16 CAES Vol. 6, № 3

The cultural production of gendered space

Natacha Kennedy Research Centre for Identities and Social Justice, Department of Educational Studies; Goldsmiths, University of London [email protected]

Abstract

Drawing on the different ways that different societies have constructed transgender people in the past, with particular reference to the Ainu people of Northern Japan, this paper argues that different ways of understanding trans people in different societies evidenced through remaining cultural material today demonstrate a greater sophistication in terms of including trans people than in European-based societies historically as well as at present. Although these named groups represent the categories of trans people accepted in other cultures, it is argued that this probably conceals more gender diversity in these societies than it reveals, the diversity that was erased by colonial oppression. Consequently, it is argued that trans people need to be fully engaged in defining and encouraging the many different possibilities for gendered existence.

Keywords: Identification; colonialism; transgender; epistemic injustice

The future must be lived now. Marquis Bey

This paper explores how trans people come to identify and be identified in different cultural and historical contexts and how those need to inform our thinking about the future. In particular it draws on Akulov and Nonno (2015) evidencing the ways trans people in the indigenous cultures of northern Japan and the Kuril Islands identified and raises issues about the effects of colonialism and epistemic injustice in relation to trans people’s processes of identification, especially in European-based/dominated cultural environments.

Anzaldua (1987) described how people from her own ethnic group became able to identify, as a group, only as recently as the mid 1960s, despite having existed for generations in South Texas:

Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965 when Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers united and I am Joaquin was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul – we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together – who we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might become (Anzaldua 1987: 85).

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This group became aware of its own existence as a distinct group, by the act of naming themselves, the significance of which was characterised by Foucault (1976). This does not mean, of course that both Chicanos/Chicanas did not exist before 1965, they were just not able to name themselves as a group until then.

Trans people have existed in most cultures through most of history, there is evidence that we date back many thousands of years1. However, the way we have been classified in gendered terms appears to have varied significantly. In many instances societies have characterised us as a “third gender” (Williams 1986), some others have maintained the existing binary gender system characterised by Akulov & Nonno (2015) the people of “converted gender” of the Ainu people. There is of course the possibility that the binary gender system was a result of the influence of wider Japanese culture that developed during the Edo period.

However, insofar as trans people are concerned, the differing classifications in different times and cultures are significant because it is possible to identify in all cultures a number of different groups that today might be characterised in different ways. For example, trans men, trans women, non-binary people, gender fluid people, two-spirit people, those who define themselves as “queer” (Hines 2007) and doubtless many other groups. However, the Ainu recognition of trans women as women, as opposed to a third gender, is significant as a departure from many other cultures.

So what is the position of trans people outside these culturally-accepted groups? The answer might be found in Williams (1986), who reports that some two-spirit women in North America tended to go further than others in adopting women’s gender performance and appearance, including adopting identical facial decorations to cis women while ostensibly maintaining a third gender identity.

If, in some societies trans people have been accommodated within the gender binary and others through non-binary identities, was there likely to have been, as Williams (ibid) suggests, an element of people “shoe-horning” themselves into identities that were culturally available to them at the time? This may be illustrated as occurring in Europe and the US most notably Halberstam’s (1998) work on “Border Wars” in the 1990s exemplifies how, when the became available, some who had previously adopted a butch lesbian identity came out as trans men. Is it possible that, in those societies that recognised gender diversity, differently gendered people would have been allowed to define themselves differently even if they were not recorded as doing so?

The answer to this may become more apparent if we regard this issue from a non- Eurocentric perspective. In European-based cultures the “confessional” aspect of culture, resonating with the Foucauldian (2008) concept of governmentality in respect of identity, may be absent in many non-European or pre-colonised cultures. The bureaucratic nature of European-based societies means that, for trans people in such cultures, discursive declarations of gender are particularly important, including having genders recognised in

1 See: Pink News. 5,000-year-old ‘transgender’ skeleton discovered.

18 CAES Vol. 6, № 3 official documents and identity papers, having the correct pronouns and names used and other discursive signifiers. This reflects the cultural environment in which trans people in European-based societies are embedded, because of the bureaucratisation of gender. Therefore these signifiers can be regarded, not merely as vital protections from discrimination and violence but as important recognition signifiers, something Olson et al (2016) have confirmed with reference to trans children. In other cultures this level of formal declaration may not always have been necessary or even recorded, if gender recognition functioned on a local and informal level it may not have been required. In our cultures they are vital.

In the same way that cis genders have existed differently (eg. Oyewumi 1997) trans people have also existed in different ways throughout human history, as has been detailed by Garber (1992), Snorton (2017) and Wiesner-Hanks (2011). Lugones (2007) observes how, the functioning of colonial oppression meant that race and gender represented inseparable organising principles for global capitalism in the operation of colonial domination. As a result European classification systems, including those of gender, were imposed almost ubiquitously on most of the globe. Oyewumi’s (1997) characterisation of colonial oppression as constituting both racial and gender subordination of women is significant. If genders were not differentiated in terms of power prior to colonisation that may have had a significant influence on transgender acceptance and cultural accommodation.

What Akulov’s & Nonno’s (2015) research highlights are the possible variations between different cultures and the cultural production of identification to the extent that, in many ways it could be argued that different identities now classified as trans were not always recognised in every culture. This, of course, needs to be qualified by the recognition that non-discursive (and consequently less likely to be recorded) practices of gender identification may have occurred because in some cultures formal declarations of identity were not required.

However, a more productive lens to examine differences in the ways trans people are constituted in different cultures and at different times, but particularly in European- dominated ones, may be that of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007, Dotson 2011) and in particular hermeneutical epistemic injustice (Medina 2017). For trans people this manifests itself in the lack of available conceptualisations of different kinds of trans and non-binary people, and of the different ways of being trans, resulting in trans people being unable to understand their own identities because the information they require is unavailable to them. This is evident in recent history in European-based cultures in particular. Resonating with Halberstam (1998), one of Beemyn’s & Rankin’s (2011) most significant findings was that trans people born from the last decade of the 20th century onwards, appear to have concealed their gender identities for a much shorter time period than those born earlier. This can be regarded as a consequence of a reduction in the effect of hermeneutic epistemic injustice, which denied these groups the knowledge they needed to understand themselves as trans people.

Stryker (2006) suggested that, in European-based societies, this was the consequence of a change in episteme occurring around 500 years ago. This change resulted in the basis of European culture changing from one where the spiritual predominated, to one where the 19 CAES Vol. 6, № 3 material prevailed. So analysing trans people’s experiences in different cultural environments from the perspective of epistemic injustice may also be the most productive way to regard trans people’s experiences in different cultural and historical settings. In particular, it helps to understand the origins and endemic nature of colonial European culture’s transphobia.

This highlights the need for trans people to take control over the way we identify, and how this needs to be both inclusive, multicultural and uncoerced, extending beyond what is currently available in European-based cultures and to attempt to understand different and new and old ways of being gendered. Colonialism’s obliteration of many differently- gendered ways of being, and the existence of people of converted gender in Ainu culture suggests that there may have been a considerable variety of different ways trans people have existed in different cultures. This implies that there may be different ways of being gendered that, as yet, are not visible, but which may emerge anew or again in the future. Trans people in all cultures need to control this process and ensure that trans people of all kinds are fully and actively included. Inclusive gender identification needs to be regarded therefore as an element of decolonisation. Collectively and individually we need to avoid hegemonic, Eurocentric cis- and transnormativity being externally or coercively imposed on trans people. Trans history - in particular of trans people in European-based societies and those subject to colonial domination - demonstrates the importance of inclusive self- identification not merely from an individual human rights perspective. It is a vital and fundamental element in the collective and cultural development of (trans)gender actualisation and liberation in all senses, something without which society as a whole is immeasurably poorer.

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