other related genres through the possession of a specific quality or set of characteristics. Not only does this generic mixture unsettle science fiction’s historic colonial fantasies, it indicates an alternative way of thinking monstrosity as the site of competing discourses.
The version of textual monstrosity Lai and Goto present offers a way to conceptualise ‘trans’ as monstrous without eliding racist and colonialist discourses. They speak back to another pioneering work of trans theory besides Stryker’s ‘Words to Victor Frankenstein’: Sandy
Stone’s ‘Posttranssexual Manifesto’, which advocated ‘constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic “third gender”, but rather as a genre – a set of embodied texts’.304 Salt
Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ feature protagonists who likewise embody generic mixture, standing at the intersection of East Asian folklore and Western technoscience. Thinking
‘trans’ as monstrous then might mean attending to the intertwined discourses that produce notions of stable racial and sexual categories. This might bring to the fore stories of capitalist exploitation, the medical regulation of abnormal bodies, and violent technologies of war in discussions of non-normative sex and gender.
The assumption that science and technology are historically the property of white people alone underpins the continuing resistance to categorising works by authors of colour as science fiction, or even speculative fiction. Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ demonstrate the constructedness of these distinctions between science fiction and other genres. Unruly intertextual mixtures, these works disrupt generic expectations, suggesting the science-fictional potential of Chinese and Japanese mythology. In Goto’s story, the
304 Stone, p. 165. 110
Japanese folk tale ‘Kobutori Jīsan’ is as significant an intertext as American science fiction (p.
149). Lai’s novel, on the other hand, emphasizes science’s implication in myth and fantasy – as Huang puts it, ‘science is mythological and mythology scientific – they cross-pollinate and contaminate each other’.305 The novel deconstructs science fiction’s mythological origins through its retelling of a Chinese creation myth, infusing this with elements of Hans
Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid (1836), and the story of Echo and
Narcissus from Greek mythology. Bringing together science and myth in monstrous patchworks of genres, Lai and Goto trouble the idea that there is even a distinct genre of science fiction at all.
This monstrous intertextuality opens up questions about the colonial logics at work in ideas of science fiction’s generic qualities. A vast amount of energy has been expended on detailing what distinguishes science fiction from other genres such as realism, fantasy, or myth, advocating the genre’s exceptionality. Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal note that
‘the genre’s definitions . . . range from the incredibly specific to the laughably broad’.306
Many science fiction theorists have put forward systems of classification, the most influential of which is probably Darko Suvin’s concept of ‘cognitive estrangement’, which he describes as ‘the factual reporting of fictions’.307 While many of the various proposed definitions seem to move away from a notion of science fiction as simply fiction about science, they nonetheless invest in a border politics akin to the construction of hierarchized racial and species categories.308 Little wonder then that so many of the critical readings of
305 Huang, p. 129. 306 Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, ‘Introduction: Imperialism, the Third World, and Postcolonial Science Fiction’, in Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film, ed. by Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, 2010, pp. 5–19 (p. 9). 307 Suvin, p. 374. 308 Rieder, p. 110. 111
science fiction in terms of racism, imperialism, and colonialism that have appeared over the past few decades critique such attempts to pinpoint characteristics that differentiate the genre from others.309
Attempts to delineate clear boundaries between science fiction and other forms of fantastical tales often play upon colonial progress narratives. As Rieder writes, a strategy of early science fiction works that problematized colonialism was satirical inversion,
‘demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be- colonized’.310 This strategy did not however dismantle the dynamics of colonialism, maintaining the ‘anthropologist’s fantasy’ of the Other’s culture as the remnants of a primitive, pre-civilized humanity.311 This imagined temporal relationship between colonizer and colonized is echoed in science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.312 This statement re- enacts fantasies of the anthropological encounter in which the natives look upon the scientist’s tools in awe.313 While Clarke suggests that the difference between science and magic is one of perception, this perception itself depends upon the colonial gaze, in which the positions of looking and being-looked-at relate to colonial power dynamics.314 Other theorists of science fiction have provided more nuanced accounts of the genre’s difference from fantasy than Clarke’s opposition of science and magic.315 Nonetheless this
309 Rieder, pp. 15–21; Hoagland and Sarwal, p. 9; Eric Smith, Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–3. 310 Rieder, p. 5. 311 Rieder, p. 32. 312 Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 21. 313 Rieder, p. 32. 314 Rieder, p. 7. 315 For two examples, see: Suvin; Freedman; Samuel R. Delany, ‘Some Reflections on SF Criticism’, Science Fiction Studies, 8.3 (2017), 233–39. 112
preoccupation with discerning science fiction’s particular qualities is invested in a very similar dynamic, viewing science fiction as a genre concerned with a system of knowledge that historically has been viewed as the possession of the West alone.
In the colonial mindset, medical, scientific, and technological knowledge are taken as signs of the colonizer’s superiority over the colonized. Yet historically this presumed superiority has hinged upon the misrecognition of other cultures’ knowledge-production practices. As
David Pocock has pointed out, anthropologists – and, we might also assume, colonizers – have interpreted other cultures’ ‘intellectual universes’ as magic, superstition, or religion.316
Within the colonial narrative, science and rationality are characteristic of Western culture, while the culture of the to-be-colonized is seen as ritualistic and ignorant. This narrative underpins the pursuit of a clear distinction between science fiction and other literary forms: as critics of Lai and Goto’s work have highlighted, the assumption of science fiction’s peculiarity to white Western traditions lingers on in the expectation that authors of colour or migrant backgrounds will write autobiographical, realist, or fantastical works.317
Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ explore monstrosity through ideas of reproduction in excess. They demonstrate the link between species reproduction and the perpetuation of racialised gender categories through textual repetition, eclectic intertextuality, and generic mixture. Both works offer hope for the future, imagining alternative ways of living outside of a heteronormative framework that seeks to regulate – even exterminate – abnormal bodies.
These two works emphasise that ideas of monstrosity are always bound up with anxieties
316 David Pocock, ‘Foreword’, in A General Theory of Magic, by Marcel Mauss (London: Routledge, 2001). 317 Ty, p. 90; Huang, p. 122.
113
about the racialised Other: unruly bodies that do not meet the idealised norms of whiteness and uncontrollable reproduction that threatens to overwhelm and disrupt the heterosexual family unit. These are patchwork texts that speak of histories of racist and colonial oppression and that resist attempts at categorisation.
Reclaiming monstrosity to articulate trans experience demands that we attend to monstrosity’s existing role in racist discourses. Lai and Goto’s works suggest how we might bring those discourses to the fore through textual monstrosity. The generic mixtures their works present highlight science fiction’s emergence in dialogue with colonial discourses of white racial superiority. Likewise, we might turn to the historical context in which the genre of trans monstrosity emerged, investigating how the assertion of ‘trans’ as a culturally inclusive concept is bound up with new insidious forms of racist and cultural oppression. As
Roen warns us, the idea of an ahistorical and universal category of gender non-normativity – whether ‘queer’ or ‘transgender’ or ‘trans’ – can work to obscure race and cultural difference, in effect continuing the legacy of colonialism.318 My next two chapters will explore this notion of ‘trans’ as an ahistorical, time-travelling category in more detail, by examining narratives of trans history in relation to the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference and feminist time travel films.
318 Roen, p. 660. 114
3: History as Time-Travel: Trans Historiography and the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference At the London 2018 and Manchester 2019 Pride parades, protesters broke through metal barriers and past stewards to occupy the front of the processions. At both protests, the interloping groups of lesbian and feminist campaigners handed flyers bearing the catchphrase ‘Get The L Out [of LGBT]’ to the flanking spectators. Repeated at Pride marches across the UK and Europe, these protests suggest widespread tensions between trans, lesbian, and feminist groups.319 As the case of Trystan Reese in Chapter One demonstrates, transphobia from the Christian right still makes its presence felt in contemporary America.
Yet in the British and wider European context, it is hostility towards trans people from within the LGBT community that has garnered significant media attention. These recent demonstrations seek to amplify the view that the rights of trans and non-trans women are in conflict. This idea of competing identity politics has been a popular talking point in recent media reports around proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapters Five and Six.320 In the face of these potential shifts in legal discourse, these Pride protests strive to advance the notion that trans rights pose a specific threat to lesbians.321
These Pride ‘hijackers’ held aloft banners reading ‘lesbian not queer’, ‘lesbians don’t have penises’, ‘lesbian = female homosexual’, and ‘trans activism erases lesbians’.322 Such slogans
319 ‘Get The L Out’
suggest a profound anxiety about the category ‘lesbian’ in the wake of queer theory and the emergence of ‘trans’. The wording of these banners proclaims that lesbianism requires the absence of certain genitals and that the term ‘lesbian’ always has and always will rigidly refer to a biological classification. Moreover, these anti-trans groups perceive recent social, legal, and medical moves towards greater rights and freedoms for trans people as necessarily entailing greater invisibility for lesbians.323 At its core, this concern about
‘lesbian erasure’ expresses anxiety that ‘trans’ creates confusion around the category
‘lesbian’: if we don’t know what lesbians are, definitively, then how can we know them when we see them?
This anxiety about the conceptual stability of the category ‘lesbian’ is, however, older than queer theory and older than ‘trans’. To better understand this anxiety, in this chapter I turn back to a flashpoint of fraught debate over the meaning of ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s: the 1973
West Coast Lesbian Conference (WCLC). Using this example, I explore how trans history draws upon ideas of time-travel and alternate temporalities – albeit never so explicitly as the references to monstrosity that I discussed in Chapters One and Two. This chapter joins a cluster of recent trans studies articles on the WCLC in complicating the narrative about trans history. My approach, however, identifies how rhetorical devices produce two seemingly competing – yet ultimately compatible and mutually affirming – versions of trans history that have come to dominate academic as well as mainstream trans discourse.
I reconfigure these twin narratives of trans history as parallel-world stories that present the relationship between trans and feminism as characterised by either exclusion or inclusion.
Despite their differences, both these narratives depend upon a notion of ‘trans’ as a time-
323 For more on lesbian invisibility in the wake of queer, see: Bradbury-Rance. 116
travelling category, stable and ahistorical. Drawing a lineage of figures from past to present identified as ‘trans’ by their seeming temporal dislocation, these two narratives produce the sense of a shared history that supposedly unites the different – and sometimes contradictory – groups gathered under the sign of ‘trans’. Through approaches to history that draw upon science fiction’s various experiments with time, trans scholars generate not only a sense of group belonging, but of the grouping itself. ‘Trans’ becomes what Elizabeth
Freeman describes as ‘coherently collective’, assuming meaning as a community across time
– albeit, as I will show, insecurely.324 As I show, these narratives carry certain risks: they also produce a sense of anti-trans feminism’s strong lineage, which could otherwise appear more fragile and fragmentary, and they obscure important differences between the historic constructions of gender and sexual categories.
Critically analysing patterns of history-telling in recent trans and feminist scholarship on the
WCLC, I identify how science fiction’s alternate temporalities inform our understandings of trans history. In so doing, I interrogate the notion of ‘trans’ as what so many scholars and activists have labelled an ‘umbrella term’.325 Taking ‘trans’ to refer to a much more recent development in how we think about gender and sexual categories, I ask what the WCLC might reveal about the historic relationships between these categories. How might the instability of ‘lesbian’ enable us to better understand the instability of ‘trans’? If we accept that ‘trans’ is not simply synonymous with ‘transgender’, ‘transsexual’, and ‘transvestite’, what can history tell us about how these categories were understood to function
324 Freeman, p. 3. 325 Stephen Whittle, ‘Foreword’, in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. xi–xvi; Susan Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges', in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–17. For more on the ‘umbrella’ metaphor, see T. Benjamin Singer, ‘Umbrella’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1.1–2 (2014), 259–61. 117
differently? What differences between these categories are effaced when we think of ‘trans’ as transhistorical?
History as Time-Travel In Laura Doan’s 2017 article ‘Queer History/Queer Memory: The Case of Alan Turing’, she outlines some of the differences and overlaps between the aims of queer theorists and critical historians. With queer theory’s turn to temporality in the 2000s, many literary and cultural theorists became interested in criticising history’s disciplinary norms or exploring ideas of affective and non-teleological approaches to history.326 These approaches, Doan contends, have more in common with commemorative public history and collective memory projects than ‘how historians do their work’.327 ‘Collective memory seeks an affective connection with a past already known to fulfil political aspirations in the present’, she writes, while ‘the critical historian takes nothing about the past for granted’.328 For Doan, queer theorists seeking to articulate an affective relationship with historical figures risk constructing a version of the past to suit their own ends: they are limited to finding in history only what they wanted to discover from the outset.329
Memory and history are, of course, not so easily disentangled. While acknowledging ‘the very real differences between critical historians and the makers of collective memory’, Doan cautions that these two approaches are less oppositional and more ‘intertwined, overlapping, each bleeding into the other’.330 Yet queer theory’s tendency towards memory
326 For different overviews of queer theory’s turn to temporality, see: Laura Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory: The Case of Alan Turing’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 23.1 (2017), 113–36 (pp. 124– 26); Traub; Carolyn Dinshaw and others, ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13.3 (2007), 177–95. 327 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory', p. 116. 328 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, pp. 122; 123. 329 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, p. 122. 330 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, p. 115. 118
through ideas of ‘unhistoricism’ – the rejection of academic history practices – carries certain risks. Though public history projects may be strategically useful to marginalised groups, the political benefits of using historical materials to affirm a particular narrative
‘must be carefully weighed against the loss of other plausible historical explanations’.331 The public celebration of Alan Turing at the centenary of his birth in 2012 no doubt aided the political campaign to pardon the tens of thousands of men convicted under UK ‘gross indecency’ laws.332 Yet reductive narratives of Turing’s life and death in LGBT history narratives may have unexpected consequences, helping to bolster pathologizing or otherwise prejudiced views.
My thesis might at first seem more aligned with queer theory given my ‘archive’ primarily consists of works of fiction, but in this chapter I examine what the critical historian critique of collective memory might offer trans history.333 Doan’s concern about collective memory’s
‘presentism’ – the perhaps unavoidable tendency to read the past in the terms of the present – is not a criticism of historical inaccuracy, as if the past were available as a coherent or empirical object. Rather, her critique expresses a desire for greater nuance in the knowledge we produce about the past.334 Doan understands the past as characterised by both apparent familiarity and ‘radical strangeness’, heeding Foucault’s call for critical historians to produce ‘something that doesn’t yet exist and of which we can have no idea of
331 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, p. 125. 332 The Sexual Offences act of 1967, Doan writes, ‘decriminalized private sexual acts between men over the age of twenty-one’ (p. 120). From 2017, 50, 000 men convicted of ‘gross indecency’ laws prior to this decriminalization received posthumous pardons, while around 15, 000 men still living with the convictions on their criminal records were given the option to apply for statutory pardons. Since then, only around 700 men have applied for pardons and fewer than 200 applications were successful. Joseph Lee, ‘Alan Turing Law: Gay, Unjustly Convicted - and Now Denied a Pardon’, BBC News, 2019
what it will be’.335 This chapter explores how a new approach to trans history might emphasise such encounters with the unexpected.
This idea of history as confronting us with the uncanny unknown echoes the kind of time- travel found in feminist utopian fiction such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.
These works convey the difference between one point in time and another through the literary device of the stranger or guest, who describes their impression of a new world for the (usually unacknowledged) reader. In Piercy’s novel, the protagonist Connie Ramos is at first disappointed with the future she encounters. ‘It’s not like I imagined’, she says, when her guide Luciente first gives her a tour of the future community of Mattapoisett.336 To
Connie, Luciente’s way of living looks at first like the poverty of her grandparents; she feels she has gone ‘[f]orward, into the past’.337 Over the course of the novel, however, she gains an understanding of and deep affection for this future world. While the temporality here is reversed, this scene is reminiscent of Doan’s attention to the ways in which history can be both intimately familiar and entirely unlike what we imagine.
This parallel between Doan’s critique and Piercy’s novel raises questions about the relationship between history, narrative, and forms of fiction. In Samuel Delany’s essay
‘About 5,750 Words’ (1978), he offers a framework for understanding genre not in terms of
‘content’ – conventional elements or plotlines – but in terms of the text’s relation to time and possibility, the ‘subjunctivity’ of the words used.338 The term ‘subjunctivity’ derives from the grammatical mood expressing unreal conditions or wishes; through this linguistic
335 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, p. 116; Michel Foucault, ‘Entretien Avec Michel Foucault (“Interview with Michel Foucault”)’, in Dits et Écrits II, 1976-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 893–98 (p. 893). 336 Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (London: Penguin, 2016), p. 70. 337 Piercy, p. 72. 338 Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), p. 10. 120
vocabulary, Delany indicates that the grammar regulating real and unreal time is crucial to understanding the differences between factual, historical, naturalistic, fantastical, and science fiction writing. For Delany, these different modes of fiction express different modifications of ‘happening’: reportage offers what has happened, mundane fiction what could have happened, and science fiction what has not happened.339 Notably, this framework upends the usual denigration of science fiction as a minor genre, positioning naturalistic fiction as a subcategory of science fiction – ‘parallel-world stories in which the divergence from the real is too slight for historical verification’.340 History and fiction thus offer alternate timelines, suggesting that historical account and science fiction offer forms of narrative distinguished only by their degree of speculation and temporal frame.
While Delany complicates the relationship between science fiction and history, popular culture usually adopts science fiction ideas to explore history by using time-travel as an analogy. Time-travel is a common device in fiction about history, often featuring as an educational tool, where characters go back in time to meet prominent historical figures or to understand what life was like in another era. Perhaps the best-known example of this is
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Herek, 1989), in which the two protagonists travel through time collecting historical figures (Napoleon, Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freud,
Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, and Socrates), in order to get an ‘A’ in an assignment for their History class. As a playful metaphor, time-travel offers a sense of closeness to or immersion in an imagined past. The popularity of the time-travel motif in children’s television shows and films speaks to its power in generating curiosity about the practice of producing history and the work of historians – as well as fostering engagement in
339 Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, pp. 10–11. 340 Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, p. 12. 121
the History classroom.341
Unsurprisingly then, the language queer theorists use to talk about history and temporality often draws on ideas of time-travel to express feelings of intimacy to or connection with the past. Carolyn Dinshaw’s notion of ‘touching the past’ suggests a kind of time-travel facilitated by affective bonds with past figures.342 Meanwhile, Freeman’s concept of
‘temporal drag’ as ‘the pull of the past on the present’ and Heather Love’s ‘feeling backward’ suggest ideas of being drawn unexpectedly or involuntarily backwards in time.343
These figurative descriptions of an approach to history prompted by a sense of connection with the past evoke time-travel stories like Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). In this novel, the protagonist is suddenly and helplessly pulled into different points in time, moments that relate to her family history. The way these queer theorists evoke a similar emotionally- motivated movement through time suggests that time-travel in fiction already provides a vocabulary for articulating approaches to queer history. If queer theory draws on science fictional ideas of time-travel in this way, then does trans theory do so too, and if so, how?
Does time-travel function simply as a metaphor in these narratives, or is the relationship between history and fiction more complex? How might science fiction’s imagined alternatives to linear temporality complicate the dominant construction of trans history – and ‘trans’ itself?
341 Alistair McGown, ‘Children’s Fantasy and SF: Stretching Young Imaginations’, ScreenOnline, 2014
‘Trans’ as Anachronism Many queer theorists’ engagement with ideas of temporality has addressed how queers and other marginalized groups might live outside or against the idealised trajectory of reproductive heterosexuality.344 In Freeman’s Time Binds (2010), she describes how shared temporalities – routines, schedules, timelines – have the effect of organizing disparate individuals into meaningful groups. Bodies ‘are bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective, through particular orchestrations of time’.345 Likewise, trans people are gathered together by the chunking of time on waiting lists, in waiting rooms, in support groups, or through appointment dates and referral periods.346 We might also think about shared affective responses to certain times of the month (perhaps through dysphoric experiences of menstruation), times of the year (through strained experiences of traditionally family-time oriented national holidays), or times of life (through changing relationships to the processes of puberty and aging). Freeman’s concepts of ‘temporal regulation’ and ‘chrononormativity’ posit that not only norms of sex and gender regulate our lives, but also norms of time, producing the sense that we exist as a collective. 347 This idea suggests that there already exists a sense of ‘trans’ beyond the sexological idea of an individual inner essence or psychology – as a community bound together by time.
In José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), he articulates this sense that time binds people together under the sign of ‘transgender’ through forms of
344 See for example: Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (London: Duke University Press, 2004); Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place; José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009). 345 Freeman, p. 3. 346 These temporal norms are continually shifting in the UK as waiting times for referral and treatment for gender dysphoria expand under the increasingly strained National Health Service. 347 Freeman, p. 3. 123
waiting or longing.348 He declares that ‘there is something […] transgender about waiting’, that transgender people – among other marginalised groups – share a position of being outside of temporal norms that leaves them waiting for other times, for other worlds to begin.349 Writing in response to queer theory’s anti-relational turn at the start of the twenty-first century – epitomised by Lee Edelman’s call for an end to futurity in No Future
(2004) – Muñoz describes queer utopia as the necessity of hope in the face of annihilation.
For those who are only ‘allowed to imagine […] barely surviving the present’, envisioning the future – a better future even – is a radical political act.350 In this sense, time not only binds, but also tucks, stuffs, and packs, shaping the body that waits for access to affirmative medical treatment, for legal recognition, for an escape from poverty and isolation. This is a waiting that might never end, in light of the untimely deaths of some trans people: often trans people of colour, often transsexual or transvestite sex workers, often seropositive trans people.351 For them, the shared experience of ‘trans’ existence is a shared experience of time running out.
In line with this sense of being out of time, Freeman writes that queer temporality is ‘the experience of not fitting in [that] often feels both like having the wrong body and like living in a different time zone’.352 Trans studies scholars have challenged again and again the idea of trans experience as simply ‘being trapped in the wrong body’.353 For the moment, however, I want to expand upon the idea of ‘not fitting in’ as feeling like ‘living in a different
348 See also my discussion in the next chapter of Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (London: Duke University Press, 1993). 349 Muñoz, p. 182. 350 Muñoz, p. 112. 351 Namaste, ‘Undoing Theory’. 352 Freeman, p. 172. 353 Stone, p. 162; Andrea Long Chu, ‘On Liking Women’, N+1, 2018
time zone’, in which exclusion is felt as lag or anachronism.354 Other queer and trans scholars have written about transsexual and intersex bodies as the postmodern future of gender and sexuality; transgender as inhabiting ‘a queer time and place’; queer and transgender as being ‘out of time’; and some transgender and transsexual subjectivities as being ‘out of sync’ or ‘non-chronological’.355 Descriptions such as these of bodies outside of time evoke the figure of the time-traveller, the stranger stranded outside their own ‘natural’ timeline.
H. G. Wells popularised time-travel narratives with his 1894 novella The Time Machine; since then, science fiction works have presented different theories of how time-travel might work, aided by technology, freak meteorological events, anomalies in the fabric of reality, or genetic mutation.356 However, a common device in earlier nineteenth century works of socialist utopian literature, such as William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890) and Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), was the time-traveller who falls asleep and wakes up in a future time. This kind of anachronism accords with Freeman’s descriptions of queer attachment to the ‘junk’ of the past – the cross-generational drag I discussed in the previous chapter.357 Yet in queer and trans theory, ‘trans’ and its cognates appear less as ghosts of a bygone era and more envoys from a utopian future, helplessly stuck in our miserable present.358 The sense of anachronism attached to trans people is that of being ahead of their time, inserting the category in a progress narrative that will see marginalisation and
354 Freeman, p. 172. 355 Kroker; Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place; Muñoz, p. 182; Kadji Amin, ‘Temporality’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1.1–2 (2014), 219–22 (pp. 220, 221). 356 Compare Wells’ mechanically-engineered time-travel with Tiptree Jr.’s time-jump induced by solar ‘superflares’, or Audrey Niffenegger’s idea of non-linear time due to the genetic disorder of ‘Chrono- Impairment’: The Time Machine (London: Penguin, 2005); ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’, in Her Smoke Rose up Forever (London: Gollancz, 2014); The Time Traveler’s Wife (London: Vintage, 2005). 357 Freeman, p. xxi. 358 See my discussion of Friendship’s Death in Chapter Six. 125
mistreatment one day rectified.
Pioneering works of trans history have contributed to this sense of trans as a community ahead of its time. Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors, Susan Stryker’s Transgender
History, and Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed (2004) collected and organized key moments, prominent figures, and gradual shifts to produce stories that elicit a shared affective response.359 Often these works focus on the idea of the damaged or fractured trans archive, emphasising the violence of erasure and exclusion caused by forgetting key agents of change, such as the street queen instigators of the Stonewall Riots, or by failing to memorialise historic turning-points, such as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot.360 These trans history works do not shy away from the brutality trans people have historically faced in their struggles to realise the better worlds they envision: instances of horrific physical violence against those who transgress gender norms, as in the case of murdered teenagers Brandon
Teena and Gwen Araujo, and of painful misrecognition by the medical gaze, in the case of
Lou Sullivan, denied hormonal and surgical treatment for identifying as a gay transsexual man. Anachronism entails vulnerability, where to be outside of time offers little protection from the violence of the present.
These stories seemingly follow Fredric Jameson’s maxim, that ‘history is what hurts’, a record of unhealed wounds and lingering sore-spots.361 In trans history this hurt follows a pattern: similar stories of rejection from forms of sustaining social existence – in particular
359 A subsequent book that seeks to replicate what Feinberg and Stryker have done for the UK context is Trans Britain, ed. by Burns (London: Unbound, 2018). 360 Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, Screaming Queens (Frameline, 2005); Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, ‘MTF Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966-1975: Commentary and Interview with Elliot Blackstone’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 4.2 (1998), 349– 72; Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage, ‘Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth’, American Sociological Review, 71.5 (2006), 724–51; Stryker, Transgender History. 361 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 102. 126
from feminist groups. As Emma Heaney details, there is a wealth of examples of specifically feminism’s historic hostility to trans people:
Conventional wisdom in trans and feminist academic, social, and political milieus remembers radical feminism for its trans misogyny, exemplified by Jean O’Leary’s 1973 attack on Sylvia Rivera at the Christopher Street Liberation Day, the community pressure put on the Olivia music collective to oust Sandy Stone in 1977, and Janice Raymond’s 1979 jeremiad against trans women, The Transsexual Empire. Nancy Jean Burkholder’s ejection from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) in 1991 spurred a queer and trans protest camp that hardened this political framing in queer and trans circles.362 Although Heaney goes on to highlight exceptions to this pattern of trans exclusion, this litany of events paints a picture of the women’s liberation movement as generally antagonistic towards transvestite, transsexual, and transgender people, at least from the
1970s onwards. Present-day protests at Pride parades thus appear to draw on an established tradition of feminist transphobia, affording anti-trans feminists a sense of the longevity and security of their position. The extensive evidence of anti-trans feminism makes it difficult – but also necessary – to navigate the complexity of trans history. Reading narratives of trans history as imagined alternate histories that have the power to change how we see the present and envision the future might offer a way to conceptualise the risks involved – as I will now explore in relation to the expulsion of Beth Elliott from the WCLC.
Alternate Histories To summarise briefly: Elliott, a lesbian transsexual folk musician and local activist, had helped organise the WCLC and was programmed to give a performance. When keynote speaker Robin Morgan heard of Elliott’s role, the former rewrote her speech to criticise the latter’s inclusion. The controversy around Elliott’s involvement in the WCLC centred on accusations from a member of lesbian separatist group Gutter Dykes Collective that Elliott
362 Emma Heaney, ‘Women-Identified Women: Trans Women in 1970s Lesbian Feminist Organizing’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3.1–2 (2016), 137–45 (p. 137). 127
had sexually harassed her while they had been friends in college. These accusations also implicated Elliott in the demise of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), one of the first social and political lesbian organizations in the US. Yet the national organisation of the DOB had been in decline for some time when Elliott was ousted from its San Francisco branch.363 Before
Elliott’s performance, protesters took to the stage, insisting she be ejected. Following a vote that failed to secure majority support for this, the minority against Elliott threatened to disrupt the rest of the conference if their demands were not met. ‘Twice the audience voted to keep Elliott on the stage. A small group of protesters left, and a shaking Beth Elliott performed to a standing ovation’, writes Finn Enke.364 The next day, Morgan used her speech to publicly vilify Elliott, describing her as a ‘male transvestite, an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer with the mentality of a rapist’.365
Since the late 1990s, Elliott’s story has been mentioned in several books on the history of lesbian and gay rights in the US, as well as works specifically focussing on transgender or transsexual history.366 More recently, however, there has been a minor flurry of interest in the WCLC from scholars in trans studies. Since 2016, at least half a dozen articles on the subject have appeared in various journals, with several appearing in TSQ: Transgender
Studies Quarterly. These more recent articles differ from earlier scholarship in that they are interested in complicating the much-repeated narrative running through many popular
363 Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York, NY: Carrol & Graf, 2006), pp. 29–30. 364 Finn Enke, ‘Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s: Toward a Less Plausible History’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 5.1 (2018), 9–29 (p. 17). 365 Robin Morgan, quoted in Enke, p. 17. For a brief explanation of some of the differences between the speech that Morgan delivered and the edited version included in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (1977), see: Enke, p. 18. 366 See for example: Patrick Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003); Gallo; Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1999); Joanne J Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of San Francisco (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009). 128
historical accounts. Often in the name of ‘transfeminism’ (a term I will unpack shortly), these articles counter the prevailing notion that the trans community’s relationship to feminism has been solely one of bitter exclusion, mistreatment, and hostility.
Three of the articles published in TSQ emphasise alternative histories of the 1970s, rewriting
Elliott’s story in terms of trans inclusion and involvement in the women’s liberation movement. Enke’s article ‘Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s’ (2018) explores the appeal of the so-called ‘exclusion narrative’ in terms of ‘plausible histories’. This phrase borrows from Sandy Stone’s ‘Posttranssexual Manifesto’, describing the backstory of a consistently sexed body and stably gendered existence that gender clinics urged transsexuals to produce.367 Enke argues that synonymising 1970s feminism with trans exclusion obscures the history of trans people’s engagement with feminism during that period. Likewise, Cristan Williams’ ‘Radical Inclusion’ (2016) reiterates the story of radical feminism’s forgotten trans-inclusive past, arguing for a distinction between radical feminists on the basis of their acceptance or intolerance of trans people. For Williams, trans people and their allies need to reclaim radical feminism by recourse to a history that evidences its trans-inclusivity. Meanwhile, Heaney’s ‘Women-Identified Women’ (2016) seeks to recover an archive that would demonstrate trans women’s involvement in the women’s liberation movement, in order to reconfigure contemporary anti-trans sentiments as a backlash against an already existing transfeminism.
Coined by Emi Koyama in response to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s ‘womyn-born womyn only’ entry policy, ‘transfeminism’ argues that a space of overlap exists between
367 Stone, p. 164. 129
feminism’s aims and the needs of trans people, specifically trans women. 368 In these recent correctives to the trans exclusion narrative, transfeminism has emerged as a salve for the historic wounds of trans exclusion; its popularity is akin to the rise of the term
‘intersectional’ in mainstream discourse, as the new inflection of feminism that enables us to overcome the movement’s earlier problems with racism, homophobia, and class prejudice.369 Like the investment in intersectionality’s efficacy to fix feminism’s flaws,
‘transfeminism’ also indicates a kind of progress narrative, in which its users position themselves as the enlightened forefront of the feminist movement.
While Enke, Williams, and Heaney all challenge the reductive narrative of trans exclusion from feminism, they do so by supplanting this narrative with another: the narrative of trans inclusion. These two dominant narratives of trans history seem to mirror the narratives of progress and loss that Clare Hemmings detects in accounts of feminist history. According to
Hemmings, stories about late twentieth and early twenty-first century feminist history tend to ‘divide the recent past into clear decades to provide a narrative of progress or loss, proliferation or homogenization’.370 Feminism is either gradually improving or in decay, depending on your position: these competing narratives rely on the same historical touchpoints, configuring these moments differently according to their narrative lens.
Likewise, the two dominant accounts of trans history reference the same historical events.
What my intervention here seeks to show is that exclusion and inclusion narratives are
368 Koyama. 369 As an example of intersectionality’s position in the mainstream, see:
mutually affirming rather than competing. While the exclusion narrative characterises the relationship between trans and feminism in terms of rejection, victimisation, and cruelty, the inclusion narrative provides the unsung heroes who overcame that hostile opposition.
Through collected counterexamples, these recent proponents of a rewritten trans inclusion narrative provide evidence of an alternative, hitherto-forgotten or ignored history that might change how we think about the present. But from a Delanian perspective, these two versions of history might appear as parallel-world stories that diverge from each other so little as to confirm each other’s plausibility. As such, these narratives disturb the distinction
Delany makes in his essay between factual reportage and fictional alternate histories: accounts of what did happen are not always easily distinguishable from ‘events that could have happened […] but didn’t’.371 In confirming each other’s plausibility, these twin narratives risk concretizing certain ideas that foreclose the possibility of other perhaps more radical futures. Science fiction offers vital ideas for reconceptualising this problem with how we recount trans history.
Dangerous Anachronisms As Freeman points out, the progress narrative’s view of time as a linear progression has its problems: ‘the past seems useless unless it predicts and becomes material for the future’.372
From the perspective of the exclusion narrative, the radical and lesbian feminism of the
1970s is deemed without value for a shared trans and feminist future. For the inclusion narrative, supposed examples of a lost transfeminist history appear as all that is worth salvaging. Contemporary feminists against the acceptance of trans people and their role(s) in feminism figure as the lingering legacy of this era. Yet this positioning risks solidifying
371 Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, p. 12. 372 Freeman, p. 5. 131
transphobia’s power.
In effect, opposition to the essentialist feminism that supposedly characterises this period helps to produce ‘trans’ as distinct from ‘transvestite’, ‘transsexual’, or ‘transgender’: the very inclusivity of ‘trans’, stands in opposition to the exclusionary nature of 1970s feminisms. In feminist history-telling, Hemmings argues, the 1970s is synonymous with the so-called ‘second wave’, which figures as either a high-point of feminist engagement in activism, or conversely, the low-point of feminist essentialism. According to the feminist progress narrative,
Essentialism becomes something that sticks ontologically as well as theoretically and historically, such that one might be, or think another to be, “an essentialist feminist.” […] this characterization raises the spectre of essentialism as racism in particular, making the doubled accusation one feminists will want to transcend rather than embody.373 In the context of ‘trans’, essentialism becomes not only code for racism, but also transphobia, with the phrase ‘biological essentialism’ referring to the belief that trans women cannot be women because they are not ‘biologically’ women.374
The exemplary biological essentialist feminist is the ‘TERF’ (trans exclusionary radical feminist), a term emerging in recent years from online social media and blogs.375 That the figure of the TERF signifies feminism of the 1970s is suggested by the reference to ‘radical feminism’ in the initialism. As Hemmings states, ‘the overwhelming majority of progress narrative glosses do not name the 1970s directly; instead changes are more euphemistically
373 Hemmings, p. 60. 374 There continue to be debates about what it means to be a ‘biological’ woman. See: Susan Stryker, ‘Transgender Feminism: Queering the Woman Question’, in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. by Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 59–70 (p. 62). 375 There has been considerable debates over the use of ‘TERF’ in trans studies, see: Sally Hines, ‘The Feminist Frontier: On Trans and Feminism’, Journal of Gender Studies, 28.2 (2019), 145–57 (pp. 146–47). 132
temporalized’.376 In this case, radical feminism – and by default also lesbian feminism, as the two are used interchangeably in feminist progress narratives – come to represent the 1970s, in a kind of temporal synecdoche.377 In such discussions, the TERF appears like the aforementioned figure of the long-sleeping time-traveller, an embarrassing relic of an outdated feminism, ignorant to how the world around her has changed while she has slept.
The anachronism of the TERF supposedly functions to invalidate her political position: her views are out of date, and perhaps even no longer feminist at all. But there is a risk here in casting contemporary anti-trans feminism as simply anachronistic: by linking back to events of the 1970s through reference to ‘radical feminism’, the term ‘TERF’ secures a sense of the durability of transphobic feminist ideas. Perhaps this framing positions the TERF as anachronistic in the sense of eternal, the time-traveller who survives across the ages, like the centuries-old vampires of Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch, 2013) or the immortal
‘Oldman’ of The Man from Earth (Schenkman, 2007). By constructing the transphobia of the present as a hangover from the 1970s, we risk emboldening it as an enduring force – rather than, as I discuss in Chapter Five, a more fragile and recent development in many ways disconnected from actual feminist traditions.
Unintended Erasures A thread running through these recent trans history articles is a desire to make good past wrongs. Through tropes of recovery, reclamation, and restoration these critics assert the need for a kind of historical practice that will repair the damage to the trans archive. The trans inclusion counter-narrative reproduces what Doan terms ‘ancestral genealogy’, an approach to history that lends itself well to projects of ‘rectifying exclusion’ and ‘recovery
376 Hemmings, p. 39. 377 Hemmings, p. 53. 133
work that […] gives voice and presence to sexual minorities otherwise denied entry to the historical record’.378 Williams writes that ‘[l]ost in these popular representations of radical feminism is its long and courageous trans inclusive history’, while Enke calls for transfeminist readings that investigate feminism’s ‘potentially lifelong trans history’.379 The inclusion narrative these critics espouse strengthens rather than displaces the exclusion narrative they purport to critique or complicate.
Often these trans inclusion narratives will describe the new histories they present as previously ‘lost’, ‘eclipse[d]’, ‘silenced’, under ‘erasure’, or ‘yet to be written’.380 As Doan writes,
With roots in political activism and animated by identity politics, ancestral genealogists ask who ‘hid’ their history and characterize their project as a struggle for visibility, a breaking of the silence, an emergence from the shadows, or the desire for community.381 Doan’s description here bears similarities with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis of the paranoid reading practices that dominate queer theory, specifically, the faith a paranoid approach places in exposure.382 To give a sense of the resonances between Doan’s account of ancestral genealogy and Sedgwick’s of paranoid reading, it is necessary here to give a longer quote of Sedgwick’s words.
378 Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 15. 379 Cristan Williams, ‘Radical Inclusion: Recounting the Trans Inclusive History of Radical Feminism’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3.1–2 (2016), 254–58 (p. 255); Enke, p. 12. 380 Cristan Williams, ‘Radical Inclusion’, p. 255; Enke, pp. 10, 11; Heaney, p. 138; Susan Stryker, ‘Lesbian Generations - Transsexual...Lesbian...Feminist...’, Feminist Studies, 39.2 (2013), 375–83 (p. 380). 381 Doan, Disturbing Practices, p. 2. 382 To be clear here, I adopt Sedgwick’s notion of ‘paranoid’ in the sense of the psychoanalytically-informed reading practice, not to further pathologize trans people or dismiss their experiences of exclusion. Transsexualism’s prior categorisation as psychosis lingers: many conservatives, the religious right-wing and even medical practitioners still consider trans people delusional. Trans scholars disagree as to whether the historic role of psychoanalysis in pathologizing cross-sex identification demands we abandon its conceptual tools. For more on this, see: Susan Stryker, ‘Transgender, Queer Theory, and Psychoanalysis’, in Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, ed. by Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (Earth, Milky Way: Punctum, 2017), pp. 419–26; Sheila L. Cavanagh, ‘Transpsychoanalytics’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4.3–4 (2017), 326–57. 134
Whatever account it may give of its own motivation, paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure. Maybe that’s why paranoid knowing is so inescapably narrative. Like the deinstitutionalized person on the street who, betrayed and plotted against by everyone else in the city, still urges on you the finger-worn dossier bristling with his precious correspondence, paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story known.383 According to Doan, historians commonly use narrative accounts to organise the historical knowledge they produce, and often with a chronological structure.384 But the paranoid reading of the ancestral genealogist goes beyond this, with the narrative account of the historical event conforming to a broader narrative. Understanding trans history’s tendencies towards ancestral genealogy in terms of narrative emphasises its relationship to the conditional temporalities of more speculative fiction; such works might elucidate problems with trans histories motivated by recovery and a faith in exposure.
Science fiction works exploring time-travel suggest some of the potential ramifications of this desire to repair trans exclusion through their various theories of how time-travel might affect causality and the potential paradoxes or bizarre happenings this might produce. Often time-travel in these works involves going back in time to fix something that has gone wrong or make a change that would improve the present, with a range of potential consequences: perhaps changing the past will result in events unfolding differently; perhaps changing the past will confirm the present in unexpected ways, as the ultimate chain of events cannot be altered. A popular recurring theme in works of science fiction exploring time-travel into the past – such as Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’ (1952) and the film The
Butterfly Effect (dir. by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) – is that attempting to rectify
383 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 138. [My emphasis] 384 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, p. 122. 135
the problems of the past can have unexpected and sometimes devastating consequences.
Moreover, in films such as Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985) and Looper (Johnson, 2012), returning to the past can effect sometimes violent erasure: both films deploy visually shocking effects to suggest how changing the past might cause characters (or parts of their bodies) to disappear from the present.
Thinking in terms of these ideas from science fiction about time-travel and its paradoxes, we might think about how trans history’s tendencies towards rewriting the past in the terms of the present may enact its own erasures. For Abram J. Lewis, the trans archive ‘provides the historian an impossible choice […] – a violence of historical erasure or a violence of historical recovery’.385 While for Lewis erasure and recovery are in opposition, his words nonetheless resonate with this science-fictional imagery of recuperative time-travel producing unintended erasures. Trans history is thus caught in a double-bind, as repairing the damage of absence from the historical record inevitably entails new forms of violence, holding details of the past beyond the reach of our understanding. I now turn back to the WCLC to explore this problem of trans history’s unintended erasures further.
The Instability of ‘Lesbian’ Enke and others have pointed out an important slippage in narratives that focus on the
WCLC as an exemplary moment of trans-exclusionary feminism: the wider context reveals tensions regarding the definition of ‘lesbian’, which like ‘trans’ contains multiple, sometimes contradictory, identifications. Morgan’s invitation to speak at the WCLC was itself a controversial issue at the time: Morgan was married to a man, with whom she had had a child, and many conference attendees did not consider her to be a lesbian.386 Moreover,
385 Abram J Lewis, p. 28. 386 Enke, p. 19. 136
debates about what it meant to be a lesbian (never mind a lesbian feminist) were in abundance: the conference brought together various different lesbian organisations and individuals, ranging across lesbian socialists, lesbian civil rights activists, radical feminist
‘dykes’ and lesbian separatists. According to Elliott, the organisers intended ‘a balanced conference – politics AND culture, with workshops for both activists and non-activists, anything that anyone wants to do’, indicating the broad range of understandings of lesbian feminism at the time.387 The organisers hoped Morgan’s speech would heal tensions between lesbians and other heterosexual feminists following the ‘Lavender Menace’ protest action, in which a group called the Radicalesbians interrupted the 1970 Second Congress to
Unite Women to protest homophobia in the women’s liberation movement.388
Instead the WCLC indicated the widening divide between so-called ‘cultural lesbians’, women engaged in romantic or sexual relationships with women, and political or ‘radical’ lesbians, advocating the definition of lesbian as someone prioritising women’s issues. In
Morgan’s speech, titled ‘Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions’, she claimed to ‘identify as a Lesbian because [she] love[s] the People of Women and certain individual women with [her] life’s blood’. 389 As Elliott notes, this ‘overly-florid language’ was common in descriptions of lesbian and feminist activism at the time, but it served a particular function in Morgan’s speech: to advance a notion of lesbianism beyond sexuality.390 In Morgan’s view, lesbian credentials were not a matter of sexual relations, but
387 Elliott, p. 248. 388 Anselma Dell’Olio, ‘Home Before Sundown’, in The Feminist Memoir Project, ed. by DuPlessis and Snitow (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1998), pp. 149–70 (p. 161). 389 Robin Morgan, ‘Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms of Contradictions?’, in Speaking for Our Lives: Historic Speeches and Rhetoric for Gay and Lesbian Rights (1892-2000), ed. by Robert B. Ridinger (London: Harrington Park Press, 2004), pp. 198–211 (p. 199). 390 Beth Elliott, ‘Fear and Loathing in Westwood’, in Mirrors: Portrait of a Lesbian Transsexual, ed. by Geri Nettick with Beth Elliott (Oakland, CA: Createspace, 2011), pp. 245–80 (p. 247). 137
rather political energies, engagement in feminism being just one of many forms of lesbianism.391
Morgan’s use of the word ‘identification’ gestured to the idea of ‘the Woman Identified
Woman’ (the title of the Radicalesbians’ 1970 manifesto) as a way to describe a feminist political orientation. As Heaney writes, ‘the assertion of their identity as women in an androcentric culture was a central concern of 1970s feminist projects’.392 The idea of ‘love
[for] the People of Women’ expressed a version of political rather than cultural lesbianism.
Morgan’s reference to ‘life’s blood’ suggests her own notion of same-sex love based on
‘sisterhood’ rather than sexual attraction: her anthology of women’s liberation writing,
Sisterhood is Powerful, was published only a few years before the WCLC in 1970. Calling for lesbians and feminists of all stripes to put aside their differences, she argued against women criticising other women’s interpretations of feminism and lesbianism, all the while promoting an expanded notion of ‘lesbian’ that would incorporate heterosexual women feminists.
In effect, Morgan deflected attention from her own contentious presence as keynote speaker by directing the audience to Elliott and the few other transsexual lesbians present at the 15,000 strong conference. Stryker describes the WCLC as ‘perhaps the most consequential incident in the rising tide of hostility towards transgender people in the summer of 1973’.393 Indeed, this year is of particular significance to understanding the discursive shifts out of which ‘trans’ emerged: as Stryker points out, 1973 was the year that saw the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM) used by
391 Robin Morgan, ‘Lesbianism and Feminism’, p. 201. 392 Heaney, p. 141. 393 Stryker, Transgender History, p. 102. 138
psychiatrists and medical practitioners.394 The categorisation of homosexuality as a
‘paraphilia’ or ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ – and the resultant use of conversion treatment – had long been criticised by gay rights campaigners.395 However, as homosexuality’s psychiatric status was finally demoted from mental illness to benign sexual variation, transsexuals and transvestites became the new primary targets of pathologisation.
As Butler notes, while the category of homosexuality was removed, supposedly non- normative gender expression appeared to take its place through the creation of the category ‘gender identity disorder’. ‘Some have argued that the GID diagnosis took over some of the work that the earlier homosexuality diagnosis performed, and that GID became an indirect way of diagnosing homosexuality as a gender identity problem’, Butler writes. ‘In this way, the GID continued the APA’s tradition of homophobia, but in a less explicit way’.396
This echoes the process that Gayle Rubin describes in her trailblazing 1984 essay ‘Thinking
Sex’, in which she writes about the hierarchy of sexual acts. While monogamous homosexuality began to ‘be permitted to cross over into acceptability’, she writes,
‘promiscuous homosexuality, sadomasochism, fetishism, transsexuality, and cross- generational encounters [were] still viewed as unmodulated horrors’. 397 With the official depathologisation of homosexuality in the DSM, lesbians and gay men achieved a degree of societal acceptance from the 1970s onwards. Transsexuals and transvestites, meanwhile,
394 Susan Stryker, ‘Gay American History @ 40’, The New School (YouTube 2016)
struggled to shake off the status of perversion. The case of Beth Elliott demonstrates how this struggle for respectability played out in the context of lesbian and feminist political organising.
Despite calling for ‘an exquisite diversity in unity’, Morgan used her platform to denounce transsexual lesbian feminists, or in her words, ‘men who deliberately re-emphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering’.398 Through these references to
‘gender roles’ and ‘parody’, Morgan invoked the growing antipathy in the lesbian and feminist movement towards gay men and butch/femme role-playing.399 Morgan interpreted
Elliott’s female self-presentation as within the tradition of gay men’s drag performances, perceiving this as an offensive parody rather than an expression of womanhood. She thereby constructed a new object of scorn onto which former conflicts could be projected.
Trans exclusion or inclusion narratives of the WCLC neglect this important detail: Morgan’s deployment of ‘transvestite’ in her speech over Elliott’s preferred term ‘transsexual’.
Morgan’s choice of words here reflects the different – and hierarchical – meanings attached to these categories at the time: the former term clearly carried connotations that Morgan thought would be more uncomfortable for the audience than the latter, perhaps based on assumptions that Elliott also held.
As some trans historians have noted, ‘transsexual’ was not a race- or class-neutral category.
Dan Irving writes that ‘[t]he majority of gender-variant individuals who enlisted medical experts for substantive assistance were white, middle-class, able-bodied male-to-female
398 Robin Morgan, ‘Lesbianism and Feminism’, pp. 2014, 210. 399 Joan Nestle, ‘A Fem’s Feminist History’, in The Feminist Memoir Project, ed. by DuPlessis and Snitow (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1998), pp. 338–49. 140
trans people more likely to be able to finance medical transition’.400 The diagnosis for
‘transsexualism’ used by the gender identity research clinics of the 1960s and 1970s carried the de facto requirements of whiteness and middle-class status. Emily Skidmore similarly notes that in the 1950s, ‘as the subject position of the transsexual was sanitized in the mainstream press and rendered visible through whiteness, other forms of gender variance were increasingly made visible through non-whiteness’.401 ‘Transsexual’ thus denoted a level of white, middle-class respectability.
In some circles, ‘transvestite’ could be an exclusive category: prominent transvestite activist
Virginia Prince’s organisation the Foundation for Personal Expression ‘limited members to married heterosexual men, excluding gays, male-to-female transsexuals, and biologically female individuals’.402 However, ‘transvestite’ often carried racialised associations of deviance and social marginality. The WCLC took place in April of 1973; only a few months later, lesbian feminist activist Jean O’Leary would deliver a statement at the Christopher
Street Liberation Day (CSLD) criticising transvestite activist Sylvia Rivera and other ‘drag queens’ for ‘impersonating women for entertainment or profit’ (meaning, presumably, for sex work).403 A destitute Latina woman, Rivera co-founded the group Street Transvestite
Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which focussed on helping homeless and imprisoned members of what she called the ‘gay’ community. Morgan’s reference to Elliott as a ‘male transvestite’ thus carried racialised connotations of low social status and sexual deviance.
400 Dan Irving, ‘Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive’, Radical History Review, 100 (2008), 38–59 (pp. 42–43). 401 Emily Skidmore, ‘Constructing the “Good Transsexual”: Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Press’, Feminist Studies, 37.2 (2011), 270–300 (p. 271). 402Stryker, Transgender History, p. 55. 403 Jean O’Leary Speech at 1973 Gay Rally (YouTube, 2019)
Collecting these two events of 1973 under the singular narrative of a forgotten transfeminist history obscures the tensions between Rivera’s idea of revolutionary street transvestites and Elliott’s transsexual lesbianism. Notably, Elliott’s Roman à clef Mirrors (2011) suggests she did not see herself as part of a wider trans community alongside transvestite activists such as Rivera, describing this as a ‘group claimed to be a “community”’, riddled by problems with ‘political correctness’.404 Instead, ‘this [lesbian feminist] community was my home’,405 she writes, staunchly opposing some activists ‘in the new wave of trans advocacy’ who dismissed 1970s feminisms as irredeemable detritus.406 ‘A very few wanted to appropriate me and my history for their own oppositional stance toward the women’s community’, she writes; ‘I had been, after all, the archetypal transsexual victim of radical lesbians. I was a prize, a talisman, a star to which an angry wagon could be hitched to great effect’.407 For Elliott, the lesbian feminist organisations thriving in the 1970s were a source of support for her own transsexual womanhood. Both the exclusion narrative’s positioning of her as a victim of TERFs and the inclusion narrative’s celebration of her as a transfeminist hero ignore her own understanding of herself as a transsexual lesbian feminist rather than as ‘trans’.
Envisioning Alternative Futures Although Morgan’s speech was ultimately damning of Elliott’s presence at the WCLC, extracts from her talk could read as advocating a more welcoming approach to transsexual participation in lesbian feminism. Ironically, the reconceptualization of ‘lesbian’ Morgan encouraged in her speech – moving away from a lesbianism rooted in sexual acts between
404Elliott, p. x. 405 Elliott, p. viii. 406 Beth Elliott, ‘Introduction to the New Edition’, in Mirrors, ed. by Nettick with Elliott (Oakland, CA: Createspace, 2011), pp. i–xv (p. vii). 407 Elliott, ‘Introduction to the New Edition’, p. vii. 142
bodies and towards lesbianism defined by engagement in women’s political issues – could equally have entailed a celebration of Elliott’s involvement as a conference organiser. The internal contradictions that abound in Morgan’s rejection of both feminist infighting and
‘male transvestites’ engaged in feminism indicate the fragility of the anti-transsexual feminist position in this moment.408
The vote for Elliott to continue with her performance passed with a strong majority and her departure from the conference hinged on only a few disruptive voices. Indeed, Pat Califia’s
Sex Changes (1997) and the publication Lesbian Tide indicate widespread support among the lesbian feminist community for Elliott.409 In her account of the conference, Barbara
McLean wrote,
We believe this issue should be discussed since it has serious implications for the whole women’s movement. There IS a contradiction here. Do we or do we not believe that anatomy is destiny? Just WHERE do we draw the line? Do we refer to a transsexual as a man before the operation and a woman after? Is it the surgeon’s knife that makes the difference? I honestly don’t know. But, until I do, I feel that I cannot oppress someone who just might be my sister.410 Articulated through a series of questions, McLean’s somewhat ambivalent message of support for Elliott suggests how her expulsion from the WCLC became a generative impetus for feminist thought around the categories of ‘lesbian’, ‘feminist’, and ‘woman’. Drawing on
Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of womanhood as a state of becoming, McLean connects transsexual embodiment to feminist thinking in ways that foreshadow works that would come to be seen as the inaugural texts of trans studies.411
In my exploration of the events of the 1973 WCLC, I have sought to heed critical historians’
408 Robin Morgan, ‘Lesbianism and Feminism’, pp. 204–5. 409 Califia, pp. 113–14; Barbara McLean, ‘Diary of a Mad Organizer OR: What You Always Wanted to Know about the Organizers but Never Bothered to Ask’, Lesbian Tide, 2.10/11 (1973), 32–38. 410 McLean, p. 33. 411 See in particular: Stryker, ‘Transgender Feminism’, p. 59. 143
guidance to hold onto the alterity of the past, rather than to twist it into a recognisable story arc. ‘While the social historian delves into the archive to find queer lives that seem familiar (or different) to us’, Doan writes, ‘the critical historian is alert to the unexpected, startling, even shocking in a radically alien past’.412 The task of critical history in producing historical accounts is to describe and explain an encounter with the unfamiliar, perhaps so strange and so different from the present as to be inconceivable. Doan is insistent that this engagement with the past’s radical difference from the present requires we not ‘translate the past into terms we understand now’, but instead try to understand historical figures as they understood themselves.413 This means resisting the temptation to convert those who understood themselves as transsexual or transvestite into the contemporary terminology of
‘trans’. Regardless of whether it is truly possible to avoid viewing the past through a presentist gaze, we might similarly consider the ‘untranslatability’ – that is, the historical specificity – of gender and sexual categories in order to understand the particular conceptual moves that ‘trans’ presents.414 In the next chapter, I explore how three feminist time-travel films might offer further ways of rethinking our approach to trans history through cinema’s transfigurations of time.
412 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, p. 123. 413 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, p. 120. 414 I pick up this notion of the ‘untranslatability’ of ‘trans’ in Chapter Five. 144
4: The Colonial Politics of Time-Travel: Orlando, The Sticky Fingers of Time, and Conceiving Ada Women filmmakers have long deployed filmic devices to explore non-linear temporalities, altering the usual speed or continuity of movement through time. One such filmmaker is
Maya Deren, who worked in the 1940s, a time when the dominant Hollywood filmmakers were securing cinematic conventions for a causal, linear temporality. In Deren’s films she explored not only the non-linearity of time, but its significance for questions of sex and difference.415 In the opening to her silent short Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), a woman
(Rita Christiani) watches a second woman (Deren) walking between the two open doors of a room.416 The camera’s focus suggests Rita’s point of view, as she watches Maya through the doorways apparently conversing with an unseen partner, with whom she then sits to ball a hank of yarn. Upon entering the room however, Rita finds Maya alone, seemingly fixed in time, her stillness accentuated by the contrast with Rita’s own movement across the room.
Like a street performer’s imitation of a mechanical doll, Maya reanimates when Rita sits in front of her, picks up the ball of yarn and begins to wind. This reanimation is a visual reference to the early days of cinema, the Lumière screenings that ‘beg[an] with a projected still photograph […] subsequently propelling it into movement’.417 Deren thereby links the visual representation of women to the play of stillness and movement integral to the technology of the cinema.
As Rita slowly turns her head to see a third woman (Anaïs Nin) standing behind her in the doorway, her body forms an uncanny visual echo of the twisting wool and Maya’s swinging
415 Annette Kuhn, ‘Classic Hollywood Narrative’, in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook, 3rd Edn (London: British Film Institute, 2007), pp. 45–48 (p. 45). 416 To avoid confusion, as these characters are not named, I will use the actors’ first names. 417 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 24. 145
arms. As Rita turns back, Maya’s rhythmic unwinding of the hank of wool from her wrists seems to move in slow motion, arms waving hypnotically, while a mysterious breeze seems to blow about her hair and scarf. When the camera’s focus switches back to Rita, the film’s speed returns to normal, and as the camera pans back to where Maya was sitting, the chair is empty. Classic Hollywood cinema often shows a woman in slow motion to convey the male protagonist’s (and male spectator’s) desire. Here however, slow motion conjoined with the bizarre mechanical movements of the characters suggests the woman-camera hybrid of the filmmaker. By accentuating the peculiarity of cinematic time, Deren unsettles the conventional representation of women in film as simply objects of desire for the male gaze.418 Through freeze frames, slow and accelerated motion, and repeated shots, Deren’s film ‘transfigures’ time, producing the illusion of her characters travelling across time and space in fantastical ways. An empty room suddenly becomes a crowded party, whose repeated gestures become a dance; a statue comes alive, juddering between movement and stillness; characters switch places, moving out of shot only to return as someone else. For the spectator, film becomes time-travel, enabling jumps backwards or forwards in time, and the sense of slowing down or speeding up movement.
The three films I analyse in this chapter build on and extend Deren’s experiments with cinematic time through devices that produce the sense of strange temporalities. I analyse
Sally Potter’s Orlando, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Conceiving Ada, and Hilary Brougher’s The
Sticky Fingers of Time419 as three examples of what I call ‘feminist time-travel films’. This term brings together these works’ engagement with a tradition of feminist filmmaking and
418 For more on the representation of women in classic Hollywood cinema and the male gaze, see: Laura Mulvey, ‘“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 833–44. 419 Hereafter: Sticky Fingers. 146
their foregrounding of non-linear temporalities through resistance to dominant cinema conventions. I seek with this new category to analyse works that might not be well-captured by the term ‘feminist science fiction’, but that nonetheless engage with the science fiction motif of time-travel, their protagonists moving through time and space in unusual ways. All three films focus on the ways in which cinematic time comes to shape our understanding of history and temporality, contributing to ongoing theoretical debates on the specificity and anti-normativity of ‘women’s time’ or ‘queer time’.420 As such they offer insights into how we might rethink our approach to trans history.
Like Deren’s works, these films present an alternative to the conventions of Hollywood narrative cinema to which we have since become accustomed. As Richard Abel describes, the early cinema of the 1890s and 1900s employed shots that produced an emphasis on spectacle, but this was soon overshadowed by a new logic to structure the various shots that together constitute a film: the communication of a causal narrative with a linear temporality.421 Shot/reverse-shot, eyeline matches, action matches, and the 180-degree rule became filmic norms that encouraged the spectator to derive a singular meaning from the juxtaposition of different shots in the sequence of film stills. The unidirectional movement of the film stock in the camera or projector became the underlying semantic logic for the film’s content, moving forwards in time through a problem to its resolution.422
420 For more on women’s time, see: Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7.1 (1981), 13–35; Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (London: New York University Press, 2000); Sam McBean, Feminism’s Queer Temporalities (London: Routledge, 2016). For more on queer time, see: Edelman; Freeman; Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place; Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Love; Dinshaw and others. 421 Richard Abel, ‘Early and Pre-Sound Cinema’, in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook, Third (London: British Film Institute, 2007), pp. 3–11 (pp. 4–5). 422 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 30. Although, of course, early films were often also shown in reverse for effect; see: Doane, 27. 147
Yet the temporality of classic Hollywood cinema does not simply recreate the continuous linearity of what Mary Ann Doane describes as ‘temporal irreversibility’, the sense of time’s necessarily forward movement.423 Instead, filmic techniques conceal interruptions to continuity. Editing produces the illusion of a seamless narrative transition across time and space, Annette Kuhn explains, ‘[d]espite the fact that every new shot constitutes a potential spatial disruption, and each gap of years, months, days and even minutes between narrated events a potential temporal disjuncture’.424 The conventions of classic Hollywood cinema conceal the spatial and temporal disruption of the cut, privileging the progression of the narrative over adherence to the actual progression of time.425 While experimental filmmakers toyed with the juxtaposition, mise-en-scène, and framing of shots to produce different experiences of temporality and causality, classic Hollywood cinema developed specific conventions to convey flashbacks, dreams, or jumps forward in time or across space. Filmic techniques such as intertitles, the dissolve, or the use of different types of film stock securely confined potential challenges to the sense of continuous linear time by emphasising the progress of the narrative. In effect, the narrative film’s disjointed movement across time and space was hidden in plain view.
While still narrative films, the feminist time-travel films I analyse in this chapter are nonetheless structured by their resistance to mainstream cinematic conventions of narrative time, stretching, disordering, and collapsing time in ways indebted to more experimental cinema. As Annamarie Jagose highlights, the ‘queerness of time’ is in many
423 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 27. 424 Kuhn, ‘Classic Hollywood Narrative’, p. 46. 425 Steinbock has explored how early filmmakers such as George Méliès employed the cut to produce the ‘trick effect’ of characters changing sex. Shimmering Images, pp. 36–42. 148
ways ‘at the heart of “time” or, for that matter, “history”’.426 Yet these films’
‘transfigurations’ of time – to borrow Deren’s vocabulary – indicate different ways of feeling the strange relationship to history specific to the experience of women and queers: their formal oscillations (shifting between the past and present) and their repetitions
(emphasising the past as present) conjure up alternative histories, parallel timelines, and potential futures in order to speak to ideas of memory and desire.
Moreover, these films show that our conception of time has a spatial dimension. Film duration was once measured in the physical length of film reels and, as Laura Mulvey points out, the play of movement and stillness in film is a matter of space as well as time.427 Time- travel films accentuate the space-time relationship. While time-travel might seem to privilege time, space is also often significant to such journeys, entailing for example instantaneous movement across a vast distance, or simultaneous existence in multiple places. Time-travel’s distortion of space in these three films makes visible the political significance of space, suggesting how non-linear temporalities might have more sinister applications than queer or feminist scholars tend to acknowledge. Valerie Traub highlights that many queer theorists have celebrated non-linear temporalities.428 Yet as I discussed in
Chapter Two in relation to the ‘anthropologist’s fantasy’, non-linear time can mean the uneven distribution of being-in-the-present that positions Western time as progress and the time of the racialised or colonised Other as stagnation or prehistory. Novelist L. P. Hartley’s famous line, ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’, can appear inverted under colonial temporalities: the foreign country is a past, supposedly offering
426 Dinshaw and others, p. 186. 427 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2012), p. 69. 428 Traub. 149
insight into the West’s origins and requiring development to attain goals the West has already achieved.429 My close readings of these films examine how fantasies of recovering forgotten feminist or queer histories are entwined with struggles against racial and colonial oppression.
I argue that the explorations of history and memory in these three films enable us to think through some of the problems with the dominant conception of trans history, in particular, to question understandings of ‘trans’ as a universal category. In different ways, each film speaks to the development of ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality through histories of racism and colonialism. These films therefore offer alternative possibilities for approaching trans history beyond the dominant narratives of exclusion and inclusion discussed in the previous chapter. My analysis of the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference showed the importance of attending to the historic specificity of gender and sexual categories; here I argue the importance of understanding ‘trans’ as a geographically specific category – that is, located in discourses attached to certain geographic sites or areas.
Feminist Time-Travel Since the early 1990s, authors and critics have proposed alternative terms to describe feminist contributions to the traditional generic categories of ‘science fiction’ and ‘fantasy’, including feminist fabulation and speculative, slipstream, postmodern, utopian or dystopian fiction.430 By viewing these three films through the lens of a new category of ‘feminist time- travel’, I want to sidestep, and perhaps disturb, the fraught disagreements over what does
429 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 1. 430 See for example: Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination (London: Virago, 2011), p. 8; Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood’, Guardian, 29 August 2009
and does not make a feminist science fiction film. As Kuhn has described, the dominant conception of science fiction film has historically revolved around ideas of spectacle, achieved through special effects, stunts, and high-quality costumes and make-up.431 These prove a barrier for more experimental or feminist filmmakers, who often work under tight budgets with limited time, crew, and access to specialist equipment or software.
Generic categories do have their place – and we should be under no illusions that they will disappear any time soon. Genre structures mainstream cinema, and by playing with generic boundaries, films speak back to cinema history. But the dominant approach to science fiction also involves a kind of generic boundary-policing that – as I discussed in my first two chapters – can follow a problematic logic akin to racial classification and sometimes bolstered by notions of white Western technoscientific superiority. Focussing on these works as feminist time-travel rather than feminist science fiction films opens up a different frame, decentring preconceptions about what constitutes a science fiction film. While a reading of the three films as science fiction is certainly possible, my aim in this chapter is to examine the different form time-travel takes in each film, demanding different narrative structures, affective registers, and filmic techniques.
In Orlando, Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, time-travel takes the form of the eponymous protagonist’s exceptionally long life, spanning several centuries, multiple locations, and male and female sexes. The film is a playful response to the rise of so-called
‘heritage films’ in the 1980s, historical dramas or adaptations of nineteenth and twentieth century novels, often celebrating upper class luxury and conservative values.432 Potter
431 Annette Kuhn, ‘Introduction: Cultural Theory and Science Fiction Cinema’, in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. by Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 1–12 (p. 7). 432 Richard Dyer, ‘The Heritage Film in Europe’, in Encyclopaedia of European Cinema, ed. by Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFI/Cassell, 1995), p. 204. 151
exaggerates the feel of a heritage film through lavish, sometimes even caricatured, period costumes and sets, as well as visual emphasis on the film’s primary location at (what becomes) a stately home. These allusions to heritage film complement the sense of
Orlando’s persistence across time, presenting the character in terms of a literary legacy.
Yet Potter undercuts the political conservatism associated with heritage films through postmodern devices, such as Orlando’s direct address to camera, that quite literally enable the film to speak to its contemporary moment. In the wake of the outbreak of AIDS in the
1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced Section 28, legislation which prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools. Meanwhile the media disseminated a homophobic moral panic about the dangers of the ‘gay lifestyle’. Orlando presents a subtle critique of the homophobia of the Thatcher era, even alluding to Neil Kinnock’s famous 1983 general election speech with Queen Elizabeth’s caution to Orlando to ‘not grow old’.433
These words are spoken by camp icon Quentin Crisp, whose gender-bending role as ‘the
Virgin Queen’ presents an inverted correspondence with that of Tilda Swinton playing
Orlando. The film’s additional casting of queer activist and musician Jimmy Somerville, who provides diegetic music at the film’s opening and close with his distinctive falsetto/countertenor voice, heightens the film’s queer credentials. While the plot’s temporal span covers 400 years then, these references to the film’s contemporary context emphasise the significance of the source text for the political climate of that moment.
Contrastingly, in Leeson’s Conceiving Ada, the narrative oscillates between the past (the mid-1800s) and the present (the mid-1990s), a split that gives a sense of the film being part
433 Neil Kinnock Giving His Election Speech about Life under Thatcher (YouTube, 2010)
historical docudrama, part cyberfeminist hacker film. The film’s protagonist, contemporary computer-artist Emmy (Francesca Faridany), attempts to visually reconstruct and thereby preserve the life history of her muse Ada Lovelace (Tilda Swinton) through digital technologies that capture the information waves of her memories. This proves a challenging project alongside Emmy’s discovery of her pregnancy, which she fears will impede the progress of her work. Meanwhile in the 1800s, Ada is also desperate to progress her own research, developing programs for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, which would later make possible the computers Emmy uses to research and reconstruct Ada’s life. Like Emmy,
Ada’s work is limited by her frailty during pregnancy, and finally by the uterine cancer that causes her death.
Emmy’s use of computer technologies to digitally resurrect Ada, finally implanting the nineteenth-century mathematician’s memories in her gestating foetus, self-consciously alludes to the film’s own production processes. Coming from a background in video and computer art, Leeson subverts the conventions of period drama films that are so lusciously exaggerated in Potter’s Orlando. Instead of painstaking attention to detail in costume design and on-location shooting, the scenes of Ada’s life use computer-generated backdrops in predominantly dimly lit, indoor spaces. These aspects give the film a boxed-in, claustrophobic feel. A wide range of references to, for example, digital culture, psychedelics, classic and science fiction literature, theatre, and underground music scenes, generates what Jackie Stacey terms a ‘citational aesthetic’, giving the sense of the artist’s varied source material.434
In Sticky Fingers, various characters race against time to either commit or prevent the
434 Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, p. 198. 153
murder of journalist and pulp fiction author Tucker (Terumi Matthews). Exposure to radiation at an H-Bomb test mutates Tuckers’ ‘code’ (akin to, but not the same as DNA), enabling the experience of time as non-linear. Tucker’s nemesis Ofelia (Belinda Becker) seeks to kill her in order that her ‘code’ splatter across time, contaminating the codes of others and making possible their own non-linear time-travelling abilities. After ‘travelling’ to the future in search of her editor-friend Isaac (James Urbaniak), Tucker encounters Drew, a suicidal writer who has unwittingly narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Ofelia’s mind-controlled minions. Isaac enlists Drew’s help to save Tucker, who gives her a new- found sense of purpose in life. Overcoming Ofelia’s evil machinations, Drew travels to the
1950s to prevent Tucker from attending the H-Bomb test. In true time-travel paradox fashion, Drew prevents the mutation that makes this ability possible, ultimately stranding herself in the 1950s with Tucker.
Like the two other films in this chapter, Sticky Fingers functions as what Richard Dyer defines as pastiche, knowingly invoking the structures and styles of other film genres, ‘a kind of imitation that you are meant to know is an imitation’.435 In this case, the film imitates the cool, the mystery, and the suspense of 1950s thrillers and films noirs, giving them a contemporary queer twist.436 However, there is a stark contrast between Sticky Fingers and other recent queer films that pastiche 1950s genres, such as The Wachowskis’ Bound
(1996), or Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015). Instead of the moody elegance and sumptuous detail of these works, Brougher’s film conveys a sense of ordinary life, with most scenes confined to cramped apartments or shabby bars, and predominantly
435 Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 1. 436 Examples include: Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock, 1954); Killer’s Kiss (Kubrick, 1955); Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 1955); The Big Heat (Lang, 1953); and Woman on the Run (Foster, 1950). 154
employing medium and close-up shots that concentrate the viewer’s attention on the characters. The film’s budget style revels in the rejection of the slick editing, lighting techniques, and camera movements of mainstream Hollywood films. Combining a narrative about the imagined side effects of nuclear radiation with a futuristic femme fatale, Sticky
Fingers gestures to science fiction B-movies of the 1950s, such as Devil Girl from Mars
(MacDonald, 1954), The Astounding She-Monster (Ashcroft, 1957), and The Wasp Woman
(Corman and Hill, 1959). Yet Sticky Fingers eschews the costumed monsters and crude special effects of these B-movies: in this film, the villain is time.
Together, these three films explore the possibilities time-travel or otherwise strange temporalities might offer as conceptual tools for grappling with the histories we construct around gender and sexual categories. These films use non-linear or discontinuous time to tell stories that could not previously be told, referencing the history of representation in cinema and art to signal the feminist and queer histories that have long been left out. Yet in different ways, these films also problematise the desires we invest in recovering the past.
They therefore suggest how science fiction ideas might enable us to imagine alternative approaches to trans history that attend to the risks of assuming this category is straightforwardly transhistorical and universal.
Non-Linear Temporalities With Orlando, Potter destabilises ideas of history as a progress narrative, suggesting instead time as looping or weaving. The film places heavy emphasis on movement, with shots of walking and running, processions, ice-skating, and transport by sledge, boat, sedan, camel, horse, and finally, a motorbike with sidecar. This pervasive sense of bodies in motion would seem to indicate the relentless onward movement of time. Yet the length of Orlando’s life, stretching across several centuries, distorts time’s supposedly normal forward drive, 155
emphasising the sense of repetition and return in movement itself. Moreover, the film’s use of intertitles to date and label segments of the film – starting with ‘1600-death’ and ending with an undated ‘birth’ – present Orlando’s life as one lived in reverse. While these intertitles might at first seem to categorise Orlando’s life in universalising terms, their inverted relationship to the events of the film suggests only an ironic engagement with the discursive construction of colonial Englishness. While the film attains a certain ‘progress’ by the film’s conclusion, following Orlando’s journey to the East and back again, Orlando’s deviations across time and space means s/he literally exceeds the boundaries of the life set out for her/him.
This sense of forward motion disrupted or diverted is exemplified in the scene that marks the transition between 1750 and 1850. Hoicking up her skirts in a display of furious disdain at her would-be suitor Archduke Harry’s insults, Orlando flees the scene, exiting through an entrance to a maze on the grounds of her soon-to-be repossessed house. The camera seems to both give her steadfast gaze and to chase her as she runs ahead, her image escaping the frame as she abruptly turns corners, glimpsed only as a flash of colour between the hedges.
Despite the sense of onward motion, movement is restricted, and time is distorted. Quick cuts between shots suggest time sped up, and the sudden change of costume indicates a jump to a new century. In the liminal space of the maze, time is an illusion, echoing film’s own dependency on illusion to produce the sense of movement.437 Instead of a progress narrative then, Orlando’s longevity functions to suggest the presence of the past in the present. Orlando is in effect pursued, haunted even, by notions of gender and sex s/he has encountered – and even benefitted from – in the past.
437 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 19. 156
Traub writes that ‘[a]ny ethics we might wish to derive from a consideration of temporality must contend with the irreducible force of time’s movement on our bodies, our species, and the planet’.438 Rather than this sense of an inevitable onward progress of time, Potter uses film techniques to suggest a sense of time’s repetitions and circularity, subtly critiquing colonial discourses of England as the forefront of civilisation. After transforming sex from male to female, Orlando’s experiences at the hands of men echo her/his own earlier treatment of women. Most notably, Archduke Harry’s proposal evokes the possessiveness and self-aggrandisement of Orlando’s own earlier proposal to his Russian innamorata Sasha.
Yet besides these similarities in dialogue, the film also produces this sense of history repeating itself through visual patterning, with repetition of mise-en-scène within and across different shots. In 1610, Orlando and his fiancée stand before a portrait of Orlando’s parents, an inverted mirror of the painting’s framing of the couple. Later, in the 1990s, with this same painting of Orlando’s parents in the background, she and her daughter look at a painting of her younger self (see figs 2, 3, and 4).439 As the film’s opening voiceover has predicted, Orlando has become, like her/his parents before her/him, a ‘portrait on the wall’
– but certainly not the figure they envisioned. This frame-within-a-frame motif recurs throughout the film, drawing attention to the active construction of gendered Englishness and its history through art and cinema.
The problem with time, the film argues, is how to break away from the sexism and heteronormativity of the past in order to develop a more feminist and queer future. Potter supplies the answer to this problem through the film’s conclusion, which points to feminist filmmaking as a way to disrupt linear time. After visiting the stately home that Orlando’s
438 Traub, p. 32. 439 Traub, p. 32. 157
former estate has become, she and her daughter spend time outside: the mother sitting beneath a tree, re-enacting the film’s opening; the daughter racing around, video-recorder in hand. The child’s filmmaking is shown by cuts to grainy, shaky, almost unintelligible footage of trees, sky, a cornfield, seemingly seen through that camera’s eye (figs 1 and 2).
The cuts between 35mm and gritty low-quality digital formats emphasise the film’s final message, expressing hopefulness for the future through new film technologies in the hands of a new female generation. While this utopian gesture might seem to invest in ideas of progress, the film’s circularity ultimately suggests history is not so obedient to such linear expectations.
Figure 2: Orlando and his fiancée Euphrosyne stand in front of Orlando's parents in Orlando (Potter, 1993) 158
Figure 3: The painting of Orlando's parents in the background above her and her daughter in Orlando (Potter, 1993)
Figure 4: Orlando and her daughter examine Orlando's portrait in Orlando (Potter, 1993) 159
Figure 5: Orlando's daughter as would-be filmmaker in Orlando (Potter, 1993)
Figure 6: Orlando's daughter's video-diary in Orlando (Potter, 1993)
160
Like Orlando, Conceiving Ada uses a technologically gifted girl child to figure feminist futurity. In this case, the child is not merely the daughter of the protagonist, but also implanted with Ada’s recovered memories. New computer technologies – both filmic and otherwise – become a means of feminist time-travel. Through this recovery of a past life, the film engages the ‘ancestral genealogy’ approach that I discussed in the previous chapter, indulging in the longing to give forgotten women their ‘place in history’.440 However, the film also problematises that longing, emphasising history’s constructedness through techniques that disrupt the linear timeline of ancestral genealogy narratives and that foreground the past as a fiction produced in the present rather than something simply there waiting to be accessed.
The first of three feature films by Leeson, each starring Swinton, Conceiving Ada deals with ideas of technology, identity, and reproduction that would continue to fascinate the filmmaker for over a decade.441 Leeson has described the films in this trilogy as ‘all about loss and technology’.442 According to Leeson, Lovelace ‘was basically erased from history’, and the repair of this forgetting or erasure forms the motivation behind both Leeson’s film and her protagonist Emmy’s computer experiments.443 Conceiving Ada would therefore seem to fit into the understanding of feminist history as a project of recuperation, of uncovering hidden or forgotten stories – as Doan might put it, a work of collective memory rather than critical history.444
The plot of Conceiving Ada appeals to collective memory’s desire for community across
440 Doan, Disturbing Practices, p. 15. 441 The two later films are Teknolust (2002) and Strange Culture (2007). 442 Tatiana Bazzichelli, ‘Hacking the Codes of Self-Representation: An Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 17.1 (2011), 28–33 (p. 32). 443 Bazzichelli, p. 32. 444 Doan, ‘Queer History / Queer Memory’, pp. 122–23. 161
time, using filmic structures that produce the spectator’s identification with Emmy in her pursuit of access to Ada’s memories. The film is heavily invested in the ideas of exposure and visibility that, as I discussed in the previous chapter, connect Doan’s concept of ancestral genealogy with Sedgwick’s idea of paranoid reading. Yet while Leeson’s commentary ostensibly positions the film as earnest in attempting to award Lovelace her
‘rightful place’ in history, the cinematic tone of the film is more tongue-in-cheek. The film deviates sharply from the conspiracy theories of secret government experiments and crime cover-ups in the spy and action thriller film genres on which Sedgwick draws to explain paranoid reading.445 Instead, Leeson seems to take inspiration from scenes of computer hacking and cyberspace in mostly techno-illiterate television dramas. Eschewing realism,
Conceiving Ada presents cybertechnology as it is imagined, complete with arrhythmic mouse-clicking and keyboard-tapping, unexplained computer jargon, imagery of garbled code, and a computer-user hunched over a monitor in the wee hours. This excess borders on parody. Rather than simply recognising Lovelace’s contributions to computer programming, Leeson explores her fantasmatic status in feminist culture.
Conceiving Ada is thus hardly faithful to history, playfully disrupting the seriousness of the paranoid or ancestral endeavour. In so doing, the film evokes the reparative pleasures of camp that Sedgwick posits as a much-needed accompaniment to the paranoid:
the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the “over”-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture.446
445 Sedgwick, p. 138. 446 Sedgwick, pp. 149–50. 162
Conceiving Ada’s narrative is frequently interrupted by esoteric cultural references and sudden switches in affective register and temporal location. The film features cameos from psychedelics pioneer and countercultural icon Timothy Leary as Emmy’s mentor Sims, and cult indie musician Chris von Sneidern as a busker. Meanwhile, Ada is visited by
Frankenstein author Mary Shelley; and the screens of shifting code borrow from Mamoru
Oshii’s 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell (which would famously later be riffed on in The Matrix
[The Wachowskis, 1999]) (fig. 3). These eclectic intertexts reflect Leeson’s status as an art filmmaker, producing work predominantly for gallery spaces. Rather than progress the plot, as the drive to causality in conventional narrative cinema demands, these scenes frustrate linearity and lend a surreal quality to the film’s aesthetic. These interruptions to the flow of the film indulge in the pleasures of resisting appropriation to a linear narrative of progression.
The film’s non-linear narrative jumps back and forth between different points in Ada’s lifetime and Emmy’s present. The two figures are locked into a relationship akin to the historian and the object of study re-animated through archival research, much like
Dinshaw’s description of her connections to fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe and mid-twentieth-century scholar Hope Emily Allen.447 In this sense then, the film conforms to ideas of bringing to light – giving visibility and voice to – feminist forebears. Yet the film continually reminds us that the past to which Emmy returns is a virtual creation. Emmy does not connect with Ada, but with a reconstruction of her produced through her memories, recorded in the various samples sent to Emmy by Sims. The film’s mise-en-abîme structure emphasises that this re-animation of Ada is computer-generated: what we see of Ada’s life
447 Dinshaw. 163
is presented as a screen within a screen (fig. 4). Ada’s ‘life story’ is a virtual reality just as programmed as Emmy’s digital hound Godsdog. Sam McBean writes that ‘the footage of
Ada’s life and memories is accessible to viewers via Emmy’s computer screen’.448 However, like cinema itself, the ‘footage’ here is not a window onto the past, but rather a carefully selected, edited, and fictionalised reimagining of it. The emphasis on the labour of Emmy’s research needed to produce the virtual construction of Ada echoes Leeson’s own archival research in producing the film.
Conceiving Ada further suggests history’s constructedness through the use of new media techniques. As Sharon Lin Tay explains, ‘[t]he Victorian sets that Ada and her contemporaries inhabit are completely digitised and layered on as the actors perform in front of a blue screen’.449 The film’s flashbacks are digitally constructed through use of stock footage. This method goes against the norms of period drama, and instead the film bears greater similarity with budget television dramas, appealing to a sense of suspended disbelief and foregrounding the affective realm over the aesthetic. The unsettling artificiality of these sojourns into the imagined past lends a sense of referential circularity: Ada’s history can only be reconstructed by recourse to footage of Victorian sets produced for other contemporary audio-visual fictionalised stories of that era. The film thereby suggests that history is brought into being through our active constructions of it, rather than being already
‘there’, waiting for discovery.
448 Sam McBean, ‘The Gamble of Reproduction: Conceiving Ada’s Queer Temporalities’, Studies in the Maternal, 6.1 (2014), 1–16 (p. 4). 449 Sharon Lin Tay, ‘Conceiving Ada, Conceiving Feminist Possibilities in the New Mediascape’, Women: A Cultural Review, 18.2 (2007), 182–98 (pp. 188–89). 164
Figure 7: Screens of shifting code, in Conceiving Ada (Leeson, 1997)
Figure 8: Screen within a screen, in Conceiving Ada (Leeson, 1997)
165
Figure 9: The cover of the novel in The Sticky Fingers of Time (Brougher, 1997)
Figure 10: 'A Mysterious Woman with Time to Kill', in The Sticky Fingers of Time (Brougher, 1997)
166
While Conceiving Ada alludes to history’s constructedness through a visual emphasis on screens and use of new media technologies, Sticky Fingers looks at history as film history. A pastiche of 1950s B-movies and thrillers, Brougher’s film shows the past as we come to understand it through cinematic codes. The characters’ movements through different time periods are indicated through changes in film stock – from the black and white of the 1950s, through the brown-tint of 1970s Kodachrome, to the colour of the 1990s. In effect, the characters do not move through time, but rather move through fictionalised time, history as it is reproduced in film and novels. The appearance of clear mucous around the eyes of characters after they have ‘travelled’ hints to the now mostly discarded practice – common in the 1950s – of applying Vaseline and coloured gels to the camera lens to soften the focus or tint the colour of the shot. This allusion positions the character’s eyes as cameras, emphasising the cinema’s influence on our reconstruction of the past.
The film’s homage to pulp science fiction goes so far as to construct a fictional pulp novel to tie the two main timelines of the 1950s and the 1990s together. A copy of Tucker’s (to her) unfinished novel – dog-eared, faded and missing many pages – is discovered by Drew in her ex-boyfriend’s bookshop. The presence of the novel offers a multi-format mise-en-abîme, albeit a story within the story that the audience never learns. The camera’s gaze lingers over the cover of the novel, which features the captivating title The Sticky Fingers of Time. The cover’s image shows a black woman in red dress wielding a pocket watch, and the ominous tagline, ‘a mysterious woman with time to kill’ (figs 5 and 6). This style follows the pattern of
1950s pulps in featuring an alluring woman in repose.450 It is this image which captivates
Drew more than the actual content of the novel, which she soon discards. The implication is
450 Although as I will come to later, this femme fatale’s blackness renders her representation on the cover of a science fiction novel exceptional for the 1950s and still unusual even for the 1990s. 167
that this film is interested in the aesthetics of the 1950s more than its content.
This focus on the aesthetics of the 1950s – surfaces rather than depths – suggests a negative affect that we might label nostalgia. As Susan Stewart writes,
Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.451 Stewart’s characterisation of nostalgia resonates here as a way to conceive of the strange temporality – the future-past orientation – invoked by Sticky Fingers’ fantasised return to a
1950s devoid of political context. While for Stewart, nostalgia constructs a narrative of history with little bearing on actual events, in Sticky Fingers nostalgia functions as an organising principle. The film calls upon its audience to consider the ways in which all histories are to some extent structured by this affect, bringing the ever-absent past into presence through narrative. The film’s emphasis on history as film history speaks to the ways in which narrative – mediated through works of fiction such as films and novels – produces history.
The aesthetics of the 1950s that the film seeks to conjure up through cat-eye glasses and pulp novel covers are necessarily inauthentic expressions of nostalgia. While the film flicks back between the 1950s and 1990s, the space of the 1950s is limited to scenes in Tucker’s flat and archival footage of a detonating bomb at the Nevada test site. As I will discuss shortly in more depth, there is not even a gloss of the racial, gender, or sexual political climate of the 1950s. The past that the audience returns to is ‘always absent’, existing only as the remnants of narrative, the few remaining pages of a tattered book. The nostalgia in
451 Stewart, p. 23. 168
Sticky Fingers is not for the actual 1950s, but for a fictional, filmic version of the era that
‘never existed’. Ofelia’s quip that ‘nostalgia has no meaning in non-linear time’ refers not just to the sense that nostalgia is misplaced, but that nostalgia is indistinguishable from history when we consider the construction of history through narrative, including narrative cinema.
Time-Travel’s Colonial Connotations The two women in the opening to Ritual in Transfigured Time are dressed seemingly identically in a dark shift with a pale scarf, producing a dreamlike doubling which suggests their fungibility. They are distinguished only by the slight differences in their skin tones and face shapes, the visibility of their racial difference – Deren was born in the Ukraine, while
Christiani was born in Trinidad – all but effaced by the grayscale of the black and white film stock.452 They are twin versions of the mysterious yet alluring image of the femme fatale of
1940s film noir. As in later Hollywood works such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), this doubling emphasises and thereby disturbs the Hollywood cinematic conventions in which, as Claire Johnston puts it, ‘woman as woman is largely absent’, presented instead as an icon, a symbol for ‘Woman’.453 In contrast to this near-effacement of racial difference in Deren’s film, Orlando, Conceiving Ada, and Sticky Fingers bear more visible traces of racist and colonial histories. Connecting these histories to ideas of time-travel and non-linear time, these works indicate how fantasies of mending feminist and queer absences from the historical record often construct time in ways that rely on colonial logics, extending the reach of the white Western subject into the frontier of time. All three films trouble the
452 Richard Dyer discusses how film technologies including film stock have historically privileged white faces in Dyer, White, pp. 89–103. 453Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. by Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 31–40 (p. 33). 169
tendency to universalise gender and sexual categories through attention to place – emphasising that it is not these categories that are universal, but rather colonialism.454
Orlando presents a subtle critique of British imperialism, with the film partly constituting a series of interactions between the white English titular character and the foreign Other.455
In the 1600s, Orlando’s noble heritage means he moves in the same circles as foreign diplomats, stranded during the freezing of the Thames, where he meets Sasha, daughter to the Muscovite ambassador. In the 1700s, the reigning king tasks Orlando with preserving the interests of the British in a region referred to vaguely as ‘the East’, where he meets the
Khan of Khiva. Meanwhile in the 1800s, the location of Orlando’s resplendent family home and expansive countryside grounds coincides with the path of Shelmerdine, an American freedom fighter en route to join the American Civil War. While love and heartbreak might form the narrative logic that propels Orlando’s movement between the different locations of these encounters, the film takes pains to show the significance of Orlando’s privileged status in these interactions. Orlando’s noble family and connections offer her/him forms of mobility and inactivity unavailable to others: the luxury of days asleep, the escape of international travel, and the ease of being transported by others. Moreover, as Anne Ciecko writes, ‘Potter ironically comments on the colonizing and globalizing process in which she, as English and European, is implicated’.456 As a transnational film with a focus on English history, the production of Orlando navigates the same problems of Occidentalism and
Orientalism that the film’s narrative critiques.
454 For more on colonialism’s universality, see: Robert Spencer and Anastasia Valassopoulos, Postcolonial Locations: New Issues and Directions in Postcolonial Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 1–15. 455 However, Swinton, the actor who plays Orlando, is Scottish. 456 Anne Ciecko, ‘Transgender, Transgenre, and the Transnational: Sally Potter’s Orlando’, The Velvet Light Trap, 1 (1998), 19–34 (p. 20). 170
Orlando demonstrates the peculiar temporality of the colonial gaze through the varied attention to historic specificity in the two primary locations of the film, England and
Uzbekistan. In almost all the film’s historical settings, the period is suggested through detail in décor and dress, and further pinpointed by the presence of or references to the ruling monarch and historical events – such as the River Thames frost fairs. Despite some minor anachronisms, this attention to historical accuracy gives a sense of the scope of Orlando’s
400 years, a life lived at the behest of and in dialogue with royalty. Yet the parts of the film set in the East are emptied of historical reference. In contrast to the timeline in England where progress is measured through the succession of monarchs, in the East, the unnamed local ruler is a romantic caricature detached from time, simply titled ‘the Khan’ in the film credits. The setting – Khiva, Uzbekistan – is recognisable only to an audience familiar with the Djuma mosque’s distinctive pillars or the details of the film’s production. Meanwhile, the war that precipitates Orlando’s sex change and flight back to England is fought against vague ‘mutual enemies’, resisting the viewer’s attempts to locate this event within actual
British colonial activities. Unmoored from history, Orlando’s escape to the East becomes an escape from rigidly periodized temporality: the ‘period cramps’ against which queer historians such as Madhavi Menon argue.457
Through this mix of anachronism and anatopism, Potter’s film parodies the colonial gaze.
Orlando’s adoption of local dress and customs echoes Hollywood cinema’s embarrassing history of white actors performing racial otherness through black and brownface. Not long after his arrival in Khiva, Orlando discards his full-bottomed wig and heavy red coat in favour of a white turban and robes. This attire echoes the Khan’s outfit in their first encounter (figs
457 Menon. 171
7 and 8), functioning as a kind of cultural appropriation that literally whitewashes the foreign custom – a reference, no doubt, to David Lean’s 1962 biopic Lawrence of Arabia.458
Relying on the temporally fluid Orientalist stereotype, the Khan’s outfit, and Orlando’s imitation, bear only vague resemblance to actual Uzbek fashions of the eighteenth century – as the special features documentary accompanying the film reveals, the character of the
Khan was unrecognisable to the Uzbek locals included as extras in these scenes. Potter’s film thereby skewers cinema’s role in constructing white Western fantasies of journeys to the
East as a form of time-travel or escape to a timeless world.
As the setting of Orlando’s transition from male to female, this positioning of the East as atemporal has significance for the film’s exploration of gender and sex. Orlando’s
‘limitlessness’, in Swinton’s words – traversing centuries, countries, and sex – is made possible through her/his noble heritage, a family history entwining whiteness with proximity to power.459 As Ciecko points out, ‘Potter blanches Orlando’s character’ with the casting of
Swinton, whose ethereal whiteness erases the ‘dubiety about the purity of [Orlando’s] class and ethnic/racial identity’ in Woolf’s novel.460 Yet rather than functioning, as Ciecko suggests, to ‘streamline the narrative, to put the focus on gender’, the effect here is to comment on the ways in which race, gender, and power are entangled.
Although separated by ethnic and cultural difference, Orlando’s affinity with the Khan rests upon a homosocial bond. In a drinking ceremony scene, they celebrate ‘the manly virtues’ and their shared difference from women. Appropriating or reinforcing the local notions of
458 Echoing Alec Guinness’ brownface role as Prince Faisal in Lean’s film, Potter also casts white French Canadian actor Lothaire Bluteau in the role of the Khan. 459 Dennis West, Joan M West, and Tilda Swinton, ‘Achieving a State of Limitlessness’, Cinéaste, 20.1 (1993), 18–21. 460 Ciecko, p. 27. 172
sexual difference that accord with Western values thus forms one device by which British imperialism secures its foothold in other regions. While Orlando’s ambassadorial jaunt in the East is ostensibly sandwiched between 1700 and 1750, the dislocation from historical specificity signifies the relevance of this scene for the contemporary moment. Like the use of direct address to camera and celebrity cameos, the sense of time suspended suggests the continuing role of Western political influence in shaping notions of sex and gender. Foreign concepts in line with Western notions of sex and gender developed through sexology are upheld, functioning to consolidate power in service of Western interests.
In Conceiving Ada, the film similarly conveys a sense of time and space suspended in its depiction of mid-1800s Britain through digitally inserted backdrops. The historical inaccuracies in the flashbacks to Ada’s life story emphasise the role of fantasy in Emmy’s desires to resurrect her long-dead computing hero. Moreover, the inherent anachronism of reconstructing the pre-cinematic past through nascent new media technologies highlights the actual legacy of Lovelace’s work, with her writings forming the basis of modern-day computer programming. However, subtle links throughout the film to race and colonialism problematise the film’s explicit fantasy of recovering a neglected feminist history and lost technoscientific possibilities. 173
Figure 11: The Khan in stylised 'Eastern' costume in Orlando (Potter, 1993)
Figure 12: Orlando imitating the Khan's attire in Orlando (Potter, 1993)
174
As I have discussed, Leeson’s film constructs an ambivalent longing for a history in which
Ada Lovelace survives to complete, and receives widespread recognition for, her life’s work.
Yet key moments in the narrative resonate with a more critical perspective on the history of science and technology, acknowledging its implication in the trade of natural resources, manufactured goods, and enslaved Africans as part of the development of Western colonial powers. The flashbacks to Ada’s life focus exclusively on her family and sexual liaisons – a scheming network of white European aristocrats, continually deceiving, manipulating, and seducing one another. Despite this narrow focus, the film hints to the broader context in which Lovelace lived through references to medical science. These references suggest that any celebration of Lovelace must locate her work within power relations beyond sex and gender.
Conceiving Ada undoubtably laments the foreshortening and neglect of Lovelace’s contributions to science and technology. The film’s longing for this history-that-never-was is indicated by Ada and Emmy’s repeated exclamations of there not being enough time: while in Orlando the protagonist has more time than he/she knows what to do with, here the two characters race against a quickly draining hourglass. In effect, the sense of time as an irreversible progression from birth to death is positioned as the enemy of scientific progress.
The film repeatedly lists the potential significance of Babbage’s Analytical Engine for various fields and industries, staging scenes in which Ada confronts the inventor for failing to comprehend the significance of his idea.
Yet the film also hints at the horrific consequences that could have taken place had Lovelace survived to advance computing technologies, given the historical context in which she lived.
Primarily, Leeson’s film achieves this through its visual emphasis on gynaecology and 175
allusions to the history of this field of study, which emerged in the 1840s, during Lovelace’s lifetime. The film features multiple medical examinations and scenes in which Ada and
Emmy discuss their uterine health with doctors and other characters. Not only is the film framed around Emmy’s pregnancy, but many of the virtual flashbacks to Ada’s life concentrate on her declining health as a result of her pregnancies. Moreover, the name of
Emmy’s mentor, Sims, evokes that of J. Marion Sims, considered by some the ‘father of modern gynaecology’.461 Conceiving Ada’s gynaecological focus might at first seem to present a narrative celebrating medical advances in women’s health, yet the film’s overall tone and atmosphere unsettles such a reading, opening the film up to more critical reflections on the entanglement of the medical construction of female reproductive health with racist histories.
Notably, the film’s sole Black character is the curiously named ‘Dr Fury’, an obstetrician who performs Emmy’s ultrasound scan. The view of Emmy’s gestating foetus appears on a screen, produced through waves, much like the process Emmy describes by which she conjures up the image of Ada. This scene further links Lovelace’s mathematical contributions to gynaecology through the sonogram, an imaging technology made possible by computing technologies.462 Dr Fury remarks that there is a shadow obscuring the screen, a mark that challenges the legibility of Emmy’s reproductive organs. This shadow not only foreshadows the dangers of Emmy’s research for her pregnancy, but also suggests the dark history of gynaecology itself.
Preceding the field of sexology, gynaecology’s emergence as a discursive field secured
461 Snorton, p. 20. 462 For feminist critiques on the visual representation of the sonogram in visual culture, see: Lauren Berlant, ‘America, “Fat,” the Fetus’, Boundary 2, 21.3 (1994), 145–95; Donna J. Haraway, ‘The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order’, Feminist Review, 55 (1997), 22–72; Petchesky. 176
notions of binary sexual difference through knowledge-production techniques including: the penetrative exploration of genital orifices; the surgical mapping, suturing, and removal of internal reproductive organs; and the classification of ‘feminine’ maladies – hysteria, mania, nervous disorders, infertility and abnormal sexual desire.463 As C. Riley Snorton argues, this new science produced the category of biological sex as scientific ‘fact’ through the scopic examination of live and dead enslaved Black bodies:
the coupling of sex and gender occurs as a racial arrangement [in which] gender socially constructs sex, and captive flesh becomes the material and metaphorical ground for unsettling a view of sex and gender as neatly divided according to each term’s relation to medicoscientific knowledge.464 Presuming Black people’s racial inferiority, white doctors justified Black people’s subjection to the medical gaze. The emergence of gynaecology depended on not only racist pseudoscience, but also the availability of enslaved Black people, on whose bodies early gynaecologists experimented. Casting a Black woman in the role of gynaecologist Dr Fury,
Leeson inverts the historical positioning of the Black woman, from object to subject of medical study. Nevertheless, reading Leeson’s film through the racist history of gynaecology brings to light the more unsettling implications of feminist fantasies of restoring Lovelace’s place in history – prompting questions about the dangers Lovelace’s work might have posed for enslaved people had she lived to extend it.
Sticky Fingers also explores the racial ramifications of desires to turn back time. In an incisive essay, Frances Negrón-Mutaner criticises the film for perpetuating the racist stereotypes of the ‘black bitch’ or ‘phallic black beast’, through the casting of Belinda Becker
463 Snorton, pp. 44–48; Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 47. 464 Snorton, pp. 32–33. 177
as Ofelia.465 Her article argues that the film exploits stereotypes about Black womanhood to secure its narrative arc towards white lesbian domesticity.466 Despite Brougher’s claim to have cast actors colour-blind, the film’s racial opposition of white female protagonists and
Black female antagonist speaks to the often unremarked-upon racial implications of time- travel narratives: Brougher’s film does not contemplate the improbability of a Black Tucker securing the opportunity to report on the bomb tests in Nevada in 1953, or the challenges a
Black Drew would face in choosing to live in the 1950s with her female lover.
Comparing the film with Octavia Butler’s time-travel novel Kindred suggests another reading of the work in which the film speaks to the racist dynamics of gentrification as an ongoing form of systemic racism and settler colonialism that continues today. Butler’s novel makes plain the racist assumptions of many time-travel narratives, which imagine time as simply one more dimension for adventure, exploration, and even colonisation.467 In Butler’s novel, the Black female protagonist Dana involuntarily travels back in time from the 1970s to the early 1800s. The novel demonstrates the vastly different implications of time-travel on the basis of racialisation, as Dana finds herself transported into slavery. Meanwhile, Sticky
Fingers does not elaborate on what ultimately happens to Ofelia once Drew has prevented
Tucker’s code mutation: her fate is left unresolved, relegated beyond the confines of the film’s narrative. In leaving this narrative thread without closure – going against the conventions of narrative cinema – the film attests to the idea that time-travel has tended towards white nostalgic fantasies in which the freedom of white characters to travel back in
465 Frances Negrón-Mutaner, ‘Ofelia’s Kiss: Racing The Sticky Fingers of Time’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 5.3 (1999), 425–35 (pp. 428, 429). 466 Negrón-Mutaner, p. 433. 467 Atwood makes a similar point about utopian and dystopian works’ gradual adoption of other times – forgotten pasts, possible futures and alternative presents – in place of unexplored lands and unmapped islands, In Other Worlds, pp. 69–70. 178
time is secured by historic racism.
Time-travel in Sticky Fingers is signalled through sudden changes in the setting that give not only the sense of time having elapsed, but also time moving at a different pace. The film is set in New York – for the most part, locations in Brooklyn in 1953 and the 1990s. By constructing New York across different points in time, the film provokes the question of what has changed in the intervening period. This is emphasised in Tucker’s first time-travel scene. The camera tracks her movement across the street, as she walks past shop windows made up to look like a 1950s funeral home, barbers, and grocery store. Suddenly, she travels to the 1990s, signalled by a change from black and white to colour film. Tucker’s confusion, the sense of the strangeness of the present, is conveyed through shots of graffiti, busy streets, and the sounds of traffic. The hustle and bustle of 1990s Brooklyn, suggested through quick cuts between static shots and footage from a moving vehicle, stands in contrast to the leisurely pace of the film’s opening in the 1950s. This shift to the flurried movement of bodies references not only the increased speed of new technologies – faster cars and rollerblades – but also the sense of Brooklyn as a site undergoing rapid change.
The film alludes to gentrification in this first time-travel scene, as Tucker tries to return home, only to find the locks changed and someone else living in her apartment. The well- documented gradual displacement of established Brooklyn residents over decades through rising rent prices is re-enacted on an individual scale, condensed into a few minutes of film.
A wave of articles in recent years have documented the social impact of steeply rising rents in Brooklyn, dubbed ‘America’s most unaffordable place to buy a home’.468 Sticky Fingers
468 Vivian Yee, ‘Gentrification in a Brooklyn Neighborhood Forces Residents to Move On’, New York Times, 2015 demonstrates the onset of this phenomenon in the 1990s, before the mass displacement that has been reported more recently.469 However, Sticky Fingers also relates the broader social process of gentrification to systemic racism, through its construction of a predominantly white Brooklyn setting. The film presents a new form of colonialism that perpetuates the White American disregard for the lives of people of colour symbolised by the H-bomb detonation at the film’s opening. As filmmaker Spike Lee puts it, the influx of white residents into Brooklyn suggests a kind of ‘Christopher Columbus Syndrome’, the continuation of settler colonialism into the twentieth century. The film’s version of 1990s Brooklyn centres incoming white residents’ desires for, as one Brooklyn author puts it, ‘appealing housing, lively walkable streets, and express subway lines to Manhattan’.470 The spaces of late twentieth-century Brooklyn that the film’s characters move through include clean streets, quirky bookstores, grungy bars, a dentists’ surgery and a park for roller-skating and dog-walking, cleared at dusk by police. There are few, if any, non-white faces in these scenes. This fantasy cityscape thus enacts on a grander scale Drew’s escape to the 1950s, made possible by banishing Ofelia, and what Negrón-Mutaner terms ‘the contaminating potential of her blackness’, from the frame.471 york-city/482310/> [accessed 8 November 2018]; Elizabeth Kissam, ‘In the Shadow of Gentrification’, The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture, 2014 Bringing these references to historic and ongoing forms of colonialism in these films to the fore, this chapter has emphasised the significance of ideas of time-travel and otherwise strange or non-linear temporalities to issues of race and place. In their own ways, these feminist time-travel films explore and problematise the desires that motivate the construction of histories of gender and sexual categories. The longing to recover forgotten feminist histories, to celebrate progress narratives, or to tell queer stories not previously able to be told, can, as my readings show, obscure histories of racist and colonial violence that linger on in structures that continue to displace and dispossess Black and Brown people, positioning them as out of place and out of time. These films offer trans studies ways to think about synthesising the experience of temporal asynchronicity or disjuncture with a heightened attention to the racial and colonial implications of references to time-travel: figuring time as one more dimension to be colonised, as so many time-travel narratives historically have done, should leave us uncomfortable. Adapting the non-linearity explored by earlier experimental filmmakers to feminist narrative films, Potter, Leeson, and Brougher unsettle the conventional causal narrative drive established by Hollywood cinema. Their techniques of editing, new media technologies, and eclectic intertextualities explore the experience of time as disjointed or unlimited, looping or repeating, instead of the expected onward movement. My emphasis on the relationship between non-linear time and the politics of space in these films opens up questions of how we might think about the strange temporalities and complex histories of ‘trans’ while attending to the ways in which ‘trans’ circulates in space: this category’s relationship to historic colonial discourses and its role in global capitalist systems. In the final two chapters of this thesis, I focus more closely on how ‘trans’ circulates as a category, investigating how contemporary debates on trans rights draw on ideas of alien language. 181 5: Untranslatability: Towards Critical Utopia in Debates on Trans Terminology as Alien Language In Harry Josephine Giles’ recent poetry zine “Some Definitions” (2019) they explore the sense of ‘trans’ as a new language that is yet to be properly understood. Giles troubles the desire for easy explanations of the different terms associated with the contemporary discourse of ‘trans’, parodying the popular, activist, and psycho-medical attempts to fix the meanings of categories of identity. Giles’s eleven-page pamphlet is comprised of seven prose-poems.472 The collection begins with a short introductory paragraph, explaining that the speaker seeks to offer ‘a simple explanation of some of these terms’ (p. 1): ‘gender’, ‘sex’, ‘transvestite’, ‘transgender’, ‘transsexual’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘trans’. Ironically, however, there is no ‘simple explanation of […] these terms’ to be found: the seven ‘definitions’ gathered here turn out to be almost entirely unrelated to the terms under which they are presented. ‘Gender […] is a very small purple flower’ (p. 3), ‘transsexual’ heads a comparison of the Eight of Swords in different Tarot decks (p. 7), while ‘trans’ is followed by a detailed description of breathing (p. 9). Notably, Giles’s zine was published in the context of ongoing debates regarding the Scottish and English consultations on their respective Gender Recognition Acts (both 2004) and the inclusion of trans and non-binary identification on the upcoming 2021 census. Elsewhere Giles has written about the lack of clear definitions of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in UK law; “Some Definitions” thus seems a tongue-in-cheek response to this lack, addressing the absence and impossibility of a ‘simple explanation’ of these terms.473 472 Harry Josephine Giles, "Some Definitions" (Edinburgh: Easter Road Press, 2019), p. 11. Subsequent references in parentheses. 473 Harry Josephine Giles, ‘Sex and the Scottish Census’, Medium, 2019 The poems in “Some Definitions” present an eclectic mix of discourses, genres, and forms, including botanical and anatomical encyclopaedia entry, classical myth, television review, occult guidebook, colour chart, and flash fiction. This abundant variety of styles and moods speaks to the convergence of different discourses out of which the collected terms emerge and now circulate. As Susan Stryker writes in her introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader, Transgender phenomena have become a topical focus in fields ranging from musicology to religious studies to digital media; a theme in the visual, plastic, and performing arts; and a matter of practical concern in such fields as public health, plastic surgery, criminal justice, family law, and immigration.474 With the increased mainstream visibility of ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ in the decade since the publication of The Transgender Studies Reader, we can safely assume that the diversity of fields touched by ‘trans’ has only increased. Giles’s poetry likewise presents ‘trans’ as a tissue of different discourses, extending beyond the field of sexology from which the categories of ‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’ originated with the reworking of scientific discourse into new creative and political registers.475 Printed on pink, blue, and white paper – the colours of the trans flag – the pamphlet points to the activist discourse that has reconfigured psycho-medical descriptors of sexual deviance into identity categories. That the poem titles in this zine relate barely if at all to their proffered ‘definitions’ offers a subtle critique of the tendency in mainstream trans activist discourse towards rigid and reductive definitions of trans vocabulary. Instead, by mimicking the form of a foreign language phrasebook, Giles makes strange or alien terms 474 Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges’, p. 3. 475 Kay Gabriel has described Trish Salah’s poetry in similar terms, as ‘a bricolage of cultural references that it writes both through and against’. This bricolage-as-genealogy technique – drawing on Avant Garde poetry styles such as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) – thus seems an emerging trend in trans cultural production. Kay Gabriel, ‘Untranslating Gender in Trish Salah’s Lyric Sexology Vol. 1’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3.3–4 (2016), 524–44. 183 whose meanings are supposedly commonly understood. An almost science fictional defamiliarization, this semantic displacement gestures to ideas of linguistic or cultural untranslatability, evoking a future or alien language. This sense of the array of neologisms relating to ‘trans’ as a new or alien language is the final key theme examined in this thesis. Recurring across popular and scholarly discourse on trans, especially in popular debates on the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, ideas of trans terminology as an ‘alien language’ abound, even if not explicitly articulated. Both sides of the debate on trans rights share this conceptual terrain, invoking the fantasy languages of speculative fictions to affirm or dismiss recent developments in mainstream trans politics. The debates taking place in the opinion pieces and editorials of national newspapers, on TV and radio shows, and across blogs and social media have been highly generative of academic discussions in legal and sociological journals. This chapter focuses on recent LGBT charity campaigns around trans rights and the outrage they have provoked among some feminist groups. The common allusions to science fictional ideas in this interaction reveal how the narrowing of conceptual and critical possibilities in the popular discourse of ‘trans’ (through the polarising framework of ‘debate’) might be subverted. The structure of this thesis charts a shift in the discourse of ‘trans’, from a focus on the body, through time, to language. I began with discussions of the monstrous body inaugurated by Jack Halberstam and Stryker’s formative contributions to trans studies in the 1990s, moving on to time-travel’s role in trans history narratives, predominantly from the early 2000s. These final chapters arrive at ideas of alien language circulating in the past few years. Of course, this development of ideas in trans discourse is not so neatly chronological 184 as the linear progression of these chapters might suggest: the three science fiction themes (monsters, time-travel, and alien language) have continually surfaced in debates on trans issues over the past three decades. By structuring my chapters in this way, I mean instead to emphasise that the rise and fall in significance of these three key science fiction motifs follows a certain narrative thread sometimes referred to as the ‘cultural turn’ posed by queer theory. When used dismissively, the notion of a ‘cultural turn’ connotes a flawed attachment to the discursive, textual, or conceptual. The accusation goes, as Judith Butler – the supposed key culprit of the cultural turn – puts it: ‘they invariably miss the body or, worse, write against it’.476 In the feminist debates over the cultural turn taking place in the late 1990s, Hemmings spies the emergence of an insidious refrain that she labels the ‘return narrative’: ‘we are exhorted to return to a focus on the everyday lived experience and to material or embodied realities instead of remaining mired in a conceptual realm deemed to have no value outside of the academy’.477 This insistence that scholars of gender and sexuality retreat from the cultural and redirect their attention to materiality and embodiment has long rippled through trans studies. The ‘return narrative’ characterises the position of Viviane Namaste, who argues for a return to empiricism and an analysis of labour.478 Many trans scholars have heeded calls to return to the body and materiality, with the notion of ‘trans materiality’ gaining popularity in recent years; others, meanwhile, have highlighted how the discursive and the material are inseparable.479 476 Butler, Bodies That Matter. 477 Hemmings, p. 97. 478 Namaste, ‘Undoing Theory’, pp. 20–22. 479 Compare for example: Max van Midde, Ludovico Vick Virtù, and Olga Cielemęcka, ‘Editorial - Trans Materialities’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 14.2 (2018), 4–9; Zairong Xiang, ‘Transdualism: Toward a Materio-Discursive Embodiment’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 5.3 (2018), 425–42. 185 Bearing in mind this indivisibility of language and embodiment, this chapter will show that the sense of ‘trans’ as strange, alien, and potentially threatening draws on the history of the device of ‘alien’ or ‘artificial’ languages in works of science fiction. Remembering the context of science fiction’s emergence discussed in Chapters One and Two, I argue that to understand how ideas of alien language are invoked in the discourse around trans demands attention to the historic construction of racialised Otherness through the figure of the alien in science fiction. “Some Definitions” is one among many recent works in this expanding discourse of ‘trans’ that explores ideas of language, definition, and untranslatability: the past few years have seen what Foucault might term ‘a veritable discursive explosion’ of articles on the relationship between ‘trans’ and language.480 ‘Translating Transgender’ was the title of a 2016 TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly double-issue; ideas of translation and linguistics have featured in many other articles on trans across various disciplines, including criminology, psychology, voice studies, and film studies.481 Even in the inaugural texts of what we now call trans studies, ideas of translation across different languages, language coinage and change, as well as the proper usage of terminology, have been of central importance.482 However, this attention to ideas of translation and linguistics now goes beyond the academic discussion of ‘trans’. 2019 saw a flurry of mainstream media attention 480 Foucault writes that, contrary to the widespread belief in a longstanding culture of sexual repression, ‘one sees a veritable discursive explosion’ on the topic of sex over the previous three centuries. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 17. 481 Jennifer Sumner and Lori Sexton, ‘Lost in Translation: Looking for Transgender Identity in Women’s Prisons and Locating Aggressors in Prisoner Culture’, Critical Criminology, 2015, 1–20; S. J. Langer, ‘Gender (Dis)Agreement: A Dialogue on the Clinical Implications of Gendered Language’, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, 15.3 (2011), 300–307; Elena Mora and others, ‘Translation, Cultural Adaptation, and Preliminary Evaluation of the Spanish Version of the Transgender Voice Questionnaire for Male-to-Female Transsexuals (TVQ MtF)’, Journal of Voice, 32.4 (2018), 514; Song Hwee Lim, ‘Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transgender?’, New Cinemas: Jounal of Contemporary Film, 5.1 (2010), 39–52. 482 See for example: Feinberg; Whittle, ‘Foreword’; Valentine; Stryker, Transgender History; Serano. 186 on the topic of language change with respect to trans, with countless news articles on gender-neutral pronouns, the proliferation of terminology for gender identity, and the introduction of key terms to major English-language dictionaries.483 Language, meaning, and translation have thus become topics of central concern in relation to trans politics in popular discourse. A key problem that continually circulates across these popular, activist, and scholarly debates on ‘trans’ and language concerns the issue of translation. Several trans scholars have problematised the dominance of anglophone trans activist discourse.484 A paradox of translation has appeared as the discourse of ‘trans’ has gained traction internationally, particularly in relation to human rights. ‘Trans’ or ‘transgender’ is often used in place of other cultural terms for non-normative sex and gender – such as kathoey, hijra, travesti, fa’afafine, and two-spirit – but not the other way around. Whittle, for example, writes that: A trans person might be a butch or a camp, a transgender or a transsexual, an MTF or FTM or a cross-dresser; they might, in some parts of the world, consider themselves a lady boy, a katoey, or even the reclaimed Maori identities whakawahine or whakatane. Some communities and their terms are ancient, such as the Hijra from Northern India, but many are more modern.485 As Katrina Roen has pointed out, this universalising move – made by activists and scholars alike – functions to assert the existence of ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’ phenomena across all 483 ‘Merriam-Webster: Non-Binary Pronoun “They” Is Word of the Year’, BBC News, 2019 human cultures.486 In this one-way substitution, culturally-specific terms are seen to be encompassed by the supposedly cross-cultural term ‘trans’. In effect, ‘trans’ appears untranslatable: the category seeps into other languages through the anglophone dominance of social justice discourse, sometimes supplanting other cultures’ terms for gender-variance altogether. Linguist Kelly Washbourne might describe this ‘as an untranslated borrowing [that] demonstrates the context-specificity of a term’.487 Yet the context-specificity of ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ has only gained acknowledgement in recent years through the work of a new wave of trans scholars.488 How do science fictional ideas of the alien encounter inform this recent shift in discussions around trans and language? Imagined languages have provided a rich source of ideas for science fiction, particularly in order to think about the possible differences and difficulties in communication between humans and beings from beyond the stars. In this chapter, however, I follow Ria Cheyne’s concept of the ‘alien’: Here and throughout, ‘alien’ is not used as a synonym for ‘extraterrestrial’ but in a broader sense. ‘Alien Languages’ therefore includes the languages of future, past, or alternate human societies depicted in sf, as well as the languages of non-human beings such as robots, extraterrestrials, and artificial languages.489 Cheyne’s redefinition includes all that which moves beyond the familiar in our current temporal and spatial location, encompassing imagined extraterrestrial as well as artificial 486 Roen, p. 658. See also: Travis Alabanza, ‘Non-Binary People Aren’t a New Phenomenon - We’ve Been Here as Long as Humans Have Existed’, Huffington Post, 2018 languages – as I will go on to explore further in the final chapter of this thesis. In Cheyne’s more generous definition, ‘alien’ can refer to ideas of estrangement, alienation, and difference explored in science fiction beyond the strict notion of unearthly lifeforms. These are languages that denote their speakers are in some way ‘other’ and that remind us of the strangeness of language itself. The alien-as-Other has figured as a pivotal concept in science fiction criticism. An array of works appearing across the 1990s and early 2000s shifted ideas of the alien-as-Other away from abstract philosophical notions of the Other as the unknown or that which constitutes the subject. Instead of this universalising humanist view whereby the ‘alien’ functions to confirm the human, feminist works read the alien-as-Other in terms of racialised and gendered Othering. These included Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), Robin Roberts’ A New Species (1993), Jenny Wolmark’s Aliens and Others (1994), and Patricia Melzer’s Alien Constructions (2006). Many of these works focussed on what Adam Roberts dubs the ‘woman-as-alien motif’, exploring how the dominant construction of women in science fiction provokes a mix of desire and terror.490 Elsewhere, scholars have also studied particular trends in representing the alien in science fiction works: the alien as messiah, the alien as transnational subject, and the alien as queer sexual enigma.491 The alien in science fiction is thus already a figure of various resonances. By expanding the notion of the alien in a science fiction context beyond extraterrestrial beings, Cheyne heightens the conceptual ambiguity ‘alien’ already holds, particularly in the twenty-first century Anglo-American context. In Rebecca Solnit’s essay ‘Crossing Over’ 490 Adam Roberts, p. 98. 491 Hugh Ruppersberg, ‘The Alien Messiah in Recent Science Fiction Films’, Journal of Popular Film and TV, 14.2 (1987), 158–66; Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism, ed. by Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, and Graeme Stout (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Brooke M Beloso, ‘Making E.T. Perfectly Queer: The Alien Other and the Science Fiction of Sexual Difference’, Feminist Media Studies, 14.2 (2014), 222– 36. 189 (2019), she examines the ‘alien’ in terms of the contemporary politics of migration and borders. Solnit notes the relationship between ideas of the alien and alienation: Alienate: ‘To transfer or surrender ownership of (property rights); to make over to another owner…to cause (a person) to feel estranged, hostile, or unsympathetic.’ Alien: ‘Latin aliēnus (adjective) of or belonging to others, unnatural, unusual, unconnected, separate, of another country, foreign, unrelated, of a different variety or species, unfamiliar, strange, unfriendly, unsympathetic, unfavourable, inappropriate, incompatible, distasteful, repugnant’.492 The ‘alien’ thus connects broad notions of difference to specific histories of intercultural encounters. These are histories of dispossession and colonialism, histories in which the other is positioned as ‘hostile’, ‘unfriendly’, and ‘repugnant’, and therefore properly met with suspicion, regulation, and violence. Solnit’s juxtaposition of ‘alien’ and ‘alienate’ here binds these two terms together through the felt experience of being alien: ‘to feel estranged, hostile, or unsympathetic’. This connection between ‘alien’ and ‘alienate’ is, according to Gillian Beer, a defining characteristic of science fiction, which ‘takes on the task of alienation’ and ‘helps us to learn how to be foreigners’, alert to the borders, boundaries, customs, and conflicts that aliens of all kinds must navigate.493 Both Solnit and Beer write in the context of heightened political, media, and activist attention to borders, immigration, and so-called ‘illegal aliens’. Such debates rage on both sides of the Atlantic alongside fraught debates about trans people’s access to single-sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms. Right-wing demands to legislatively secure borders – in the context of Brexit, as well as Donald Trump’s Muslim ban and family separation policy – have filled column inches alongside debates on proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act in the UK and so-called Bathroom Bills and bans on transgender 492 Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story Is This?: Old Conflicts, New Chapters (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019), p. 135. 493 Gillian Beer, ‘Foreword’, in Alien Imaginations, ed. by Küchler, Maehl, and Stout (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. xi–xvi (p. xii). 190 military personnel in the US.494 These discussions do not simply take place in parallel: suggested legal moves to simplify changing sex on passports and other identification documents take on new significance in the context of the UK’s heightening hostile environment policy and frequent refusal to grant asylum to LGBT claimants.495 The entanglement of these debates suggests not only a heightened attention to borders and boundaries of different forms, but also how the concept of the ‘alien’ is complexly interwoven with ideas of gender, sexuality, race, and citizenship. This chapter interrogates how this sense of ‘trans’ as alien – otherworldly, threatening, and unintelligible – is produced through devices that draw upon ideas from science fiction. I argue that groups both in support of and hostile to trans rights construct the language of ‘trans’ in ways that evoke science fictional notions of alien language. For trans activists and allies, the language of trans appears as a utopian world-building tool, whereas for so-called gender-critical feminists (as well as other right-wing and religious contributors to these debates), the changes in language accompanying the growing mainstream visibility of ‘trans’ is distinctly dystopian. What role do allusions to science fiction’s alien languages play in contemporary debates on trans rights? 494 Zing Tsjeng, ‘This Is What’s Happening with the Gender Recognition Act’, Vice, 2019 Unlike the previous two themes discussed in this thesis, direct references to the ‘alien’ or ‘alien language’ rarely appear in trans discourse. Perhaps the only trans scholars to make this link are Stryker and Sandy Stone, who in a 2016 interview discuss the proliferation of neologisms among the ‘new critical mass of transsexuals’.496 Stone describes this as part of the development of a shared language of ‘transsubjectivity’, ‘consciousness trying to evolve that richer, deeper language’ beyond the ‘oppressor culture’ of the psycho-medical discourse of transsexualism, towards ‘something which is quite alien’.497 For Stone and Stryker, the blossoming vocabulary of trans experience we have seen over the past half century is an early sign that a broader linguistic shift is underway: a new ‘alien’ language of ‘trans’ is on the horizon. Despite the dearth of critics explicitly engaging with the notion of trans terminology as an emergent alien language, there are striking parallels between the current conversations about the language of ‘trans’ and the ways in which science fiction has historically constructed ‘alien’ languages. This is not simply a relationship of analogy: I am not ultimately arguing that ‘trans’ is or appears like an ‘alien language’, but that science fictional ideas of alien language inform many of the discussions about the linguistic changes taking place with the emergence of ‘trans’ as a new category of identity. By showing how the contours of the discussions on ‘trans’ and language are shaped by science fictional ideas of 496 Susan Stryker, ‘Another Dream of Common Language: An Interview with Sandy Stone’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2.1–2 (2016), 294–305 (p. 304). 497 Stryker, ‘Another Dream of Common Language’, p. 304. As I will explore in more detail in the next chapter, Stone connects this ‘translational process’ to the 1970s feminist pursuit of ‘a common language’: The project was to remember and reinvent the essentialist female language. By reinventing that language, women would be able to speak in a new way that would bring into being a new consciousness. It would crystallize not just a new episteme but a new kind of being in the world that would cause the patriarchal type to wither away. (p. 301) For Stone then, the new development of a ‘richer, deeper, language’ of trans extends the various projects of constructing a feminist language over the late twentieth century. 192 the alien, I seek to resituate these discussions with respect to the context in which these notions emerged in science fiction, paying attention to how the alien depends upon (and disavows) notions of racial and cultural Otherness. There are important ways in which the discursive explosion around trans, language, and translation is not like the alien and otherwise constructed languages of science fiction. By acknowledging this, I seek to pay heed to the critique of analogy as a weak form of argument that Barad articulates in Meeting the Universe Halfway. For Karen Barad, the problem with analogies is not just that they sometimes misunderstand the objects to be compared, such that the analogy falls flat, but that analogy as a form of argument occludes the intra-action between objects, ‘how they matter and how they stand in relationship to one another’.498 In keeping with this, in this and the following chapter I seek to detail the nature of the relationship between the language of trans and alien language, exploring how these two seemingly disparate discursive forms are entwined. My analysis differs somewhat from Barad’s project in Meeting the Universe Halfway though. In Barad’s critique of analogy, she argues against the separation of matter and meaning, such that an aspect of the material becomes an example with which to explain a more complex non-material or cultural phenomenon.499 As Judith Butler might put it, the distinction between matter and culture is an unstable one.500 My argument inevitably somewhat sidesteps this binary of nature/culture, in that alien language is unquestionably fictional and that ‘trans’ is regularly consigned to the realm of culture. Many commentators in the mainstream discourse of ‘trans’ view the category as inherently 498 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 23. 499 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 25. 500 Judith Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, Social Text, 1997, 265–77 (p. 267). 193 embedded in identity politics, while in academic discourse, ‘trans’ is strongly associated with the cultural turn in feminist and queer theory, a product of a broader postmodern intervention in the study of culture.501 As I discuss later in this chapter, this tendency to position ‘trans’ as part of a poisonous resurgence of identity politics ignores the various critiques of ‘identity’ proffered by trans studies scholars over the past few decades.502 Moreover, such dismissals of ‘trans’ as ‘merely cultural’ (as Butler would put it) neglect the sustained commitment to addressing the material over or alongside the linguistic in the work of many prominent scholars in trans studies, such as Viviane Namaste, Jay Prosser, and Gayle Salamon.503 Nevertheless, by adopting a genealogical approach to the emergence of alien language as a device in science fiction, I draw attention to the material conditions of discursive shifts. Like Clare Hemmings, I view the turn to matter as inescapably discursive or rhetorical, and like Butler, I view discourse as already a matter of materialisation.504 I ask, namely, how does the cultural context of alien language in science fiction matter, and what does this matter mean for ‘trans’? This harks back to the threads of argument I raised in Chapter Two regarding the context of racialised Othering and the material reality of dispossession and colonial violence in which the emergence of science fiction is implicated. Paying attention to the material significations of the construction of the alien in science fiction means rethinking how both trans and anti- trans groups invoke ideas of alien language. Both those for and against the expansion of civil 501 Alexandra Topping and Peter Walker, ‘Tony Blair: Labour Must Avoid “Cul-de-Sac” of Identity Politics’, Guardian, 20 February 2020 rights for trans people often assume the universality of the category ‘trans’, which becomes in effect a lingua franca for non-normative gender. As critics such as Roen, Unni Leino, Alvaro Jarrin, S P F Dale, Max Strassfeld, and others have emphasised, other cultures’ terms for gender variance become distorted through translation into English, with culturally specific meanings lost in the substitution.505 Bringing to the fore how the popular discourse on ‘trans’ and language draws upon science fictional ideas of the alien troubles notions of the presumed universality of ‘trans’, locating the term instead within a specific anglophone discourse. A Brief History of Alien Language in Science Fiction “Some Definitions” bears strong similarities to Giles’s earlier collection, Travellers’ Lexicon (2017), ‘a full and comprehensive guide to the terminology, argots, phraseology, eccentricities and essential knowledge necessary for the seasoned traveller to undertake any journey’.506 This pamphlet similarly presents an array of terminology with ‘definitions’, ninety short poems that defamiliarize words that for the most part are common household terms (camera, marriage, snow). Unlike “Some Definitions” however, the entries in Travellers’ Lexicon recognisably hold a semantic relationship to the terms they purport to define, often functioning as aphorisms on the fraught politics of travel, tourism, and settler- colonisation. These earlier poems more explicitly reflect on actual geographies of empire, the space and place of British (and specifically Orcadian) colonialism.507 In “Some 505 Roen; Unni Leino, ‘Conceptualising Sex, Gender, and Trans: An Anglo-Finnish Perspective’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3.3–4 (2016), 448–61; Jarrin; S. P. F. Dale, ‘An Introduction to X-Jendā: Examining a New Gender Identity in Japan’, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, 2012 Definitions”, on the other hand, Giles creates a further displacement, an almost total disconnect between term and meaning. While none of the content of the poems in “Some Definitions” is particularly science-fictional, the juxtaposition of surreal and sometimes quasi-scientific descriptions alongside trans terminology provides a sense of distance and otherworldliness.508 By making strange the very notion of a glossary of terms, “Some Definitions” seems to draw on the form of appendices often found at the back of science fiction or dystopian novels. As Cheyne notes, a glossary of terms is a common trope used in works of science fiction that explore the encounter with the alien or fantastical Other.509 Over the twentieth century, science fiction works popularised the device of using appendices to explain details of grammar, pronunciation, and the cultural significance of the alien language(s) used in the body of the text, or, as in the case of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962), providing a lexicon. This use of glossaries to present fictional languages drew on the popularity of foreign language phrasebooks and travel guides during the so-called ‘Golden Age of Mass Tourism’ in the West over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of factors such as greater prosperity, paid holidays for workers, as well as the availability of and improvements in international travel.510 The convention of glossaries of alien language in science fiction sometimes directly borrowed from the form of these guides and 508 Following Delany’s idea of understanding genre as a mode of reading a text rather than in inherent qualities, as I discussed in Chapter Two, we might think of Giles’ poems as ripe for reading as science fiction. Indeed, Giles is now writing poetry more explicitly intending a science fictional reading with the verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Future Fantasy (Edinburgh: Stewed Rhubarb [forthcoming]). 509 Cheyne, ‘Created Languages in Science Fiction’, p. 391. 510 Erkan Sezgin and Medet Yolal, ‘Golden Age of Mass Tourism: Its History and Development’, in Visions for Global Tourism Industry: Creating and Sustaining Competitive Strategies, ed. by Murat Kasimoglu, Online Ebo (IntechOpen, 2012), pp. 73–90 (p. 73) phrasebooks: Joanna Russ’ science fiction short story ‘Useful Phrases for the Tourist’ (1972), parodies the form of a foreign language phrasebook to imagine a human visitor to an alien planet. The alien language glossary has thus been generative for various worldbuilding and speculative fictions, but its popularity in often predominantly white-authored genres must be understood in relationship to the racialised power dynamics of Western tourism and travel.511 Unlike the origin myths of science fiction discussed in Chapter One, few scholars or fans of the genre have focussed on uncovering the earliest or most complete examples of alien or invented languages described in fiction. However, research into early examples usually cites the Utopian language in Thomas More’s Utopia (1551), the Lunar language in Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone (1638), Percy Greg’s ‘Martial’ language in Across the Zodiac (1880), or the language of the Eloi in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895).512 While I have no interest in arguing the case for any one of these texts as initiating ideas of alien language in science fiction, they are worth mentioning because they indicate the scope of genres to which ideas of alien language have contributed. These works are commonly cited as Ur-texts of utopian literature, adventure stories, travel literature, and science fiction respectively – all genres with considerable overlap.513 Together these works demonstrate the significant role alien languages have played in expanding notions of generic potential: alien languages signal new ways of saying things, new worlds of possibility. 511 Leonard, p. 253. 512 Cheyne, ‘Created Languages in Science Fiction’, p. 386; Ron Gallagher, ‘Science Fiction and Language: Language and the Imagination in Post War Science Fiction’ (The University of Warwick, 1986), p. 7 Fictional adventurers have travelled into outer space in works as early as the second century.514 Yet as Margaret Atwood points out, the imagined expansion into the ‘unknown’ of future time and distant space only truly flourished when European explorers ran out of new land to ‘discover’: the complete mapping of the Earth necessitated new unmapped terrain in the imaginary landscapes of science fiction.515 Works now described by critics as early science fiction envisioned alien encounters by elaborating upon actual encounters with foreign humans and animals that appeared in popular works of travel and adventure writing, both fictional and autobiographical. While scientist Charles Darwin is better known now for the theory of evolution he articulated in The Origin of the Species (1895), before this work Darwin gained fame for his travel journal The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). These notes described Darwin’s experiences travelling the world, detailing his interactions with other cultures and the wildlife he encountered. In dialogue with Darwin’s travel journals and other similar works, fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories developed accounts of strange lands populated by strange lifeforms.516 As John Rieder details, maps and travel journals produced by venture-scientists such as Darwin played an important role in the development of science fiction as a genre; their trace can be felt in works by Samuel Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle.517 The connection between Darwin’s later work on evolution and his earlier travel writing should not be overlooked here: nineteenth-century science fiction stories of contact with non-human lifeforms drew not only on adventurers’ descriptions of unfamiliar vegetation or creatures, but on pseudoscientific ideas of racial hierarchy that positioned white Europeans 514 Lucian of Samosata, True History, ed. by David Lear (Firestone Books, 2013). 515 Atwood, p. 69. 516 Rieder, p. 22. See also: Beer. 517 Rieder, pp. 21–25. 198 as more evolutionarily advanced in comparison to the humans they encountered on their worldly travels.518 Adventuring Europeans – as well as philosophers who never so much as left their own nations – questioned the humanity of the indigenous Others encountered in far-away lands, positioning them as perhaps belonging to another species or as bridging the gap between human and animal.519 Nineteenth century works such as Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau drew quite explicitly upon tales of sea voyages to far-flung lands and resultant island shipwrecks. Yet Wells also grappled with questions about the ethics of British colonialism and the widespread perception of foreign and racialised Others as somehow closer to animals, even perhaps not really human at all.520 Through colonial territorial expansion, Europeans encountered vastly different languages and cultures. This encounter with cultural and linguistic difference provoked intense discussion among European philosophers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose interests lay in the relationships between different cultures and their languages. Humboldt’s idea was that linguistic difference reflected cultural difference: the differences between languages indicated differences in ways of thinking, in ways of perceiving the world.521 I will discuss the concept of linguistic relativity in more detail in the next chapter, but this thread leads me to another strand of ideas in relation to alien language: imagining how society might be otherwise. Utopian literature (the name of which derives from More’s work) sometimes imagines perfect languages to accompany their perfect societies. This pursuit of a perfect language extends beyond the realm of the fictional, with various linguists, philosophers, and 518 Rieder, pp. 109–10. 519 Rieder, pp. 97–104; Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ‘The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s Anthropology’, in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 103–40. 520 Rieder, pp. 104–10. 521 Julia M. Penn, Linguistic Relativity Versus Innate Ideas (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 19. 199 even oculists proffering invented languages in preparation for what Joseph Lo Bianco describes as an emerging ‘global age’: not the promised fantasy of greater interconnectedness, but an extension and transformation of the control of distant lands by European ‘imperial powers’.522 The boundary between utopian literature and actual political movements is blurry: many authors of key texts of the utopian canon, such as William Morris and Edward Bellamy, were actively involved in socialist projects. So while the construction of ‘alien’ languages in science fiction often lends a sense of cultural distance – through allusions to the voyages of European scientists – such languages can also produce the sense of the completeness of the imaginary world, an entire working society open to comparisons with our own. Through science fiction’s constructions of alien language then, Cheyne writes, ‘the possibility of acquiring a new way of thinking, or of becoming more than human, is opened’.523 Alien languages in science fiction have thus presented tools with which to envision different – and better – societies. The twentieth century saw the expansion of attempts to produce politically neutral languages, now termed International Auxiliary Languages (or IALs), the most famous of which is probably Esperanto.524 These IALs differ from other somewhat older constructed languages, such as cockney rhyming slang and Polari, in that they were intended to facilitate communication across different social groups (predominantly between European nations with different language speakers). By contrast, a cant – otherwise known as an argot or an anti-language – intentionally obstructs comprehension for those outside of a particular 522 Joseph Lo Bianco, ‘Invented Languages and New Worlds’, English Today, 78.20 (2004), 8–18 (p. 14). 523 Cheyne, ‘Created Languages in Science Fiction’, p. 396. 524 Bianco, p. 11. 200 social group, often one that is marginalised or ostracised.525 Speakers of anti-languages such as cockney rhyming slang and Polari evade the regulation of outsiders and maintain the existence of their own alternative societies, through a mix of different techniques such as relexicalization (using old words with new meanings), inventive metaphors, and anagrams.526 Works of science fiction and dystopian literature over the twentieth century sometimes explored this notion of anti-language. The most famous example is probably A Clockwork Orange, written in ‘Nadsat’, the invented language of the novel’s teenage criminal gangs. However, the proliferation of constructed languages in fiction has tended towards ideas of the political control of language and the threat of ideology, propaganda, and censorship, in works such as George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or Jack Vance’s ‘Pastiche’ in The Languages of Pao (1958).527 Drawing on the repression of language taking place under right- and left-wing totalitarian regimes over the twentieth century across Europe and beyond, science fiction and dystopian novels often cautioned against the dangers of language use motivated by politics. The contemporary discourse on ‘trans’ draws upon the construction of alien languages in science fiction with reference primarily to these two subgenres of science fiction – utopian and dystopian literature. The analysis that follows addresses the role that alien language in utopian and dystopian science fiction plays in recent debates around trans politics. 525 I will explore ideas of anti-language with respect to attempts to construct feminist language in more detail in Chapter Six. 526 M. A. K Halliday, ‘Anti-Languages’, American Anthropologist, 78.3 (1976), 570–84. 527 Elizabeth Barette, ‘Language and Linguistics’, in The Greenwood Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction: Themes, Works, and Wonders, ed. by Gary Westfahl, Vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), pp. 461–64 (p. 462). A key exception here is J. R. R. Tolkien’s elvish languages in the fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954- 1955). 201 Trans Terminology Guides as Alien Language The increased visibility of ‘trans’ in the UK in the twenty-first century is due in part to the efforts of trans charities, activist groups, conference and pride event organisers, and individual campaigners.528 Specific organisations fighting for the civil rights of trans people have been around for decades: the gender-diverse children’s charity Mermaids was founded in 1995, while Sparkle – the National Transgender Charity – began in 2005. However, larger charities formerly focussed on the rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people shifted their focus to the struggle for trans rights in the aftermath of the successful campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in the UK in 2014. Stonewall, founded in 1989, had previously been criticised for its neglect of trans rights issues, but in 2015 announced the extension of its remit to become an LGBT charity engaged ‘in the fight for trans equality’.529 Likewise, the Lesbian and Gay Foundation changed its name to the LGBT Foundation in 2015 to signal its involvement in activism around trans rights. These larger charities played an important role in bringing the issues trans people face to a broader audience, capitalising on the success and popular recognition achieved by the campaign for marriage equality. With the rise to prominence of trans issues through the work of these charities – as well as activist groups, healthcare providers, and other wellbeing services – a specific genre has flourished: glossaries of trans terminology.530 These glossaries, often featured on these organisations’ websites, present an array of vocabulary relating to trans experience: 528 For key examples, see: Burns, Trans Britain. 529 Vic Parsons, ‘Ruth Hunt Has No Regrets about Stonewall Trans Inclusion Ahead of Departure’, Pinknews, 2019 sexological categories, analytical terms, medical jargon, and community slang. These guides maintain an interactive relationship with more or less informal networks of trans people and the online social media discourse in which they participate, through platforms such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. Even more niche social media and news sites, such as LinkedIn and Healthline, feature posts and threads with glossaries and diagrams offering explanations of key trans terms.531 In a relatively short space of time, an assortment of neologisms has gained purchase, met with frequent remarks in right-wing opinion pieces about the difficulties of keeping pace with the proliferation of new genders.532 Several prominent early books in the emerging field of trans studies opened with chapters detailing key terminology: Stryker’s Transgender History begins with ‘An Introduction to Transgender Terms and Concepts’, while the opening chapter of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007) concerns ‘Coming to Terms with Transgenderism and Transsexuality’.533 These trans scholars have often acknowledged the volatility of trans terminology. ‘[A] potential problem with the glossary approach’, Serano writes, ‘is that it gives the impression that all of these transgender-related words and phrases are somehow written in stone, indelibly passed down from generation to generation. This is most certainly not the case’.534 By contrast, many of the glossaries produced by trans rights charities present fixed and stable meanings to be learnt, and clear-cut rules that can be followed in order to avoid offence. Many of 531 Samantha McLaren, ‘15 Gender Identity Terms You Need to Know to Build an Inclusive Workplace’, LinkedIn Talent Blog, 2019 these guides are explicitly aimed at ‘non-trans’ or ‘cis’ people – including journalists, legislators, employers, educators, and medical practitioners – sometimes addressing their readers as well-intentioned allies of trans people who do not want to look ignorant or inadvertently offend.535 Alternatively, these guides may be provided for new members of the trans community who may recognise themselves in the provided terms. In effect, these glossaries position their readers as initiates who need to learn how to use this new language correctly. These glossaries present themselves as doing the work that dictionaries have yet to catch up on, a kind of impartial subcultural dialect recording. Replacing older, supposedly inaccurate terms with ever more precise substitutes, the authors of these glossaries position themselves at the forefront of an epistemic progress narrative, gaining ever more insight into the true nature of sex and gender.536 Meanwhile, the power these glossaries hold in constructing the meaning of trans terminology – and consequently shaping public opinion as well as policy around trans issues – is rarely if ever acknowledged within the glossaries themselves. My point here is that this emergent discourse in the charity and activist sector does not simply describe key terms in circulation but rather produces their significance and regulates their meaning. In Judith Butler’s essay ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991), she writes that ‘identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the 535 See for example see the media guidance produced by All About Trans and Trans Media Watch: ‘Resources for the Media’, All About Trans, 2020 normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression’.537 While Butler writes here specifically about identity categories, her caution about the reinstitution of regulatory practices applies to the tendencies in many of the ‘how-to’ guides produced on websites and social media posts that push a decidedly liberal narrative of trans identity. By providing singular definitions for these terms, these glossaries obscure that their meanings are indeed disputed. Much like the tendency among the users of dictionaries to ignore or forget that these texts are edited by a select few lexicographers with their own biases and flaws, readers of these trans terminology guides may interpret the provided definitions as authoritative and incontrovertible.538 Trans terminology guides share with science fiction’s alien languages the sense of fleshing out a world unfamiliar to the reader. Even if, as Cheyne points out, science fiction authors do not construct fully-developed languages furnished with a working grammar and vocabulary, alien languages function to suggest the completeness of an alien world.539 They communicate to the reader the intelligence and complexity of an alien culture, generating a sense of difference or cultural distance for the reader.540 With this in mind, trans terminology resembles the science fictional device of presenting the narrative from the perspective of an alien species; in effect, the human culture familiar to the reader is rendered strange or alien. Feminist science fiction works such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) or Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean have employed this 537 Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, pp. 13–14. 538 Anne Curzan, ‘What Makes a Word “Real”?’, TedxUofM, 2014 device in order to place into question notions of human superiority, inverting ideas of human and alien. Trans terminology guides thus write another possible world, an alien or alternative reality, into existence. The sense of ‘alien’ that these trans terminology guides appeal to is that of difference or distance, making use of the science fictional quality of estrangement to denaturalise norms of sex and gender. That said, trans vocabulary also attempts linguistic integration: categories which have travelled from medico-psycho-sexological discourses are constructed to correspond with existing terminology in those fields. In contrast to the science fictional techniques described by Cheyne of constructing alien difference through language by using linguistic sounds unfamiliar to the reader, trans language follows existing linguistic rules for word formation.541 In this sense, these terminology guides seek to present the language of trans as natural or native, and to assimilate with existing language. The trans/cis binary, for example, is sometimes explained with reference to the scientific convention for naming geometric isomerism.542 Despite this attempt at semantic assimilation however, as Paula Blank points out, “cisgender” sounds more improbable as a word than “transgender” ever did. While the prefix “trans” is familiar from hundreds of English words (“translate,” “transport,” “transcend”), “cis” occurs in only a handful, the least obscure of which is probably “cisalpine” (“on this side of the Alps”).543 So while the construction of trans terminology may abide by existing naming processes, the end result is nevertheless something alien. 541 Cheyne, ‘Created Languages in Science Fiction’, p. 392. 542 B. Aultman, ‘Cisgender’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1.1–2 (2014), 61–62. 543 Paula Blank, ‘Will “Cisgender” Survive?’, The Atlantic, September 2014 The Gender-Critical Backlash The rise to prominence of charities agitating for the expansion of civil rights for trans people has not gone without criticism. The proliferation of these trans terminology guides has sparked particular outrage because of a perceived attempt to control language, with the definitions of ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender’ in these glossaries coming under specific attack.544 Hence the emergence of the term ‘gender-critical’, the moniker adopted by feminists and other ‘dissenting stakeholders’ who argue against measures to improve trans people’s day-to-day lives.545 Many in the ‘gender-critical’ camp attack the patriarchal origins of the popular usage of ‘gender’ as a term for male or female social roles or inner psychology.546 Their ‘criticality’ of ‘gender’ focuses on the definition of the term advocated by LGBT charities, in effect disavowing the significant role this term has played in feminist scholarship and ignoring the various critiques of the psycho-medical discourse of ‘gender identity’ articulated by trans studies scholars.547 These feminists identify as ‘gender-critical’ in opposition to the acronym ‘TERF’ (Trans- Exclusionary Radical Feminist), rejected by these feminists as a misogynistic slur. TERF itself is a key term in this dispute over trans language, sparking fierce debate over its usage in 544 Kathleen Stock, ‘Are Academics Freely Able to Criticise the Idea of “Gender Identity” in UK Universities?’, Medium, 2019 academic journals.548 As one journalist puts it, for many, ‘“TERF” sounds like a foreign word’.549 The example of ‘TERF’ exemplifies how gender-critical feminists experience the discursive shifts around sex, gender, and sexuality provoked by ‘trans’ as a set of externally imposed rules: strange, foreign, and threatening. Testimonies from gender-critical feminists about their experiences in academia frequently mention the words ‘concern’, ‘fear’, and ‘vulnerable’, while their tone expresses bewilderment at the accusations of transphobia they have encountered.550 Unsurprisingly then, gender-critical feminists and their allies more or less explicitly invoke dystopian ideas about language from science fiction in their critiques of trans terminology. Over the last few years, newspaper editorials and social media posts have promulgated the idea that the linguistic shifts triggered by ‘trans’ pose a threat to freedom of speech. Requests that people use others’ preferred pronouns on the one hand and avoid pejorative language to refer to trans people on the other, have met with accusations of censorship and authoritarianism.551 In June 2019, thirty academics signed an open letter to the editor of The Sunday Times in which they argued that universities collaborating with Stonewall were quashing necessary academic debate around gender, sex, and sexuality.552 Stonewall’s 548 This is discussed in more detail chapter 3 of this thesis, but for a discussion of the academic usage of ‘TERF’, see: Justin Weinberg, ‘Derogatory Language in Philosophy Journal Risks Increased Hostility and Diminished Discussion (Guest Post) (Update: Response from Editors)’, Daily Nous, 2018 Diversity Champions Programme requires that participating higher education institutions introduce policies to tackle transphobia and to help students, staff, and visitors feel included. These policies, the letter’s authors maintain, pose a threat to academic freedom by preventing scholars from debating contested concepts: ‘Alongside Stonewall’s definition of transphobia as including any “denial/refusal to accept . . . gender identity”, this leaves academics unable to question the contested notion of “gender identity” without fear of sanction’.553 Not just Stonewall’s guidance comes under attack here, but specifically their provided definitions of terms. To accept trans people’s account of themselves amounts, according to these dissenting academics, to accepting the imposition of ideological redefinitions and made-up concepts. This letter contributes to the fearmongering around what has been dubbed ‘gender’ or ‘trans ideology’, the politicised mainstreaming of unscientific views on sex and gender, for the sake of political correctness and in order to court the support of naïve progressives.554 This notion of ‘trans ideology’ is deeply entwined with ideas of a threatening alien language derived from dystopian science fiction works. While the open letter makes no direct reference to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the connection between this text and the language of censorship and threat to freedom of speech its authors adopt has already been made elsewhere in a plethora of right-wing articles attacking trans rights.555 ‘We’re living through an era of trans Orwellianism’, writes one anti-trans commentator, seemingly oblivious to the irony of making this comparison on a public platform alongside a slew of other opinion pieces making exactly the same point.556 References to Nineteen Eighty-Four in relation to issues of freedom of speech and human rights are nothing new: the terms ‘Newspeak’, ‘Big Brother’, and ‘Orwellian’ have become so commonplace as to be cliché, inspiring, as George Packer writes, ‘movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album, imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society’. 557 Orwell’s fictional language Newspeak was a tool with which to curtail linguistic expression, but in an ironic twist, Nineteen Eighty-Four has presented an immensely generative source for language play. In particular, Packer notes, the novel has taken on renewed relevance in relation to political events such as the 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump, which catapulted the phrases ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ into popular usage.558 While many complaints from gender-critical feminists concentrate on alleged censorship through practices such as no-platforming, it is this Newspeak-style erosion of meaning that poses the greatest threat.559 In their supposed denial of reality through the redefinition of words, the ever- expanding glossaries of trans terminology present a threat that is distinctly alien. In the gender-critical account, explicit and implicit references to Nineteen Eighty-Four work 556 Brendan O’Neill, ‘Ian McEwan Notes That 2 + 2 = 4 - Horrified the LGBT Orwellians Make Him Take It Back’, National Review, April 2016 to suggest that the discursive shifts around ‘trans’ present an alien language that ultimately threatens unintelligibility and meaninglessness.560 However, Washbourne’s study of translation in science fiction indicates that we might be more cautious about applying Orwell’s novel to the context of trans terminology. ’The concept of Newspeak rests on doubly faulty premises’ he writes, ‘first, that something that does not exist cannot be named – that is, that any given thought needs a name to be a thought […] and second, that a name’s meaning or associations can be wilfully delimited.561 It is not that trans terminology actually does pose a threat to linguistic structures then, but that these Orwellian allusions indicate the kind of alien encounter that this discursive shift is felt to threaten. This sense of the alien is akin to the nightmarish extra-terrestrial encounter depicted in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961) or the ominous psychedelic refraction of the Shimmer in Annihilation (Garland, 2018; based on Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel of the same name). Instead of the stereotypical depiction of the alien as a roughly humanoid or insectoid figure, these works present the alien in terms of an incomprehensible entity or phenomenon, the encounter with which threatens/promises the feared/desired dissolution of the subject. In this respect, this sense of the alien in relation to ‘trans’ also alludes to science fiction stories in which the meeting of alternative worlds with different universal or mathematical laws threatens the fabric of reality, as in Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (1972) or Greg Egan’s short story ‘Luminous’ (2007). For gender-critical feminists, the alien language of 560 Gender-critical feminists also explicitly reference feminist dystopian texts such as Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and allude to other works such as Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World (1974), and Russ’ The Female Man. See: Sophie-Grace Chappell and Holly Lawford-Smith, ‘Transgender: A Dialogue’, Aeon, 2018 trans terminology means existential horror. Rather than confirm the subject, this alien encounter risks the dissolution of boundary between self and Other, even potentially destroying reality itself. Untranslatability as Critical Utopia In these recent critiques made by an increasingly prominent and vocal contingent of anti- trans academics, the phenomenon of a proliferating trans terminology is a menacing development. The difference between these gender-critical feminists and the trans charities and activists they oppose might seem to map directly onto the utopia/dystopia binary. Gender-critical feminists cite dystopian texts, and though the trans terminology guides above do not explicitly reference utopian science fiction works, they are animated by the same world-building potential of that subgenre’s alien languages. Gender-critical feminists see themselves as the corrective to utopia’s dystopian excesses, pragmatists warning of utopia’s inevitable failure and nightmarish realities. Indeed, many twentieth century dystopian novels emerged as a warning of the dangers of utopianism, arguing that many of the perfected societies presented in literature thus far were only utopias for some. For many critics, utopias so often resemble dystopias because of the need for regulation in a supposedly perfect society: as Foucault wrote in relation to his concept of the Panopticon, ‘utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough’.562 The neat and tidy definitions produced by many LGBT charities and activist groups evoke the ‘perfect enclosure’ of meaning that for gender-critical feminists suggests authoritarianism and censorship. It is important, however, to pay heed to the ways in which that opposition of 562 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 205. 212 dystopia/utopia has long been troubled by science fiction writers and scholars. In Tom Moylan’s Demand the Impossible (1986), he explores the critical utopia, in which dystopia’s criticisms of utopia are incorporated and held in check. Rather than a fully formed end-point – what Moylan architecturally refers to as a ‘blueprint’ – the critical utopia appears as an ongoing process, complex and contradictory.563 The literary utopias Moylan discusses are not the telos of a progress narrative, but rather brought into being through incremental changes, or are perhaps merely temporary, limited and fragile. A cluster of critical utopian works appeared in the mid-1970s, responding to the culture of political activism around race, gender, and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s: Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Samuel Delany’s Triton (1976), and Suzy McKee Charnas’ Motherlines (1978). Reading trans terminology guides in light of ideas of critical utopia illuminates some of the problems with attempts to pin down trans terminology and to fix these processes in place. In the context of trans language, this might mean accepting the inevitability of change in language, even potentially encouraging that change through linguistic experimentation. It might, like Giles’s zine, mean rejecting stable or coherent meanings and resisting definition. Much like the anti-languages and cants I discussed above, this might mean leaving trans terminology intentionally illegible or unintelligible. In Washbourne’s essay, ‘Ideologies of Human Translation in Speculative Fiction’ (2015), he argues that ‘untranslatability is either ideologically dramatized as a first contact with insurmountable or unconquerable otherness, or surmounted and conquered through manipulation or through colonializing assertions of a 563 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 1–3. 213 de facto universality’.564 One example of the former that Washbourne discusses is Robert Sheckley’s ‘Shall We Have a Little Talk’ (1965). In this short story, a colonizer attempts to translate the language of the inhabitants of the planet Na in order to produce legal documents justifying the invaders’ territorial acquisition, but his attempts are thwarted: ‘The language on this planet changed with terrible speed, and, even worse, the translator caused it’.565 Untranslatability figures here as an anticolonial strategy. Keeping in mind the genealogy of alien language in science fiction, entwined as it is with histories of colonialism, critical utopia might pose an alternative to the stultifying binary of utopia and dystopia invoked by the liberal narrative of LGBT charities and the fearmongering ‘concern’ politics of gender-critical feminists.566 Moreover, explicitly invoking critical utopian works when discussing trans terminology could function to reveal and subvert the dystopian allusions of gender-critical feminists. By emphasising the embeddedness of science fiction in uncomfortable colonial histories, we might also be able to acknowledge the troubling role that anglophone trans discourse plays in contemporary geopolitics, highlighting that any translation of trans terminology is necessarily incomplete and bound up in existing power relations. As Kay Gabriel, paraphrasing Barbara Cassin puts it, ‘transsexuality as an untranslatable […] never ceases (not) being translated’: mobilising deliberate obscurity and inscrutability for a new alien language of trans relies on a continual process of translation rather than the end-point of simple definition.567 Seen in terms of critical utopia then, trans language thus becomes a way of creating a better world, a utopia in process achieved through linguistic change. This idea of alien language producing cultural 564 Washbourne, p. 285. 565 Washbourne, p. 293. 566 For more on transphobia and ‘concern’ politics, see: Shaun, Transphobia in the UK (YouTube, 2019) change is the focus of the next and final chapter of this thesis, explored through close readings of the Native Tongue trilogy and the film Friendship’s Death. 215 6: Troubling Recent GRA Debates through the Alien Languages of Friendship’s Death and the Native Tongue Trilogy In July 2019, multiple news outlets reported that the California city of Berkeley was to replace gender-specific language in its municipal code with gender-neutral alternatives. ‘No more “manholes”’ reported NBC, with various other articles using this same contentious example in their headlines.568 Other substitutions include using ‘artificial’ instead of ‘man- made’, and ‘human effort’ or ‘workforce’ in place of ‘manpower’, moves which have been advocated by feminists at least as far back as the 1970s.569 Feminists once argued that gender-neutral language was key to women’s liberation; its introduction now takes place under the banner of trans rights. Rigel Robinson, the Berkeley ordinance’s primary author, does not explicitly refer to feminism when explaining this shift to gender neutrality. Instead Robinson cites inclusivity as the driver behind these new guidelines: In recent years, broadening societal awareness of transgender and gendernonconforming identities has brought to light the importance of non-binary gender inclusivity […] Women and non-binary individuals are just as entitled to accurate representation. Our laws are for everyone, and our municipal code should reflect that.570 The representational inaccuracy mentioned here chiefly relates to the predominance of masculine pronouns in the city code that imply, as Robinson puts it, ‘men are the only ones 568 Elaine Thompson, ‘No More “Manholes”: Berkeley, California, Removing All Language from City Code’, NBC News, 2019 that exist in entire industries or that men are the only ones on city government’.571 This argument echoes the longstanding critique by feminist linguists regarding the implicit male bias in the use of ‘he’ as the third person generic pronoun.572 Yet the catalyst Robinson cites for this shift is not this history of feminist linguistics, but rather the increased visibility of transgender and non-binary lives. Robinson’s statement implies that with the emergence of ‘trans’, battles feminists have been fighting for decades can finally be won. ‘Trans’ thus appears to make certain political shifts possible where feminism has seemingly proved unsuccessful. Critics of the proposed changes argued that the supposed inclusivity of gender-neutral language instead obscures the issues that affect women specifically.573 The ordinance not only replaces terms that implicitly centre men, but also those that refer to women: not only ‘he’, but also ‘she’, will be replaced with ‘they’, while ‘pregnant woman’ will be replaced with ‘pregnant employee’.574 This negative response to gender-neutrality parallels the recent furore in the British press over the alleged UK government ban on using the phrase ‘pregnant woman’.575 Opponents of the purported ban argued that such moves to eliminate references to women fail to achieve their intended inclusivity: ‘This is making women unmentionable. It feels normal – even liberal! – because the unmentionableness of women 571 Robinson, cited in Sarah Young. 572 Wendy Martyna, ‘Beyond the “He/Man” Approach: The Case for Nonsexist Language’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5.3 (1980), 482–93. 573 Sarah Young. 574 Sarah Young. 575 Notably, it is British news outlet The Independent that reports these critical responses to Berkeley’s change to gender-neutral language. See: Sarah Young. The change to ‘pregnant person’ was in fact suggested by the British Medical Association in communications guidelines for their own staff. A trade union, the BMA has no authority to enforce the language of NHS medical staff, nor was that the intended remit of the guidelines. Joël Reland, ‘Has the Government Banned the Term “Pregnant Woman”?’, Full Fact, 2017 is such a deeply ingrained cultural default’.576 Attempts to change language to include trans people are thus dismissed as perpetuating the erasure of women.577 What exactly do these linguistic and legal shifts in the name of ‘trans’ seem to enable or threaten here though? Notably, both the advocates and critics of these moves towards gender-neutrality rely upon the notion of language’s power to enact cultural and social change. Robinson declares that ‘[t]here’s power in language […] This is a small move, but it matters’.578 Ironically, the criticism of Berkeley’s ordinance also rests on this assumption: changing language is deemed to produce political effects, albeit in this case negative ones. Language can and does have political consequences, of course, particularly in a legal context. Yet as Judith Butler warns us in Excitable Speech (1997), speech acts can function in often unpredictable ways, opening up a gap between their intended force and their actual effects. In this sixth and final chapter, I will trouble this shared investment in language change as a political tool, exploring how alien language in feminist science fiction can illuminate problematic assumptions at work in debates on UK Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reform. I argue that both sides of this debate – trans activists and their allies on the one hand, their so-called ‘gender critical’ opponents on the other – overestimate the effects language will produce in the world, imagining that shifts in legal wording around trans self-identification will necessarily have either a liberatory or threatening effect. Casting doubt upon such 576 Sarah Ditum, ‘No, It Doesn’t Make You a Bigot If You Want to Be Called a Pregnant “Woman” Rather Than a “Person”’, Independent, 2017 attempts to predict the outcome of linguistic changes, science fiction unsettles the assumption that there is a direct or secure match between a word and its referent. As Samuel Delany has argued, science fiction demonstrates the startling possibilities that can be imagined when we allow that words have ambiguous meanings and do not produce predetermined outcomes.579 Science fiction loosens the assumed connection between speech acts and their consequences; this productive slack in what Delany calls the ‘thread of meaning’ allows us to imagine alternatives to the stifling narratives that trans liberation hinges upon state law and corporate inclusion policies, or that greater autonomy in legal recognition necessarily equips sexual predators with a (not so) proverbial hall pass.580 Continuing with the combination of genealogical and close reading methods deployed in the previous chapters, this chapter shifts across different discourses. I start by examining recent media accounts of debates on the GRA, moving onto science fiction’s engagement with the linguistic theories of performativity and relativity, and concluding with two feminist science fiction experiments that disrupt an instrumentalist approach to language and meaning: the Native Tongue trilogy (Native Tongue, The Judas Rose, Earthsong) and the film Friendship’s Death. These works respond to the demand emerging from feminist debates of the 1970s and 1980s to correct women’s linguistic alienation. Adopting the science fiction convention of the alien encounter, Suzette Haden Elgin’s novels and Peter Wollen’s film indicate that this feminist political project requires not just the creation of ‘alien’ or artificial languages that centre women’s experiences, but that we make language itself alien. 581 By this I mean that the task is not just to create new terminology or patterns of language use but to 579 See Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, pp. 1–15; Delany, ‘Some Reflections on SF Criticism’. 580 Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, p. 10. 581 Again, I am using Cheyne’s more expansive definition of ‘alien’; for more detail on this, see Chapter Five. 219 approach the relationship between signification and meaning as a radically strange and tenuous dynamic that can allow for alternative possible futures. Although many other science fiction works have explored the feminist possibilities of alien language and language change, Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy is rare in positioning women’s construction of a new feminist language as the central storyline.582 In the novels’ vision of a future America, women have lost the civil rights granted them by the nineteenth amendment to the United States’ Constitution. Concurrently, humans have made contact with intelligent alien life. In order to communicate with these alien lifeforms, thirteen families of linguists are founded. Their polyglot children learn a mix of alien and Earth languages from infancy, as training for their future careers as interpreters in interspecies trade negotiations. The women of these linguist families – known as the Lines – use the thorough knowledge of linguistics gained through their experiences as alien language interpreters to fight back against their male oppressors. A small group of women produce a feminist language, Láadan, which they hope will enable women to liberate themselves by putting into words their perception of the world: ‘A language to say the things that women wanted to say, and about which men had always said “Why would anybody want to talk about that?”’583 Elgin, a linguistics professor, created an actual grammar and preliminary vocabulary for Láadan, which she hoped fans of the novels would eventually take up as a feminist tool with which to more easily express their experiences.584 As Susan Squier and Julie Vedder write in 582 See for example: Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home and. For more examples, see: Cheyne, ‘Created Languages in Science Fiction’. 583 Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue (New York, NY: Daw Books, 1984), p. 215. Subsequent references in parentheses. 584 Suzette Haden Elgin, ‘Láadan, The Constructed Language in Native Tongue’, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 1999 their afterword to the 2000 Feminist Press reprint of Native Tongue, Elgin’s motivation for constructing Láadan was – as she saw it – to combat the violence of patriarchy through language.585 Notably, Elgin’s other major work is The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1980), a self-help manual for navigating verbal confrontation and reacting to abusive language. With Láadan, Elgin sought to offer another strategy, offering women a linguistic tool to both discuss women’s issues (the language offers an array of phrases for discussing menstruation, childbirth, and the labour historically assigned to women) and to repair the alienation women experience due to linguistic sexism.586 By contrast, Friendship’s Death does not feature a created language in the strict linguistic sense, but rather uses the figure of the alien to engage with contemporary debates about constructing a feminist cinematic language. The film’s eponymous character Friendship (Tilda Swinton) is an envoy, a ‘programme’ in female form, sent by intelligent alien computers from the galaxy Procyon to deliver a message of peace to the inhabitants of Earth.587 A technological malfunction diverts Friendship from her original destination, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instead she lands in Amman, Jordan, during Black September, a period of armed conflict in 1970 between the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Jordanian Armed Forces. Friendship’s primary human contact is not then the intended team of computer scientists, but Sullivan (Bill Paterson), a cynical male journalist and self-confessed adrenaline-junkie. Reporting on the conflict, Sullivan is also an alien of sorts, a ‘stranger in a strange land’, like the protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s 585 Susan Squier and Julie Vedder, ‘Afterword: Encoding A Woman’s Language’, in Native Tongue (New York, NY: Feminist Press, 2000), pp. 305–27 (pp. 305–6). 586 As I will discuss later, however, in this chapter I am interested instead in Láadan’s failure to live up to its intended purpose – and the assumptions about language that this failure reveals. 587 BFI, Reflections on Friendship’s Death (YouTube, 2020) < https://youtu.be/rYoqpR1M8nU> [accessed 4 December 2020]. 221 novel of the same name (1961). Given the war raging around them, Friendship’s name might seem ironic. But like William Guest, the protagonist of William Morris’ News from Nowhere, this envoy’s name indicates her role – befriending Sullivan. Wollen’s dialogue-heavy film concentrates on the development of this unlikely pair’s mutual understanding, a platonic association that ends when they part (their ‘friendship’s death’), she to join the PLO, he to return to England. Neither Friendship’s Death nor the Native Tongue trilogy have seen much scholarly or popular attention until very recently. Native Tongue and Láadan received some interest from journals of linguistics and science fiction, but hardly any attention from journals of feminism or gender studies. Neither the novels nor the language have garnered anywhere near as much critical acclaim as other feminist science fiction authors who have explored feminist re-imaginings of language. However, Elgin’s trilogy was republished with new critical material in the early 2000s and again in 2019; a third version of her Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan was also published in 2019. Although fans have added numerous contributions to the Láadan online dictionary, the language was not taken up by as many women as Elgin had hoped. The author later wove this disappointing trajectory into the story of the final novel, as I will explain in more detail later.588 Nor did the language gain the widespread popularity (or notoriety) afforded other created languages in science fiction. Klingon, a created language from the science fiction television and film series Star Trek (Roddenberry, 1966-), has featured as the focal point in news articles on courses examining created languages at universities and adult education institutions in the US, Canada, and 588 Elgin, ‘Láadan’. 222 Switzerland.589 By contrast, Láadan is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Likewise, Swinton describes Friendship’s Death as a ‘buried’ film, little-known beyond the circles of arthouse cinema.590 The film played for a year at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York, and was reviewed by the New York Times in anticipation of its screening at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988.591 Nonetheless, the film has yet to be the focus of a full- length journal article or book chapter and is usually mentioned only in passing in relation to Wollen’s filmmaking or Swinton’s career. The film script was included in Close Encounters (1990), a key anthology of feminist science fiction film criticism – but without a critical commentary.592 This scarcity of critical attention can perhaps be attributed to the film’s generic fluctuations (described by Thomas Elsaesser as ‘an s-f plot in a polit-thriller’, and by Wollen as a ‘film without a passport’), juxtaposing the popular genre of science fiction with the high theory of experimental cinema.593 I point out the relative obscurity of the works on which I focus in this chapter because my reason for analysing these texts is not that they were particularly influential on wider 589 Mia Georgiou and Rebecca Hawkes, ‘Beyoncé Studies to Jedi Training: 11 Pop-Culture University Courses’, The Telegraph, 2014 feminist thought. Rather, I examine these works because they both contributed to an existing conversation on feminism and language in an unusual way: by adapting the science fiction trope of the alien encounter. As discussed in the previous chapter, the alien encounter has historically offered one way of exploring theories of language and cultural Otherness. Yet what is significant about Elgin and Wollen’s works is how they play with science fiction’s generic expectations. Although they both feature extraterrestrials, they displace the alien as figure by emphasising instead the experience of alienation. Moreover, both disturb the boundaries of science fiction: Wollen, by mixing genres, Elgin by blurring the line between language construction and literary creativity. Wollen and Elgin both explore the political potential of linguistic intervention by offering ‘alien languages’, new and unfamiliar sign-systems. Nevertheless, there is of course considerable difference between the kind of invented language that Elgin constructs with Láadan and the filmic language that Wollen explores in Friendship’s Death. In Saussurean terms, Elgin produced the langue – the underlying grammatic structure – of Láadan, so that the language might eventually exist as parole – a language in actual use.594 Wollen, by contrast, does not produce a readymade prescriptive structure or template for feminist filmmaking. Instead he offers an example of what we might think of as a feminist cinematic language, through which we might disrupt dominant structures of representation and allow more politically generative conversations to emerge. For Wollen, cinema functions as a space to imagine impossible encounters that shift how we understand past, present, and future. 594 Langue and parole are concepts developed by early twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to distinguish between the underlying system of (a) language and the actual utterances of that language. See: Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Roy Harris (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 224 The relationship between the two – novel and film – might thus seem one of metaphor: Wollen presents a figurative feminist language, whereas Elgin provides the literal version. Yet in Elgin’s creative output, Láadan features as both a literal and a literary language, troubling the distinction between imagined language as fictional device and ‘real world’ research tool. As such, Láadan realises the speculative dimension of some science fiction, offering an imagined example of the language’s political potential in order to inspire actual feminist activism. Meanwhile, Wollen’s work in film theory and production sought to disrupt the idea of cinematic language as metaphor.595 Wollen’s book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) inverts this presumed relationship between the system of signs deployed in film and that in spoken or written language: what we usually think of as ‘language’ is only one branch of a broader system of signs. What makes language alien in Friendship’s Death and the Native Tongue trilogy then is less the engagement with extraterrestrial or artificial languages, but rather their techniques of defamiliarizing language. They both unsettle attempts to pin down language as ever only either figurative or literal. In contrast to the earlier chapters then, this chapter examines both film and literature together. As I have discussed already in Chapter Four, feminist science fiction film and literature have vastly different trajectories. The stunted development of a distinct genre of feminist science fiction film, in contrast to feminist science fiction literature, is overdetermined by the already complex problems of putting together a feminist film, not least funding.596 Yet Elgin’s novels and Wollen’s film do reveal a shared fascination with 595 Russian formalists introduced the metaphor of cinematic language, understanding film’s way of making meaning as a system of signs only similar to the real thing, ‘language itself’. Edward W. Hudlin, ‘Film Language’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 13.2 (1979), 47–56 (p. 47). 596 Complicating things further, many filmmakers of the 1970s and 1980s sought to subvert and resist generic classifications. Thomas Sobchack, ‘Genre Film: A Classical Experience’, Film Literature Quarterly, 3.3 (1975), 196–204 (p. 203). 225 systems of meaning, marking a point of overlap between feminist science fiction film and literature. To explain the significance of this preoccupation for conceptualising ideas of language use in relation to trans rights, I now turn to recent debates on the GRA. Gender Recognition Act Reform While this section of the chapter focusses primarily on the UK context, the UK debate on trans rights is entangled with the US. As trans journalist Jane Fae has noted, ‘[t]he Trump victory and anti-LGBT backlash in the US […] has led to some issues (for instance, women’s safety in public toilets) being imported into the UK’.597 The terms of the debate in the UK context are guided by the campaign strategies of the wealthier, larger, and often more successful lobbying groups of the US Christian right.598 Despite this significant degree of overlap between pro- and anti- LGBT rights campaigns in the US and the UK, the conceptual landscapes of trans discourse in these two nations over the past five years are markedly different. The debate in the US has centred primarily on so-called ‘Bathroom Bills’: proposed legislation that would force trans people to use the public restrooms and changing facilities of the sex they were assigned at birth.599 In 2017, seventeen US states considered Bathroom Bills, of which one passed (North Carolina).600 By contrast, the UK media has focussed primarily on the GRA and transition healthcare for children. Other trans issues have received heightened media attention, such as the teaching 597 Fae, p. 203. 598 Sophie Lewis, ‘How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans’, New York Times, 7 February 2019 of trans issues in schools, prolonged waiting times for NHS Gender Identity Clinics, and rights for non-binary people. Furthermore, Fae indicates that many issues related to gender more broadly are being labelled as ‘trans issues’ when they actually have little to do with trans people in particular.601 However, the reform of the GRA has provoked exceptionally intense debate, and other trans issues – especially in relation to children – are often framed within the context of the potential ramifications of changes to this legislation.602 What is potentially only a relatively minor shift in legal language has become an incitement to discourse, a site of intensified linguistic activity. Proposed GRA reforms have emerged out of parliamentary discussions on the difficulties trans people face going about their daily lives. In 2015, the Women and Equalities Select Committee began a parliamentary inquiry into transgender experiences, and in July 2017 the government ran the largest national survey of LGBT people in the world, with over 108,000 participants.603 These two government projects identified significant problems experienced by the trans population of the UK, especially in relation to healthcare, physical safety, education, and employment. It appears somewhat counterintuitive then, that the UK government responded to the worrying issues raised by the inquiry and the survey by prioritising a review of the GRA.604 Questions about the GRA did feature prominently in both 601 Fae, p. 203. 602 Steven Swinford, ‘Gender Recognition Act Changes Halted After Child Fears’, The Times, 22 February 2020 the Transgender Equality Inquiry and the national survey. The latter even highlighted the statistic that 93 per cent of trans people without a Gender Recognition Certificate reported they would like to have one.605 However, the national survey’s ‘headline finding’ that trans people report particularly low levels of life-satisfaction in comparison to the national average seems to have been overshadowed by the project of GRA reform.606 Alongside an ‘LGBT Action Plan’, the GRA figures as one of the UK government’s first steps in solving the problems reported in the national survey, aiming ‘to tackle unnecessary bureaucracy and to assess the need for medical checks’.607 The government launched a public consultation on the GRA in 2018, one of the first measures towards resolving issues raised by the inquiry and the survey. We can imagine that this focus on the GRA was intended as a simple legislative move to resolve an issue of dissatisfaction among trans people relatively swiftly, with a measurable positive outcome. Those in favour of reform likely envisioned something similar to the Irish Gender Recognition Act 2015 as an alternative model to the laborious process of applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate in the UK.608 The Irish system allows the legal change of gender without the need for medical or state assessment of transgender status. Instead, the applicant submits a form Rocket Science, Analysis of Public Consultation on Proposed Service Specifications for Specialised Gender Identity Services for Adults, 2017 including a ‘Statutory Declaration’ which must be witnessed by a recognised authority.609 In the UK context however, this very issue of self-identification has become a major stumbling block. The spike in attention to the GRA indicates an unexpected turn in the mainstream discourse of ‘trans’. The deadline for the 2018 GRA reform consultation was ‘extended due to the high volume’ of submissions, with the government taking two years to announce an official response.610 This overwhelming reaction to the public consultation was accompanied by sustained media attention on issues relating to the GRA from 2018 onwards. According to corpus linguistics specialist Paul Baker, UK media outlets ‘wrote over 6,000 articles about trans people in 2018-19’, a rate three and a half times the output of articles in 2012.611 The other key problems raised by the national LGBT survey and addressed in the government’s ‘LGBT Action Plan’ – such as ending conversion therapy and improving the recording of homophobic and transphobic hate crimes – have received far less media attention in comparison to this relatively straightforward legislative issue.612 The vast majority of trans respondents to the national survey indicated they would like to be able to obtain a Gender 609 Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, ‘Apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate’, Gov.Ie, 2019 Recognition Certificate more easily, a clear demand for legal change. Nevertheless, we might question why the GRA has taken such high priority for reform and such exceptional mainstream visibility over trans people’s experiences of lengthy NHS waiting times or unacceptably high rates of abuse, harassment, and violence in public spaces, schools, and workplaces. This intense scrutiny of the proposed GRA reforms in the UK media landscape signals the success of homophobic and transphobic campaign groups in shaping the terms of the debate. In October 2018, US Guardian journalists penned a frustrated response to the newspaper’s UK editorial on the GRA, which constructed the debate in terms of an irresolvable antagonism between trans and women’s rights.613 Expressing ‘dismay’ at the editorial’s discursive similarities with ‘the position of anti-trans legislators who have pushed overtly transphobic bathroom bills’, the journalists noted that ‘the editorial and resulting conversations have exposed some of the fundamental divides between American and British feminism and progressive politics’.614 Crudely put: in the US context, ‘feminism and progressive politics’ are in opposition to ‘anti-trans legislators’, whereas in the UK, these groups are in alliance against trans people. These tensions between US and UK journalists on the left over the coverage of trans issues indicate the dominance of a certain stultifying concept in the British context: self-identification. The outcome of the national survey might have entailed a public discussion over how to – as Judith Butler might put it – make the lives of LGBT people more liveable. Instead, 613 Editorial. 614 Sam Levin, Mona Chalabi, and Sabrina Siddiqui, ‘Why We Take Issue with The Guardian’s Stance on Trans Rights in the UK’, Guardian, 2 November 2018 mainstream trans discourse has focussed on the supposed threat posed by a system of legal recognition in which citizens can declare themselves a different gender to that assigned at birth. While ‘self-declaration’ models such as the Irish GRA are often seen to be more streamlined, they nonetheless still require the completion of a form by the applicant and a legally authorised witness, as well as the submission of other identification documents such as a birth certificate or proof of residency. These lingering aspects of bureaucracy notwithstanding, anti-trans feminist groups have reduced self-declaration to a ‘simple process’, ‘that enable[s] males to self-identify as women and enter women-only spaces’.615 Groups such as Fair Play for Women and Woman’s Place UK argue that enshrining self- declaration in law will encourage other organisations to adopt similar policies that provide predatory (non-trans) men a ticket into women-only spaces and a watertight defence if caught. The focus on self-identification has thus become a particular barrier in combination with the rhetoric of predators and perverts imported from US battles with Bathroom Bills.616 Trans activists sometimes seem to echo this sense of GRA reform as constituting the alignment of legal self-identification with other contexts. According to Stephen Whittle, A change to ‘self identification’ in the law, will simply unify the current system we use to be recognised as ourselves by others. Before the Gender Recognition Act 2004, self-identification was all that trans people could do; we changed our names, applied for a new driving licence and started living as ourselves. That system was all we had for over 50 years – and it was without reports of men getting new passports, so they could enter the ladies loos and commit crimes.617 There is an illuminating difference here from the position of anti-trans feminists though: the 615 FPFW, ‘Sex Self-ID and What It Means for Privacy, Safety, and Fairness for Women’, Fair Play for Women, 2018 relationship between cause and effect is reversed. For groups such as Fair Play for Women, a shift to gender recognition through self-identification in law will inevitably lead to a shift to self-identification policies in other environments, including single-sex spaces. This is seen to necessarily entail violence towards women in much the same way that Janice Raymond viewed transsexual women as the embodiment of rape.618 For Whittle, on the other hand, the legal recognition of self-identification is exactly that: the acknowledgement that self- declaration – ‘living as ourselves’ – is the means by which trans people move through the world already. In Whittle’s account, GRA reform is not the liberatory fiat Rigel Robinson and likeminded others imagine, but more a matter of the law catching up with existing practices. What Whittle leaves unstated in his defence of GRA reform is that this half-century-old system of self-identification has never been perfect: the history of non-normatively gendered lives is a brutal one. Anti-trans feminists argue that reform to the GRA will ‘increase the likelihood of finding a male-bodied person in a space reserved for women’.619 This scaremongering neglects the reality of what often happens to that person when they are ‘found out’: self- declaration of gender is not necessarily successful, risking a violent response.620 Trans people know all too well the sometimes lethal cost of the fact that, as Judith Butler puts it, ‘a speech act is not always an efficacious action’.621 What does this mean? In Butler’s Bodies That Matter, she discusses the frequency with which the theory of performativity she introduced in Gender Trouble is misinterpreted to 618 Raymond, p. 104. 619 FPFW. 620 Kyla Bender-Baird, ‘Peeing under Surveillance: Bathrooms, Gender Policing, and Hate Violence’, Gender, Place, and Culture, 23.7 (2015), 983–88 (p. 984). 621 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 17. 232 mean that someone can simply pick up a new gender and perform it in the same way that someone might pick out an outfit from their wardrobe.622 The problem with this reading of her work, she claims, is that it assumes a masterful subject who can voluntarily choose their gender and effortlessly perform it. Butler’s notion of gender performativity builds upon J. L. Austin’s work on performative speech acts in How to Do Things with Words (1962), a borrowing she expands upon in Excitable Speech to investigate further the relationship between linguistic acts and their effects. As Butler describes in Excitable Speech, ‘a theory of performativity is already at work in the exercise of political discourse’: particularly in relation to the law, speech acts are often presumed more efficacious than they may actually be. In the case of the debates on the GRA, anti-trans feminists fantasise that legal recognition of self-identification will buttress someone’s self-declaration of gender so securely as to enable widespread gender deception and thereby fuel an epidemic of sexual violence. Echoing Butler’s analysis of the US military’s former ban on homosexual self-definition, self-declaration of trans womanhood in particular is imagined to signify in more powerful and far-reaching ways than trans people’s actual vulnerability to violence suggests. On the flip side, changes in the law’s recognition of trans people cannot repair trans people’s societal alienation and abjection as straightforwardly as the government promises. My claim here is that both advocates and opponents of GRA reform overestimate the power of legal recognition of self-identification through a theory of performativity that attributes sure-fire success to linguistic acts. In the next section I track this theory of performativity through twentieth century debates on constructing a feminist language, debates to which 622 Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. ix. 233 science fiction works of the 1970s and 1980s contributed. As part of this, Elgin and Wollen’s works represent crucial experiments with constructing forms of feminist language – crucial because they demonstrate the limitations of this project. Placing these works alongside one another illuminates how by making language alien – loosening the connection between signs and meaning – they show the political potential of language’s incompleteness and ambiguity. Despite the perhaps gloomy prospect that self-declaration of gender cannot always be efficacious, this space to imagine how things might be otherwise offers a useful strategy for rethinking trans politics. Performativity and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Analyses of science fiction’s use of linguistics have often focussed on how these works play with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also termed linguistic relativity.623 This notion asserts that language to a lesser or greater extent influences what can be thought, and that therefore different languages shape how humans perceive reality. Despite its name, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was not a jointly produced theory, but rather the popular conjunction of Edward Sapir’s ideas with those of Benjamin Lee Whorf. According to Julia Penn, the hypothesis has its origins in the German philosophical notion of Weltanschauung (worldview), expressing the idea that cultural difference is related to differences in linguistic structures.624 Many German philosophers advanced the strong form of the hypothesis, ‘that language determines thought completely’.625 While this extreme equation of language with thought has since been dismissed due to its internal contradictions, later contributors to the topic would explore weaker forms of the hypothesis, in which the role of language is about 623 See for example: Washbourne, p. 290; Ria Cheyne, ‘Ursula K. Le Guin and Translation’, Extrapolation, 47.3 (2006), 457–70. 624 Penn, p. 19. 625 Penn, p. 20. 234 limiting or enabling what can be thought.626 Many science fiction authors have experimented with linguistic relativity, often exploring extreme versions of the hypothesis. In Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), the titular language is a weapon in an intergalactic war. An analytically precise language, Babel-17 enables its users to solve real-world problems simply by learning the language. Likewise, in Ted Chiang’s novella ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998) – later adapted for the screen as Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016) – the protagonist is able to perceive time non-linearly as she gradually develops fluency in the alien language of the heptapods. These two popular examples imagine that constructing or deciphering an alien language might bring radical changes in how we perceive reality, with significant social ramifications. Some science fiction writers have explored the feminist potential of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but never as explicitly as Elgin in her Native Tongue trilogy. The first of Elgin’s novels continually references the alien ‘worldviews’ the linguists share by learning and speaking in extra-terrestrial languages (p. 14), while the second novel, The Judas Rose, discusses at length the relationship between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the fictional universe’s failed women’s liberation movement.627 Moreover, Elgin is alone in using fiction to assess linguistic relativity’s potential as a real-world feminist tool: Láadan was more than a fictional device, serving also as an experiment to ascertain if the key to women’s liberation lay in constructing a language more suited to women’s needs.628 Elgin’s motives, Ruth Menzies highlights, were to test out a series of hypotheses.629 If even the weak form of the 626 Penn, p. 21. 627 Suzette Haden Elgin, The Judas Rose (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), pp. 160–61. Subsequent references in parentheses. 628 Elgin, ‘Láadan’. 629 Menzies, paras 11–13. 235 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were correct, Elgin supposed, then Láadan could change the world not just within the novel, but beyond, a more feminist society emerging from the expression of women’s perceptions of the world. Elgin’s intervention contributed to the feminist debates of the 1970s and 1980s on the position of women in language and sign-systems. As Sandy Stone notes, this discussion – ranging across creative writing, poetry, and linguistics – sometimes raised the notion of constructing a new language for women.630 Hélène Cixous’s work on écriture feminine, for example, called on women to invent an ‘impregnable language’ that would counter what she called the ‘phallogocentrism’ of Western thought.631 Perhaps the most crucial finding of these feminist analyses of language was the construction of men and masculinity as the universal standard in many languages. Typically, men are unmarked, and women are marked.632 Words and phrases such as ‘mankind’, ‘the society of man’, ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’, and the use of ‘he’ as the generic third-person pronoun, position the category ‘man’ as synonymous with ‘human’.633 Feminist linguists of the 1970s found that, in general, the English language presumed the perspective of men, which was unsurprising given the dominant if not exclusive role men had played in the various institutions that controlled and shaped its usage, not least, lexicography.634 630 Stryker, ‘Another Dream of Common Language’, p. 301. 631 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1.4 (1976), 875–93 (p. 886). 632 Or more accurately, societal roles are divided up, such that valued roles are assumed to be held by men, whereas devalued roles are assumed to be held by women, such that we might talk of a ‘female doctor’, but also a ‘male nurse’. 633 Richard Dyer writes about how a similar process occurs with the assumption of whiteness as universal. See: White. Notably, while the use of the singular ‘they’ as the generic third-person pronoun was once widespread, prescriptive grammarians in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries promoted the use of ‘he’ instead, the logic being that language should reflect he supposed natural order of male authority over women. See: Ann Bodine, ‘Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar: Singular “They”, Sex-Indefinite “He”, and “He or She”’, Language in Society, 4.2 (1975), 129–46. 634 Spender, p. 20. 236 With the creation of Láadan, Elgin sought to address this problem of women’s linguistic alienation. As Kelly Rafey points out however, Láadan does not aim at effecting women’s linguistic equality with men – a far cry from the rhetoric of ‘inclusion’ and ‘representation’ deployed by Robinson. The language instead seems to merely invert the sexism of the English language. Despite Elgin’s claim that Láadan’s third person generic pronoun be is without gender, Rafey highlights that it ‘is used in every single Láadan translation with the word “she”, whereas “he” is only every referred to as behid (be with the masculine morpheme -id)’.635 In effect the masculine form becomes marked, while the feminine form is unmarked. As such, Láadan expresses a radical feminist viewpoint, prioritising women. Meanwhile, similar discussions took place in cinema regarding how to tackle the structures of sexism as they manifested in film. Claire Johnston’s essay ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter- Cinema’ (1973) broke new ground, addressing how the representation of women in the mainstream perpetuated certain ‘myths’ that consolidated their oppression.636 Yet there arose among other feminists engaging in film analysis the sense that the problem with the way that films enacted sexism extended beyond simply characters and storylines. Such critics elaborated upon John Berger’s ideas of how images could construct patterns of gendered looking: men’s looking and women’s to-be-looked-at-ness.637 Instead of the flat, still image of woman however, these critics thought in terms of the qualities specific to the moving image and the structuring systems of the dominant cinema that produced sexist habits of reading film. 635 Kelly Rafey, ‘This Is an Essay: The Language and Legacy of Láadan (Evidently)’, Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy, 2014, 1–4 (p. 3) As Annette Kuhn points out, a key feature of that dominant cinema is its appearance of needing no interpretation: the meaning seems self-evident.638 Such works create the illusion of ease of interpretation by playing upon established pleasures of looking. So argues Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which used psychoanalytic theories of pleasure to examine the workings of the dominant Hollywood film production. Mulvey posited that such films activate both voyeuristic and narcissistic scopophilia, generating pleasure through cinematic techniques that present women as objects to be looked at and men as figures with which to identify. Conventional films following the norms of classic Hollywood cinema reproduce sexism not only at the level of content then, but at the level of form. Film theorists thus conceived of the formal qualities of a film – mise-en-scène, editing, point- of-view shots and so on – as comprising the cinema’s particular system of signs. As Stephen Prince writes, ‘film theory since the 1970s has been deeply indebted to structuralist and Saussurean-derived linguistic models’.639 Through this linguistic turn, film structure came to be articulated in terms of ‘language’, ‘vocabulary’, and ‘grammar’. These descriptions followed Saussure’s ideas about the symbolic and arbitrary nature of language, which were later developed to have a broader cultural application by theorists of semiotics such as Roland Barthes. In this view, films were not simply reflections but instances and constructors of culture, and therefore also sites of potential cultural intervention. The task of feminist cinema was to denaturalise this filmic grammar, and perhaps even construct it anew. Mulvey argued in favour of a dual-pronged approach, using film analysis to make 638 Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Verso, 1994), p. 127. 639 Stephen Prince, ‘The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies’, Film Quarterly, 47.1 (1993), 16–28 (p. 16). 238 evident how films in the dominant mode conceal their symbolic workings, and to ‘dare to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire’.640 Mulvey advocated for a new women’s cinema – a new language – that would radically change people’s experiences of watching films. Friendship’s Death engages in debates around the deconstruction of the dominant norms of filmmaking and the production of a feminist cinematic language. The film is Wollen’s seventh – and only solo – film after the six he co-wrote and co-directed with Mulvey. Wollen and Mulvey’s first and second collaborations, Penthesilea (1974) and Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), both deploy experimental film techniques to enact the feminist film theory they espoused. The former concentrates on the figure of the eponymous Amazon queen, encouraging women to fight the male gaze and other patriarchal structures using ‘an alien look and an alien language’. Riddles functions as an answer to this call to arms. Over thirteen segments, its central narrative addresses feminist concerns such as the division of labour in the home and collective childcare. The film features unbroken 360-degree pan shots that reject the classical cinematic techniques of editing that Mulvey had argued against in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Friendship’s Death continues the conversation these earlier works began. The film’s fragmented mise-en-abîme structure is a visual echo of the layered narratives in Penthesilea and Riddles: the dialogues between Friendship and Sullivan are told within the filmic narrative of their encounter in Jordan during Black September, while this narrative is structured as a reminiscent conversation between Sullivan and his friend Kubler in 1980s London. The film ends with a further story-within-a-story: Friendship’s ‘Videotape’ recording 640 Mulvey, ‘“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”’, p. 835. 239 her time spent with Sullivan in Jordan. Moreover, Friendship’s Death is also broken into segments with markedly different filmic styles that resist the generic reading of the film as SF. The film opens with archival footage of the September 1970 Dawson’s field hijackings, but to indicate the film’s setting in Amman, the film switches to low-quality documentary footage of rubble, ruins, and desert space. To show Sullivan’s encounters with Friendship, the film then cuts to a claustrophobic theatre-set style, as Anton Bitel writes, ‘confined to a tiny cast and a few interior sets’.641 These give the impression of a 1970s television play, like the BBC Play for Today series. These structural and aesthetic resemblances indicate the preoccupation Friendship’s Death shares with Wollen and Mulvey’s earlier films: constructing a feminist counter-cinema with a new filmic language.642 Significantly however, Friendship’s Death diverges from many of the avant-garde techniques of its predecessors, producing a far more conventional filmic narrative and eschewing those slow, dizzying pans. Moreover, the film’s conclusion stands in marked contrast to these earlier works. In the film’s final scene, Sullivan’s teenage daughter Catherine helps him access Friendship’s electronic diary, a device holding an audio-visual recording. As she works out how to play the alien ‘videotape’ through her father’s television, we cut to an abstract, brightly coloured computer-generated sequence. The screen shifts between layered images of blood cells, anatomical diagrams, a televised football match, fractals, ornaments, machines, and an alien script (fig. 13). These eclectic images are overlaid with a collage of 641 Anton Bitel, ‘Friendship’s Death (1987)’, Eye for Film, 2009, para. 4 sound, strings of nonsense phrases like alien poetry. There is a documentary nature to this film-within-a-film, gesturing back to the archival footage from the film’s opening. As Friendship’s electronic diary, this sequence literally documents what Friendship has ‘seen’, citing earlier shots from the film: extreme close-ups of Sullivan’s stubbled jaw, his typewriter, the objects she collected, and clips from the football match they watch together. These citational shots function, as Friendship puts it, like ‘fossil records of a dead species’, working to undo the film’s opening framing device and repositioning Sullivan’s story through Friendship’s alien gaze (fig. 14). Although the film drops many of the experimental techniques pioneered in Wollen’s earlier films then, the final scene responds to these earlier works’ call to develop an ‘alien look and an alien language’ – Friendship’s alien message points to the future of women’s filmmaking in the age of computer generated graphics. Making Language Alien Both Elgin’s trilogy and Wollen’s film were thus engaged in responding to this call to produce forms of feminist language. Foreshadowing recent trans debates, they seem at first to rely on the notion that to enact political change is to intervene in language and produce new sign-systems. Trans activist groups have not gone so far as to construct their own complete artificial languages, but as the previous chapter discussed, efforts have been made to codify emerging trans vocabularies in ways that draw upon science fiction’s alien languages. Feminist science fiction offers a uniquely fitting approach to the idea of language change as a political tool, given the genre’s preoccupation with imagining alternative worlds and exploring ideas of alienation, estrangement, and Othering. Indeed, Elgin says as much, comparing science fiction with Láadan itself as a means of enacting feminist liberation through language.643 However, Elgin and Wollen’s works stand out from science fiction’s 643 Elgin, cited in: Squier and Vedder, p. 305. 241 experiments with language more generally, because they also stage the limitations of linguistic relativity. They suggest the irreducibility of political change to a voluntarist model of language change, troubling the notion that language can reliably produce the political effects we desire and intend. In the Native Tongue trilogy, the feminist language of Láadan does bring about some changes that benefit the oppressed Women of the Lines. As the protagonist Nazareth reveals near the end of the first novel, ‘[t]he hypothesis was that if we put the project into effect it would change reality’ (p. 296). At the conclusion of the first instalment of Elgin’s trilogy, the Women of the Lines finish developing their secret language and begin to share it among their daughters and granddaughters. The men they live with are barely conscious of the significance of the women’s new language, experiencing only a general shift in the way the women behave: ‘It’s as if they weren’t really even there at all!’ (p. 289). The discomfort the men now experience in the presence of women causes them to introduce a kind of sex- segregation, building housing for women separate from men. In Elgin’s ambivalent dystopia, linguistic relativity produces subtle changes towards a kind of feminist separatism.644 Language thus appears a vital tool for the women’s resistance. Despite the hope invested in the notion of a women’s language at the start of the trilogy, the Women of the Lines are forced to adopt a different tactic in order to see through their project of emancipation. In the second instalment of the trilogy, The Judas Rose, Láadan spreads through the Women of the Lines, who infiltrate the Catholic church in order to reach beyond the confines of their linguist families: ‘The tiny cells of Láadan within the convents were everywhere now, not only on this world but on colony worlds […] the 644 Val Gough, ‘Commentaries on Native Tongue’, Foundation, 79 (2000), 35–40. 242 language had spread too far to root out’ (p. 354). Yet ultimately, the spread of Láadan is not successful and by the third novel, Earthsong, Láadan is all but abandoned by the characters. The trajectory of the trilogy parallels Elgin’s thought experiment, and at certain points in the final novel, the narrative voice even seems to communicate Elgin’s own disappointment: They had been so sure that women outside the Lines would welcome Láadan, would welcome a language constructed specifically to express the perceptions of women once they knew it existed and had ways to learn it. They had been so certain that it would be the same blessing for other women that it had been for the linguist women. And they had been so wrong in those certainties.645 As the author points out, over the decade in which she published her books, women did not take up Láadan in large numbers, nor did they develop ‘a better women’s language of their own construction’.646 Both within and beyond Elgin’s fictional universe, linguistic relativity falters. Despite Elgin and her characters’ faith in the efficacy and utility of Láadan as a feminist tool, the language failed to produce the intended political changes that might enable women’s liberation. In effect, the course of the novels and the failure of Elgin’s experiment more generally demonstrate the problem with the voluntarist theory of performativity at the heart of recent debates on trans-inclusive language and legal recognition of self-identification. In Austinian terms, the conditions under which the language of Láadan could have political effects were not present: the simple declaration of a feminist worldview could not simply make it so. 645 Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue III: Earthsong (New York, NY: Daw Books, 1994), p. 74. Subsequent references in parentheses. 646 Elgin, ‘Láadan’. 243 Figure 13: Diagram of blood vessels in they eye overlaid with alien script in Friendship's Death (Wollen, 1987). Figure 14: Extreme close-up of typewriter in Friendship's electronic diary in Friendship's Death (Wollen, 1987). 244 Figure 15: Everyday objects appear unfamiliar in Friendship's Death (Wollen, 1987). Figure 16: A UFO's eye view in Friendship's Death (Wollen, 1987). 245 Figure 17: Grainy archival footage of Jordan in Friendship's Death (Wollen, 1987). Figure 18: Friendship seen reflected in a mirror in Friendship's Death (Wollen, 1987). 246 Moreover, Mingming Liu’s research on Láadan cautions that women’s languages have already existed, but they are not necessarily cause for feminist celebration. After comparing Láadan with Cixous’ theory of écriture féminine, Liu draws our attention to nüshu, a language exclusively used by women in the Chinese County of Jiangyong, particularly during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). As Liu points out, nüshu could hardly be described as a language of women’s liberation, given that surviving writings in this script focus on women’s experiences of loneliness and financial difficulty without offering any model of political organisation or resistance to these conditions. ‘It would be too romantic and far-fetched to say that nüshu is an example of proto- women’s liberation consciousness’, Liu argues. ‘it is not a discourse against gender oppression, but an invaluable source for scholars’.647 The project of constructing a feminist language, might, as feminist linguist Dale Spender warns, simply fall foul of existing structures of sexism by which language becomes assimilated to the dominant cultural order.648 Despite the failure of Elgin’s experiment, the Native Tongue trilogy does suggest ways to intervene in politics through language: through techniques of estrangement that draw the reader’s attention to how existing languages work to alienate women. Drawing on her linguistics background, Elgin utilises the notion of ‘lexical encoding’: ‘the way that human beings choose a chunk of their world, external or internal, and assign that chunk a surface shape that will be its name; it refers to the process of word-making’ (p. 22). As Mary Kay Bray writes, the linguist women of Native Tongue expand upon this concept to designate a process of coining words that refer to aspects of women’s experience with no equivalent in 647 Mingming Liu, ‘Écriture Féminine, Láadan and Nüshu: A Reassessment of the Postmodern Feminist Visions of a Female Language’, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, 2010, 1–8 (p. 6) other languages, alien or human, ‘“Encoding” with a capital “E”’ (p. 22).649 These Encodings are at the heart of Láadan; in Elgin’s imagined universe, they enact cultural change by creating conceptual territory that has not yet been mapped. While Láadan was not adopted in the way that Elgin had hoped, this practice of conceptual mapping has been key to the development of feminist, queer, and trans politics over the past few decades, with terms such as ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘intersectionality’ making their way from feminist theory into mainstream discourse. Unlike Elgin, Wollen does not produce a feminist cinematic language that can be learnt, but rather a filmic intervention into the very discussion of film as language. Friendship’s Death plays out Wollen’s theories about how films make meaning. Wollen contributed to debates about the linguistic turn in film studies by examining how films make use of other types of sign beyond the strict linguistic sense.650 In Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Wollen referred back to Charles Sanders Pierce’s second trichotomy of signs in order to investigate how films trade not only in one kind of sign, the symbol, but in other kinds of sign too: the icon and the index. For the icon, Wollen writes, ‘the relationship between signifier and signified is not arbitrary but is one of resemblance or likeness’, whereas ‘[a]n index is a sign by virtue of an existential bond between itself and its object’.651 To speak of cinematic language as metaphor then, is to emphasise the workings of film in terms of Saussure’s notion of the arbitrary sign, and to ignore how film also makes use of iconic and indexical signs, which Wollen argued were more powerful.652 In Friendship’s Death, Wollen 649 Mary Kay Bray, ‘The Naming of Things: Men and Women, Language and Reality in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue’, Extrapolation, 27.1 (1986), 49–61 (p. 51). 650 Prince, pp. 16–17. 651 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, third edit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 122. 652 Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, p. 140. 248 emphasises indexical and iconic signs over symbolic ones in order to shift the focus from the linguistic to a broader conception of how films convey meaning and shape perceptions. His play with iconic and indexical signs places, as Delany might put it, a different ‘tension on the thread of meaning’ within film, opening up space for shots to hold more ambiguous and indefinite meanings that enable the film’s continued resonance with politics and culture.653 Wollen adopts the science fiction convention of the alien encounter to suggest that estrangement might be key to producing a feminist cinematic language and thus an effective counter-cinema. As the previous chapter discussed, the history of the alien encounter in science fiction has often allegorised encounters with the racialised Other, figured as an invading threat. Likewise, Swinton’s embodiment of an alien and machinic femininity serves to undermine Friendship’s initial appearance as ‘woman in jeopardy’, instead positioning her as a potential threat to the suspicious Sullivan. As Friendship states, her ‘veneer’ is designed to be ‘reassuring’ for the scientists at MIT, yet in Amman this appearance positions her as an unusual threat, somewhere between a naïve lone tourist and a potential spy. The threat Friendship poses, we discover, is not to Sullivan, but to the conventions of film language. An alien gaze repeatedly interrupts the expected flow of the film. While Friendship’s Death does not eschew conventional cinematic editing techniques such as the shot/reverse-shot – as Riddles does – the film intersperses this with other techniques which resist the spectator’s easy identification with any character’s look. Sudden extreme close-up shots of bizarre yet familiar objects, slow camera movements tracing details, and a zoom-out from a photograph of ruins destabilise the relationship between viewer and viewed, emphasising 653 Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, p. 10. 249 the camera’s presence as a kind of Brechtian alienation (fig. 15). Overhead shots give the sense of looking in at both Friendship and Sullivan from above – a UFO’s-eye view (fig. 16). Moreover, Wollen often opts for the two shot rather than shot/reverse-shot, which resists the spectator’s identification of the camera’s gaze with Sullivan’s point of view. While the framing device of Sullivan reminiscing on his time with Friendship in Jordan ostensibly positions the film as privileging Sullivan’s perspective, this is disturbed throughout by an alien gaze. This new alien cinematic language emphasises the iconic and indexical nature of the signs that film produces. Frequently images refer beyond the film’s frame, presenting connections between this work and Wollen’s earlier feminist filmmaking through the similarity of certain shots. Certain scenes from Friendship’s Death seem to directly reference shots from Riddles. The combination of voiceover layered over grainy archival footage of Jordanian ruins and roadsides suggests the gritty shots of the Egyptian Sphinx of Giza in Riddles’ second chapter (fig. 17). Likewise, a slow panning shot traces Friendship’s reflection in a mirror while she narrates the hostage situation she encounters in Jerash (fig. 18). This evokes the twelfth segment of the central chapter of Riddles, in which the camera’s gaze revolves around a room with several mirrors while the character Louise reads aloud from the dream journal of her girlfriend Maxine. Through this intertextuality, Friendship’s Death gestures to these earlier works’ attempts at constructing a new feminist cinematic language, yet here the framing device of the alien encounter emphasises the need to question our very assumptions about how cinema conveys meaning. Reading Elgin and Wollen’s works together reveals how science fiction’s impossible fantasy 250 of extreme linguistic relativity might nonetheless help us understand what political interventions might be made through language. What this means for the discourse of ‘trans’ is, firstly, a shift in political investments from changing language and updating terminology to understanding the conditions under which language can produce political effects, and, secondly, a greater attention to disrupting and exposing conventional codes of meaning- making beyond the purely verbal or linguistic. This problem perhaps explains why trans film studies has been such a crucial site of scholarship, examining how conventional filmic structures can be disrupted through the transgender look or aesthetics of change.654 My analysis of Elgin and Wollen’s works suggests that our discussions around the GRA and other shifts towards legal recognition for trans people must make language alien: they must lay bare the processes by which intervention at the level of language succeeds or fails in producing the political effects we desire. Moreover, this approach means attending to how the linguistic self-declaration of gender might be undercut or made vulnerable by other systems of signs. There might be power in language, but a simple substitution of terminology is not enough in effecting political representation or securing the safety of trans people as they move through public space. 654 For work on the transgender gaze, see: Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, pp. 76–96. For more on the aesthetics of change see: Steinbock, Shimmering Images. 251 Conclusion As I outlined in the introduction, mainstream discussions of trans rights continue to privilege ideas of representation and visibility, despite the longstanding critique of these concepts by a range of critical theorists. With this thesis, I join other trans critics who have begun to question the liberatory promise of visibility and representation, particularly for trans people of colour.655 I intervene in the debates on the new cultural presence of ‘trans’ by critically analysing the assumptions that underpin calls for better trans representation and contemporary trans discourse more broadly, namely, the tendency to presume that ‘trans’ is a stable, legible, transhistorical, and universal concept. Examining how the discursive construction of ‘trans’ draws on science fictional ideas, I ask if feminist science fiction might offer alternative ways to think about ‘trans’ that might help us better navigate recent debates on trans rights. I seek to open up new ways to conceptualise ‘trans’. Mapping shifts in discursive formations around sex and gender over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, my research examines the investment in ‘trans’ over older categories of gender variance. I interrogate the conceptual instabilities of ‘trans’, highlighting the ongoing tensions that this supposedly more inclusive term obscures. Over the six chapters of my thesis, I explore how theoretical tools from queer theory and cultural studies can help us to think differently about ‘trans’, providing examples of how these tools might be used. In response to the logic of visibility-as-liberation in current political discourse, I ask different questions about what ‘trans’ means and what it does, drawing attention to the science fictional ideas that shape the conceptual field of trans debates. I thereby emphasise science fiction’s significance for understanding the discursive landscape in which ‘trans’ now 655 Gosset, Stanley, and Burton. 252 circulates, as well as the generative possibilities for a renewed attention to feminist science fiction works in the wake of the recent explosion of trans theory. I have been motivated by the following questions: Were we to reject the assumption that ‘trans’ is something already known or recognisable (in order to be better represented or made visible), what would it mean to rethink ‘trans’ as a conceptually unstable category of identity? How might the category install new regimes of regulation, new exclusions, new erasures, even as it promises greater visibility and inclusion? What would it mean to construct a genealogy of ‘trans’ based on the premise that ‘trans’ is not a transhistorical or universal category? In order to answer these questions, this interdisciplinary thesis has combined close readings of feminist science fiction writing and film with historicising analyses of media, political, and legal discourse. Through these mixed methods, I have argued that science fictional ideas have structured the debates on trans rights over the past few decades, with scholarly and popular discourse making explicit or implicit references to monsters, time-travel, and alien encounters. These science fiction tropes inform how both the advocates of trans rights and their opponents construct the current political, legal, and media landscape. In short, I have explored how the discursive terrain of ‘trans’ is steeped in science fiction. By exploring monsters, time-travel, and alien languages in the history of science fiction, I have shown how we can problematise the conceptual moves by which ‘trans’ appears as necessarily inclusive or exclusionary, progressive or threatening. Moreover, feminist science fiction works – especially those by writers and filmmakers who sought to trouble the genre’s boundaries and conventions – offer ways to reconceptualise our approach to ‘trans’: as a monstrous multiplicity of texts, as historically and geographically located, as radically 253 unintelligible and untranslatable. My close readings present ways to engage with the existing science-fictionality of current trans debates, approaching feminist science fiction writing and film as landscapes, laboratories, and imaginative toolboxes for experiments with thinking about sex and gender. Feminist science fiction works are crucial resources for trans scholarship. My analyses also problematise the assumptions at work in discussions of trans issues in media and activist discourses. Heeding the work of feminist, queer, and critical race scholars, I examine how progress narratives and the privileging of a white Western perspective shape contemporary trans debates. It may well be that in certain contexts, a ‘strategic essentialism’ of the kind Gayatri Spivak once proposed is necessary to advance trans rights.656 In response to the recent high court ruling on young people’s access to puberty-blocking hormones, for instance, it might be necessary to mobilise narratives about ‘trans identity’ that we might fiercely critique elsewhere. Yet much as the legibility and stability of ‘trans’ might be desired to rebuff transphobic talking points and simplify political campaign rhetoric, my research highlights that such essentialism carries significant risks. Attempting to pin down the meaning of ‘trans’ risks obscuring ongoing tensions between the categories ‘trans’ is thought to encompass. The ways in which we have come to think about ‘trans’ in popular discourse obfuscates the category’s default whiteness, intergenerational and intercultural tensions, and complex entanglement with both histories of colonialism and current international power imbalances. My study of feminist science fiction suggests how we might instead approach ‘trans’ as, like genre, open to creative reworkings. We might find that a radical reimagining of ‘trans’ renders essentialist or 656 Elizabeth Gross and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Criticism, Feminism and the Institution’, Thesis Eleven, 10– 11.1 (1985), 175–87 (pp. 183–84). 254 universalising positions unnecessary. The assumption that ‘trans’ is stable and universal underpins various activist, legal, medical, and scholarly projects that seek to affirm the legitimacy, longevity, and legibility of ‘trans’. Such projects aim to protect trans lives against external and internal violence, where ‘external’ refers to instances of physical and verbal violence and the violent biopolitical technologies of the state, and where ‘internal’ refers to the internalisation of abjection that leads to self-harm and suicide.657 My thesis shares this aim of advancing the movement towards trans liberation, but I investigate a different approach that conceives trans as a discursively constructed category. The supposed conceptual coherence of ‘trans’ is a fiction, and – as I outlined in the introduction – the corollary idea that better representational accuracy will secure trans people’s safety is already in doubt among many trans scholars and activists. My readings of feminist science fiction works indicate the political potential of telling new stories, of imagining alternative futures that challenge our present conceptions of the possible. This project of locating ‘trans’ in history and culture begins by tracing a critical genealogy of science fiction, problematising the common feminist claiming of Frankenstein as science fiction’s originary text. Examining this novel’s cultural and critical afterlives, this first chapter traces the discursive entanglement of sex, monstrosity, and the transsexual. My research finds that late-twentieth-century feminist critiques of Victor Frankenstein usurping women’s reproductive powers overlap with anti-trans radical feminists’ abjection of transsexual bodies through the figure of the monster. Later, transsexual and queer scholarship – starting 657 For more on the many forms that violence can take, see Butler, Excitable Speech, pp. 2–6; Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020). 255 with Jack Halberstam and Susan Stryker – reworks Frankenstein to inhabit and reclaim monstrosity through identification with Mary Shelley’s rageful creature. I argue that the common feminist reading of Shelley’s novel as a cautionary tale about male womb envy is uncomfortably amenable to transphobic rhetoric, especially in the wake of heightened media attention towards trans pregnancies. By mapping how early contributors to the emerging field of transgender studies reconfigured monstrosity, I demonstrate the generative and vital nature of this discursive move. The reclaiming of monstrosity has been pivotal in the emergence of ‘trans’ as a new category for gender variance encompassing multiple, sometimes contradictory identifications. Yet, as I explore, this reclaiming has often failed to attend to the discourses in which monstrosity – and the monster of Shelley’s novel in particular – is already embedded, often leaving questions of race and colonialism under- theorised. Chapter Two examines this question of the racialisation of monstrosity further, offering close readings of two feminist interventions into the historically white- and male-dominated genre of science fiction. I argue that Salt Fish Girl and ‘Hopeful Monsters’ both disturb the genre’s implication in racist and colonial pseudoscientific discourses in ways that suggest a possible alternative approach to the alignment of ‘trans’ with monstrosity. Demonstrating the inextricability of race from gender, Larissa Lai’s novel and Hiromi Goto’s short story use techniques of monstrous reproduction at the level of content, form, and genre to disrupt ideas of science fiction as inherently belonging to white Western traditions. In so doing, I argue, these works suggest how we might rethink ‘trans’ in terms of generic monstrosity. This approach requires us to take seriously Sandy Stone’s demand that we understand transsexuals ‘not as a class or problematic “third gender,” but rather as a genre – a set of 256 embodied texts’.658 If there is something monstrous about ‘trans’, it is less this category’s association with abject bodies, and more this category’s emergence at the collision of different discourses that are embedded in histories of racist and colonial violence. Moving on from monstrous bodies, Chapters Three and Four are organised around science fiction’s ideas of time-travel, examining how this convention informs scholarly and popular approaches to trans history. In Chapter Three, time-travel figures as a device with which to identify different trans history narratives. Taking the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference as a case study, I interrogate trans historiography’s relationship to what Doan terms ‘ancestral’ history. This mode of historical research is motivated by desires to recover or repair the ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ histories of those from marginalised communities.659 My argument in this chapter builds upon the work of Laura Doan and other queer historians who problematise these ancestral history narratives. These critics understand such narratives to be troubled by anachronistic misrecognition and a problematic adherence to a progress narrative of history as the unfolding of ever-greater knowledge. I warn against the tendency in projects of trans history to claim historical figures as ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’, attributing a legibility and intelligibility to the category that does not hold true. While the emphasis on recovery, recognition, and return in these projects of trans history resembles the time-travel stories of so many science fiction works, these histories neglect science fiction’s warnings about the dangers these desires to fix a broken past might pose. Continuing with this focus on time-travel and trans history, Chapter Four argues that feminist science fiction cinema offers ways to conceptualise different approaches to 658 Stone, p. 165. 659 Doan, Disturbing Practices, pp. 14–17. 257 constructing the history of categories of identity. This shift from literature to film considers the different tools film offers as an audiovisual medium. Expanding the genre of feminist science fiction to include film as well as writing requires that we reflect on the different trajectories and intertextualities of these two forms. In particular, film has a different relationship to time and space and the technology of the cinema has a different history to that of textual publication. This different relationship to time and history makes film well- suited to addressing questions of temporality in relation to trans history. My chosen films emphasise the spatial dimension of time-travel, raising questions about identity categories as necessarily geographically as well as historically specific. For this chapter, I analyse three examples of what I term ‘feminist time-travel films’ from the 1990s, independent feminist filmmaking that experiments with transfigured time in science fictional ways. My close readings of Orlando, Conceiving Ada, and The Sticky Fingers of Time show different attempts at grappling with how women and queers experience a strange relationship to time. In so doing, they offer frameworks for troubling trans history narratives that assume knowledge unfolds linearly. My readings of these works urge us to consider the ways in which ‘trans’ and its sexological predecessors have historically circulated in racial and colonial discourses. The final two chapters of the thesis analyse how science fictional ideas of alien language inform and structure contemporary debates about trans terminology and state recognition of trans identification. In Chapter Five, I borrow Ria Cheyne’s broad definition of the ‘alien’ beyond the strictly extraterrestrial to meditate on the resonances of the ‘alien’ in discourses of migration and border control. I thereby open up the colonial histories to which science fiction’s alien encounters are indebted. I argue that science fictional ideas of the alien 258 inform the contemporary discursive terrain of trans politics: the heightened attention directed at trans terminology as either a hopeful worldbuilding tool or menacing threat to meaning itself draws on science fictional ideas of alien language. Science fiction’s emergence out of colonial and racist discourses unsettles these allusions to the utopian or dystopian quality of trans terminology: the construction of new trans vocabulary as ‘alien’ fails to acknowledge how science fiction’s figuring of the alien draws upon colonial-era constructions of foreign and racialised others as non- or pre-human. Moreover, science fiction’s alien or artificial languages are interwoven with European imperialism, oppressive systems of globalization, and contemporary anglophone linguistic dominance. Both mainstream trans activist discourse and the backlash from so-called ‘gender-critical’ feminists allude to science fiction’s alien languages in ways that perpetuate normative notions of intelligibility: the former by producing rigid definitions of trans terminology for a predominantly non-trans readership; the latter by rendering trans existence the annihilation of sense and order. Both sides of the debate eclipse the role of anglophone neoliberal human rights discourse in subsuming other cultures’ terms for gender variance under the umbrella of ‘trans’. I argue for an alternative approach informed by anticolonial resistance strategies: maintaining this untranslatability of trans terminology by embracing the instability of meanings. This emphasis on untranslatability and instability might seem to fall into the much-critiqued trap of celebrating transgender identifications that emphasise gender indecipherability as powerfully transgressive over transsexual identifications that emphasise the radicalness of demanding a safe and stable life.660 However, the refusal to pin down what ‘trans’ refers to 660 On these debates, see: Elliot. 259 while also conceptualising ‘trans’ as a historically and culturally specific category presents a productive paradox for thinking through this tension. This paradox demands that we generate new ways of thinking and talking about ‘trans’ in terms of its continual discursive construction alongside other categories of gender variance. Instead of capitulating to the dominant logic of ‘trans’ as something already known that requires recognition through the current legal and medical structures, this means imagining how those structures might be transformed, such that conformity and recognition are not the basis on which the marginalised and vulnerable have access to care and community. Chapter Six extends the previous chapter’s discussion of the hope and fear invested in the changes to language that have come about in the wake of ‘trans’. This chapter interrogates the investment trans activists and so-called ‘gender-critical’ feminists share in the notion of language change as necessarily enacting political change. I read this assumption underpinning recent ‘trans’ debates on legal recognition and representation as a theory of performativity that bestows language with incredible political efficacy. Shifting across different discursive registers, I combine this analysis of recent debates on legal and political language with close readings of feminist science fiction works. The Native Tongue trilogy and Friendship’s Death present different forms of ‘alien language’ that trouble this conception of language as producing predetermined and inevitable effects. Suzette Haden Elgin’s novels demonstrate the problems with the theory of linguistic relativity, while Peter Wollen’s film explores the primacy of non-linguistic signs. Moving beyond other science fiction works that play with creating alien or otherwise artificial languages, Wollen and Elgin unsettle the opposition between language as literal or figurative, revealing a productive gap between sign and meaning that might inspire hope for trans politics. By placing these texts in dialogue with one another, my analysis also brings into play the question of language’s 260 relationship to cinematic systems of meaning-making, to suggest that trans filmmaking might offer terrain for future research. Concluding the thesis, this chapter brings us back to the present day by analysing recent debates on GRA reform. The chapters follow a somewhat chronological structure, in that they follow shifts in trans studies from the 1990s to the present day, beginning with the focus on monstrosity in the inaugural texts of trans studies, through ideas of time-travel in trans history works of the late 1990s and early aughts, and concluding on ideas of the alien quality of trans terminology in contemporary trans debates. The structure is not rigidly chronological though, emphasising that any history of trans discourse is necessarily more messy, winding, and circular than the conventional segmenting of time can convey. The feminist science fiction works on which the even-numbered chapters focus further disrupt the sense of linear progression. The fiction works appear in reverse, starting with early twenty-first century novels, back to 1990s time-travel films, and concluding with works from the 1980s; moreover, close analysis of other texts such as Frankenstein, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and “Some Definitions” disturb any sense of a clear chronological progression. The thesis weaves together feminist science fiction, historical events, and contemporary political debates in order to suggest how we might rethink ‘trans’ as a category emerging from the friction and flying sparks of different discourses bumping up against one another. Medical, political, legal, activist, and scholarly discourses produce ‘trans’ through language and ideas indebted to science fiction. Transsexual and transgender embodiment has long been described by feminist and queer theorists as a kind of science fiction made real – either dystopian horror or queer utopianism.661 This thesis offers ways to move beyond this 661 See for example: Daly; Kroker. 261 framing, which effectively paints trans liberation as always something futuristic rather than, as Harry Josephine Giles puts it, ‘labour already underway’.662 Approaching feminist science fiction as another discourse involved in the co-production of ‘trans’ suggests how we might intentionally engage the genre’s capacity for imagining new worlds in order to envision new possibilities for trans research and activism – new technologies, new social and kinship structures, new forms of protest and solidarity. Such explorations of science fiction’s potential are already underway with the publication of Meanwhile, Elsewhere (2017), an anthology of trans-authored speculative fiction. Yet my thesis demonstrates the critical value of existing feminist science fiction literature and film for offering new perspectives on contemporary trans debates. This thesis contributes primarily to conversations across trans studies concerning how ‘trans’ is understood to signify, but in engaging with science fiction studies – and feminist science fiction studies in particular – my work forges new avenues for future research. My findings join a new wave of trans scholars in challenging some of the field’s foundational approaches to the study of trans history and culture. However, my work offers a unique perspective that attends to the place of science fictional ideas in shaping contemporary cultural imaginaries. To understand the rhetorical moves that shape political investments in ‘trans’, I argue we need to attend to the cultural frame of science fiction. My thesis suggests that analyses of science fiction film and literature and engagement with science fiction criticism can illuminate how discursive categories emerge and circulate, allowing us to understand how they might be transformed. By combining the study of feminist science fiction writing and film, this work has posed 662 Giles, Wages for Transition, p. 16. 262 questions about the different techniques these forms employ and thus the different tools they offer to think with. As feminist science fiction develops bodies of work in other forms – computer games, visual art, comics and graphic novels, animation, zines, poetry, music, performance, and fashion – scholars interested in ideas of reimagining gender and sexuality might explore how these forms give shape and texture to ongoing debates on sex and gender in popular discourse and what they offer in terms of theoretical tools. My thesis offers a model for such cross-media analysis in the context of trans debates. The texts in my corpus also disrupt the stability of generic boundaries and origin stories. As technological possibilities and platforms for sharing ideas shift, attention to reconfigurations of the genre in new forms prove necessary for the insights they offer into how gender and sexuality develop in relation to these changes. Resisting Progress Narratives The stability and coherence of ‘trans’ is presumed necessary to communicate trans experience to non-trans people, in order that trans people might access healthcare and social services, as well as legal recognition and protection. The ‘wrong body’ narrative is one such example of how trans people have had to explain their understandings of themselves in essentialist terms to access transition healthcare: without the right narrative of embodied experience, trans people are barred from the particular diagnoses that permit hormonal and surgical treatments, or legal recognition.663 As Giles puts it in their zine-manifesto Wages for Transition (2019) ‘our minds, bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function, in a specific function, and have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted in this society’.664 The dominant liberal model 663 Engdahl. 664 Giles, Wages for Transition, p. 13. 263 promises that simplifying or stabilising ‘trans’ for a non-trans audience will better facilitate the process of transition – whether legal or medical – and ensure the safety and acceptance of trans people. This promise has not held true. As Chapters Three and Five have argued, such simplified narratives of trans experience have sometimes backfired, with gender-critical feminists and right-wing commentators using ideas of gender as an inner feeling or free choice to dismiss calls for better legal protections for trans people. Those trans people whose experiences do not meet the normative conception of ‘trans’ are rendered unintelligible. ‘In the same way that a life for which no categories of recognition exist is not a livable life’, Judith Butler writes, ‘so a life for which those categories constitute unlivable constraint is not an acceptable option’.665 The dominant construction of ‘trans’ in popular discourse produces its own constraints even as it seems to offer recognition – as Reina Gosset, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton put it, doors that become traps, promised shortcuts to acceptance and freedom that rapidly show themselves to be dangerous dead-ends.666 The assumption that ‘trans’ is a timeless category is a feature of many history projects uncovering forgotten or erased stories of trans figures. Such works often trace the lineage of contemporary trans activism back to earlier moments of invert, transvestite, and transsexual collective resistance, community formation, and joyful celebration. These narratives of trans history, discussed in Chapters Three and Four, are valued in part for the sense they produce of a community across time, even providing a kind of ghostly kinship network for those too often abandoned by their first families. Historic examples of invert, 665 Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 8. 666 Gosset, Stanley, and Burton. 264 transvestite, and cross-dressing figures inspire hope for young trans people, for whom rates of suicide and suicidal ideation are extraordinarily high.667 Some trans activists and scholars view these trans histories as useful tools to vindicate trans existence in the present by refuting the claims of transphobic groups that ‘trans’ is a fad, an ideology, or a conspiracy. The supposed existence of trans phenomena in all cultures likewise serves to assert transness as a ‘natural’ human trait, while offering examples of how trans people might be included and even revered in society. As writer and theatre- maker Travis Alabanza points out, the notion that ‘trans’ and ‘non-binary’ in particular are only recently constructed functions to disparage trans and non-binary people as the naïve dupes of a fashionable ‘trend’.668 Moreover, this sense of novelty is bound up with a white Western gaze that refuses to acknowledge the role of colonialism in policing other cultural forms of gender variance: ‘Whiteness becomes a default in deciding when something exists, and with that erases the complex, nuanced and rich history of Black and brown people’.669 For trans people of colour, the existence of ‘countless examples of indigenous ways of being outside the binary’, as Alabanza puts it, is a way of making sense of the self when white frameworks fail to fit.670 This thesis argues that this sense of ‘trans’ as a transhistorical and universal phenomenon carries significant risks. We lose the opportunity to understand how people historically understood sexual and gender deviance, including the indebtedness of ‘trans’ to feminist 667 See for example the photographs of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld holding a party at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft or of former slave and ‘first drag queen’ William Dorsey Swann posing for the camera: Peter Tatchell, ‘This Week in History: Sex Scientist Magnus Hirschfeld’, People’s World, 2018 and queer histories that I explore in Chapters Three and Four. By viewing ‘trans’ as an umbrella term for different forms of non-normative gender, we ignore the specific discursive shifts that produced categories of pathological sex/gender behaviour. The supposed multiplicity and inclusivity of ‘trans’ obscures gender’s inextricability from race, the focus of Chapters Two and Four. We also flatten out the differences between categories that have stood in tension with one another – often in highly racialised and classed ways, as Chapters One and Three show. The progress narrative that positions ‘trans’ as the most up- to-date language for gender variance neglects the ways in which the meaning of ‘trans’ now continues to be managed: As Chapter Five explores, well-intentioned trans terminology guides inadvertently play into pathologizing and depoliticised models of gender, while bolstering frameworks of legal recognition that, as Chapter Six examines, fail to address trans people’s vulnerability to violence. Moreover, the sense of ‘trans’ as universal is deeply embedded in a human rights discourse that perpetuates the rhetoric of white saviourhood and non-Western backwardness, as explored in Chapters Four and Five. The tendency to subsume other cultural forms of gender variance to the Western model of ‘trans’ sometimes carries specific material effects in terms of access to legal recognition and healthcare.671 My thesis thus critiques progress narratives within trans discourse – but can progress narratives be put aside so easily? Robyn Wiegman and Clare Hemmings both warn us about the tendency in feminist writing to pit the present against the past in such a way that casts earlier political movements as inherently essentialist and thus insufficiently attentive to intersectional issues. In Wiegman’s analysis of the transition from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ in feminist discourse, she writes that ‘race’ can function as ‘the very excess or the remainder 671 Jarrin. 266 of the anxiety that the turn away from the founding paradigm of women can neither allay nor undo, no matter the intensity of the transferential investment’.672 Similarly, Hemmings has pointed out that the critique of feminist essentialism – of singularity, insufficient nuance, overgeneralising – is often a coded critique of racism: ‘[t]he anxiety of being labeled essentialist or anachronistic within Western feminist theory is thus a more precise anxiety of being understood as racist’.673 Both Wiegman and Hemmings are sceptical of how ‘race’ functions in critiques of the feminist past, sometimes offering a way to perform anti-racism without actually attending to the complexity of ‘race’ as a category. We can claim to transcend a failure to engage with ‘race’, but this failure will remain with us. Despite its intention otherwise, my argument risks falling into such a progress narrative. By positioning previous trans scholarship and activism as failing to address satisfactorily issues of race and colonialism, my own research might appear as offering the solution that can overcome these problems. In critiquing existing progress narratives, do I risk unwittingly installing my own? I hope instead to take heed of Wiegman and Hemming’s analyses: rather than offering a neat resolution to the ways in which ‘trans’ can function to obscure issues of race, my research seeks to open up more questions about what it would mean, as Wiegman might put it, to ‘[resist] the imperative to “move on”’, to resist the fantasy that the new category will resolve the old problems. What would it mean to resist progress narratives of ‘trans’ as more inclusive than its predecessors, without lapsing into a new progress narrative that reifies ‘race’? My research indicates that through genealogical approaches we can reflect on these tendencies, while the critical utopias of science fiction remind us that 672 Wiegman, p. 51. 673 Hemmings, p. 44. 267 liberation is an ongoing process and not a final destination. This continued troubling of progress narratives is particularly needed with the growing attention towards ‘non-binary’, a category of identity at once distinct from and a subcategory of ‘trans’. Non-binary has a complex relationship to other cultures’ forms of gender variance that explicitly reject the notion of gender/sex as binary, including indigenous and Black queer subcultures that reject sex binarism as the imposition of colonial logics. There has not been space in this thesis to give ‘non-binary’ the sustained attention it deserves, given its growing significance in UK debates on gender-neutral language, unisex public facilities, and gender markers on identification documents. My thesis does however offer ideas as to how we might engage with ‘non-binary’ using a genealogical approach, as well as posing questions about how political investments in mainstream discourse might shift from ‘trans’ to ‘non-binary’. By reading my corpus in dialogue with contemporary trans debates, I have indicated how feminist science fiction film and writing might offer ways to rethink how we understand ‘trans’. Lai and Goto’s reworkings of the science fiction genre emphasise the inextricability of gender and race, suggesting that we might rethink ‘trans’ in terms of genre in order to highlight the historic racialisation of medicalised categories for gender variance. The way in which feminist time-travel films emphasises the spatial dimension to time-travel urges us to locate ‘trans’ as both a historically and geographically specific category, a relatively recent construct distinct from ‘transvestite’ or ‘transsexual’. Feminist science fiction’s alien languages – literal and figurative, literary and cinematic – offer ways to embrace the necessary unintelligibility and untranslatability of the category, so that we remain, as Butler 268 might put it, ‘permanently troubled’ by ‘trans’.674 Expanding upon Stone’s famous theorisation of the posttranssexual as a ‘set of embodied texts’, my work over these six chapters in effect places ‘trans’ and ‘science fiction’ in a reflexive relationship, gesturing outwards to reconceptualisations of science fiction – and even genre itself – in terms of discursive categories. In the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, trans politics have taken on even greater urgency. On June 14th 2020, thousands of people protested the severe violence faced by black trans people by gathering outside the Brooklyn Museum in New York, dressed in white in a nod to the 1917 Silent Parade in which the NAACP protested against anti-black violence.675 A fortnight later, thousands of protesters also marched on London’s streets to protest discrimination against black trans people and government plans to obstruct trans people’s access to single-sex facilities.676 These mass demonstrations suggest a political opening, the potential for a radical shift in trans politics to emerge. In an online public roundtable reflecting on the current political moment in relation to abolitionist politics, Black feminist theorist Angela Davis remarked that ‘the trans community is showing us the way […] this community has taught us how to challenge that which is totally accepted as normal […] that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy’.677 In order to envision the radical possibilities of this 674 Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’. 675 Anushka Patil, ‘How a March for Trans Lives Became a Huge Event’, New York Times, 15 June 2020 current political moment, my research has suggested that feminist science fiction film and writing might offer useful tools, while also urging us to pause and reflect on the discursive construction of ‘trans’ and its effects. 270 Bibliography Abel, Richard, ‘Early and Pre-Sound Cinema’, in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook, Third (London: British Film Institute, 2007), pp. 3–11 Aldiss, Brian, W., Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson: 1973) Andersen, Hans Christian, The Little Mermaid (Copenhagen: Scandinavia Publishing House, 2005) Amin, Kadji, ‘Temporality’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (2014), 219–22 Armstrong, Elizabeth A., and Suzanna M. 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Born in Flames, dir. by Borden, Lizzie (1983), First Run Features Bound, dir. by Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski (1996), Gramercy Pictures Boy Meets Girl, created by Kerrigan, Elliott (2015-16), Endemol UK [TV] Boys Don’t Cry, dir. by Peirce, Kimberly (1999), Fox Searchlight Pictures Butterfly, created by Marchant, Tony (2018), StudioCanal [TV] Carol, dir. by Haynes, Todd (2015), StudioCanal UK Cherry 2000, dir. by De Jarnatt, Steve (1987), Orion Pictures Conceiving Ada, dir. by Leeson, Lynn Hershman (1999, c1997), WinStar TV & Video Devil Girl from Mars, dir. by MacDonald, David (1954), British Lion Films Dial M for Murder, dir. by Hitchcock, Alfred (1954), Warner Bros. Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, dir. by Feder, Sam (2020), Netflix Far From Heaven, dir. by Haynes, Todd (2002), Focus Features Friendship’s Death, dir. by Wollen, Peter (1989, c1987), British Film Institute Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, dir. by Feig, Paul (2016), Sony Pictures Releasing Ghost in the Shell, dir. by Oshii, Mamoru (1995), Manga Entertainment Girl, dir. by Dhont, Lukas (2018), Lumière I am Cait, created by Jenner, Caitlyn (2015-2016), E! [TV] Killer’s Kiss, dir. by Kubrick, Stanley (1955), United Artists Kiss Me Deadly, dir. by Aldrich, Robert (1955), United Artists Lawrence of Arabia, dir. by Lean, David (1962), Columbia Pictures Looper, dir. by Johnson, Rian (2012), TriStar Pictures Mad Max: Fury Road, dir. by Miller, George (2015), Warner Bros. Pictures 304 Only Lovers Left Alive, dir. by Jarmusch, Jim (2013), Soda Pictures Orange is the New Black, created by Kohan, Jenji (2013-2019), Netflix [TV] Orlando, dir. by Potter, Sally (1992), Sony Pictures Classics Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, dir. by Mulvey, Laura, and Peter Wollen (1974), British Film Institute Pose, created by Murphy, Ryan, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals (2018-), FX/20th Television [TV] Prevenge, dir. by Lowe, Alice (2017), Kaleidoscope Entertainment. Psycho, dir. by Hitchcock, Alfred (1960), Paramount Pictures Riddles of the Sphinx, dir. by Mulvey, Laura, and Peter Wollen (1977), British Film Institute Ritual in Transfigured Time, dir. by Deren, Maya (1946) [available on YouTube] Screaming Queens, dir. by Stryker, Susan, and Victor Silverman (2005), Frameline Seahorse, dir. by Finlay, Jeanie (2019), not on general release Sense8, created by Wachowski, Lana, Lilly Wachowski, and J. Michael Staczynski (2015-2018), Netflix [TV] Silence of the Lambs, dir. by Demme, Jonathan (1991), Orion Pictures Star Trek, created by Roddenberry, Gene (1966-) [TV and Film] Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, dir. by Lucas, George (1977), 20th Century Fox Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, dir. by Kershner, Irvin (1980), 20th Century Fox Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, dir. by Abrams, J.J. (2015), Walt Disney Strange Culture, dir. by Leeson, Lynn Hershman (2007), Videorama Teknolust, dir. by Leeson, Lynn Hershman (2002), Velocity Entertainment The Astounding She-Monster, dir. by Ashcroft, Ronnie (1958), American International Pictures The Big Heat, dir. by Lang, Fritz (1953), Columbia Pictures The Brood, dir. by Cronenberg, David (1979), New World Pictures The Butterfly Effect, dir. by Bress, Eric, and J. Mackye Gruber (2004), New Line Cinema The Exorcist, dir. by Friedkin William (1973), Warner Bros. Pictures The Fly, dir. by Cronenberg, David (1986), 20th Century Fox The Fly, dir. by Neumann, Kurt (1958), 20th Century Fox The Handmaid’s Tale, created by Miller, Bruce (2017-present), Hulu [TV] The Man from Earth, dir. by Schenkman, Richard (2007), Anchor Bay Entertainment/Shoreline Entertainment The Matrix, dir. by Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski (1999), Warner Bros. The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), dir. by Almodóvar, Pedro (2011), Warner Bros. Spain The Stepford Wives, dir. by Forbes, Bryan (1975), Columbia Pictures 305 The Sticky Fingers of Time, dir. by Brougher, Hilary (1997), Strand Releasing The Terminator, dir. by Cameron, James (1984), Orion Pictures The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, dir. by Hooper, Tobe (1986), Cannon Releasing The Wasp Woman, dir. by Corman, Roger, and Jack Hill (1959), Allied Artists Pictures Corporation Top of the Lake, created by Jane Campion and Gerard Lee (2013-2017), BBC Two [TV] Transparent, created by Soloway, Joey (2014-2019), Amazon Studios [TV] Vertigo, dir. by Hitchcock, Alfred (1958), Paramount Pictures We the Others, dir. by Borg, Maja (2014), not on general release Woman on the Run, dir. by Foster, Norman (1950), Universal Pictures