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Download (1MB) A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details VARIATIONS: TRANSGENDER MEMOIR, THEORY AND FICTION A thesis submitted to the University of Sussex for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of English January 2019 GEORGINA JULIET BUCKELL (JULIET JACQUES) SCHOOL OF ENGLISH CONTENTS ABSTRACT 4 DECLARATION 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7 NOTES ON FORMATTING 8 INTRODUCTION 9 CHAPTER ONE: TOWARDS A TRANS-HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING 17 A NIGHT AT THE THEATRE 21 A NIGHT AT THE THEATRE: DRAMATISING THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE, THE 34 POLICE AND THE PRESS A WO/MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE 39 A WO/MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE: VICTORIAN LITERATURE, QUEER SUBCULTURE 53 AND THE CRIMINAL LAW AMENDMENT ACT 1885 RECONFIGURATION 58 RECONFIGURATION: FEMALE-TO-MALE PEOPLE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF 81 SEXOLOGY CHAPTER TWO: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ACTIVISM AND CULTURAL 88 REPRESENTATION DANCING WITH THE DEVIL 91 DANCING WITH THE DEVIL, TRANSSEXUAL MEMOIR AND MASS MEDIA 108 NEVER GOING UNDERGROUND 113 NEVER GOING UNDERGROUND AND THE GAPS IN LGBT HISTORY 132 ‘THE TWIST’ 140 ‘THE TWIST’: HYBRID FORMS, TRANS THEORY AND THE SUSPICION OF MEMOIR 196 CHAPTER THREE: TOWARDS A THIRD WAVE OF TRANS WRITING 207 CROSSING 211 CROSSING AND BRITISH TRANS THEORY, PRAXIS AND PERFORMANCE 231 TIPPING POINT 237 TIPPING POINT: BUYING IN, OR SELLING OUT? 260 CONCLUSION: FICTION, THEORY AND MEMOIR AFTER THE ‘TIPPING POINT’ 265 BIBLIOGRAPHY 278 Word count: 82,821 4 ABSTRACT This practice-based, Creative and Critical Writing PhD consists of eight short stories that tell a history of transgender (hereafter trans: a label that covers transsexual, transvestite, transgender and non-binary) people in the United Kingdom from the Victorian period to the present, and a critical thesis about the uses and possibilities of such a project after nearly a century of writing by transgender people that has almost exclusively been autobiographical or theoretical, putting my stories (or ‘Variations’) into their historical, political and theoretical contexts. Between them, the Creative and Critical aspects of my PhD demonstrate not just the infinite possibilities of gender self-identification, but also the possibilities for their creative expression, helping to ignite a British literary culture that is not just transgender but also trans-genre. Based on extensive reading, interviews and research, my creative practice moves from the constitution of trans identities via urbanisation (shown in my first story, A Night at the Theatre), legal persecution (A Wo/Man of No Importance) and sexological definition (Reconfiguration) to the challenges of the media ‘outing’ transsexual people (Dancing with the Devil), the marginalisation of trans people within gay and lesbian-led political movements (Never Going Underground) and the portrayal of trans people within mainstream UK cinema during the 1990s (‘The Twist’). Moving into the 21st century, it looks at some of the fractures that made it harder for trans people to organise outside of mainstream political parties or LGB (and not always T) institutions (Crossing) and the frustrations of trying to work within the mainstream media, to make trans people not just more visible in themselves, but also to raise awareness of their social concerns (Tipping Point). The stories are set in a variety of locations – several take place in London, but others play out in Cardiff, Manchester, Brighton and Belfast. They feature a range of protagonists, starting with male-to-female cross-dressers, taking in the country’s first transsexual men of the inter-war period, to the transsexual women who found themselves on the fringes of the gay liberation movement after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, and the emergence of non-binary people in the 21st century. The Critical Commentary builds on this process of creative-critical practice. It looks at how and why memoir became the dominant mode of trans writing, with autobiographical 5 texts becoming a crucial means for trans authors to counter the tropes of exploitative press coverage. It also asks how transgender theory arose (almost exclusively in North America) through critiques of those memoirs, addressing the work of Kate Bornstein and Sandy Stone in particular. It looks at the reasons for those two genres forming the framework for nearly all writing by trans people about trans people until very recently. It concludes by proposing that new forms are needed that will enable more complicated contracts between authors and readers than have been possible in non-fiction works; and enable us not just to bridge, but to transcend the divide between ‘memoir’, which has long been characterised as written for ‘outsiders’, and ‘theory’, positioned as being written for ‘us’ [trans people]. In this light, it concludes that fiction, because of its capacity to speculate about characters’ motives rather than simply describe their actions, might be able to provoke people to think about the historical presence of trans people, and the formation of a ‘community’ with shared social and political concerns, in different ways. 6 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signed: Date: 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to Margaretta Jolly and Sam Solomon for their supervision of this thesis, as they provided great insight and encouragement throughout. It was a pleasure to return to the University of Sussex after ten years away, and find that it remained a natural home for me and my work: I must also thank Vicky Lebeau and Rachel O’Connell for helping me to locate not just the right project, but also a source of funding – my gratitude also goes to the Consortium for the Arts and Humanities in the South-East (CHASE) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for their generous support. I am also grateful to the team at Somerset House Studios, where I wrote most of these stories. Over the years, I have been glad to be able to exchange ideas with a number of trans activists and writers, some of whom – Christine Burns, Roz Kaveney and Nat Raha – are named in this thesis. Hugh Fell, Em Temple-Malt, Louise Wallwein and Sarah Wilkinson were wonderful interviewees for Never Going Underground, and I am grateful to Ra Page for commissioning it in Comma Press’ Protest anthology. Thanks also to Josh Appignanesi for reading ‘The Twist’ and providing feedback on the workings of the film industry, and comrade Georgy Mamedov at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan for providing a platform for me to discuss this project with a completely different audience. 8 NOTES ON FORMATTING I decided to interweave the Creative and Critical Writing sections of this Ph.D. into a single paper, as outlined on the Contents page. There is an overall Introduction, and then three sub-sections consisted of an introduction, followed by a story, and then a critical commentary on that story. Finally, there is an overall Conclusion, then the Bibliography. As the stories are written in a variety of styles (explained in the Critical sections) that (often) replicate existing forms, certain formatting decisions need an explanatory note. A Wo/Man of No Importance and Reconfiguration use footnotes to explain references in the texts; I have kept these as footnotes rather than converting them to endnotes to make it easier for readers to immerse themselves in the narratives, and to emphasise that these notes are an essential formal device for these stories. (Consequently, the endnotes refer only to references made in the Critical commentaries.) In Reconfiguration, R.’s testimony is presented in Baskerville Old Face (11pt) to distinguish it from the surrounding text, matching the convention in Havelock Ellis’s Eonism (1928), on which the story is based. Meanwhile, ‘The Twist’ is written as a screenplay, so I have used the UK film/TV industry’s standard formatting as much as possible, setting it in Courier New (12pt), indenting dialogue and character names accordingly, including the ‘FADE IN:’ and ‘FADE OUT:’ usually found at the beginning and end of each scene. I only used a couple of standard abbreviations in the script: ‘OOV’ means ‘Out of View’, and ‘V/O’ is voice-over. Finally, Tipping Point is a collection of blog posts, set in 2014: the use of Arial font for the dates and brown text for the posts’ titles replicates the format of early 2010s platforms. 9 VARIATIONS: Transgender memoir, theory and fiction INTRODUCTION ‘I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic “third gender,” but rather as a genre – a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored.’ (Sandy Stone, The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto)1 First published in 1987, trans artist and media theorist Sandy Stone’s call for gender- variant people to explore space between male and female through writing launched a revolution in the way that transgender identities were constituted. Stone’s text was circulated via early 1990s digital networks, inaugurating a line of transgender theory and activism that, over the following decades, moved from the margins into mainstream media, leading to Time magazine’s famous ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ article of May 2014, and beyond.2 The prominence of Time’s claim – accompanied by a photograph of Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox, then the world’s best-known trans actor – set a paradigm for discussions about the nature of trans media representation, politics and theory, and how they related to each other.
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