General Editors' Introduction

General Editors’ Introduction SUSAN STRYKER and PAISLEY CURRAH ooking back over the first volume of TSQ, including this issue devoted to L cultural production with which our inaugural year concludes, we are struck anew by the depth and breadth of research that can be conducted through the lens of transgender studies. As editors Julian B. Carter, David J. Getsy, and Trish Salah point out in the opening paragraph of their introduction, the question of how creativity expresses itself through the cultural reworking of the material world, including the transformation of our own living bodies, cannot be separated from very general questions about the long arc of our species’ experience, the human enterprise, and the evolving margins of these undertakings. Transgender studies can thus sink long taproots into analyses grounded in the concept of culture, histories of art, philosophies of the body, and theories of representation as it tries to make sense of a contemporary moment in which mass media completely saturated with trans- content, and trans-related literary works, visual media, and other arts practices are exploding into unprecedented levels of popular awareness and critical attention. Significantly, the field of cultural production encompassing trans- topics increasingly includes work that addresses neither the making of art and literature by people understood to be transgender in some sociological sense nor the representation of such lives in creative work but, rather, that expresses capacities, perceptions, feelings, and knowledges informed, often obliquely and in non- identitarian ways, by experiences and consequences of nonnormative genderings and embodiments. Perhaps transgender creativity can be thought to occupy a chaotic intersection, at which Eurocentric modernity’s ongoing quest for the transcendence of tradition through new aesthetic forms crashes into the limit of our dawning reality that we are living amid what will likely be viewed as the next great planetary extinction. Might transgender name no more and no less than the common work of imagining the transformation of our embodied personhood in light of a future in which “human” as we have known it will be absent, perhaps having become something else? TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Number 4 * November 2014 467 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2815102 ª 2014 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/4/467/485070/467.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 468 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly If there is an overarching theme in the work collected herein, it is that of the relationship between trans- and poiesis: etymologically, simply “making”; literally, the root of poetry, which is a making of meaning that exceeds the functional communicative use of language; materially and metaphorically, a plo- sive breath of life into word; critically, as in Heidegger, that which brings forth; most expansively, a creative action that transforms and continues the world. How might transversal movement across existing categorizations, conceptualizations, and organizations of being be generative of new becomings, emergent life, novel modes of continuance? These are the questions that motivate trans cultural production, that invite us all to move and to make ourselves and our worlds differently. To engage with and enact such concerns in the pages of an academic jour- nal is to confront restrictions in one’s mode of expression: we must work in print media, with a few pictures. Printed words stage the body’s absence, yet the relationship of creative expression to bodies in processes of transformation is pre- cisely what seems most vital to address. Consequently, the work collected here is, for the most part, the representation in words of works of cultural production in other media. The editors of this issue nevertheless have done a commendable job selecting a collection of essays that document the wide range of contemporary trans cultural production, including work not only on literature but also on photography, film, architecture, dance, theater, performance art, new media, and curation. These essays offer the field of transgender studies a useful point of departure for the ongoing and potentially vast undertaking of trans cultural criticism and the interpretation of trans cultural production. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/4/467/485070/467.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 Introduction JULIAN B. CARTER, DAVID J. GETSY, and TRISH SALAH his issue of TSQ explores trans both in relation to and as a form of creative T practice—a project that repeatedly brought the editorial team face-to-face with some fundamental questions. What does trans look like? Must it be apparent or easily legible? Through which strategies might we articulate the significance of the many ways culture makers explore and express issues of form, content, medium, technique, duration, reception, authenticity, and originality in relation to trans aesthetics or sensibilities? How should we approach the vexed politics of trans representation, with all the issues they raise about accuracy, inclusion, and accountability? How long a history can we imagine for what this issue of TSQ is calling “trans cultural production”? Gender expresses culture, and culture transforms the material world, including the materiality of our bodies; at what point, then, does it become analytically necessary to distinguish a particu- larly “transgender” creativity from a more pervasive drive to create cultural forms, including embodied selves? Who knows? We can’t say, after all, what dreams animated the artists who outlined their hands on cave walls by blowing pigment through hollow reeds. The materials gathered here respond to these questions and open others, collectively embarking upon debate about the relationship of creativity to embodied experience in the contemporary world. One of our first editorial decisions was to focus on the present and the recent past, because we are currently witnessing an explosion of creative and critical work on and by trans subjects. It is too soon (and the phenomenon is too multiform and widespread) to venture a synthetic analysis of that work, but we can offer a few observations. First, we want to draw attention to a persistent tension between, on the one hand, the construction and representation of individual trans subjects and, on the other hand, concerns with making and representing trans collectivities. Second, we wish to stress the exciting range of divergent perspectives, methods, and priorities that are driving both practitioners and critics. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Number 4 * November 2014 469 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2815183 ª 2014 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/4/469/485080/469.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 470 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly The bounded individual self is a cultural product of the modern West that has artifactual counterparts in the related creative forms of autobiography, portraiture, and the novel. One of the founding works of transgender cultural studies was Jay Prosser’s 1998 Second Skins, which interpreted twentieth-century trans- sexual autobiographies as metaphors for and materializations of the narrative process of transition. Another was Susan Stryker’s (1994) “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” in which Stryker spoke back, in the first person, to the narrator of Mary Shelley’s fictional autobiography. More recent literary scholarship suggests that the modern novel took shape in part through fictional autobiographies purporting to document the lives of people who transed gender (e.g., Saxton, Mance, and Edwards, forthcoming). In this view the narrative conventions that have dominated both subjectivity and fiction in the West since the eighteenth century have been entwined with representations of transgender experience—to the point that both the modern English-language story and the modern Anglophone self could be interpreted as inflected by trans cultural productions. If we understand modern Western modes of becoming trans as manifestations of a long cultural concern with self-creation and the resulting problem of interface between the individual and the collective, it makes sense that some of the foundational analyses of cultural production from a transgender-studies perspective drew so heavily on autobiography: the genre of autobiography takes the singularity of experience as its organizing principle and foregrounds the lone voice of its solitary self-creating subject. Yet at the same time, such narratives perform that voice’s reach into the broader social world. To take a classic instance, the 1968 paperback edition of Christine Jor- gensen’s autobiography (orig. published 1967) soon sold over 400,000 copies (Stryker 2000: ix). The proliferating story of that earnest trans self, told publicly and directly, contradicted widespread cultural ascriptions of “sex change” as an anticreative, nonreproductive cul-de-sac that doomed its practitioners to isola- tion if not social death. Jorgensen’s autobiography and similar midcentury narratives drew on long cultural traditions of celebrating self-creation to create persuasive positive accounts of trans being. Such testaments to existence and survival helped to generate shared trans identity, community, and debate. In the visual arts, photographic portraiture mobilizes a similar gesture, and the pho- tograph

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