Trans Affect”

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THINKING AND FEELING WITH “TRANS AFFECT” A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS with an emphasis in FEMINIST STUDIES by Harlan E. Weaver June 2012 The Dissertation of Harlan E. Weaver is approved: _________________________________ Professor Donna Haraway, Chair _________________________________ Professor Carla Freccero _________________________________ Professor Karen Barad _________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright by Harlan E. Weaver 2012 Table of Contents Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................1 Inheriting Transgender: Response, Responsibility, and Contested Categories ......................... 27 Mapping towards “Trans Affect”: Finding Speculative Language and Specific Distances .... 67 Affect, Ontology, and Friction: Reading with Aleshia Brevard’s The Woman I Was not Born to Be .................................................................................................................................................... 118 Friction in the Interstices: Affect and Landscape in Stone Butch Blues ...................................... 147 Monster Trans: Diffracting Affect, Reading Rage ...................................................................... 172 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 209 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 219 iii Abstract This dissertation articulates the ways that thinking and feeling with “trans affect” promises better understandings of experiences of trans embodiment. First examining key intellectual debates in feminist, queer, and trans theories about the inheritances and formations of “transgender” and trans, the dissertation explores ties between these conversations and discussions in feminist science studies about knowledge politics. Arguing that attention to “affect,” or feeling as bodily movement and emotion, promises better ways to get at the lived experiences of trans people, the dissertation focuses on the role of specifically “trans affect” as a means to understand the kinds of transformations and emergent knowledges that trans experiences promise. Close readings of the role of “trans affect” in work by Aleshia Brevard, Leslie Feinberg, and Susan Stryker reveal the ways that “trans affect” can prompt transformations in not just methods of reading and understanding, but also in the knower who seeks its touch. The writing concludes by articulating how the mode of attention that inheres in “thinking and feeling with trans affect” can and should be brought into other projects in ontology and epistemology. iv Dedication To my parents, for their constant support and affection. To my advisors, Donna Haraway, Carla Freccero, Karen Barad, and Nancy Chen, whose skills as readers and thinkers are quite possibly exceeded by their work as mentors. And to Haley, Lukifer, Annie, and Tucker, my constant companions who keep teaching me new ways of understanding the world. v Introduction An intellectual genealogy of “thinking and feeling with ‘trans affect’” It’s more like an erosion than a decision. – Jennifer Finney Boylan on her transition A lot of voices tell us to think nondualistically, and even what to think in that fashion. Fewer are able to transmit how to go about it, the cognitive and even affective habits and practices involved, which are less than amenable to being couched in prescriptive terms. – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick This dissertation asks two fundamentally interwoven questions: How do thinking and feeling with transgender and transsexual authors produce better understandings of their experiences? And how does thinking with feeling, or with “affect” as I will define it in the course of this introduction, change knowledge production for the better? This introduction details the intellectual trajectory that led to these questions, outlining the conversations that prompted me to think with feeling in and through transgender experiences of embodiment. Following Sedgwick’s interest in the practices and habits that make up the doing of thinking nondualistically, I begin by taking up the problem of binarisms. Two by Two A dualism key to feminist theories of embodiment is that of the division between mind and body. Elizabeth Grosz, among others, highlights this when arguing that “the body has thus far remained colonized through the discursive practices of the natural sciences,” all of which assert its naturalness and its “fundamentally biological and 1 precultural status” (x). Ludmilla Jordanova underscores Grosz’s point in noting that the assumption of sex difference inherent in the division of female and male maps onto other prominent divides such as nature/culture and body/mind, yielding female/body/nature: male/culture/mind (55-74). That these divisions are assumed and that they are implicitly paired with sexual difference reveals how the ways of understanding common to modern Western cultures often rely on divisions that efface the realities of how people actually experience their bodies. Taking issue with the coding of bodies as feminine and passive, Grosz argues that “bodies … function interactively and productively … they act and react,” generating “what is new, surprising, and unpredictable” (xi). Grosz’s point, that all bodies are experienced as corporeal, and that bodies cannot be read as passively following the instructions of a distant and distinct mind, challenges the dualism of mind/body. Indeed, anyone who has ever experienced the unwelcome feeling of nausea, for example, knows that bodies are certainly capable of generating unexpected sensations and understandings. This line of thinking is helpful in pointing out the ways that the dualism of mind/body, like a number of other dualistic understandings, “gets it wrong.” However, the kind of thinking outside dualisms Sedgwick desires also speaks to other currents in contemporary feminist and postmodern thought of special relevance to transgender embodiments. Jay Prosser, writing on transsexual narratives of embodiment in Second Skins, laments how readings oriented around questions of hegemony, subversion, and gender obfuscate good understandings of transsexual lives. Implicitly referring to debates such as those about the film Paris is Burning (see next chapter) that ask whether and how drag 2 performances reify or subvert gender norms, Prosser confronts what he terms “fear of the literal.” Arguing that in so much contemporary theory “‘fear of the literal’ (what we might term referential panic: the enormous pressure to disown, to abrogate the referent) encodes all literalizing as hegemonic (‘bad’) and all deliteralizing as subversive (‘good’),” Prosser finds that “the binary of textual effect (subversive/hegemonic) is calcified onto the binary of the subject’s relations to referentiality (literalizing/ deliteralizing)” (15). For Prosser, when deployed in relation to transsexual subjects, this move is especially problematic: “in readings that embrace the transsexual as deliteralizing, as much as those that condemn the transsexual as literalizing, the referential transsexual subject can frighteningly disappear in his/her very invocation” (14). As the writings to which Prosser refers explicitly question binarized gender through transsexual figures, his argument regarding literal/nonliteral reveals how new binarisms can emerge in work that directly contests dualisms, effacing lives lived and bodies themselves in the process.1 Of course, there are many more dualisms to add to those named by Grosz, Jordanova, and Prosser, and in addition to mind/body, hegemonic/subversive, male/female, active/passive, and literal/figurative, one can add inner/outer, material/discursive, sex/gender,2 and homo/hetero to an increasingly lengthy list of problematic binaries. These binaries come from both queer theories and transgender studies, for both fields contribute to problematic frameworks that interfere with the realization of good understandings of transgender embodiment. For example, the 1 Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body pursues a similar strategy to that of Prosser, pointing to the manner in which “sexuality is a matter not of seeing but of sensing, which takes 2 Sex/gender is not a binary opposition in the same way as the others listed, but I place it in this list because it inherits the nature/culture distinction (as noted by Jordanova). 3 distinction of inner/outer is a common way to describe the experience of gender dysphoria. Many narratives of transition repeatedly emphasize experiencing a sense of being a “woman trapped in a man’s body” or feeling simply “trapped in the wrong body.” This language gives a sense of there being an inner core at odds with the external body. And yet, the prominence of this description is often attributed to medical gatekeeping (see the section on Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back” in my second chapter), such that it is difficult if not impossible to discern whether this phrase is a rote invocation deployed for the purpose of gaining treatment or if it actually speaks to how a particular transperson understands his/her/hir body.3 In a similar vein, gender transitions challenge the

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