Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory Contested Sites Patricia Elliot DEBATES IN TRANSGENDER, QUEER, AND FEMINIST THEORY Queer Interventions Series editor: Michael O’Rourke Independent Colleges, Dublin Founded by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke, Queer Interventions is an exciting, fresh and unique new series designed to publish innovative, experimental and theoretically-engaged work in the burgeoning field of queer studies. The aim of the series is to attract work which is highly theoretical; queer work which intersects with other theoretical schools (feminism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism); work which is accessible but values difficulty; ethical and political projects; and most importantly work which is self-reflexive about methodological and geographical location. It is also keen to commission empirical work which is meta-theoretical in focus. The series is interdisciplinary in focus and publishes monographs and collections of essays by new and established scholars. It promotes and maintains high scholarly standards of research and is attentive to queer theory’s shortcomings, silences, hegemonies and exclusions. It also encourages independence, creativity and experimentation: to make a queer theory that matters and recreate it as something important; a space where new and exciting things can happen. Titles in this series: The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke ISBN: 978-0-7546-7135-0 Post-Queer Politics David V. Ruffolo ISBN: 978-0-7546-7675-1 Somatechnics Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray ISBN: 978-0-7546-7530-3 Queer Renaissance Historiography Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton ISBN: 978-0-7546-7608-9 Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory Contested Sites PATRICIA ELLIOT Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada © Patricia Elliot 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Patricia Elliot has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Elliot, Patricia. Debates in transgender, queer, and feminist theory : contested sites. -- (Queer interventions) 1. Gay and lesbian studies. 2. Transgenderism. 3. Feminist theory. 4. Queer theory. I. Title II. Series 306.7'6-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elliot, Patricia, 1955- Debates in transgender, queer, and feminist theory : contested sites / by Patricia Elliot. p. cm. -- (Queer interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0393-7 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-0394-4 (ebook) 1. Transgenderism. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Gender identity. 4. Queer theory. I. Title. HQ77.9.E57 2010 306.76'8--dc22 2010024834 ISBN 9781409403937 (hbk) ISBN 9781409403944 (ebk) Contents Series Editor’s Preface Trans-positions, Fugitive Poetics and Educated Hope vii Preface and Acknowledgements xv About the Author xvii Introduction Exploring Rifts in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theories 1 1 Feminist Embattlement on the Field of Trans 17 2 Revaluing Gender Diversity Beyond the Ts/Tg Hierarchy 33 3 Desire and the “(Un)Becoming Other”: The Question of Intelligibility 61 4 Risking the Unfamiliar: Psychic Complexity in Theories of Transsexual Embodiment 85 5 Still Not in Our Genes: Theorizing Complex Bodies 113 Conclusion Fielding Contested Desires 149 Bibliography 157 Index 181 This page has been left blank intentionally Series Editor’s Preface Trans-positions, Fugitive Poetics and Educated Hope Patricia Elliot’s Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites is a wonderful, and courageous example of what Samuel Chambers calls fugitive theory, of what Rosi Braidotti names transpositioning, and of what Bryan Reynolds terms transversal poetics. Transgender studies may be “arguably the newest of academic fields”1 but its short history has been marked, as Elliot notes throughout her book, by rifts, battles, border wars, fissures, disputes, deep divides, schisms, divisive hierarchies, political minefields, dissensions, tensions, conceptual and political impasses, and fraught relationships. Transgender studies has proved, then, to be what Elliot calls a “contested site”. Rather than getting involved in further skirmishes or trying to put an end, once and for all, to the diverse disagreements, Elliot explores the wounds of transgender theory, not in order to heal them, but to, as she says, foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the “complexity, heterogeneity, and political diversity that exists”. Calling for more nuanced analyses of trans debates Elliot engages in fugitive theorizing.2 Judith Butler, in the context of a discussion of her performativity, has said that “the point is not to enumerate the political consequences of a theory [...], but rather to show how a theory [...] is already at work in the exercise of political discourse (theory can work in implicit and fugitive ways)”.3 How theory works in an implicitly fugitive manner is by travelling between and across, traversing “fields, genres, or disciplines” (Chambers, 23). Elliot works in precisely this fashion by critically engaging debates and theorizing across multiple terrains, in and between transgender/queer/feminist studies as well as psychoanalytic theory with the express hope that her work will assist in the difficult process of transforming the current battlefield into a forum for open debate and dialogue. 1 Masha Raskolnikov, “Transgendering Pride”, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 157–164, at 158. 2 Samuel A. Chambers, “Cultural Politics and the Practice of Fugitive Theory”, Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006): 9–32. 3 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997) 40 (Chambers’ emphasis). DEBATES IN TRANSGENDER, QUEER, AND FEMINIST THEORY A dictionary definition of a fugitive gives up two meanings. Fugitivity means both “to have taken flight from duty and to have been driven out, banished, or exiled” (Chambers, 23). As Elliot is most careful to remind us, trans and non- trans persons have very different stakes and investments in theorizing trans lives and subjectivities and her own experience has often been one where her work is routinely condemned as suspect because of her non-trans positionality. If Kate Bornstein can style herself as a Gender outlaw, perhaps we could say that in this text Elliot positions herself as a theoretical outlaw. She may have been exiled, in some sense, from transgender studies, but she still insistently practices a fugitive theory which is both critical and self-critical, deliberately crosses the border into trans-theorizing. If, as Chambers argues, “this sort of border-crossing proves necessary for our very existence as theorists” and “the disciplinary borders do little, if anything, to protect us, so it is in our own interests (intellectually and pragmatically) to encourage their erosion”, then Elliot is not exactly eroding borders. She doesn’t take flight from the fraught fields but rather enters them in order to transform them, to learn (and subsequently teach others) by engaging the various debates. The process is as she admits, both one of learning and unlearning, undoing and redoing, undoing some oppositions and challenging (but not suturing over) others. The fugitive politics she practices is a coalitional one as she tries to encourage discussion between diverse communities, aims for a solidarity between trans and non- transpersons without soldering them together. And she is very clear that her “fugitive theory will only be able to survive if [trans and non-trans] colleagues outside the discipline … are willing to shelter it and protect it—which means, of course, to practice it” (Chambers, 25). This methodology shares some affinities with Tim Dean’s ethics of “cruising as a way of life”. As Dean explains it, in the context of the subculture of barebacking, “cruising entails a remarkably hospitable disposition towards strangers … exemplifies a distinctive ethic of openness to alterity”.4 Elliot’s ethics of (un)becoming similarly entails a hospitable embracing of strangeness in ourselves as well as the strangeness of others (Dean calls this stranger love). While Dean as insider is concerned to argue for the exemplarity of barebacking in ethical terms, Elliot as outsider is concerned to demonstrate how the ways in which transpersons are differently embodied challenges existing conceptions or inscriptions, in Butlerian terms, of the normative, the intelligible, and the human. She is advocating, she tells us, for the cultural and political intelligibility of forms of what Nikki Sullivan Tim Dean, “Cruising as a Way of Life”, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) 176–212, at 176. viii SERIES EDITor’S PREFACE calls (un)becoming other, what Fintan Walsh has recently dubbed “an ethic of fragilization”.5 Elliot’s final pair of chapters both make a convincing case for the usefulness of psychoanalysis—mostly in its Lacanian versions—for understanding