Copyright Alanna Beroiza 2018 ABSTRACT
Out of Sight: Gender in Scopic and Aural Systems
by
Alanna Beroiza
From delivery rooms, to bathrooms, to celebrity boudoirs on the cover of Vanity
Fair, gender, in its mainstream, contemporary definitions, circulates around visually articulated binary imaginaries of bodily materiality. These formulations depend on the visibly sexed body to act as a site of subjective “truth,” and this dependence only intensifies as medical, legal, educational, and popular cultural institutions increasingly recognize gender as “fluid.” Without seeking to further entrench the dominance of this model, neither does Out of Sight: Gender in Scopic and Aural Systems seek to challenge it—at least, not outright. Instead, this dissertation examines the systems of representation that both enable the visible body to function as a site of subjective “truth” and expose it as a stand-in for the subject in mainstream formulations of gender. The project employs psychoanalytic and systems theoretical modes of critique to investigate the ways in which visual media technologies such as photographs, digital images, and films, both suture and disclose the subjective fiction of gender in their representations of bodily materiality.
Additionally, the project explores the ways aural modes of representation—specifically, the voice—both radically undermine, and intensely reify, the totalizing illusions of the visual that sustain the fiction of the body as a material truth in mainstream gender. In critical analyses of texts that range from Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair, to archival images from the Documentary Collection at the Kinsey Institute, to Wynne Neilly’s photographic installation at Ryerson Image Centre, to films by Pedro Almodóvar, Sebastián Lelio, and Chase Joynt, the project demonstrates how scopic and aural systems of representation facilitate the conceptual collapse of gender into sex and visually articulated bodily materiality. In the same breath, these analyses also demonstrate—and the project as a whole insists—that this reductive, yet pervasive, model for gender is but one of many possibilities for understanding subjects and the organization of their experiences and desires. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For this dissertation, I owe thanks to a network of supportive mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. I will never forget the day I met Judith Roof. Already jet lagged, I was subsequently stunned by the discussion that she and I had about gender at Rice’s new student recruitment day in 2011. Seven years later, that conversation has morphed into this dissertation and so much more. Her critical feedback and unflagging encouragement have enabled me to do my best and most creative work. I am deeply grateful for her mentorship. Timothy Morton has been a supportive second reader and a demonstration of kindness in thinking. Melissa Bailar has far exceeded her role as my third reader. I am thankful for her thoughtful comments on my work, the pedagogical opportunities and training she has given me, and for her encouragement of, and collaboration on, several of my artistic research projects.
One of the greatest pleasures of this project has been the opportunity to share it with a host of colleagues and friends along the way. These include Derek Woods, Lorena
Gauthereau, John Ellis-Etchison, Lindsay Chappell, Laura Richardson, Sophia Hsu,
Hannah Biggs, Kristina McDonald, and Beth Hupfer. I owe a special thanks to Alex
Adkins, Justine Bakker, Roma Hernandez, Joe Carson, Sydney Boyd, and Ben Kozicki. I count you each as colleagues and dear friends—thank you for weathering the many ups and downs with me. Kara Grant, thank you for helping me to find my voice. To the
Ciccarelli-Cornetta family, thank you for welcoming me into your fold and for being my cheerleaders. To my father, Ricardo, thank you for your support. To my mother, Kathleen, and grandmother, Margaret, thank you for a lifetime of love and encouragement. Kevin vi
Ryan, I wish you could see this. David Forrest and Courtney Stock, thank you for your lasting friendship and support. Juliet Morgan, you are my bedrock. Theo, my love, this project led me to you, and you have held my hand through it ever since. I am so happy to share this, and my life, with you. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iii
Acknowledgements v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures 20
Chapter 2 Sex, Suture, Cinema 64
Chapter 3 What is Gender Heard? 105
Conclusion 145
Bibliography 151 1
Introduction
On April 17, 2016, writer, activist, and performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon published a short blog post, “Push Harder! Beyond Nonbinary Inclusion,” that concluded with a series of questions and an affirmative statement:
How did all of the complexity in the world, all of its difference, all of its context
become reduced to two categories only? How did we come to think it was okay to
link and define our sexual orientations to binary gender (let alone organize entire
movements around them)? How did trans politics come to be about trans people
“gaining rights” and not everyone divesting from gender to begin with? How are
we upholding institutions, rituals, cultures, politics, and ideas that further entrench
the gender binary and facilitate violence against nonbinary people? How did
gender become so essential that it has become required for humanity?
These questions are not rhetorical. They have answers. And nonbinary people
have been on the frontlines of providing them.
Vaid-Menon’s questions and statement are a useful point of entry into the problem of gender not simply for their straightforward assertions that gender, in its binary manifestations, is a reductionist mechanism for controlling desires, sexes, bodies, and subjects, but also for the somewhat convoluted ways in which they present these assertions. With their successive repetition of the interrogative “how,” the questions have a lulling effect. They string their readers along from one unresolved issue to the next, never pausing for consideration or comment on what relevance they might have to preceding questions, or to the subject of binary gender more generally. This formally 2 induced absorption goes unnoticed until Vaid-Menon exposes it with their assertion that,
“These questions are not rhetorical.” By negating the rhetorical value of the questions,
Vaid-Menon does the double duty of pointing out the ways the questions’ formal organization compels readers to invest in them, regardless of their content or answerability, and insisting on their urgency and practicality. They also evoke a comparison between the questions’ hypnotic flow and the often unknowing or unthinking ways in which individuals participate in “institutions, rituals, cultures, politics, and ideas that further entrench the gender binary.”1 Denying the value of form only underscores its significance—not just for this set of questions, but also for the concept of gender that they interrogate.
For Vaid-Menon, gender is a structural phenomenon. It is an apparatus that, by way of binary distinction, simplifies individuals and their concatenations of desires into two categories. As they write in the opening sentences of their post, the reduction that gender’s structural mechanism imposes on individuals presents a problem because “there are people in the world who are neither men nor women. It’s not just that they don’t
‘identify’ as men nor women. They are just simply not men nor [sic] women. They are not wrong; the gender binary is wrong.” Insofar as the words “men” and “women” stand in for two unachievable cultural, psychic, and anatomical ideals, Vaid-Menon is not wrong either. At least, they are not wrong in their affirmation that there are people who exist who are neither men nor women. And, they are not wrong to assert that binary categorization produces and maintains inaccurate descriptions of human subjects. Where
1 Vaid-Menon, “Push Harder!” 3
Vaid-Menon becomes curiously entangled in their own line of argumentation is in their claim that certain individuals “are just simply not men nor [sic] women.”2
Whether or not Vaid-Menon is making a kind of essentialist claim about this group of people (which is certainly possible, given their clarification that the non-woman and non-man status of these individuals is not related to any process of identification), what they are, unmistakably, doing is creating a binary distinction between this group of people and those individuals who would fit within the categories of “men” and “women.”
In their insistence on the existence of a non-binary category of people, Vaid-Menon creates an additional binary that is as inaccurate as the one upon which they aim their critique.
Binaries are convenient tools for reducing complexity because they set up an asymmetrical oppositional structure where one side is always defined in terms of the other. They construct hierarchical relations by defining the other in terms of the one and presenting this distinction as somehow objective, or “natural.” This is Luce Irigaray’s point in her essay, “This Sex Which is Not One.” Something like “‘feminine’ vaginal passivity” can be taken for granted in a heterosexist system of sexual difference, because this binary distinction operates “on the basis of masculine parameters.”3 “Man” and
“woman,” “male” and “female,” “masculine” and “feminine” are not equally defined terms in these distinctions. And, this logic of the binary applies equally to the distinction between “binary” and “non-binary” as it does to any other binary distinction. In each
2 Vaid-Menon, “Push Harder!,” emphasis mine.
3 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is, 23. 4 case, the latter is defined in terms of the former. Or, rather, the latter is defined as that which the former is not. As Judith Roof writes, “the other is a complement, a site of displacement, where the shadowy and fantasmatic ‘not all’ and ‘not I’ lurk their looks back.”4 This “not all” status has a complex role, especially when one considers it in the
Lacanian sense, in organizing systems of desire; however, that complexity does not hold up to further structural definition. As in the example that Niklas Luhmann offers of being/ non-being, “being” becomes a concept precisely when the “unmarked state” between being/non-being is specified as “non-being.”5 From the side of “non-being” one can
“observe the contingencies of being” but, as Luhmann goes on to explain, “there is no room on this elementary level of exposition for the act of remaining in the state that must be called ‘non-being,’ because it would require a further distinction.”6 Thus, while tempting, as Roof argues, “recuperating or asserting the equivalence of the other by speaking as a woman or a queer, for example, spectacularly reinforces the binary logic by which the woman or queer cannot speak in the first place.”7
Notably, although Vaid-Menon very deliberately sets up a binary distinction between binary and non-binary people, at no point in the post do they ever explicitly define (beyond using the words “men” and “women”) the terms of the gender binary that they critique. In statements such as “it’s not just that they don’t identify as men or
4 Roof, Gender, 172.
5 Luhmann, Theories, 116.
6 Luhmann, 123.
7 Roof, Gender, 173. 5 women, they are just simply not men nor women,” this definitional aporia seems to function as a way of both exposing readers’ assumptions of what it might mean to “just simply” be a man or a woman while also underscoring the ambiguity inherent in both of those terms. The sentence evokes the naturalized status of anatomical, especially genital, definitions of sex that subtend dominant, mainstream notions of “simply” being a man or a woman and, suggestively, extends and complicates this uncontested status beyond man or woman and beyond binary imaginaries of materiality. However, the critical rethinking of gender that their definitional aporia evokes in this post is challenged by their use of the term “cisgender”—referring to a person who identifies with the sex that she or he was assigned at birth—which denotes at least some uncritical adherence to a definition of gender that, as much as it may seek to distinguish itself from them, remains tied to binary, anatomical, genital, definitions of sex.8
This slippage in use between gender and sex that appears in Vaid-Menon’s post is not unusual. In popular culture, medicine, law, and academic work, gender persists as a
“cultural nominator for sex.”9 It seems to have never quite given up the association with sex that was embedded in its emergence in the intersex clinic of psychologist John Money who argued, in 1955, that “psychological sex, renamed and retheorized as gender, was learned postnatally,” and used this theory to justify a surgical protocol for operating on children born with ambiguous genitalia. 10 Nevertheless, the fact that Vaid-Menon
8 Vaid-Menon, “Push Harder!”
9 Repo, Biopolitics, 1.
10 Repo, 2. 6 deploys gender to signify sex in this post—specifically in their use of the term
“cisgender”—is remarkable, given the attention that they pay to the effects of the same terminological interchangeability in the final question of their series: “How did gender become so essential that it has become required for humanity?”11 There is a play on words in this question that turns on the word “essential” and its association with sex as a pre-discursive, material, biological given. What it ends up asking is not just how gender has become such a social and cultural focal point, but how an essentialized version of sex has, as Vaid-Menon goes on to say, become “required for humanity.”12
The question recalls Judith Butler’s emphasis, in Bodies That Matter, on sex as a mechanism that produces and regulates an individual’s “cultural intelligibility.”13 Part of an argument meant to build upon and clarify her theory of gender performativity in
Gender Trouble, Butler explains in Bodies That Matter that “sex is…not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it…[is] one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility.”14 For Butler, neither gender, nor sex, are prediscursive facts. They are also not personal attributes that can be voluntaristically adopted and deployed by an individual. Instead, they are the products and producers of a disciplinary mechanism which, Butler argues, functions performatively—through the repeated, supposedly
11 Vaid-Menon, “Push Harder!”
12 Vaid-Menon, “Push Harder!”
13 Butler, Bodies, 2.
14 Butler, Bodies, 2. 7 unconscious and conscious, enactment of norms—within a massive socio-political apparatus comprised of the dense intersection of medical, juridical, religious, educational, and familial discourses. Gender, as she writes in Gender Trouble, is that which compels
“bodies to signify” femaleness or maleness, femininity or masculinity “as their very essence, style, and necessity.”15
Both of these definitions of sex and gender circulate around the idea of a body and its role in either securing or not securing adequate “cultural intelligibility” for an individual to function in a socio-cultural sense. For Butler, the body is not “a ‘being’ but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality.”16 It is a “…corporeal enactment…that constitutes its interior signification on its surface.”17
Notable in both of Butler’s descriptions of the body quoted above is her use of the word “surface.” Paul B. Preciado critiques John Money’s “clinical notion of gender” because it “sees [gender] above all as an instrument of rationalization for a living being whose visible body is only one of the parameters.”18 Although the word “surface” could be stretched to include haptic modes of perception, its association here is, presumably, with the visual. By implication, Butler’s concept of the body, which subtends her concept of “performative” gender/sex, is, largely, conceived visually. Of course, rationalizing the
15 Butler, Gender Trouble, 183.
16 Butler, Gender Trouble, 189.
17 Butler, Gender Trouble, 189.
18 Preciado, Testo Junkie, 111. 8 value, viability, or intelligibility of individuals on the basis of their exterior, visual, physical appearances sounds absurd when one highlights it the way that Preciado does with reference to Money’s work.
It goes without saying that individuals are concatenations of changing psychic desires and physical experiences. They are certainly not reducible to their visual appearances. Yet, presented with a great diversity of bodies—not only of visible bodies
(genital and otherwise), but also of bodies at the level of their hormones and chromosomes—clinicians, since the middle of the twentieth century and still today, define them according to two, visually articulated categories premised on the imaginary of sexual reproduction. The same goes for the vast majority of mainstream socio-cultural systems. In light of this, one might say that Butler’s theories offer a rather specific account of how subjects are gendered within socio-cultural systems for which “cultural intelligibility” is defined visually.19
Specific though it may be, from delivery rooms to bathrooms the model of gender as a mechanism for regulating, specifically, visually articulated and binary imaginaries of bodily materiality is a dominant force in contemporary culture. My project does not seek to further entrench the dominance of this model, but neither does it challenge it—at least, not outright. The aim of this dissertation is to examine the scopic and aural modes of representation that both enable the body to function as a site of subjective “truth” and expose it as a stand-in for the subject, in contemporary, mainstream models of gender.
The project employs, largely, psychoanalytic and systems theoretical modes of critique to
19 Butler, Bodies, 2. 9 investigate the ways visual media technologies such as photographs, digital images, and films both suture and disclose the fiction of the gendered subject in their representations of bodily materiality. It also explores the ways aural modes of representation— specifically, the voice—both undermine, and reify, the totalizing illusion of the image which scopic systems use to sustain the fiction of the body as a material truth at the heart of mainstream models of gender. These analyses attempt to provide answers to something like Vaid-Menon’s question by demonstrating how scopic and aural systems of representation facilitate the collapse of gender, sex, and bodily materiality. They also hope, in the same breath, to demonstrate that this reductive model for gender is but one of many possibilities for understanding subjects and the organization of their desires.
As a second point of entry into the problem of gender and the particular questions that this project poses with regard to it, I turn now to Chase Joynt’s Resisterectomy: a short film that uses the cinematic medium to demonstrate the ways visual and aural modes of representation sustain—but also, and by way of this demonstration, complicate and fail to sustain—contemporary, mainstream, and, specifically, medical definitions of gender. Over the course of approximately eight minutes, Resisterectomy flickers and arhythmically oscillates between Dr. Mary K. Bryson and Joynt framed in a split screen.
Each is relaying her or his experience as the subject of surgical intervention in the
Canadian healthcare system. On the left, at medium-close range, Bryson sits in front of a white backdrop, wearing a black t-shirt, and speaking (on and off) directly into the camera (Fig. 1). Her dialogue centers on her experience with mastectomy and the possibility of chest (not breast) reconstruction following her breast cancer diagnosis. On 10 the right, also framed in a medium close-up shot, against a white back drop, wearing a black t-shirt, and speaking directly into the camera is Joynt. His dialogue recounts his experience having a hysterectomy which, he explains, was medically indicated after the results of a pap smear showed the possibility that he might have either endometriosis or cancer. Their stories are both consciously framed as narratives—Bryson’s dialogue, which is the first bit of audio in the film, even opens with the prefatory words, “So, I’m gonna start when I’m standing in the West Jet line at the Edmonton airport,” consciously marking the beginning of the account she is about to give.20 Neither account, however, proceeds uninterrupted. Without any clear logic, Bryson’s dialogue is intermittently intercut by Joynt’s while the two images either remain in juxtaposition with one another or with an empty space in the split screen. The vocal track flips from Bryson to Joynt, or
Joynt to Bryson, appearing to animate either Bryson’s or Joynt’s moving image as it does.
Meanwhile, the image of the person who is not speaking either remains frozen or drops from the screen as the other speaks (Fig. 3).
Figure 1. Chase Joynt, Resisterectomy, 2012. Image screen shot by author in May
2018.
20 Joynt, Resisterectomy, 2012. 11
Figure 2. Chase Joynt, Resisterectomy, 2012. Image screen shot by author in May
2018.
Figure 3. Chase Joynt, Resisterectomy, 2012. Image screen shot by author in May
2018.
This eight, or so, minutes of asynchronous, arhythmic visual oscillation and aural intercutting breaks the fiction of the body as a site of subjective “truth” into some of its component parts. One of those component parts, but also the mechanism responsible for the overall marshalling of images and sounds in succession to synthesize the body as a site of subjective truth, is narrative. There are several layers of narrative in this film:
Bryson’s and Joynt’s individual narratives of their interactions with the Canadian healthcare system; the hybrid (and more generalized) narrative about bodies, sexes, and genders, that the film’s viewer may synthesize from the intercutting audio of Bryson and 12
Joynt’s, respective, accounts; and the narrative about narrative that the viewer (me, in this instance) might synthesize from the way that the film’s implementation of certain of its formal elements highlights the ways that those elements typically create a “reality” effect yet, here, are being used not only to expose the constructed nature of that effect, but also the way that—even in its constructedness—it persists as a kind of focal point for desire.
In their accounts of the ways that their bodies were often misunderstood by healthcare providers, Joynt and Bryson make sense of their bodies as insensible to the
Canadian healthcare system. Bryson explains that she had to reject her surgeons’ assumption that she would undergo breast reconstruction and, instead, advocate on her own behalf for chest reconstruction following her mastectomy. Joynt speaks about a demeaning interchange with a surgeon at a women’s diagnostic clinic who asked him:
“What are you? A transgender or something?” The surgeon then explained to him the historical need for women’s centered medical care, and the fact the he was the exception to the rule at that clinic.21 Neither Joynt’s body in the women’s clinic (which, before his hysterectomy, simultaneously contained a uterus, had had a bilateral mastectomy, and had been hormonally supplemented with testosterone for several years), nor Bryson’s idea of her masculine pectoral landscape post-mastectomy were entirely comprehensible to their doctors. There is something in this lack of comprehensibility that, contradictory as it may sound, fortifies the notion that imaginaries of bodily materiality could stand in for subjective truth. Similar to Audre Lorde’s comment in The Cancer Journals, “I…began to feel that in this process of losing a breast I had become a more whole person,” in both
21 Joynt, 2012. 13
Bryson and Joynt’s narratives there is the sense that their stories are ways of filling a gap.22 As with Lorde, the process of dealing with the loss of a body part, or the lack of comprehension of one’s body, synthesizes a new kind of subjective whole. Whether this wholeness is related to the actual absence or presence of a body part is irrelevant, because in both cases it is the idea of this bodily materiality that matters. It is the idea that the body could stand in for the subject (as lack), that makes the, suggestively, visually articulated body the thing to strive for.
Of course, the production of these visually articulated imaginaries of bodily materiality that would stand in for subjective “truth” in Bryson and Joynt’s, respective, retrospective accounts is consciously complicated by the film’s formal aspects. Every step of the way, the film makes its viewers aware of the modes of representation that they have to use, and the particular ways in which they have to use them, in order to generate such a stand-in for the subject. Resisterectomy wants to remind its viewers of the limits of representation. As Vilém Flusser writes of photography: “The apparatus does as the photographer desires, but the photographer can only desire what the apparatus can do.”23
The way that the film treats its images in terms of their framing and mise-en-scène is designed to emphasize their status not only as images, but as basic units of filmic syntax.
Especially when they appear frozen and juxtaposed with a moving image at their side, the film, rather loudly, broadcasts the idea of the still image as a component part of a larger whole.
22 Lourde, Cancer, 56.
23 Flusser, Technical Images, 20. 14
The composition of these images—with their head and shoulders framing and their identical wardrobes and backdrops—also recalls at least two recognizable types of images: the mugshot and the selfie. These two species of image are significant because they both rely, in some way, on notions of photographic indexicality—or, the idea that, as
Kaja Silverman puts it: “since an analogue photograph is the luminous trace of what was in front of the camera at the moment the photograph was made, we argue, it attests to its referent's reality.”24 Mugshots and selfies are identifying images. Even digitally generated, they are specifically meant to attest to an individual’s presence in a certain place at a certain time. The fact that Bryson and Joynt’s images recall these identifying images makes them not only basic units of the photographic identification of individuals, but also basic units of filmic syntax—or, the identification of individuals as, in some ways, reducible to a photograph.
In my earlier discussion of Vaid-Menon’s blog post, I didn’t mention that the majority of their internet and social media presence is centered on their Instagram account and, near daily, selfie posts. In a blog post called, “Why I Take Selfies,” which includes a photograph of Vaid-Menon of the same genre, Vaid-Menon recounts a threatening interaction with a man outside of their apartment building who, upon seeing
Vaid-Menon, yelled, “what the fuck is that!?,” and followed them down the street with a group of his friends, recording them with their phones and taunting them as they did.25
Vaid-Menon explains that they had taken a selfie that morning before leaving the house.
24 Silverman, Miracle, 1.
25 Vaid-Menon, “Why I Take Selfies.” 15
When they finally hailed a cab to get away from the man and his friends, they pulled up the selfie on their phone, looked at it, and thought: “i remember how powerful i felt when i took it. i remember how fun it was to get ready.”26 They go on to say: “what selfies allow me to do is to remember who i am, what i am fighting for, and what the world i want to create looks like. a selfie is an earnest invitation into the world i am making for myself.”27
In recent years, selfies have become ubiquitous images employed for a vast array of purposes across a variety of digital and non-digital platforms. One of those purposes, which has a much longer history than the few years that selfies have been on the scene, is the documentation of gender transitions that include medical intervention—a site where gender is often entirely collapsed in its meaning with sex and bodily materiality. This sort of documentation tends to involve several selfies juxtaposed with one another to show change over time, and it usually features visual changes occurring on particular parts of a person’s body (i.e. changes in their facial hair, the presence or absence of breasts on their chests, etc.). Neither Vaid-Menon’s image in “Why I Take Selfies,” nor the images of
Bryson and Joynt in Resisterectomy take quite such a literal approach in their relations to the intersections of gender, sex, bodily materiality, and visual representation.
Nevertheless, both remain ensnared, in greater, lesser, and different senses, in a scopic system that organizes subjects around dynamics of display and deferral. What does one put on display when one posts three selfies side-by-side to show the incremental
26 Vaid-Menon, “Why I Take Selfies.”
27 Vaid-Menon, “Why I Take Selfies.” 16 increase in facial hair that one has experienced over the course of a year on testosterone?
The beard, here, becomes a display that is meant to stand in for the subject and, temporarily, cover over the fact that, at least in a Lacanian sense, the subject is characterized by its lack.
That one displays this beard and its change over time on a social media platform, like Instagram, complicates this scopic system of organization further, because it wraps it up in a dynamic of looking that constantly reproduces the display and defers the lack that it covers. Roof describes this dynamic as part of the “vertiginous” regime of gender. One of a variety of different “regimes” of gender—“complex systems that preserve, in one way or another, a culture’s own fantasy”—the vertiginous “is bound up in reflection—a looking at oneself looking at oneself being looked at in an apparent performance of gender fluidity.”28 A vertiginous display of gender is typified by a “conscious performance” of “taxonomic gender signifiers (conventional binary gender attributes)” which folds back on itself in this embedded circuit of looking.29 Vaid-Menon’s selfie is an excellent example of this. The image displays Vaid-Menon consciously performing a set of clashing conventional binary gender attributes—as they comment in their post: “i remember the delight of seeing my chest hair and my lipstick and my floral all together”—in an image of them, quite literally, looking at an image of themself looking at themself on the display of their smartphone.30 Their display of these attributes of binary
28 Roof, Gender, 28.
29 Roof, Gender, 175.
30 Vaid-Menon, “Why I Take Selfies.” 17 gender, as Roof explains of the vertiginous regime, “signif[ies] the lack of essential connection between bodies and genders;” however, “as repeated in the paratextual discourse of these performances, such signifiers are understood to refer in both direct and circuitous ways to some subjective essence, some self-defining set of characteristics of personal identity.”31 It’s not so much about the display as it is about seeing oneself being seen seeing oneself perform this sort of cacophony of conventional gender attributes—the act of performance, more so, even, than the content of the performance itself is what is standing in for the subject, here. And so, when Vaid-Menon claims that “a selfie is an earnest invitation into the world i am making for myself,” one might, once again, turn their sentence on a word, in this case, “earnest,” and agree with their self-summation.
Because, what they are doing, what most selfies are doing, is earnestly soliciting the gaze of the Other to “[certify] their own self-regard.”32
Although Bryson and Joynt’s, respective, images and moving images in
Resisterectomy are not highly conscious vertiginous performances in the sense that Vaid-
Menon’s selfie is, they are part of a larger filmic narrative that participates in its own, semi-vertiginous cascade of self-regards in the sense that it is a film that wants to be seen seeing itself as a film about the intersection of gender, sex, the body, and film. In this sense, the images of Bryson and Joynt are images that want to be seen as images that would be used as stand-ins for the subject in a vertiginous performance of gender. To that end, throughout the film, the images display their limits as images. They are fixed,
31 Roof, Gender, 175.
32 Vaid-Menon, “Why I Take Selfies;” Roof, Gender, 179. 18 framed, and sometimes frozen substitutes for the chaotic mix of desires and experiences that, never quite, constitute the subject. They are also basic units for the succession of images that makes up the film that they are in—the film announces this with the intermittent absence and stillness of the images onscreen. And, they are separated from one another by a medial black border on the split screen, which serves as a reminder of the conscious work that one must do if one wants to associate these images with one another.
Beyond the consciousness that the framing, mise-en-scène, and intermittent presence of Bryson and Joynt’s, respective, images brings to their status, and subsequent limitations, as images, these formal considerations also highlight the work of the voice in this film. At the same time as the film is formally emphasizing the limits of these images, its interweaving audio continues without pause and without regard for the rigid frames containing their images. Joynt’s and Bryson’s voices touch in ways that their images never will, creating a patchwork audio track in which the two spoken narratives also become one as a result of their constant intercutting. Similar to the way that the very particular framing of Joynt and Bryson’s, respective, images emphasize their status as images, this intercutting between their voices emphasizes the status of their voices as aural mediums. Whereas one typically understands the voice as a bearer of meaning, every aural cut between Joynt and Bryson in this film interrupts the flow of meaning that one expects from the voice. Each cut becomes a place where, for just a moment, the voice exposes its role as a bearer of meaning and a producer of stand-ins for the subject—set on covering over, as Mladen Dolar writes of the voice: “the wound inflicted by culture, [and 19 restoring] the loss we suffered by the assumption of the symbolic order.”33 This task is interrupted, and thus exposed, every time either Joynt’s or Bryson’s voice abruptly starts or stops on either side of the stitching together of their tracks.
By emphasizing the ways the voice can take on a very flexible shape in comparison with the image, Resisterectomy points to the possibility and potentiality of thinking about the intersection of gender, sex, bodies, and media (which is its subject) outside of the realm of the visual. It provokes one to ask: what is gender heard? Would aural gender eschew this ceaseless striving for subjective “truth” that characterizes mainstream, visually articulated models of gender? And, the film provides a, perhaps, less than favorable answer in the sense that it is, finally, the voice (Joynt’s, Bryson’s, and
Joynt’s and Bryson’s) that carries most of the sense of this film. The voice is not an exit from the self-perpetuating search for subjective substitutes that flatten gender, sex, and bodily materiality in mainstream models of gender, but it may still usefully highlight the ways in which this search tends to be saturated by sight.
33 Dolar, A Voice, 31. 20
CHAPTER ONE
How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures
On the cover of their July 2015 issue, Vanity Fair ran a story that became one of the most widely discussed news items of that year. Pictured against a metallic background in a white satin corset, long auburn hair cascading over her shoulders, and the words
“Call me Caitlyn,” superimposed across her mid-section, Caitlyn Jenner made her public debut (Fig. 4).34 In the days and weeks that followed, the story went viral. Links to the article crowded Facebook and Twitter feeds, contentious opinion pieces appeared in The
New York Times, and gender transition became coffee shop conversation among people for whom it had previously been an unknown topic.35 The Vanity Fair story, however, was not the first occasion on which Jenner publicly articulated her identity as a woman— in April 2015 she gave a nationally televised interview on ABC with Diane Sawyer where she discussed, in detail, her experiences with gender in a variety of contexts over her lifetime.
During the interview, though she had been taking hormones, Jenner hadn’t yet had facial feminization or breast augmentation surgeries. She was still going by Bruce and using male pronouns to refer to herself. Tellingly, if one looks up the interview on abcnews.com one finds (printed in large, capitalized, white font): “THIS IS THE LAST
INTERVIEW HE GAVE BEFORE TRANSITIONING TO CAITLYN JENNER.”36 The
34 Bissinger, “Caitlyn Jenner;” See figure 4.
35 Burkett, “What Makes A Woman?”
36 Sawyer, “Bruce Jenner,” emphasis mine. 21 cover story, not the Diane Sawyer interview, marked Jenner’s debut as Caitlyn because it combined her imperative nominal claim with an array of images which lent optical
“proof” to what has become understood as a, largely, bio-technologically rendered, material claim to gendered subjectivity. Jenner’s image on the cover of Vanity Fair culminated a narrative that defines gender as the psychic experience of identifying, or not, with a binarily sexed bodily “reality” sanctioned by language and images.
Figure 4. Annie Leibovitz, “Caitlyn Jenner: The Full Story,” Vanity Fair, June,
2015. Image downloaded from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/caitlyn-
jenner-bruce-cover-annie-leibovitz in August 2018.
This narrative, not least of all by virtue of its status as a narrative, effectively reduces gender, a complex system for organizing multifarious desires, to a linear and binary process of psychical negotiation that finds closure in the form of visually articulated and physically manipulable images. The Vanity Fair essay consistently quotes 22
Jenner reiterating her conviction that she had been born into the wrong body, specifically that she had been a girl, and eventually a woman, trapped in the body of a boy, and then a man. This conviction is supported by poignant anecdotes from Jenner’s childhood that together produce a story of gender construction intimately entwined with experiences of visual appearance and recognition. Gender becomes something that can be seen, and sights become gendered. In Bissinger's description of Jenner's penchant for sneaking into her mother’s and sister’s closets and wearing their clothes as a child, for example, even
Jenner’s sartorial choices, almost nonchalantly, receive a medical diagnosis:
He would put on a dress and maybe wrap a scarf around his head and walk around
outside. Without knowing the clinical term for what he was feeling—gender
dysphoria—he found himself ‘fascinated by it all,’ just as he felt ‘scared to death
somebody was going to find out.’37
Whether she is wearing her mother's clothes or desiring to wear them, names, images, and diagnoses are ready at hand to categorize her expressions and desires. And yet, without wishing to discredit Jenner’s personal convictions, certain aspects of the article— such as Annie Leibovitz’s photo shoot—belie the simplicity of a narrative that would so straightforwardly equate an individual’s internalized perception of herself with bio- materially supported, male or female, masculine or feminine sexed and gendered identities defined by their outward appearances. One wonders, in all of this, what room is left for fascination when gender is so overwhelmingly defined by sight?
37 Bissinger, 62. 23
Undoubtedly, Jenner’s story is the story of an individual’s triumph of personal agency in relation to her gender identity. It is also, however, and especially in the context of Leibovitz's photo shoot, a story about the imaginary, and particularly visual, nature of this triumph.38 A story about the role of the visual and, more specifically, the photographic and/or technical image in constructing a concept of gender as something over which one might exert personal agency in the first place. As much as Jenner's image on the cover, and the numerous photographs of her inside of Vanity Fair, all taken by
Annie Leibovitz, appear to act as evidence of Jenner’s control over her image, these photographs also reveal the firm grip that media- and bio-technologies exercise on Jenner and any claims she might make to agency over her image in a cultural and historical moment when advanced biomedical technologies offer individuals unprecedented autonomy over their bodily appearances.
The very existence of these photographs and this article is evidence of the control that images exert upon individuals, rather than the other way around. As expertly as
Jenner may be able to manipulate the appearance of her body and images of her body to satisfy her personal desires, the fact that she consciously seeks to manipulate her body in these ways points to a persistent and pervasive socio-cultural belief that visually articulated signifiers can confirm a body as either male or female, a person as male or female. The photographs in Vanity Fair, by virtue of their status as photographic—and, therefore, apparently, objective—images, in combination with certain self-reflexive
38 “Imaginary,” here, refers to the Lacanian psychoanalytic definition of the term which Stephen Heath usefully defines as “a specific fiction of the subject in the symbolic.” Heath, 105. 24 viewing practices, simultaneously work to confirm a material existence that, presumably, subtends definitions of sex (and, ultimately, gender) to further promote popular, medical, and legal assumptions that this visually articulated bodily materiality is the foundation for these social categories. In other words, the photographs construct the same material
“origin” that they confirm; they condition the appearance of Jenner’s body and the appearance of Jenner’s body conditions the production and distribution of the photographs.
From some of its earliest instantiations the photographic apparatus has been a means for controlling and defining visual perception. More specifically, as Silverman argues, photography has been and continues to be a means of controlling and defining perception developed around, and in the service of, maintaining the illusion of the sovereign human subject.39 The popular understanding of photography as a transparent medium that accurately captures and represents the world around it, writes Silverman,
“marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of modern metaphysics.”40 The photographic image coincides with “the history that began with the cogito, which seeks to establish man as the ‘relational center’ of the world, and whose ‘fundamental event’ is
‘the conquest of the world as a picture.’”41 Produced independently from the human hand, but for the impression of the shutter, the photograph inherits a status of representational exactness through its relative mechanical autonomy, which surpasses
39 Silverman, Miracle, 1.
40 Silverman, Miracle, 1.
41 Silverman, Miracle, 1. 25 anything previously assumed possible in painting and drawing.42 The actual quality of the
“exactness” of photographic reproduction in comparison to realistic sketches or paintings, however, is often highly debatable. Nevertheless, as Andre Bazin notes in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” “production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image.”43 Paintings and drawings, no matter how accurate, are depictions—mental imaginings, manually approximated. The photograph, by contrast, appears as a revelation, an unveiling of a visual “truth” that no human hand could recreate.
Bazin connects this eagerness to extol the accuracy and objectivity of the photograph to the modern subject’s desire for ontological certitude:
Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object capable of
satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere
approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object
itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.44
Technical images are understood to be a means of accessing, capturing, and fixing, a visual “truth” that subtends the illusions of subjective autonomy and sovereignty that define the modern subject. These truth claims are typically associated with the
42 Walter Benjamin points out in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” with its appearance, “for the first time, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic tasks in the process of pictorial reproduction—tasks that now devolved upon the eye alone.” Benjamin, 20. The photograph enabled painting to become abstract, and subsequently bore the burden of accurate reproduction that was formerly the task of the human hand.
43 Andre Bazin, “Ontology,” 13.
44 Bazin, 8. 26 indexicality of the medium. Taken from Charles Sanders Pierce’s concept of the index, the photograph—like a footprint in the sand or a weathervane that spins in the wind
—“indicates” that something has been present in a particular place at a particular time.45
The same photons that bounce off the object before the camera's lens also expose the emulsion of the film within the camera, which can eventually be developed into the photographic image. This encounter with the “real,” so to speak—distinct from a
Lacanian Real—is what enables one to say, as Roland Barthes does, that with the photograph one “can never deny that the thing has been there.”46 Nevertheless, to have been there and to be “accurately” represented in a photograph, are two separate things.
What the indexicality of the photographic image enables is the fantasy of pure contact, a brush with the origin, access to the thing-in-itself. Anyone who has ever looked at a beautiful sunset or a striking piece of architecture can attest that there is never a one- to-one correspondence between what the eye sees and what the photograph captures of the same site/sight. A photograph is a selection of available visual information subject to the effects of light conditions, exposure times, film types and qualities, and development chemicals, among other things. A photograph is as much a stand-in for human-generated, ocular centric “reality” as is a painting or a drawing. The difference is that, as Bazin’s comment underscores, social and psychological investment in the automatism and indexicality of the photographic image have trained human minds to see photographic
45 Silverman, Miracle, 1.
46 Barthes, Camera, 76. 27 versions of “reality” as, in some ways, more “real” and more accurate than what the eye alone can grasp.
In his theory of the technical image—an umbrella term which includes the photographic image—Flusser points to the ways in which such fixations on capturing and confirming the “reality” of the world by way of a technical apparatus reveal an inability to “make sense” of objects—especially at their particulate or psychically interior levels.
The technical image, according to Flusser, arises from “a peculiar hallucinatory power that has lost faith in rules.”47 Technical image-making apparatuses engage with levels of materiality that do not adhere to human demands for singularity or narrative progression.
For example, visible light is both a particle and a wave. Photons act as point-like entities in their interactions with the silver nitrate molecules on the surface of a photographic emulsion, but they also act as waves as they travel through the air to reach the emulsion.
For the technical image-making apparatus, such duality is not problematic, “particles are no more than a field of possible ways in which to function. And that is what a technical image is: a blindly realized possibility, something invisible that has blindly become visible.”48 The technical image—a product of apparatuses designed specifically to access and catalyze unforeseeable, unpredictable potential that exists on levels of quantum physicality and psychic obscurity—brings into vision (en-visions), for the human eye and the human consciousness, that which would otherwise remain out of sight.
47 Flusser, Technical Images, 10.
48 Flusser, Technical Images, 16. 28
Flusser’s explanation of the technical image gives one reason to re-think Bazin’s claim that “production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image,” not simply in terms of the “psychology” of perception and representation that it refers to, but also, and importantly, in terms of the very images that it references.49 For
Bazin, the word “automatic” fairly straightforwardly translates as “objective.” He writes:
“the objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making.”50 And he goes on to say that, “in spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.”51 Once again, what Bazin is referring to here is the fact that the photographic image cannot be made in the absence of the object it represents; the presence of the object—rather than the imagination of the artist—is necessary for the production of the image. However, in light of some of Flusser’s insights, one must ask: in what sense is the object that one perceives before the photographic apparatus present? Is it present at the level of its particulate activity? Typically, not. The automatic process, then, as Flusser describes it, is,
a self-governing computation of accidental events, excluding human intervention
and stopping at a situation that human beings have determined to be informative.
49 Bazin, 13.
50 Bazin, 8.
51 Bazin, 8, emphasis mine. 29
The difference between the apparatus and the universe is, accordingly, that the
apparatus is subject to human control.52
Whereas by Bazin’s definition automation ensures objectivity, ostensibly due to the lack of human intervention in the process, what Flusser’s argument brings to light is the specifically human bounds placed on this concept. The photograph is objective only by human standards; it counts as “informative” or information within the context of the human observer’s pre-existing imagistic repertoire. Looking at a photograph, one usually does not become any better informed about the “reality” of wave/particle behavior than one does by looking at a seat cushion. Instead, photographs display a particular, fixed, interval of interaction between light and a light sensitive surface that somehow becomes meaningful or recognizable to the individual human observer. “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner,” comments Barthes, “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”53 What the individual human observer sees is what she can see and, on the flip side of this coin, what the photographer produces is what she can produce.
Recall Flusser’s argument: “The apparatus does as the photographer desires, but the photographer can only desire what the apparatus can do.”54
Preciado specifically connects visually constructed contemporary notions of sex to the invention of photography. Although, as Preciado notes, drawing on Thomas
Laqueur’s work on the subject in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
52 Flusser, Technical Images, 19.
53 Barthes, Camera, 6.
54 Flusser, Technical Images, 20. 30
Freud, “anatomical and pornographic drawings” had already aligned the body with visual description before 1835, the advent of photographic technology “signaled a crucial stage in the production of the new sexual subject and its visual truth” because it “[endowed] this technical production of the materiality of the body with the merit of visual realism.”55
Once again, the “realism” of the photograph takes center stage, and from an object that was formerly reproduced by hand and, therefore, at least somewhat by the imagination of the artist, the human body—specifically, human sex—becomes “a visual disclosure.”56 As with any other object considered in light of the notion of photographic indexicality, the body and sex become pre-existing visual “truths” that require only the click of the shutter to be revealed, fixed, and reproduced. With its presumed capacity to capture the world as the eye sees it—or better—its presumed capacity to offer visual “proof” that something or someone looks a certain way and has been in a particular place, “photography participates
[in the construction of sex] like an ontological catalyst,” Preciado argues, “making explicit a reality that wouldn’t be able to emerge any other way.”57 With the rise of technical images, sex becomes not only something that one can see, but a sight that can be documented and made into data.
The Documentary Photography collection at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington,
Indiana is an example of an archive where technical images enable the emergence of bodies, sex, and sexuality as visually quantifiable data. A supplement to his famous mid-
55 Preciado, 111.
56 Preciado, 112.
57 Preciado, 112. 31 century “reports” on male and female human sexuality, Alfred Kinsey began collecting the photographs that would comprise the Documentary Collection in 1938.58 By the time of his death, in 1956, the collection contained around 20,000 photographs and the current count stands at approximately 50,000 images.59 Each of the images in the collection depict some aspect of human sexuality.60 An extensive and highly detail-oriented classification system organizes the images according to the sexual content that they depict.61 Kinsey did not impose restrictions—beyond a broadly conceived definition of the sexual—on the content of the photographs that entered his archive. He collected widely from a variety of different sources, but did his utmost to erase the provenance of the images he collected in an effort to imbue them with a greater sense of scientific objectivity.62 In 1949, Kinsey hired a staff photographer, William Dellenback, to record various ongoing projects at the institute.63 The provenance of the images was not
Kinsey’s main concern. Once a photograph entered the archive he did as much as he could to conceal its origin in the interest of preserving its subjects’ anonymity. In this way the organizational structure of the collection grew horizontally, with no behavior, identity,
58 Yamashiro, “Sex in the Field,” 5; “Art, Artifacts, and Photographs,” https:// kinseyinstitute.org/collections/art-artifacts-photographs/index.php.
59 Yamashiro, 5.
60 Yamashiro, 160.
61 Yamashiro, 171.
62 Yamashiro, 172.
63 Yamashiro, 190. 32 or photographic content taking precedence over any other. Each image was just another piece of data contributing to a more detailed understanding of human sexuality.
In the archive, photographs are sorted according to four main categories based on
“1) special photographic formats, 2) special interests, 3) sexual behaviors, and 4) male and female figure photography.” 64 From these larger divisions arise more than sixty categories, ranging from “Humor” to “Erotic Facial Expression” with significant variety in between and various different subcategories stemming from each category.65 (“Dildo” and “Genital Oral,” for example, are just two subcategories of the “Homosexual Female” category).66 Each photograph is mounted on a piece of 8.5 x 11 beige card stock, marked at its corners with various codes. The codes denote the category and subcategory to which the image belongs along with other bits of code, which are sometimes obvious in their meaning and sometimes not. Like the classification system used for his thousands of interviews, neither Kinsey nor his research team kept a master list of sources for the photographs. Kinsey adapted the code he used to identify the photographs in the
Documentary Collection from the one he developed for his interviews.67 He carried out both projects using the taxonomic approach that he employed in his previous work on gall wasps as a professor of Biology.
64 Yamashiro, 145.
65 Yamashiro, 145.
66 “Dildo,” Homosexuality Female Photographs, Documentary Collection; “Genital Oral,” Homosexuality Female Photographs, Documentary Collection.
67 Yamashiro, 140. 33
Kinsey’s attempt to classify human sexuality systematically in terms of its visual manifestations in the Documentary Collection speaks to, but also chafes against, a larger trend around the middle of the twentieth century to continue to organize genders, bodies, and sexes according to the pre-formed, visually constructed, dimorphic categories of the nineteenth century in spite of increasingly abundant, scientifically derived evidence to the contrary. As Preciado notes, by the 1950’s, this framework for determining sex—and, ultimately, gender—was becoming glaringly insufficient as it was “confronted with an infinite variability of bodies and desires (multiple chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, external genital, psychological, and political variables) that could not be subsumed within the disciplinary imperative of heterosexual reproduction.”68 Yet, even such influential figures as Money, despite declaring that the “sexual dimorphism that is programmed into the brain under the influence of prenatal hormones appears to be not sex irreducible but sex-shared and threshold dimorphic,” continued to impose a two-sex model on his research and his research subjects, advocating for consolidation rather than proliferation in the concept of gender roles that his constructivist program aimed to approximate.69
Money worked hard to prove that an individual’s psychologically and socially developed
“gender” is distinct from her sex, but he also fought to assure that his patients would find a place within one of two gender roles rather than imagining a social scenario in which more than one gender could exist.
68 Preciado, 104.
69 Preciado, 104; Also, see John Colapinto’s book on the David Reimer case, As Nature Made Him, in which Money advocated for Reimer to be raised as a girl after a botched circumcision left Reimer accidentally castrated shortly after birth. 34
Kinsey, on the other hand, was what taxonomists called a “splitter.”70 Instead of attempting to make his findings on the subject of human sexuality conform to existing concepts of sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual behavior, he “was driven by the quest to study individual variation” and accounted for subtle details, marking slight distinctions by creating new categories.71 Presumably, the great advantage of such a strategy of classification, especially for the study of human sexuality, is the potential it has to destabilize binarized, normative categorizations such as male/female, homosexual/ heterosexual, normal/deviant, which not only reduce the complexity of anything that they set out describe, but also establish hierarchies between the two terms of any binary.
A representative product of Kinsey’s splitter methodology, and also the most widely recognized and oft repeated intellectual product of the Kinsey reports, is the
“Kinsey scale.” Based on information collected from individuals’ sexual histories, the scale assigns a number from zero to six with zero describing an individual as exclusively heterosexual in the past and at the present moment, and six describing a person as exclusively homosexual in the past and at the present moment. An additional category
“X” describes an individual who reports no sexual contacts or responses.72 In the more than half of a century since the scale was devised and made public, it has received various criticisms for its insufficient account of possibilities for sexual expression. The scale remains historically significant, however, for its introduction to a popular audience
70 Yamashiro, 138.
71 Yamashiro, 138, emphasis mine.
72 “The Kinsey Scale,” https://www.kinseyinstitute.org/research/publications/kinsey- scale.php. 35 the notion that human sexual orientation is much more complex than a simple heterosexual or homosexual identification. Nevertheless, it is important to note that this introduction was a particular one, with particular limitations—as is any product of a splitter’s method.
A more contemporary example of the kind of proliferation that a splitter’s taxonomy like Kinsey’s produces is the ever-expanding list of identity categories housed under the LGBTQIAA umbrella. Like Kinsey’s scale, such an expansive and expanding list appears radically inclusive and highly attentive to individual variation, enabling individuals to self-identify in ways that, ostensibly, distinguish them in ever-more meaningful ways from the existent categories for sexual orientation and gender identity.
Of course, this list is quite different from Kinsey’s scale, particularly in the sense that the emphasis on identification and identity much more rigidly binds these categories to ontological statuses than do numbers on a scale denoting a particular propensity toward certain sexual behaviors at a particular time. In spite of its potential limitlessness, the list of sexual and gendered minorities—based as it is on a principle of self-identification and self-declaration—not only continues to promote individual subscription to a particular, identifiable, category (however specific it may be), but it also demands that the individual self-identify as a member of that category.
The list not only compels the individual to adopt a categorization but also, in some sense, to consciously perform that categorization, thus propelling her into an asymptotic endeavor to demonstrate that she is the kind of person that she says she is. In other words, although they promise liberation via specification and greater attention to 36 individual differences, the identity categories in the list are still just that: categories. As such, they will always reduce and constrain—often in unforeseeable ways—those things that they seek to describe.
In spite of the elaborate and proliferating nature of its categorization system, then, the Documentary Collection at the Kinsey Institute was, and is, still a collection of photographs grouped together based on an organizational method that—especially at the time of its inauguration—considered the images in its archive “raw data” that could be meaningfully sorted to contribute to a more complex understanding of human sexuality.73
To what extent the notion that these photographs were “raw data” actually amounted to an understanding by the staff at the institute of the photographs as entirely objective and accurate representations of the acts and individuals they portrayed is unclear. As art historian and former Documentary Collection curator Jennifer Yamashiro attests in her dissertation project on the collection, “there is no evidence that the photographs were read literally by the scientists.” It is likely that the photographs were understood as data in the sense that they indicated the ways in which sexuality is seen and constructed through the photographic apparatus, rather than as visual evidence of different sexual behaviors, orientations, sexes, or genders. The “exception” to this rule of critically considering the photographs that entered the archive, explains Yamashiro, “was internal projects. The institute viewed its own photography and film projects as objective.”74 Only in the photographs that issue from these projects do “the researchers’ pervasive claims of
73 Yamashiro, 173.
74 Yamashiro, 172. 37 objectivity intersect with common attitudes and assumptions made about the photographic medium,” and does the particular vision of the photographic apparatus become the accepted representation of a body, an act, or a sexualized individual.75
This assumption of objectivity is nowhere more clearly, or more fascinatingly, articulated than in the photographs stored in the “Anatomical Studies” boxes at the
Documentary Collection.76 Attributed to William Dellenback, these several hundred photographs, according to Yamashiro, “complement a study on the variation of male and female genitalia and female breasts”—the idea being that, “examining and photographing anatomical differences was a preliminary step toward observing behavior first hand.”77
More so than most of the photographs in the archive, these images overtly and unselfconsciously present themselves as accurate, objective representations of particular aspects of the human body. What is so interesting about these images is that in their very attempts to “document” certain anatomical structures and to be seen as evidence, the photographs undo themselves and reveal the contingency of their evidentiary claims. The category demonstrates the contingency of its claim to represent human anatomy by virtue of the images that it excludes from its purview. Although the collection as a whole strives to incorporate a great deal of individual variation, the subjects pictured in this category are strictly coded as male or female based on normative visual criteria for human genitalia. Indeed, this visually disclosed, normative dimorphism dictates the
75 Yamashiro, 191.
76 William Dellenback, Anatomical Studies Photographs, Documentary Collection.
77 Yamashiro, 190. 38 categorization of bodies throughout most of the collection—the exceptions being the photographs included the “Medical” boxes, which depict “photos of females with medical interest: gynecology, obstetrics, abnormal genitalia, pathology, etc. Male photos with medical interest are also included: abnormal genitalia, pathology, etc.”78 While the subjects imaged in this “Anatomical Studies” category demonstrate a range of ages, they do not represent a racially diverse sample of subjects.
Beyond the details of their categorization, the images themselves, in terms of their composition, work against an objective reading of their content. To begin with, the photographs are visually stunning. Dellenback’s angles, lighting, and revelation of texture in pubic hair and folds of skin are more reminiscent of the “high art” photography of someone like Robert Mapplethorpe than of a photographic still being used to document a particular anatomical structure. One could dismiss such stylistic detail as incidental, or one could see it as indicative of the fact that the “documentary” is a genre and “evidence” has a recognizable style. Conventions of documentary style emerge in several of the photos via the appearance of wooden rulers usually at the side of the close-up frames— ostensibly providing measurements of certain pieces of anatomy—yet, in other instances, such nods to the scientific aesthetic are challenged by dark nail polish or pearl rings on hands spreading labia apart.79
Such details draw the images out of a neat, clinical, aesthetic and expose a subjectivity that works against the researchers’ supposed intentions for the photographs.
78 “Description Sheet,” Medical Photographs, Documentary Collection.
79 Dellenback, 707, 755, 702, Anatomical Studies. 39
Perhaps the most interesting image of the three hundred assigned to this category is one picturing a naked man seated in profile, bent over and performing fellatio on his own erect penis.80 There is no counterpart for this photograph amongst the female images, and its inclusion in the category of “Anatomical Studies” says much more about the particular interests and biases of the researchers than it does about anatomies in general.
The great deception of the technical image, from the photograph to the digital image, is the sense of agency that it proffers. From the camera obscura's promise to enable its users to “give us a true Draught of whatever he sees before him,” to the lure of front facing cameras on mobile devices that enable users to consult and curate their images at any moment and distribute them to a wide viewing public, technical image apparatuses have been understood as devices that support human mastery over representational “truths.”81 While this ability to “see the world as it really is” and to be able to manipulate that “reality” to meet one’s desires seems the apex of agency in personal expression, it is, in fact, as Marshall McLuhan suggests, an apex of dependence.
McLuhan argues that in their engagement with the technical apparatus individuals become “servomechanism[s].”82 He contends that users must, “to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his
80 Dellenback, 620.
81 Silverman, Miracle, 22.
82 McLuhan, Understanding, 46. 40 clock.”83 Where the individual presumes that she is controlling the apparatus, it turns out that she is its tool—she comes not only to rely upon, but to be identified with the technology that she uses to the point that the two become indistinguishable from one another.
In Jenner's various engagements with media- and bio-technologies as a surgically altered, synthetically hormonally regulated, sartorially designed, and digitally retouched, woman, for example, she stands alongside the photographs, online videos, and television interviews that simultaneously create and naturalize popular concepts of gender. Jenner is an extension of herself. Visual media technologies are embedded not only in her story but also in her body. Jenner's body is a media technology. Her particular engagements with bio-technologies (which are ultimately designed to function as media technologies) and media technologies (which ultimately condition the development of certain bio- technologies), bring to light the operation of a mechanism that ensures that sexes and genders continue to be designed and defined as visually disclosable and physically manipulable aspects of the subject.
Rather than the product of agential choice, Jenner’s body is better described as what W.J.T Mitchell terms a “living image,” or (in systems theory terms) an entity that autopoetically produces itself as the image of itself.84 Eugene Thacker refers to such phenomena as “biomedia”: “particular mediations of the body, optimizations of the
83 McLuhan, 46.
84 Mitchell, “What Do Pictures,” 10, emphasis mine. 41 biological in which ‘technology’ appears to disappear altogether.”85 Recognizing the imbricated character of the relationship between bodies and the technologies said to optimize them is increasingly important, and increasingly difficult, in a contemporary social and cultural environment in which technologies are more and more seamlessly integrated into bodies. Systems/cybernetic theories provide a window into the relation between bodies and biotechnologies that exposes this dynamic as something far more complex than a kind of cause-and-effect, agent-centered interaction.
Whereas the popular narrative would describe Jenner as a conscious agent whose engagement with certain biotechnologies is aimed at achieving particular, material outcomes, a cybernetic re-description of this interaction would consider neither Jenner, nor her body to be static entities. Instead, engineered to signify as a particular visually articulated sex to align with a particular gender identity, “Jenner,” from this point of view, is the name for a complex threshold condition fueled by the persistent interrelation of psychic, bio-chemical, and visually mediatic systems whose most significant emergent property, as far as one can discern from popular, medical, and legal discourse, is the seamless image of a very familiar (wealthy, white, nostalgic, simultaneously sexualized and desexualized) ideal of the feminine.
This image of Jenner (this body) which will inevitably inspire/require photographic and mirror imaging as a means of confirming and recording itself so that it can continue to reproduce itself on itself, obscures the complexity of the system, the gender, of which it is a part. Image, as the Vanity Fair article and Leibovitz photoshoot
85 Thacker, Biomedia, 6. 42 clearly demonstrate, is the endgame of gender. The scopic sensibility and material focus that underlie the Jenner piece are not rarified conditions exclusive to her as a celebrity with significant financial and cultural means. In 2014, Original Plumbing: Trans Male
Quarterly published the fifteenth issue of their publication and named it the “Selfie” issue. On the second page of the magazine its editors provide an illuminating explanation for their decision to devote an entire issue to selfies—one that speaks directly to the imbricated status of bodies and images in concepts of gender:
When you hear the word SELFIE you probably think of Instagram and your own
self documentation. Or maybe you even think of Ellen at the Oscars, the
Kardashian empire, or how this short, powerful word didn’t even exist a few years
back. Some may think of the SELFIE as superficial or annoying, but for our
community it is an essential documentation of our existence.86
By the synecdochizing logic of the editor’s statement, bodies are pictures are subjects are genders. More than that, bodies are consciously curated pictures, subjects, genders. In a world of rapidly advancing media and biotechnologies the Original Plumbing editors suggest that what for some is the option to control one’s body on biological and visible levels, for others is a necessity now better technologically facilitated. Yet, from another point of view, the notion that the “selfie” is an “essential documentation of one’s existence” exposes not the improved measure of control that the individual has over her existence, but the increased level of control that her image has over her existence.
86 Mac and Kayiatos, “Letter from the Editors,” 2, emphasis mine. 43
One of the ways that Preciado describes gender, in a twentieth-/twenty-first- century context, is as an “organizing principle.”87 When Money, credited with coining the term in its current definition as a role or identity in the social or psychological sense, started using the word in his clinic he was, Preciado notes, “essentially thinking of the possibility of using technologies…to modify the body or to produce subjectivity intentionally in order to conform to a preexisting visual and biopolitical order, which was prescriptive for what was supposed to be a female or male human body.”88 This clinical setting designed gender to categorize individuals based on their physical appearances, which were, in turn, thought to indicate individuals’ reproductive capacities. From an overwhelmingly complex subject, the living being is reduced to an appearance. Here, gender becomes the umbrella under which a complex of systems/techniques—including,
“photographing ‘deviants,’ cellular diagnosis, hormonal analysis and therapy, chromosomal readings, and transsexual and intersexual surgery”—are gathered in the service of the “normalization and transformation of living beings.”89 At a moment when discoveries regarding variation in biochemistry and physical anatomy could have expanded concepts of bodies, sexes, and the individuals who inhabit them, an
“unexpected alliance between the nineteenth-century naturalist metaphysics of sexual dimorphism, focused on heterosexual reproduction, and the rise of a hyperconstructivist
87 Preciado, 111.
88 Preciado, 100, emphasis mine.
89 Preciado, 100. 44 medical and biotech industry in which gender roles and identities can be artificially designed” instead emerged from medical thinking on these issues.90
While, to some degree, in some areas, the strict female/male binary is breaking down in terms of the ways in which a body is perceived—for instance, the recently published fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders acknowledges the desire “to be” or to be “treated as” an “alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender”—a tight association between bodies, sexes, and genders remains operative in narratives of sex and gender.91 Within this matrix, a body like
Jenner’s is at once a symbol of liberation and a symbol of confinement. Her body demonstrates the tremendous possibilities for corporeal design that medical technologies now offer at the same time as it exposes the constraints of visual display and heteronormative ideals of recognition that continue to dominate popular concepts of bodies—and, somehow, subsequently, subjects—in contemporary culture. Photographic representations of sexed and gendered bodily materiality distributed across digital and print media platforms condition the emergence of societal ideals for normative gendered appearance and, subsequently, the development and use of biotechnologies (such as hormone replacement therapies and plastic surgeries) on bodies, which, supposedly, only become bodies as they come into visual representation, and so on.92 In other words, the
90 Preciado, 103.
91 American Psychiatric Association, DSM-V.
92 Recall Judith Butler’s argument that “…gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive.” Butler, Bodies, 67. 45 glossy images in Vanity Fair did not simply accompany Jenner’s announcement: they were her announcement.
If this collapse of bodies and images in the conceptualization and articulation of gender doesn’t quite show its seams, particularly in the cover image of Jenner in Vanity
Fair, then a much more blunt exposure of some of the disparate biological, technical, mediatic, desiring, and syntactic elements that gender organizes under its sign is on offer in one of the artistic features, which is also the cover page, of the “Selfie” issue of
Original Plumbing: Wynne Neilly’s Female to “Male.”93 Neilly’s project consists of a series of polaroid photographs (only five appear in the magazine, but the larger project includes many more images and remains ongoing) all of which are uniformly composed self-portraits, or “selfies,” of the artist standing against a white backdrop. Similar to, but far less cryptic than, the photographs at the Documentary Collection, each Polaroid is labeled in black ink at the top center of its white border with the number of milligrams of testosterone injected (usually 100mg) and, at the bottom, the date on which the shot was administered and the cardinal order of that shot in the series (for example 3rd shot or 15th shot, etc). In addition to the photographs, the installation of this work in at Ryerson
Image Centre in Toronto in 2014 included an audio track that documented changes in
Neilly’s voice, as well as various documents and objects (such as financial and medical correspondence and discarded syringes) related to Neilly’s “evolution” of gender, as he calls it.94
93 See Figure 5.
94 Neilly, “Female to ‘Male.’” 46
Figure 5. From “The Selfie Issue,” Original Plumbing, Winter, 2015. Image
downloaded from https://www.out.com/entertainment/popnography/2014/12/18/selfie-
centric-trans-gaze-issue-15-original-plumbing-wynne-neilly in August 2018.
“Female to ‘Male’” provides a window into a particular confluence of bio- technologies and media technologies and its relation to contemporary concepts of gender.
Labeling each photograph with the date it was taken, the dosage of testosterone injected on that date, and the photograph’s order in the series, marks the series, and the gender that it displays, as a progressively constructed entity wherein bio-chemical changes are tracked via photographic documentation. This aesthetic presentation stands in opposition to what is on display in the Jenner Vanity Fair article in the sense that, with the exception of some compositional play with mirror reflections and displays of the photographic apparatus, Annie Leibovitz’s shoot presents Jenner’s image as a kind of “finished product.” Although the article discusses Jenner’s surgeries and recovery process,
Leibovitz’s photographs do not refer to these medical interventions, and they certainly do 47 not inscribe markers of them on the images themselves in the way Neilly’s series does.
On the one hand, “Female to ‘Male’” presents a very straightforward account of the construction of gender through its component parts (which, in this case, is assumed to be hormones and photographic images) at a moment when biotechnologies and media technologies appear to provide individuals with near complete agency over their bodily appearances and, synecdochally, their genders. On the other hand, this series (which deliberately maintains quotation marks around the word “Male” in its title) not only underscores the contingency and ultimate inaccessibility of gender identities largely based on visually articulated ideals, but it also makes itself an occasion to examine and critique what these visually dominated and corporeally focused concepts of gender understand as some of the most crucial components of the process of gender construction in contemporary culture.
By creating such a conspicuous display of a narrative progression of images and attaching a particular dosage of testosterone to each image in this progression, the project encourages its audience to question the assumption that images and biochemistry are the foundations of gender construction. With “Male” positioned as the unattainable end of the project of gender, each image becomes another ineffective iteration of a visual/material path towards achieving this impossible goal. Like the selfies that propel the series, this interminable progression becomes a asymptotic loop—each image pushing the project forward to an end that will never come, each failed attempt provoking another attempt to grasp the ideal. And this, it seems, is precisely the point: to paint gender as a never- ending repetition of bodies and images that never quite reach their ends. In addition to 48 creating space for critiquing what has become something of a standard narrative of progress toward either male or female gendered ideals in contemporary concepts of gender, the project also enables a critique of visually articulated materiality and notions of singularity in relation to theories of gender.
The use of polaroid film and handwritten labels on each image in an age when images are snapped, labeled, and distributed to social media platforms in a matter of seconds is not only a throwback to an age of photographic prints, but also indicates an insistence on the particular, singular nature of the image—and, by extension, the body and the subject. Polaroids do not have negatives or digital files; like paintings they are singular images. Likewise, the handwritten ink on each of the images in lieu of a typed font functions as a kind of signature appended to each photograph.95 These material anachronisms create a sharp juxtaposition with the bio- and media-technologized genders that they support. Here, gender is both visually inaccessible and materially grounded, both infinitely repeatable and inimitably singular.
95 See Figure 6. 49
Figure 6. From “Female to ‘Male,’” Wynne Neilly, 2013. Image downloaded from
http://www.wynneneilly.com/femaletomale in August 2018.
The contradictory co-existence of visually conceived materiality in its importance and its impossibility, its singularity and its repetition, that emerges in “Female to ‘Male’” speaks to a larger contradiction systemically embedded into contemporary thinking about genders, bodies, and sexes. In 2018, as has been made abundantly clear by the various
“bathroom controversies” circulating through state legislatures and mainstream media reporting, bodies are still taxonomically sorted into one of two categories, female or male, according to fantasies of hetero-reproductive “viability” based on information that ranges from the chromosomal to the genital and is subtended, almost exclusively, by a visually conceived morphological imaginary.96 Sex and gender, as they are popularly, medically, and legally conceived, rely, as Preciado suggests, on an “optical ontology” which has defined “the real” as something that “you can see” at least since the nineteenth
96 See, for example, “Understanding Transgender Access Laws,” New York Times. 50 century.97 At the same time, the notion of a psychological sex (which will come to be known as gender) that is “[radically invisible],” and depends on a radically “immaterial ontology”—one that undergirds wide-ranging experiences of gender dysphoria—is conditioned by and develops alongside this externalized, visual paradigm of recognition for sex.98 Thus, an “irreconcilable” set of “metaphysical models of the body,” come to make up the “criteria for the assignment of gender, as well as those for its reassignment in cases of transsexuality,” in a social system largely designed to produce and control bodies, that can produce and control more bodies, that can be deployed in the service of maintaining and optimizing the heterosexist, patriarchal, and capital culture of the West.99
This irreconcilability at the heart of visually articulated and materially conceived concepts of gender is enacted by the photographic genre exhibited in “Female to ‘Male’” and touted by the editors of Original Plumbing: the self-portrait—or, more recently, the
“selfie.” Such photographic endeavors to capture one’s own image—with or without a front facing camera and an LCD screen—are either attempts to suture, or attempts to highlight the impossibility of suturing one’s mirrored reflection, or one’s photographic reproduction with one’s internal, psychological sense of oneself. Encounters with mirrored reflections are often understood as scenes of recognition that form the foundations for the construction of individual, egoic subjects. Indeed, one of the most poignant moments in Bissinger's article, finds Jenner in front of a mirror:
97 Preciado, 102.
98 Preciado, 102.
99 Preciado, 101. 51
He was naked. The gold medal was around his neck. He looked at himself in the
mirror. The grand diversion of winning the decathalon was finished. Everything
would change. Nothing had changed. He didn't see a hunk. He didn't see a
success. Instead of reveling in the accomplishment, he diminished it in his mind
because he had done it, the stupid little boy with dyslexia. The little boy who
knew he had been born a girl and was now just trying to put one over on the rest
of the world.100
In a social environment like the contemporary Western one, particularly in the United
States, in which subjects are so persistently and pervasively described and categorized as members of male or female sexes—which are then conflated with male or the female genders according to a set of largely visual characteristics—the mirror scene becomes an essential aspect not just of constructing a subject but, more specifically, of constructing a sexed and gendered subject. This moment of conscious misrecognition in the mirror has become a classic element of gender narratives, and is often described as an illuminating experience in which the individual is alerted to, or receives confirmation of, the incongruence of her interior understanding of herself and the external aspect that she presents to the world.101 The mirror becomes a site/sight of “truth” and a place of constant return in these accounts, calibrating and conditioning an individual’s progress toward a moment of closure in the presumed alignment of her internalized understanding of herself and her external appearance reflected in the frame.
100 Bissinger, 63.
101 See Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues for a particularly complex rendition of the relationship between gender and mirrored reflections. 52
Not surprisingly, McLuhan uses the myth of Narcissus to illuminate his concept of servomechanitude, as this scene provides an excellent example of a reflective visual technology developing into a complex extension of the individual—that, importantly, both is and is not the individual herself. He argues that Narcissus does not see himself in his reflection but, in fact, sees another person there. And, “this extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.”102 Fascinated by the image before him, which is not him but whose movements appear to follow his own, Narcissus and his reflection forge, according to
McLuhan, a closed system. The mythological character’s perception narrows to the visual sense, he becomes numb to the ambient perceptual information in his environment, and he isolates himself in a loop of mutual constitution with his image. A closed system can only be constructed through the observation of a third party, the action of a second order observation. While the interaction between individuals and their mirror reflections is made vastly more complex when described as a mutually reinforcing relationship, this description still reduces the complexity of the interaction that is being observed.
The pervasiveness of the notion that one could achieve this visually articulated interior/exterior alignment, persistently supported by the mirror image, reveals an equally pervasive notion that a body can be understood as a visually articulated, material whole.
As Lacan explains in his essay on the mirror stage, in one’s reflection one gains access to the body in its “total form.”103 Yet, this access is to the body “…only as a gestalt, that is,
102 McLuhan, 51.
103 Lacan, Ecrits, 76. 53 in an exteriority.”104 Staring into her reflection, the subject views an image that both grounds and undermines her sense of self. The image is grounding insofar as it appears to manifest a unified picture of the subject’s body and a confirmation of her location in space. However, it is also a reversed and fixed image at odds with the libidinal sensations that the subject feels animating her interior—it “symbolizes the I’s mental permanence, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination.”105 The recognition that the subject obtains from her image is, in fact, misrecognition. By way of this moment of fracture, the subject enters into what Lacan refers to as the imaginary order. Separated and alienated from the image that confirms her presence, something is always lost in the translation of her interior experience of corporeality to the perception of her exterior. This something, according to Lacan, is the subject’s body, an object-like entity that will always fuel her desire to be in control and always elude her attempts at mastery.
For Lacan, the body is an objet a, an object-cause of desire. Using a colorful example about Picasso and a parakeet, he explains how the body acts as a kind of screen, a visually articulated stand-in for the subject that never quite fulfills this role. One could tell that the parakeet was in love with Picasso, he argues, because it “nibbled the collar of his shirt and the flaps of his jacket. Indeed, the parakeet was in love with what is essential to man, namely, his attire. The parakeet was like Descartes, to whom men were merely clothes (habits)…walking about (en…pro-ménade).”106 The bird was in love with the
104 Lacan, Ecrits, 76.
105 Lacan, Ecrits, 76.
106 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 6. 54 sartorial signifiers appended to Picasso’s body; it had no direct access to the artist’s body as such. As Lacan goes on to say: “The habit loves the monk…In other words, what lies under the habit, what we call the body, is perhaps but the remainder (reste) I call objet a.
What holds the image together is a remainder”107 Considered through the lens of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the body is the kernel of fascination and doubt that fuels the desiring relation between the individual and the image she or he has of him or herself.
These two aspects of the individual—her internal experience and the external perceptions that she and others garner of her as a corporeal entity—cannot be separated, but neither can they be placed in alignment. Thus, the body, “the substance of what is supposedly object-like (objectal)...is in fact that which constitutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause, and sustains desire through its lack of satisfaction (insatisfaction), and even its impossibility.”108 The body, then, is better described not as an object, but as a threshold. It is an interface which only exists as the perpetual confluence of psychological lack and imagistic wholeness. Particularly before the mirror, something is lost in the translation of one’s interior experience of corporeality to the perception of one’s exterior, and this loss propels a perpetual search for wholeness, a perpetual loop of bodies and images.
Leibovitz’s shoot for Vanity Fair overtly engages this paradoxical practice of imagistic self-reflexivity, underscoring its particular significance for Jenner and its increasing importance in contemporary understandings of sex and gender more generally.
While the cover photo relies upon, rather than questions, the role of the photograph in
107 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 6.
108 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 6. 55 establishing and confirming an individual’s gendered, sexed, or embodied reality, direct engagement of human interface with visual technologies, such as cameras and mirrors, and the role that these dynamics play in producing sexed, gendered, and embodied subjects appears in many of the other pictures that Leibovitz took. Although much less didactic than Nielly’s “Female to ‘Male’” this is where Leibovitz’s work incorporates elements of self-awareness into its composition. Three of the seven photographs included in the original print version depict Jenner flanked with mirrors. Four of the photographs capture various aspects of the photographic apparatus—cameras, lighting elements, reflection boards, and light meters—either within, or reflected within, the frames of each shot. The images offer windows into Jenner’s “private” domain and the image-making technologies and visual practices through which this space and, by extension, Jenner, as a gendered and sexed subject, are both constructed and revealed as constructed. But, even as it exposes the process of the construction of Jenner's image, the Leibovitz shoot, by virtue of its status as a photo shoot, among other things, makes the paradoxical lure and contingency of human interface with the photographic apparatus into an object of mastery. In other words, at the same time that these images expose the mutually reinforcing relationship between Jenner's body, mirror reflections of her body, and widely distributed photographic images of her body, they also—through these self-reflexive compositional choices as well as their observer positions—express a measure of control over these relationships that both suggests and performs another version of the same narrative of personal agency that it would seem to undermine in the first place. 56
Two photographs from the shoot, in particular, are instructive for their staging of
Jenner’s participation, and non-participation, in certain self-reflexive visual dynamics as acts of dominance over visual systems of meaning making and the contributions that such systems make to popular narratives of gender construction and/or transition. The first photograph pictures Jenner in a black leather jacket and a black lace bustier.109 The camera frames her straight on as she looks off slightly to her left. Two views of her profiles are reflected in mirrors to her sides, and another view of the back of her head is discernible in the mirror behind her. Jenner is framed as a Janus figure—a paradigmatic example not only of paradox and liminality, but of control over paradox and liminality.
Her point of view is simultaneously discontinuous and impossibly universal in its triplication. As they split the frame into thirds, Jenner's left-gazing, straight-on, and right- looking visages—because of the straight-on positioning of Leibovitz’s camera, which gives them a more global framing—also refer to a forward moving, linear idea of time and progress in their nods to past, present, and future time. The photograph suggests that
Jenner’s present condition takes on meaning in the context of this timeline—meaning over which Jenner (or, more accurately, the direct address that Jenner’s ample chest makes to the camera) exerts complete control. Inhabiting gender, here, is about seeing, being seen, and, above all, the impossible task of achieving a “universal” perspective in this temporally bound endeavor.
109 See figure 7. 57
Figure 7. Annie Leibovitz, “Caitlyn Jenner: The Full Story,” Vanity Fair, June,
2015. Image downloaded from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/caitlyn-
jenner-bruce-cover-annie-leibovitz in August 2018.
In addition to underscoring the significance of seeing, this photograph also emphasizes the importance of blind spots (and Jenner’s awareness of them) to the particular narrative of gender construction with which she aligns herself. Reflected on the edges of the frame in mirrors on both sides of Jenner, one can make out a sliver of
Leibovitz, her camera obscuring her face, and, in another mirror reflection on the left side of the frame, the back of an assistant’s head and one shoulder. One rather easily understands the assistant’s presence as representing “the one who does not see”—and who, in turn, bolsters Jenner’s position as “the one who sees it all.” The scopic situation becomes a bit more nuanced in its relation to Leibovitz’s figure. Staring into the same lens that brought it into existence, the image photographically reproduces what Lacan refers to as “the illusion of the consciousness of seeing oneself see oneself,” in which, as 58 in the mirror, one recognizes oneself as separate from oneself—as a gestalt.110 This illusion, similar to the illusion of visual continuity that human ocular systems fabricate in spite of biologically unavoidable areas of insensitivity to light, or blind spots, at site the optic nerve, is constitutive of egoic experiences of subjectivity. As biologists and cyberneticians Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela put it in The Tree of Knowledge, their classic text on cybernetic theory: “we do not see that we do not see.”111 Yet, in
Leibovitz’s carefully curated photograph, Jenner does.
This sense of awareness and control, even over one’s own blindspots, is echoed and increased in a second photograph from the shoot in which Jenner appears in profile, facing a vanity counter with a mirror and reflected in another vanity mirror to her right.112
Rather than quadrupling her point of view here, this photograph does just the opposite.
Leaning back in a director’s-style chair with her eyes closed, Jenner stages a blasé refusal to address the camera, or anything else, with her gaze. In the mirror on her right is a reflection of her reflection in a full-length mirror apparently propped up on the wall to her left, as well as the figure of Leibovitz (camera, once again, obscuring her face) standing in a doorway as she takes the photograph. At the center of a void of infinite reflection, Jenner takes blind repose in liberated obliviousness of the scopic demands of her surroundings. From opposite ends of the spectrum of conscious participation in visual systems of meaning making, then, these two photographs announce Jenner’s control over
110 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 82.
111 Maturana and Varela, Tree of Knowledge, 19.
112 See Figure 8. 59 her image and its relationship to the gender identity that she constructs for herself. She is the one who has seen it all and the one who needn't see anything more—gender, here, is at once a decisively external and a profoundly introspective matter.
Figure 8. Annie Leibovitz, “Caitlyn Jenner: The Full Story,” Vanity Fair, June,
2015. Image downloaded from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/caitlyn-
jenner-bruce-cover-annie-leibovitz in August 2018.
The contradictory status of Jenner’s body as a visual composite, and the relation of visually constructed bodily materiality to concepts of sex and gender more broadly, are precisely what Leibovitz’s photographs boldly underscore. Yet, in their critique of visual systems of meaning making and the role that these systems play in creating and sustaining Jenner’s body, sex, and gender, Leibovitz’s photographs deliberately maintain a sense of control over the contradiction that they expose. From their status as photographic images, to the particular portrayals of Jenner's scopic engagement and non- engagement with her own image in them, these images expose both the dominance and the insufficiency of the visual from within a visual medium by referring to visual modes 60 of interpersonal interchange. In these ways, these images of Jenner write a tautological description in which they recapitulate the notion that visually constructed understandings of one’s biology are not one’s destiny at the same time that their medium and depicted content go on to suggest that the key to controlling one’s destiny lies in the visually recognizable manipulation of the “image” of one’s biological sex.
Leibovitz's photographs enact, with their mirrors and captured gazes, Roof’s concept of the vertiginous regime of gender. The practice of offering one’s image of self- reflection to an outside observer is enacted in their status as photographs, not to mention photographs published for wide public consumption. The Vanity Fair photo shoot both depicts and enacts a vertiginous “economy of consciousness understood through the vector of sight,” one that “[oscillates] endlessly between the performer’s [or subject’s] evocation of a consciousness of self-consciousness and the audience’s [or, again, subject’s] self-consciousness of a consciousness of self-consciousness.”113 Bounding back and forth between reflection and reaction and reflection again, the sense of subjective wholeness in the gestalt, and agency in the ability to manipulate that gestalt, that scopically operating constructions of gender tend to evoke is challenged here by a mode of comprehension constitutively under revision.
Gender, according to Roof's theory, is an open system: a circumscribed set of processes constantly exchanging with its environment and incorporating its environment into these processes. It is the site where an “individual’s interpretations, both conscious and unconscious, of the relation between mind and body, self and other, and subject and
113 Roof, Gender, 183. 61 socius” are negotiated and made “manifest as provisional positionings and protocols of desire,” or regimes.114 The paradigmatic example of an open system in systems/ cybernetic thought is the biological cell, a set of organelles operating within a selectively permeable membrane that controls the entrance and exit of materials into and out of the cell. Like the cell, Roof explains:
Subjects’ genderings are…continuing, roughly circumscribed (i.e., a part of
subjects’ psychical and social terrains) sets of processes that are produced both by
the possibilities offered by their environment and by the ways subjects have
unconsciously made elements of that environment (have introjected) the sets of
limitations and made possibilities part of their own psychic worlds.115
Like the cell, or any open system, while an observer can define the edges of a cell, a cell itself cannot define itself as such but from a remove. Gender also cannot define itself as such. Furthermore, any such definition that would appear to initiate from outside of the system—such as Jenner’s reflections and photographs—prove to be illusions, as any
“outside” observation here is, necessarily, re-incorporated into the system. As Maturana and Varela explain, “Everything said is said by someone. Every reflection brings forth a world.”116
114 Roof, Gender, 4.
115 Roof, Gender, 26.
116 Maturana and Varela, 26. 62
When one attempts to observe this observation, as is depicted in the scopic fantasy of Leibovitz’s Vanity Fair photo shoot of Jenner, one meets with paradox.
System’s theorist Niklas Luhmann writes:
When observers (we, at the moment) continue to look for an ultimate reality, a
concluding formula, a final identity, they will find the paradox. Such a paradox is
not simply a logical contradiction (A is non-A) but a foundational statement: The
world is observable because it is unobservable. Nothing can be observed (not
even the “nothing”) without drawing a distinction, but this operation remains
unobservable.117
In the very process of making an observation, of describing and defining the boundaries of a particular system, the observer position necessarily excludes itself from that which it observes—it cannot see itself seeing itself, and the thought that it could (as Lacan makes clear in his mirror stage essay) arises from a misrecognition of self.118 It is precisely this fantasy of being able to see oneself and, hence, to know oneself, outside of oneself, this fantasy of imagistic self-recognition and self-manipulation, that sustains the vertiginous regime and the notions of personal agency that it supports. A systems approach, thus, reveals the interior/exterior distinction—so powerfully constructed through visual paradigms, and such a foundational aspect of narratively defined popular subjectivities— to be, as Roof puts it, an “illusion produced by the effects of systemic interchange,” a
117 Luhmann, 86.
118 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 82. 63 liminal boundary that vertiginous regimes create in their oscillation.119 Notions of agency over these bounded illusions—or, bodies—are, from a systems point of view, not available as they cannot avoid being incorporated back into the system that they would define. Indeed, from this theoretical vantage, “our ideas of subjective choice and self- determination” tend to act as “alibis for the ways individual dispositions operate as a part of the systemic operation.”120
119 Roof, Gender, 26.
120 Roof, Gender, 26. 64
CHAPTER TWO
Sex, Suture, Cinema
In one of the short pieces of correspondence that makes up Chase Joynt and Mike
Hoolboom’s epistolary text, You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death, and Transition, Joynt writes to Hoolboom about the Facebook feed of a young transgender man from Europe that he had been following lately. The young man, like so many people both in and outside of transgender communities, had been constructing a narrative of his personal life for public consumption on social media. He documented the physical transformation of his body through a portion of his transition from female to male by sharing images and textual descriptions related to his phalloplasty surgery, and the complications of this medical procedure. In his letter to Hoolboom, Joynt paraphrases a series of these posts in a single paragraph:
‘Feeling over the moon!’ he reported beneath a picture of a thumbs-up hospital-
bed selfie. ‘Have an infection! Going in for emergency surgery now!’ he posted
beside another thumbs-up and a smile. ‘Dysphoria is gone!’ he finally announced
through oxygen tubes and IV lines, along with the disclosure that he cannot walk
and will not be able to do so for quite some time.121
Although displaced from their original context alongside the images that the young man snapped of himself, Joynt’s recapitulation of these posts remains disturbing. The incongruity between the young man’s emotional excitement and physical suffering emerges in sharp relief with every exclamation point—and this is to say nothing of the
121 Joynt and Hoolboom, You Only Live, 88. 65 trite colloquial phrasing of some of his exclamatory statements. These stylistic elements glaringly expose the young man’s sincere desire to present a confident, enthusiastic, and satisfied front in the face of what many—due to the persistent conflation of sex and gender, as well as the ways in which surgeries figure as an essential pivot point for narratives of transition in mainstream contemporary culture—would likely read as the major complication, or even failure, not only of the young man’s surgery, but of his transition as a whole.
For Joynt, watching the young man’s surgical experience unfold on social media is “crushing.”122 He finds it extremely difficult to look on as this young man, despite enduring great physical pain, continues to comport himself in a manner designed to maintain the patriarchal and heterosexist medico-cultural status quo:
Every update is followed by an exclamation point, maybe because he has learned
that having surgery is a privilege for some, and therefore he should be grateful or
at least perform gratitude in public. He summarizes every infection as a necessary
and welcome setback, while the end goal of a life lived on the other side of the
binary remains the same, and he is uplifted by a community of people leaving him
words of encouragement under his pictures.123
Joynt’s commentary reveals a paradox in the young man’s posts that extends beyond this particular example and into a larger discussion of gender, transition, and binary thinking in contemporary culture. Joynt understands that the medical terminology, linear timeline,
122 Joynt and Hoolboom, 88.
123 Joynt and Hoolboom, 89. 66 and technical images that the young man from Europe is using to express his liberation, descend from the terminology, timeline, and technology of visual representation that medical professionals like Money used in the middle of the twentieth century. This particular way of structuring the question of gender ensures conformity to a binary ideal for sex and an asymmetrical power dynamic between men and women. In other words,
Joynt understands that the very tools that the young man from Europe is using to liberate himself from the rigid expectations of a binary system for sex and gender actually bind him more closely to that system—demanding his allegiance to it, even at great physical and emotional cost. Joynt is a trans man who underwent a mastectomy as part of his own transition. As such, one might assume that he also understands something of what it means to navigate the rhetorics of liberation and realities of normalization that have grown up around the concept of gender and narratives of gender transition over the past half-century or so.
Confronted with the contradictory practice of seeking the liberation of one’s gender—insofar as gender, here, is conflated with a binary model for sex—and (by extension) one’s identity, by conforming to surgically rendered bodily norms, Joynt responds with a series of questions:
…what if we backed away from the selfies for a moment, or even the comment
tags, all invariably rendered in close-up? What if we took in the scene from a
distance, a telescopic distance even? Would the long shot reveal that the penis is,
in fact, not the problem to be solved? What if it was not a requirement of public 67
transition to be satisfied or excited? What if the only reliable narrative reprieve is
one where the endpoint continually shifts and changes? Dysphoria, indeed.124
Using the language of visual—primarily cinematic—media to re-articulate the young
European man’s experience, Joynt’s questions both underscore and reach beyond the narrow focus on visually perceived and articulated, binary ideals for the external appearances of individual human bodies that undergird contemporary, mainstream, medico-cultural models of gender. Disconcerted, not only by the young man from
Europe’s simultaneous suffering and elation, but also by the cultural and institutional imperatives that demand the young man’s conflicted emotional state, Joynt asks what the individual and cultural consequences are of making the physical, largely visually conceived, transformation of individual human bodies a primary focus of gender liberation. He wonders, critically, what gets obscured and magnified in the conversation when gender is conflated with a bodily imaginary of sex and thought of as something that can be seen in, on, or of, an individual human body? And, he emphasizes the role of visual media apparatuses in creating and maintaining spatio-temporal environments in which the link between visually articulated genders, bodies, and sexes is (nearly, ceaselessly) confirmed. How does one think this collapsed version of gender/sex/bodily materiality apart from narrative constructions of its “transition” from one side of an idealized binary to the other? How does one think gender apart from narrative constructions of its transition from a position within one idealized side of the binary to
124 Joynt and Hoolboom, 89. 68 another within that same side—are these narratives viable beyond the individual, the visual, and the binary?
Joynt’s questions initiate an important refinement and expansion of my claim that contemporary definitions of gender rely on a vertiginous, co-substantiating relationship between bodies and visual images (especially since the advent of photography), insofar as they underline the dependence of such relationships on particular spatio-temporal conditions. A continuous desire to see oneself being seen seeing oneself perform a display of conventional binary gender signifiers played out through bodies and photographic images may well be precisely how mainstream gender, most broadly conceived, operates; however, (and this is what Joynt’s questions so astutely point out) this sustaining relationship between bodies and images for contemporary concepts of gender exists within certain conditions of framing and narrative. A photograph taken from a “telescopic distance” would not confirm an individual’s gender. An individual for whom a new body did not provide—or at least begin to provide—satisfaction and closure would be seen as a social anomaly. Contemporary concepts of gender rely not simply on a vertiginous, co- susbstantiating relationship between bodies and images, but on a vertiginous, co- substantiating relationship between anthropocentrically conceived and framed bodies and images sustained by the continuous striving and inevitable failure of narrative logic.
Embarking on the claim that gender—or, more specifically, mainstream gender transition—is a kind of “narrative work” intimately supported by the lure of photographic referentiality, places one in well-trodden theoretical territory.125 Indeed, the importance of
125 Prosser, Skins, 4. 69 both narrative logic and visual mediation to the conceptualization of gender as a psychic relationship to sex were grounding claims in Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body
Narratives of Transsexuality, published in 1998. In the face of strong theoretical commitments to deconstruction and anti-essentialism circulating within 1990s feminist theories at the time of its publication, Prosser’s text focuses on “the literal and ontological senses of transsexual embodiment” across readings of literary texts such as
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, as well as photographs that appear in transsexual autobiographies, and the photographic work of Loren Cameron and Del LaGrace Volcano.126 Prosser premises his readings on the notion that narrative is “not only the bridge to embodiment but a way of making sense of transition, the link between locations: the transition itself.”127 He uses the compound term “body narrative” to denote the inextricability of the materiality of the body from its narrative unfolding. In its function as a sense-making mechanism, narrative, Prosser explains, becomes an essential means by which “the materiality of the body” comes into
“view.”128
Second Skins culminates—perhaps unsurprisingly—with analyses of photographic portraits that appear in several autobiographical accounts of transsexuality, as well as the portrait work of Loren Cameron and Del LaGrace Volcano. Prosser finds in the
126 Chu, “Wrong Wrong Body,” 148.
127 Prosser, 9.
128 Prosser, 12. 70 photograph a form of mediation essential to the materialization of bodies and the embodiment of gender/sex identities:
In the field of the transsexual subject the photograph functions as an incarnation;
the photograph appears co-natural with the body, and may even begin as more
referential of the self than the body. Inasmuch as the immediate purpose of
transsexuality is to make real the subject’s true gender on the body, the visual
media are highly valued, for they promise (like transition itself) to make visible
that which begins as imperceptible—there but underexposed, we might say. With
less mediation than writing between signifier and soma, the visual media realize
the image of the “true self” that is originally only apparitional.129
In his analysis of the photograph and its significance for the transsexual subject, Prosser outlines the loop between bodies and photographic images that I examine in the previous chapter of this project and that Joynt refers to in his questions. However, whereas my argument and Joynt’s questions challenge the function of the photograph’s assumed referentiality and the ways in which this referentiality places bodily materiality at the center of concepts of individual subjectivity, Prosser makes very clear his endorsement of the photograph’s utility for these purposes.
Although Prosser’s focus on narrative logics and photographic referentiality in the construction of transsexual subjectivity is tremendously useful for its exposure of the mechanics of the sort of subject-making that underlies contemporary concepts of gender, his ultimate commitment to substantiating “real” transsexual bodies and experiences,
129 Prosser, 211, emphasis mine. 71 paradoxically, consigns his analysis to an understanding of transsexuality that is, largely, limited to the constraints of an anthropocentrically framed, narratively produced loop between bodies and images.
The opening suggestion of Joynt’s string of questions, that “we [back] away from the selfies for a moment, or even the comment tags, all invariably rendered in close-up?,” importantly, if ambiguously, underscores the contingency of the narrative and photographic modes of representation that Prosser champions as means of understanding transsexuality.130 Joynt’s questions underline not only the heavy reliance of contemporary concepts of gender on visual media and representation, but also the heavy reliance of these concepts on the replication of particular visual content, from particular points of view, at particular shot distances.
Specifically, they emphasize a reliance on the close-up shot in the visual management of gender. Although most selfies (most of the, now ubiquitous images, that serve as “incarnations” of bodies, and subjects) are framed within a range from full- to close-up shot, Joynt’s use of the term “close-up,” here, denotes a tendency for images within this range to decontextualize individual subjects—and, as the questions go on to point out, human genitals—from their environments in such a way that the visual information in a close-up image of bodies, or the close-up image of genitals, becomes the most relevant, the most representative information about a subject and her sex/gender.131
To be sure, a full-shot of an individual standing in her bedroom or her doctor’s office, for
130 Joynt and Hoolboom, 89.
131 Prosser, 211; Joynt and Hoolboom, 89. 72 example, would appear to provide viewers with much more information about the environment in which the photograph was taken as well as her place in it. Nevertheless, such an image continues to make the human individual—as a whole—its subject. Indeed, it continues to make the human individual a whole. So, if, as Barthes observes and
Prosser re-emphasizes, the relationship between referent and representation is collapsed to the point of non-existence in a photograph, then what these images (from full-shots to close-ups) support is the notion these particular kinds of images (ones that often place an individual’s sartorial, gestural, cosmetic, and tonsorial style on display) can serve as stand-ins for individual subjects, and bodies, and genders.132
The purpose of Joynt’s proposition that the young man from Europe’s interaction with the medical system during and after his phalloplasty surgery be taken from a
“telescopic distance,” is not to invalidate this young man’s experience but, rather, to emphasize the ways in which the mechanics of perception and representation in visual media condition that very experience. In their speculation that, perhaps, “the penis is, in fact, not the problem to be solved,” Joynt’s questions do not seek to devalue the young
132 Throughout Camera Lucida Barthes examines the relationship between subjects and referents in the medium of photography. In his reading of Barthes, Prosser identifies a “trajectory: from photograph to subject to body.” Prosser, 210. He cites numerous examples from Camera Lucida in which Barthes, arguably, supports this trajectory. In my reading of Barthes, I find, similarly, an acknowledgement of such a trajectory from Barthes, but an acknowledgement that is importantly complicated by the ultimate ambiguity of the photographic medium as a means of representation. For example, Barthes writes: “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive (I didn't yet know that this stubbornness of the Referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for.” Barthes, Camera, 6. 73 man’s specific desires but, instead, to demonstrate that, first, it is not the reproduction of the extreme close-up shot of the genitals (but full- to close-up shots of individuals) that supports the reproduction of photographically articulated bodies and subjects in contemporary definitions of gender and, second, that the larger issue, on a certain level, is not the desire to transform a particular body part physically, but the ways in which that body part (and bodies as wholes) are made into sites of desire by way of their articulation through visual media. When Joynt’s questions ask, “what if it was not a requirement of public transition to be satisfied or excited? What if the only reliable narrative reprieve is one where the endpoint continually shifts and changes?,” they underscore the individual, emotional costs of the narrative system that synthesizes a relationship between photographic images, subjects, bodies, sexes, and genders.133 The photographic
“incarnation” of bodies and sexes becomes the end of gender, because it stands in for the
“whole” that this tautological narrative constantly aims at achieving—and which, it turns out, is never enough to satisfy and so, must, with each moment of photographic achievement, be strived for anew.134
Repurposing Laura Mulvey’s words in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” it is clear that not only “sadism” but also gender, at least in its mainstream contemporary definitions, “demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time
133 Joynt and Hoolboom, 89.
134 Prosser, 211. 74 with a beginning and an end.”135 Or, to draw on Teresa De Lauretis’s re-calibration of
Mulvey’s statement, gender, like desire, demands narrative articulation to maintain its status as a mode of identity.136 Gender is, at least in part, a producer and a product of narrative, which, like desire, as a structure of desire, “constantly reproduces the phantom of a whole, articulated system, where even the concept of a system is a product of narrative, where the idea that there are such things as parts and wholes is already an effect of narrative organizing.”137 And, as we have seen, the illusory whole that propels the circular route of gender from internal perceptions to external expressions, the Lacanian objet a of gender, is, more often than not, the photographic close-up. Thus, while it is neither the only, nor the privileged, medium through which gender, as an apparatus of social control, is created and deployed, in attempting to understand how photographic representation has come to condition bodies and sexes (under the umbrella of gender) the cinematic medium can be particularly useful tool. As a temporally bounded laboratory of successive sights (and sounds), cinema is one mode by which we can enact the observation of observation and study the ways in which, primarily (but not exclusively), visual modes of perception are developed into narrative.
Turning back to Mulvey’s essay, one might recall that its most enduring, and contested, legacy is its insight that the observer positions and editing practices that
135 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 35. Also quoted in DeLauretis’s “Desire in Narrative.” De Lauretis, 103. Note also that this quotation of Mulvey’s is used by Teresa De Lauretis to begin “Desire in Narrative,” in which she performs a deep examination of the ways in which structures of desire and narrative inform and inflect one another.
136 De Lauretis, 103.
137 Roof, Come, xv. 75 cinema (especially Hollywood cinema) offers to audiences are not politically neutral. The camera’s point of view is always particular and, as Mulvey argues, patriarchal. Through its angles, movements, and mise-en-scène, among other features, the camera frames the female figure either as a fetish object or a desexualized non-entity. And, Mulvey claims, these formal practices are fundamental to cinematic modes of seeing the world: “It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it…Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself.”138
Reductive in its literalization of “Woman,” Mulvey’s argument endures for its explicit exposure of the visual didacticism of the cinema, and the implications of this didacticism for the construction of social designations. When she claims that, “cinema builds the way” that Woman “is to be looked at into the spectacle itself” Mulvey is describing an aspect of cinema that is not explicitly available—or, at least not in the same way—from forms of visual media, such as photography, which exist in single iterations.139 Cinema is defined and defines not simply by the look, but by the look in succession—the look in the context of other looks. From this succession, this constant contextualization and re-contextualization, cinema, like the many social discourses with which it is constantly entwined, both demands and resists the production of meaning through visual recognition. In ways that are more consolidated (due to its temporal finitude) and, therefore, perhaps, more discernable, than in the case of a photograph on
138 Mulvey, 38.
139 Mulvey, 38. 76 the cover of a magazine, or a digital image in a social media post, cinema both sutures and discloses the fiction of the subject as an autonomous agent via the constant narrativization that its succession of images invites.
The way to read Mulvey’s argument is not for its revelation of a particular, literal subject continually fashioned within the cinematic medium, but for its revelation of the continual construction of this illusion of the subject in cinema, and in cultural discourses more broadly. Understanding the mechanisms of the production of the fiction of the subject enables one to conceptualize that fiction differently. This is, ultimately, the import of Joynt’s cinematically articulated call for a literal and figurative re-framing of the role of surgical intervention and, more specifically, phalloplasty, in contemporary narratives of gender and gender transition.
A recent film that carries out just such a project of re-framing around gender and surgical intervention is Pedro Almodóvar’s La Piel Que Habito—a non-linear, sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying film about a surgeon who kidnaps his daughter’s male rapist and performs a series of surgeries on him to change his outward appearance to resemble that of his, the surgeon’s, deceased wife.140 For more than thirty years, Almodóvar’s filmic repertoire, from earlier works such as La Ley Del Deseo to more recent international successes such as Todo Sobre Mi Madre and La Mala Educación, has investigated the complicated intersections of gender, desire, and sexuality in the rapidly modernizing, democratizing, and capitalizing post-Franco era Spanish society and
140 Almodóvar, La Piel (The Skin), 2011. 77 culture.141 His films are known for their complex, campy, portrayals of gender, sexuality, and desire within larger contexts of sex work, consumerism, addiction, medicine, religion, and technology. They often wrestle with the ways in which gender and sexuality may be articulated, both consciously and unconsciously, through visually constructed sartorial and/or corporeal performances, enactments, or interventions—as well as the role of personal agency within these articulations.
A well-known example, to those familiar with his work, of the complex thought that Almodóvar’s films devote to questions of personal agency in gendered expression is a monologue performed by La Agrado—a transgender character in Todo Sobre Mi Madre
—in which she recites the various injections and surgeries that she’s had done, including their financial costs, as part of an impromptu bit for a theater audience that came to see the cancelled show of her employer, the famous stage actress, Huma Rojo. At the end of the monologue, La Agrado jokes: “it costs a lot to be authentic…and you can’t be stingy with these sorts of things…because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.”142 In spite of having just described her body as an unwieldy confluence of financial costs, social norms, somatic technologies, and psychic desires, the final, pathos laden, remarks of La Agrado’s monologue, nevertheless, reify the prospect of subjective wholeness through personal agency over one's external, specifically corporeal, aspect.
141 Almodóvar, La Ley (The Law), 1987; Almodóvar, Todo Sobre (All About), 1999; Almodóvar, Mala (Bad), 2004.
142 Almodóvar, Todo Sobre, 1999. 78
In what appears to be an abrupt shift, then, La Piel Que Habito—though surely the most overtly concerned of any of Almodóvar’s films to date with the question of body modification as it relates to sex and gender—is, precisely, not about the power of the individual to control her own image, but about the power of the image to control the individual. More specifically, it is about the power of images in succession, images in the context of other images, visual narratives, the cinematic apparatus (even as that reaches outside of “cinema” proper and into digital images on computer screens), to control the fiction of the subject—particularly when these images are implemented by and within particular social discourses. Taking the intersection of the cinematic apparatus and
Western medicine as its ground, La Piel Que Habito examines and critiques the visual narratives and diagnostic authorities that have enabled, and that continue to enable, the concept of gender as an identity that is psychically understood and physically expressed to thrive in contemporary, Western, social contexts.
In brief summary: La Piel Que Habito tells the story of a renowned plastic surgeon, Roberto Ledgard, played by Antonio Banderas, who kidnaps his daughter’s rapist, Vicente, played by Jan Cornet, imprisons Vicente in his secluded villa outside of
Madrid, performs a vaginoplasty operation on him, spends six years replacing Vicente’s dermis with transgenetically produced skin that is resistant to burns and mosquito bites, cuts, shapes, and molds the skin to resemble a female body (specifically, the body of
Ledgard’s deceased wife Gal) and, finally, when Vicente's body no longer resembles its former exterior aspect in the slightest, gives Vicente the name Vera. For Ledgard,
Vicente’s body is a lump of clay to be molded according to the artist’s, or in this case the 79 doctor’s, desires. Throughout the film, shots of Vicente/Vera’s body sectioned off with markings (which become scars) indicating where new skin is to be grafted, and making his body resemble a fashion template, emphasize Ledgard’s role as doctor/artist/creator.
Eventually, these scars dissolve completely, leaving no trace of the initial incisions by the end of the six-year experiment, further underscoring the doctor's control over his subject's appearance—his subject's image. And yet, for all of the control that Ledgard appears to wield over Vicente/Vera, by the end of the film he manages to fall in love with his patient/sculpture, making himself vulnerable enough around him that, in the midst of a sexual encounter with his subject, Vicente/Vera shoots Ledgard to death.
Ledgard’s Pygmalion-like role as surgeon and designer is a commentary on the status of medicine, and, in particular, surgery, in contemporary concepts of gender. The medical authority and surgical skill that he both wields and represents—Ledgard’s omnipotence in his ability to control Vicente/Vera’s physical appearance—reflect the ineffably intimate role that medical diagnoses and surgeries have played in the emergence of the concept of mainstream binary gender from the moment of its conception in John
Money’s mid-century clinic. Yet, the film also makes clear that Ledgard (and, by extension, medical diagnosis and surgical intervention) never has complete control over
Vicente/Vera’s mind—or his psychic perception of himself. Neither Ledgard, nor the medical system that he represents, completely control their investments in the subjective fictions that they have created through surgical interventions. Like the system that he represents, Ledgard has constructed a subject (a patient, a diagnosis) and has subsequently come to view that subject as a kind of truth, or reality. And, this subjective 80
“truth” (in the form of a surgically altered Vicente/Vera) ultimately comes to undermine
Ledgard (and his medical and surgical authority) by way of seduction and murder.
Although Vicente/Vera’s seduction and murder of Ledgard, on its face, may appear an act of radical agency, the film makes clear that such an act remains ensnared within the webs of ontological, representational, and biopolitical control that circulate within the apparatus of mainstream gender. Though he has killed his master/oppressor/ rapist, Vicente/Vera’s physical appearance has been radically altered by his interface with
Ledgard—Vicente/Vera will never be readily recognized as Vicente again (unless, of course, he submits himself, once again, to surgical intervention). The film drives home the gravity of this fact, and of the import of visually articulated appearances for the maintenance of subjective fictions in its final scene: Vicente/Vera returns to his mother’s dress shop in Galicia, faces his mother, to whom he appears a complete stranger, and says
“I’m Vicente.” Vera/Vicente returns, unfamiliar, to his site of origin.143 Afterwards, the credits roll over a computer generated, rotating double helix—emphasizing yet another lure (in the form of the “original,” “biological” roadmap that DNA has come to represent) that propels the system of gender through the ultimately impossible task of finding and manipulating an “original” subjective truth within human biology. The film underscores the contingency of subjective mastery of any kind in the context of bodies, sex, and gender. Neither medicine, nor surgery, nor individual agency can claim a complete grip on gender—nor, in the current cultural climate of the West, can they completely disavow one another. Instead, each of these variables remain intertwined with one another—with
143 Almodóvar, La Piel, 2011. 81 visual forms of expression and recognition acting as a persistent thread running between them.
An important, and, no doubt, fairly obvious, observation at this point is that
Vicente/Vera’s body modification, having been forced upon him against his will, is drastically different from, for example, La Agrado’s voluntarily surgically and hormonally modified body. As a result of Ledgard’s prolonged and involuntary corporeal experiment, Vicente/Vera is overtly controlled by his appearance—by his image—which now “hides” his “true” identity and sexed “origins” from anyone he encounters. La
Agrado's corporeal interventions, on the other hand, as she states, have a contrary effect, bringing her closer to the self that she dreams of being—revealing, rather than concealing, her identity to others. However, taking a second look at her monologue, one finds that even as La Agrado lauds the potential of body modification to enable self- expression, she is also critical in her praise of bio-medical technologies and an individual’s potential to claim personal agency in and through them. The central claim of her monologue, “it costs a lot to be authentic,” indicates that she understands that not only the bio-technologies that she employs, but also the ways in which she employs them
—towards achieving an “authentic” ideal—require her to be complicit in the very systems of capitalism and patriarchy that demand her adherence to a binary concept of gender in the first place.144 Her ironic emphasis on the “cost” of authenticity, makes clear that no bio-medically supported triumph of individual agency in the arena of gender can be understood apart from its heteronormative and capitalistic legacies, both of which use
144 Almodóvar, Todo Sobre, 1999. 82 fantasies of self-actualization as lures to promote participation within their systems.
Rather than an unquestioning endorsement of the potential of pharmaceuticals and biomedical procedures to provide agency over gendered subjectivity, with its incisive wit,
La Agrado’s speech appeals, instead, to a more biopolitical concept of gender and subjectivity than one may have initially imagined.
Through her campy affect, La Agrado achieves a self-aware and contingent agency over the fantasy of gendered subjectivity proffered to her, as she points out, in the form of a medicalized commodity, by contemporary, capitalistic culture. Because every line that she delivers and every gesture that she performs bears the ironic tinge of camp,
La Agrado is able to express contradicting individual realities and leave them open in their contradiction. When, for example, she exclaims to her friend Manuela, “all that I have that’s real are my feelings and these pints of silicone that weigh a ton,” her words are both a critique of, and acquiescence to, commodified forms of femininity that demand the constant transformation of female bodies.145 Referring to the “pints of silicone” that now give shape to certain parts of her body, La Agrado very matter-of-factly decouples the material content of her bodily contours—as well as its material cost and physical discomfort—from their semiotic significance, without at the same time disavowing this significance. Her acknowledgement, even flaunting, of the artificiality of her body is an integral part of her persona, it is part of what makes her style camp, and what makes camp an ideal mode for expressing contradictory realities.
While no body or person can ever be said to be entirely “authentic,” commodified
145 Almodóvar, Todo Sobre, 1999. 83 corporeal attributes, nevertheless, continue to act as signifiers of masculinity and femininity, and these stylistic umbrellas are still used as modes of sorting individuals into one of two binary ideals, one of two subjective fictions, associated (in increasingly strategic ways) with corporeal ideals for one of two types of sexed bodies (male or female). La Agrado’s words and gestures not only underscore the absurdity of ideological systems that would attempt to reduce individual bodies, desires, and cultures into these ideals, but they also, with their inherently insincere tone, complicate any notion of subjective agency within such systems. Like the “campy drag queens” that Roof describes with reference to the vertiginous regime, La Agrado “[does] not endeavor to produce anything like a total illusion of femininity.”146 Rather, her performance in the film “is a performance of personality and of camp itself as an indication of agency.”147 La
Agrado’s frequent, contradictory, allusions to the commodified and inauthentic foundations of contemporary gendered “authenticity” push her towards what Roof refers to as “a chimeric ‘vantage’ regime, as that constitutes the perspective from which gender signifiers can be seen to be performed.”148
This all-seeing vantage, which Roof attributes to drag queens, is an “illusion,” but it is an illusion that La Agrado’s camp style knows well—an illusion without which her style would not exist, and without which its existence would not be necessary. What makes La Agrado’s campy affect such an important critical tool is that it can
146 Roof, Gender, 192.
147 Roof, Gender, 192.
148 Roof, Gender, 192. 84 acknowledge the illusion of seeing oneself seeing oneself performing certain gender signifiers—the illusion of vertiginous gender—at the same time that its undercurrent of insincerity will always frame this vantage as inherently contradictory and open to change.
In her discussion of camp sensibilities and gender, Roof acknowledges the enmeshment and co-constitution of various different regimes of gender operating within the ample category of the drag queen (a label that La Agrado, incidentally, vehemently rejects); however, she also, incisively, questions the tendency for self-conscious, vertiginous, regimes of gender to seek “sincerity” (often, “surgical sincerity”) in bodily transformation—“or at least the idea that the body expresses an inner truth.”149 To be sure, especially in the closing lines of her monologue—“and you can’t be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being”—La Agrado’s, typically flippant, cynical attitudes around questions of body modification and their capability of expressing one’s inner truth, her surgical insincerity, shifts into a much more sincere register. While her statement remains an indictment of the capitalist demand on the individual to consume in increasing volume toward the impossible attainment of an always shifting and changing bodily spectacle, the tonal shift in her delivery of this critique invites a complex contradiction into its meaning.
At the same time as she expresses the inherent insincerity and inauthenticity of desires for alignment between one's exterior appearance and one's interior sense of oneself, driven by the commodification of femininity (and, in different contexts, masculinity); she also, directly and sincerely, correlates an individual’s authenticity with her or his bodily
149 Roof, Gender, 178. 85 appearance. The coda of La Agrado’s monologue circulates in and through the notion that exterior appearances indicate interior “truths” in such a way that it both acknowledges something like Roof’s observation about the tendency to somatic literalization in vertiginous, self-conscious modes of gendering (especially the connection between medically sanctioned and performed interventions and consumer capitalism), and it acknowledges the importance of such literalized interior/exterior alignments for individuals.
Beyond its simultaneous critique of the capitalist underpinnings of the social and emotional import placed on the interior/exterior alignment of gender and sex through somatic transformation, the coda of La Agrado’s monologue does not probe much more deeply into its construction. Nevertheless, part and parcel with its capitalist utility, the emphasis on interior/exterior alignment in terms of sex and gender also bears a medico- socio legacy that has helped to ensure its perpetual significance in contemporary, vertiginous concepts of gender. If one were to remove La Agrado’s signature claim that one is “more authentic the more [one] resembles what [one] has dreamed of being,” from its campy, ironic context, one could accuse her of stealing a page right out of psychoanalyst and physician Robert Stoller’s book, Sex and Gender.150 In his mid- century work with intersex and transsexual patients, Stoller, drawing on John Money’s earlier studies, theorized gender not simply as the name for the malleability of the psychic conception of one’s sex (within an eighteen month window after birth), but also
150 Almodóvar, Todo Sobre, 1999; Robert Stoller coined the term “gender identity” in his 1968 book, Sex and Gender. 86 as a socio-cultural concept that—specifically in terms of the identity that an individual constructed around it—could be divorced from sex altogether.151 “Gender identity,” according to Stoller’s concept, refers to one’s “gender role,” or the identity that one constructs around the ways in which one distinguishes oneself as one of two sexes in public social contexts.152 Working from the other side of the same coin as Money,
Stoller’s theory wagers that bodies can be manipulated to come in line with psychic understandings of sex (gender role)—rather than psyches aligning with bodies that have been manipulated to resemble one of two sexes.
Among the most enduring consequences of Stoller’s theory of gender identity and the epistemic split it forged between sex and gender are, not only, in Preciado’s words, the creation of “a new kind of patient of state-managed medicine: an adult who claims not to identify with the gender that was assigned at birth,” but also a pervasive socio- cultural imperative to repair any such dis-identifications for the sake of one’s mental and emotional well being.153 As Jemima Repo and others have observed, the post World War
II era was characterized, in part, by “attempt[s] to democratize and tame populations through techniques derived from culture-based knowledge of human personality,” as opposed to “the biological racism of popular prewar eugenics now associated with
151 See Repo, chapter two.
152 Repo, 54.
153 Preciado, 101; Stoller gave name to this new sort of identity, but the thinking that upholds it runs through the work of Money and Harry Benjamin (the endocrinologist who treated Christine Jorgenson, whose mid-century sex reassignment drew tremendous media attention), among others. 87 fascism and genocide.”154 At the same time that Robert Stoller and John Money were performing their studies, an emphasis on “human personality,” and the ways in which it could be manipulated, was also coming to the fore. With individuals’ psychic states as sites of intervention for medicine and social science, a very specific, heteronormative notion of well-being became a dominant ideal for, and social regulator of, human life.
This demanded (particularly of the transsexual subject) the adoption and enactment of a narrative of “self-pathologization, self-discipline, and self-affirmation” with the aim of becoming “well” and properly adjusted to the relational and physical parameters of a heterosexist culture.155
For the most part, La Agrado’s campy, offensive insistence on the importance of stereotypically feminine physical attributes for women (“a woman is her hair, her nails, lips for sucking or bitching, I mean, have you ever seen a bald woman? I can’t stand them, they’re all sleazebags”), plays off of, and critiques the medicalized, heterosexist narratives for gender that conflate and regulate individuals according to their outward appearances. Nevertheless, the coda of her famous monologue, with its sincere appeal to self-affirmation through exterior expression, ties her to the same narratives of pathologization and discipline that she critiques. What La Agrado is validating when she says, “you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being” is self-affirmation through the alignment of one’s interior sense of self and one’s exterior appearance. She is acquiescing to a biopolitically-sanctioned model of subjectivity, born
154 Repo, 50.
155 Repo, 50. 88 of mid-century sexology, which, as Nikki Sullivan writes in “The Role of Medicine in the
(Trans)Formation of ‘Wrong’ Bodies,” is “founded on the shared cultural assumption that a sense of integrity is essential to human well-being.”156
The word “integrity,” of course, is incredibly polysemous in the context of genders, bodies, and sexes—and, usefully so. What Sullivan refers to when she uses this word is the sense of a body as a phenomenologically intact, integrated, whole. And also, the sense of a body as a piece of personal property (an entity over which an individual may lay claim), and the ways in which an individual’s proprietary claims over her body not only entitle her, but also compel her, to effect the integration of her psychic and physical senses of self. It is the desired end point in “the narrativization of wrong embodiment” that undergirds the concept of gender as a personal identity, but it is also a shifting, malleable endpoint because one can never be sure of “what sort of treatment would most effectively reduce the non-coincidence of sex and gender, of body and self, and thereby bring about integrity.”157
When Joynt asks: “what if it was not a requirement of public transition to be satisfied or excited?” he proposes a kind of short-circuiting of the linear and progressive
(but, as Sullivan notes, shifting) narrative of body modification—which is roughly comparable to a closed circuit—that underlies many mainstream understandings of gender and gender transition today.158 If the promise beneath these conceptions of gender
156 Sullivan, “The Role,” 107.
157 Sullivan, 107.
158 Joynt and Hoolboom, 89. 89 and gender transition is that one will be satisfied by one’s body after its physical modification, and if one agrees that this is a promise that can never be fulfilled, then what one mapped as a linear progression from dissatisfaction to satisfaction actually ends up being more analogous to the unbroken flow of a closed circuit. Information flows from one site to another and back to the original site without a break. In this case, the circuit is built around one’s current, psychic perception of one’s gendered self to one’s projected future satisfaction in a modified psychic sense of one’s gendered self which—regardless of physical modifications—will inevitably disappoint, and then back to the original
(though changed with time) site of psychic dissatisfaction. One possible way of attempting to make this circuit malfunction would be, as Joynt’s proposal suggests, to admit in advance that the physical modifications that one is taking on may not lead to one’s ultimate satisfaction.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Almodóvar’s penchant for supporting and complicating the main themes and plot lines of his films with overstated details in their mises-en-scènes, a closed circuit surveillance camera features prominently in the opening shot sequence of La Piel Que Habito—which, we can say now, is not only the most overtly concerned of Almodóvar’s films with body modification as it relates to sex and gender, but the film in his repertoire that most explicitly explores the body as a malleable fantasy of biopolitical gender systems. To the somewhat ominous and anxiety producing sound of high-tempo, minor-keyed violins, La Piel Que Habito opens with an extreme long shot of a city (Fig. 9) from which the caption “Toledo 2012” (a date still in the near future of the film’s 2011 release) advances towards the viewer. From there, the film cuts 90 quickly to a high-angle aerial view (Fig. 10) of a large house with the caption “El Deseo
Presenta” (El Deseo being the name of Almodóvar’s film production company) advancing toward the viewer.
Another quick cut to an extreme close-up (Fig. 11) of a Spanish-style azulejo displaying the name of the house “El Cigarral,” and a pan left reveals a long-shot (Fig.
12) of a tree-lined dirt path with several, slightly out-of-focus, wrought iron gate posts in the foreground. Cut to another extreme close-up (Fig. 13) poised outside of a window with wire mesh embedded in its frosted glass panes and a similar set of bars in the foreground. A beige form, which turns out to be Vicente/Vera doing yoga exercises, appears to be moving behind the glass. Another cut reveals a dome shaped security camera installed on a white wall (Fig. 14) from which the camera is slowly tracking out to frame more red text (“un film de Almodóvar”) and Vicente/Vera, wearing a beige colored body glove and stretched out over the right arm of a chartreuse couch (Fig. 15).
9. 10.
11. 12. 91
13. 14.
15.
Figures 9-15, Pedro Almodóvar, La Piel Que Habito, 2011. Images screen shot by author
in May 2018.
This opening sequence not only foreshadows the complete physical confinement that Vicente/Vera endures over the six years that he is kept at El Cigarral (from iron bars, to security cameras, to a synthetically engineered dermis, Vicente/Vera is controlled and confined by Ledgard at every level), but it also makes a comment on seeing and visual perception and the sorts of confinement that they, too, create. Visual articulation relies on the consolidation of environmental information into discrete images, or images in succession. When bodies, sexes, and, subsequently, genders, are conceptualized almost exclusively through visual media, they are confined to the representative or, in Flusser’s words, “significant surface” of the photograph, digital image, or film still, among other types of images—surfaces that “signify—mainly—something ‘out there’ in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions (as reductions of the 92 four dimensions of space and time and the two surface dimensions).”159 And, not only that, bodies, sexes, and genders that are conceptualized in this way (most bodies, sexes, and genders in a mainstream context) are confined to the loop of desire, the closed circuit, that characterizes scopic systems generally.
From the first in this film, seeing is not simply about observation, but about observation directed at an anticipated outcome—observation with the promise of future satisfaction. The succession of shots from an extreme long-shot of the city, to an aerial view of a particular home, to a view through the bars of its front gates, and then a view through the bars outside of one of its windows builds up the viewer’s anticipation for what may be inside of the house, and places the viewer in the role of voyeur. There is a certain perversely comic charm when (after building up the viewer’s anticipation for what/whom will be revealed inside of the house) the camera cuts from the exterior shot of the frosted window, with the indistinguishable figure behind it, to a full shot of the security camera. The security camera is a literalization of the satisfying/dissatisfying moment of Lacan’s classic description of the scene of voyeurism, where, contrary to what one might assume, the voyeur actually derives satisfaction from being caught looking in on someone. The voyeur’s satisfaction, indeed his status as a subject “is not there in the sense of seeing, at the level of the scopic drive.”160 Instead, “he is there as pervert and he is situated only at the culmination of the loop.”161 The humiliation of being seen looking
159 Flusser, Photography, 8.
160 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 182.
161 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 182. 93 is a repetition of traumatic experience from which the subject, unconsciously, seeks to recover a lost object—in this case, the gaze of the other—which is “suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other.”162
Due to the speed with which La Piel Que Habito cuts from shot to shot in its opening sequence (the time it takes to go from the extreme long-shot of Toledo to
Vicente/Vera on the couch is only, approximately, thirty-five seconds), along with the waning of the sound of the violins by the time the film gets to the shot of the security camera, the voyeuristic experience—for the film’s viewer—is, actually, much more subdued here than it may have been. The viewer does not feel the shame of the voyeur when the security camera appears onscreen. In fact, she may not have been at all cognizant that she was being consciously interpolated into the position of a voyeur at all.
Nevertheless, for the attentive viewer, or the repeat viewer, the significance of this opening sequence (in both its obvious references to the scene of voyeurism and its careful modulations and modifications of this scene) is clear and important.
The security camera, as both a recording device and an inanimate object, represents the intrusion of the other in the scene of voyeurism and also, ostensibly because it is a non-human other, shields the viewer from being interpolated into this scene as a voyeur. Making the viewer ambiguous in her status as voyeur, and the security camera ambiguous in its status as other, the film opens by complicating an already complicated scene of observation, desire, satisfaction, and mediation. It sets the stage for the La Piel Que Habito’s intricate examination of the role of scopic systems (which, as
162 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 182. 94 the opening sequence of the films demonstrates, are enmeshed with narrative systems) in producing the fantasy of the body as infinitely malleable, and, importantly, the limits of this visually articulated fantasy which sustains contemporary, mainstream concepts of gender.
An important question that resurfaces throughout La Piel Que Habito for viewers and within the diegesis of the film, and one whose answer provides insight, is “what is the body I desire?” Over and over again, the film suggests that it is the image of the body, and not the body itself, that one seeks. Over and over again, the film suggests that there is no distinction between the body and its image—more accurately, its mediated representation—or, at least, that this distinction is always mobile and never fixed. In the opening sequence of shots, the body that the viewer/voyeur desires is the indistinguishable form moving behind the frosted glass, and that body exists not within the room behind the glass, but as light particles passing through, and being distorted by, a window pane. What the voyeur is “trying to see…is the object as absence. What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind a curtain. There he will phantasize any magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if on the other side there is only a hairy athlete.”163
Perhaps better than evaluating these moments as examples of voyeurism is thinking about them as interfaces. An interface is the effect of an ongoing relation between two entities. When it is functioning, one doesn’t notice it (recall Barthes’ comparison of the photograph to a window pane—the photograph is lost to the
163 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 182. 95 representational visual information that its fixed exposure of light conveys to viewers).
One becomes aware of interface when it fails to function, as when two people are having a conversation and one person has to ask the other to repeat herself because the latter has just used a word that the former does not understand. Previously, the two people would not have acknowledged language as a functioning medium for communication between the two of them. Only when the opacity of a certain word compromises the relation between one person’s capacity to understand and language’s ability to provide information does one recognize the interface created by the interrelated function of systems for sending and receiving information.
When Ledgard retires to his study to engage in his nightly ritual of watching
Vicente/Vera on the large television/security monitor, an interface emerges between his, largely scopic mode of perception and understanding and the image of Vicente/Vera on the screen in front of him. The circuit of information, here, is consciously solipsistic— more so, even, than in the scene of classic voyeurism, because here there is less fear of one’s exposure in looking—Ledgard understands himself to be looking at the image of
Vicente/Vera on a screen without the feeling that she is looking back at him. Although
Vicente/Vera’s is a high-definition, larger-than-life image (and not a blurred, or shadowy figure), his image still represents the object as absence. What Ledgard is looking for, and finds, is something that is not there. Or, rather, he finds something that is there in a very particular, docile way. Vicente/Vera’s image is in his study, on his television screen, as an image, as something that he can control through his projected fantasies—that is, at least, the prevailing assumption. 96
Ledgard’s interest in engaging specifically with Vicente/Vera’s image and not
Vicente/Vera in person is made clear early in the film through a series of shots that both stress his preference for interacting with the image of Vicente/Vera instead of with Vera/
Vicente in person, and detail the mechanics of the scopic interface between Ledgard and this image. The sequence begins as Ledgard is pictured in a long-shot from across a lofted walkway as he climbs a wooden staircase. When he reaches the top of the stairs, he looks right, with an expression of curiosity and concern, towards an (un-pictured) doorway at the end of that part of the walkway. As he starts walking in the direction of the door, the film cuts to a full shot of Ledgard from behind. Despite his steady gait towards it, when he arrives at the door Ledgard pauses, and shaking his head, makes makes a half-turn to the right and starts walking. The camera pans right, following
Ledgard, once again in a long-shot, as he approaches the door at the end of that part of the walkway, pauses, looks left (back at the first door) and then enters. In a few moments, the film will reveal that the first door leads into Vicente/Vera’s room, and that Ledgard’s pause in front of it suggested a momentary desire to interact with him, followed by an ever greater desire (as viewers will soon find out) to view Vicente/Vera on the large screen in his study next door.
Once in his study, the scopic interface between Ledgard and Vicente/Vera’s image is established through camera work and shot editing.164 Upon entering the study, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Ledgard (first in profile and then in a three-quarters shot) panning left as he walks into the room, tosses his suit jacket on a chair, and gazes at
164 See figures 16-20. 97 something below him and to his left. Ledgard turns to face the camera straight on and begins walking towards the camera, his image quickly becoming a close-up as the camera follows his hand as it reaches down for a remote control on a coffee table in front of him and then back up (framing Ledgard in a head and shoulders close-up) as he undoes his tie and looks straight ahead. From there, the camera cuts to a medium close shot of Ledgard from behind, standing in front of a full-shot view of a massive television screen, on which Vicente/Vera is pictured (from behind in a full shot) naked and lying on her side in bed. After a few seconds, the film cuts back to a close-up of Ledgard’s face examining the screen, and then back to the screen again (this time panning right over an extreme close-up of Vicente/Vera’s body. Once the slow pan stops, the film cuts again to a medium close-up of Ledgard from behind looking at a full shot of Vicente/Vera on the screen.
16. 17.
18. 19. 98
20.
Figures 16-20, Pedro Almodóvar, La Piel Que Habito, 2011. Images screen shot by
author in May 2018.
The film’s shot editing after Ledgard enters the study makes use of the standard, shot/reverse-shot structure of cinematic suture to explicate and complicate the interface between Ledgard and the Vicente/Vera’s screen image as well as the relationship between this interface and questions of subjectivity. Suture is a psychoanalytic term developed by
Jacques Alain Miller in one of Lacan’s seminars, to describe “the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse.”165 Jean-Pierre Oudart brought the concept to film theory in
1969. According to Oudart, “every filmic field is echoed by an absent field, the place of a character who is put there by the viewer’s imaginary…the Absent One.”166 The idea is that every time a viewer takes in a shot they also assume—at some level—that there is something beyond the shot, beyond the frame. Suture is the imaginary element, or, one might say, interface that comes in to fill this absence. When one shot sutures another shot, the interface between these two shots (their relationship as distinct entities) generally goes unnoticed. What this typically means is that the second shot acted as the next, logical, step in the narrative production of meaning in the film. Such is the rationale
165 Miller, “Suture,” 25.
166 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” 36. 99 that Daniel Dayan used to set the standard, useful or not, for the structure of cinematic suture in the mid 1970’s, describing it as a three-step process of visual identification typified by a shot reverse-shot sequence of images where the second shot acts as a suture, giving an identity to the “absent one” or that which lies outside the frame.167
Such a narrative sequence, with its neat and tidy closure, does not, however, as
Stephen Heath argues, always necessarily go hand-in-hand with intersections of the imaginary and the symbolic in visual and written media. Using Chantal Akerman's News
From Home (a film composed of disparately connected pieces of footage from New York
City intermittently intercut with Akerman's French-language voice over reading aloud letters she had written to her mother) as an example, Heath writes that, “following the
Oudart/Dayan scenario, there is no suture: the look is not appropriated into the imaginary field of the film, the absent one is not resolved: the film has no shot/reverse-shot sequence, no figuration of the images, nothing but their continual replacement.”168 In its circumvention or defiance of these narrative conventions for images, the film “refines suture effectively as a term of the logic of the signifier” which “poses the problem of the relations of the subject in the symbolic and the holding of those relations in the imaginary.”169 In its refusal to reproduce a progressive and linear narrative framework for its images, News From Home lays bare the sense of alienation through which the subject is constituted in the symbolic. The imaginary attempts to assuage, or cover over, this
167 Dayan, “Tutor Code,” 29.
168 Akerman, News, 1977; Heath, 98.
169 Heath, 99. 100 alienation with its illusions of wholeness in images. Removed from this established, sequential structure, the images reveal their excess, their arbitrariness outside of close association with particular symbolic contexts. They reveal the illusion of the meaning, upon which we are conditioned to rely, that emerges from standardized moments of suture—from loops of bodies and images, interfaces constantly provoking and replacing one another.
The shot editing in the scene in Ledgard’s study tweaks Dayan’s three-step, narrative structure for suture in such a way that it both acknowledges and complicates the production of meaning—the fiction of subjectivity—issuing not only from traditional cinematic suturing practices but, specifically, from the interface between Ledgard and
Vicente/Vera’s image. Following Dayan’s formula, after the shot of Ledgard untying his tie (Fig. 18) the film should cut to a shot of what Ledgard is looking at. Instead, viewers get a shot of both what Ledgard was, ostensibly, looking at (Vicente/Vera’s image on the television monitor) and a view of Ledgard’s back as he looks at this image (Fig. 19). As this shot of the television and Ledgard from behind could not have been in Ledgard’s eyeline, it foils the assumption that Ledgard is the scopic agent in this scenario. In so doing, the film not only underscores Ledgard’s lack of primacy in terms of scopic agency and the meaning produced from the scopic relation, but also a universal, or constitutive lack of primacy in the scopic relation. In other words, there is no all-seeing observer, every observer has a blind spot.
Another important aspect of the second shot in this would-be suturing pair of shots is the appearance of Ledgard’s reflection in the television screen. On the center-left 101 area of the television screen, just right of Ledgard’s right arm, it is possible to make out a faint outline of Ledgard’s reflection. This inclusion of Ledgard’s reflection in the shot that looks over his shoulder at him looking at the screen resembles a particular suturing practice that Slavoj Žižek, appropriately, calls “interface,” which condenses the narrative progression of shot and counter shot—the circuit of the loop between bodies and images
—into a single shot. As Žižek explains,
when a shot includes its own counter-shot, the two shots are no longer related as
the two signifiers of a signifying dyad; the first shot now stands for the signifying
chain as such, while the spectral counter-shot sutures it, providing the fantasmatic
supplement that fills its hole.170
This visual practice not only disrupts the typical sequence of suture, it also suggests that the question, “‘Which of the two is more real?,’” as Žižek suggests, is “by no means superfluous.”171
There are two distinct reasons why the shot that includes Ledgard’s reflection does not quite fit Žižek’s description of interface: the reflection is not a true counter shot because it does not include a reflection of the film’s camera, and the reflection is a reflection—a transparent, rather than opaque, image. Where a reflection of the film’s camera on the screen would complete the circuit of self-reflection and its collapse of observer positions, its absence retains a link to the outside. And, where an opaque image of Ledgard and the film’s camera within the image would, at least for the viewer, raise
170 Žižek, The Fright, 54.
171 Žižek, 59. 102 the question of which image had a greater claim on reality, the transparent image does not capture the attention of the viewer in quite the same way. What the transparent image does do, however, is further complicate Ledgard’s status as a scopic agent. One assumes that he is looking at the image of Vicente/Vera on the screen, but he may just as well
(especially considering his manipulations of his tie in the former image) be looking at his own image reflected on the television’s screen. Returning, then, to Žižek’s question,
“which of the two is more real?,” one should follow up with: “for whom? (Ledgard or the film’s viewer)” and also, “shouldn’t we be speaking of four, rather than two (Ledgard and his reflection, Vicente/Vera’s image and Vicente/Vera in person)?”
Instead of asking about the “reality” of any of these images, one should (to return to my initial estimation of what the film proposes) ask about the desire that they each provoke. Through its image, the body becomes an object of fantasy. Perhaps, for
Ledgard, as he undoes his tie, his transparent reflection is “more real” than the image of
Vicente/Vera behind it, but the “reality” of this reflection—this image that, in some sense, confirms his existence —is a product of its unreality, its condensation of his body as a complex concatenation of senses into a bounded, representative reflection. His reflection is an object of fantasy, just as Vicente/Vera’s image is an object of fantasy. The scopic scenario cannot but make the body into an image, and the image into an object of fantasy
—as is demonstrated in the shot after the one that follows Ledgard’s interface with his reflection, in which the film cuts from a close-up of Ledgard’s face to an extreme close- up and slow pan over the image of Vicente/Vera’s body on the television screen. Whereas this objectifying and voyeuristic pan over Vicente/Vera’s body would, typically, have 103 been attributed to Ledgard, given the lack of suture between the first and second shots
(Figs. 8 and 9) and the lack of internal suture within the second shot (Fig. 9), the pan now directly inculcates the film’s viewer as well. Whether it is Ledgard, or the viewer, or both, who effects this objectification is unclear. The film’s editing here suggests that this sort of objectification is the inevitable fate of the body—especially the body in images or, rather, the body as images.
In this shot sequence and throughout the film, there is no escaping the dominance and confinement of the image. And, that, ultimately, is the point. As Carla Marcantonio insightfully remarks, in La Piel Que Habito, Almodóvar,
acknowledges the limits of his own modes of visual representation. Stated
otherwise, through the creation of Vera, the film recognizes that the possibility for
subverting dominant social structures no longer resides in discourses of
representation. Vera’s violently rendered sex change underscores the fact that the
malleability of gender, even when taken explicitly, does not resolve issues around
gender or about identity.172
Vicente/Vera, the character in the film for whom the totalizing effects of visual modes of perception and understanding are most acute, emphasizes the deeply disorienting and dehumanizing potential of the visual by way of, among other things, a written phrase that he scrawls repeatedly on the white walls of the room to which he is confined: “se que respiro” (I know that I breathe).173 Because of the utter contingency of visual
172 Marcantonio, “Transgenesis,” 53.
173 Almodovar, Skin, my translation from the Spanish. 104 representation, the only thing that Vicente/Vera seems to be able to understand as a constant element of himself is his breath (something remarkably liminal, temporary, and dispersed by nature). More than anything, what La Piel Que Habito demonstrates is, as
Marcantonio goes on to say, “cinema’s own role as a biocybernetic effect,” or, “a technology that ultimately thrives on the transmutation of bodies into images (images that subsequently reflect and feed into how we come to think of and understand bodies).”174
All of this is to say that, moving beyond this tautological circuit between bodies and images in the definition of bodies, genders, and sexes, requires that one begin by changing one’s sights.
174 Marcantonio, 54. 105
CHAPTER THREE
What is Gender Heard?
If gender, in popular, medical, and legal contexts, acts as a mechanism for controlling sex, largely through a vertiginous process of pseudo-identification with visually conceived stand-ins for the subject, then what happens to this control mechanism when one takes sex out of sight? How, and to what end, does gender govern sex, when sex can’t be seen? What is gender heard? Is it reducible to the sound of the voice, or does hearing gender encompass more ambient sounds—like that of high-heeled shoes walking across a marble floor in a building with high, vaulted ceilings, or the difference between the sound of urine flowing into a toilet bowl full of water from greater or lesser altitudes?
Are these sounds also voices? If the voice claims a privileged position in the definition of gender, does it operate, in the way that Preciado describes the photograph, as a kind of
“ontological catalyst”?175 Are there aural practices equivalent to the scope practices of examining one’s reflection in a mirror, or snapping and posting photographic images of oneself on social media? If not, how might aural modes of perception and representation present ways of thinking about gender and sex that either do not require or, at the very least, expose the insufficiency of, volitional identification with visually articulated binary imaginaries of the subject?
To begin, one might ask: what is the voice?
175 Preciado, 112. 106
Figure 21. Jacques Lacan, “Graph of Desire Schema 2,” 1960, Ecrits. Image downloaded from http://blahfeme.typepad.com/blahfeme/2008/03/the-vocal-fet-3.html in
August 2018.
From a Lacanian perspective, the voice, “somewhat surprisingly,” as Mladen Dolar writes, is the “non-signifying remainder” of signification.176 Despite the fact that it is often characterized as a bearer of pure and immediate presence, unlike the mirror image or the selfie, the voice does not function as an imaginary stand-in for the subject. In the retroactive production of the subject in the future perfect (as he or she who would have been) these specular images become fixed in the position of the ideal-ego (i(a)) as
“anticipated image[s].”177 They are, Lacan writes, “all the subject can be sure of...coming to meet him/[her],” despite the fact that they have always already passed/past and will only ever have been—they are key elements of “a misrecognizing that is essential to knowing [oneself].”178 Hence, the proliferation of these images as seen in Wynne Neilly’s
176 Dolar, 35. As Dolar notes, the graph that he reproduces in his text is actually only a part of the larger, and more complicated, complete graph.
177 Lacan, Ecrits, 684.
178 Lacan, Ecrits, 684. 107
“Female to ‘Male’” and the explosion of selfies on social media in recent years. These images provide the certainty that the subject craves, already past and always to have been. Nevertheless, this perpetuation of seductive subjective illusions is not the role of the voice. At least, it is not the role of the voice that appears on the right-hand margin of
Lacan’s graph of desire (Fig. 21).
Rather than providing a provisional and shifting sense of certainty in and for the subject, this voice “introduces a rupture at the core of self-presence.”179 That is, in contrast to common conceptions of the voice as a privileged bearer of meaning, presence, and self-presence, the voice that appears on Lacan’s graph represents the very impossibility of these things. What’s more is that it represents the impossibility of meaning, presence, and self-presence embedded in the voice itself. Dolar calls this impossibility of the voice that exists within the voice the “object voice,” distinguishing it from notions of the voice as a bearer of meaning, presence, and auto-affection by highlighting its object-status in the Lacanian paradigm.180 The object voice is an objet a.
Recalling Lacan’s description of the objet a from On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of
Love and Knowledge the object voice is, “that which constitutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause, and sustains desire through its lack of satisfaction (insatisfaction), and even its impossibility.”181 To speak of the voice, is really to speak of a simultaneously self-destructive and self-perpetuating dynamic of “the voice against the voice,” with the
179 Dolar, 42.
180 Dolar, 4.
181 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 6. 108 object voice emerging as an internal excess that undermines, and thus catalyzes, the construction of the voice as a pillar of auto-affection, meaning, and presence.182
Defining the terms of this internal division in the voice is not easy. This is partly because the sorts of descriptions available for conceptualizing it come, predominantly, from the visual domain. The voice as a site of presence and self-presence may constantly be covering over the ruptures it experiences from the object voice within—the necessary remainder of its path to meaning—but, what does it mean to “cover,” to “stand in” for, or to be “within,” with regard to an aural phenomenon? These metaphors imply a separation, or a division, whose illusion is much easier to conceive of visually than it is aurally.
In contrast to the visual world, “the sound world,” as Michel Chion remarks, “is marked by the idea of competition and of potential reciprocal disturbance among different sounds in spatial cohabitation.”183 Sounds can, and do routinely, interfere with one another and this interference changes the way listeners perceive them. As Chion explains, “there is actually no frame for sounds in the sense that word has for the visual register, namely, a container with borders that delimit at the same time that they structure what they enclose.184” The boundaries of sound, if one can speak of such things, are not really boundaries at all. If one turns one’s head away from one’s mirror image, the image no longer exists in one’s line of sight. By contrast, depending on the architecture of the space in which one speaks, one’s voice may either disappear almost instantaneously or
182 Dolar, 56.
183 Chion, Sound, 26.
184 Chion, Sound, 27. 109 linger after its utterance. It is difficult to isolate sound in the same way that one isolates elements of an image. In the scopic scenario, one easily separates the frame of the mirror from one’s reflected image. In aural contexts, “there is a ‘masking’ effect among sounds that are otherwise separate…this asymmetry flows logically from the physical character of sonic signals, which disperse in space.”185 An undisturbed separation of elements is not possible in sound—the sonic demands a dynamic form of attention that is not required by the scopic.
There is a sense of simultaneity in the voice that is also not present in the gaze, or the image. This, too, is an outgrowth of the fact that systems of meaning making—and, therefore, aural systems of meaning making—tend to lean on the visual for their explanatory metaphors. While it may be true, as Dolar observes, that “only the voice implies a subjectivity which ‘expresses itself’ and itself inhabits the means of expression,” this statement is only significant because Dolar makes it in distinction to visually articulated modes of subjectivity.186 The visually articulated body is the imagined threshold between the subject’s interiority and exteriority. The import of Guy Rosolato’s concept of the “acoustic mirror,” as Kaja Silverman explains in her book of the same name, is its exposure of the voice’s capacity to break down this interior/exterior distinction at the heart of “classic [visually articulated] subjectivity.”187 Because “the voice is capable of being internalized at the same time as it is externalized, it can spill
185 Chion, Sound, 26.
186 Dolar, 15.
187 Silverman, Acoustic, 43, 44. 110 over from subject to object and object to subject, violating…bodily limits.” 188 As a result, the voice might demand a reconsideration of concepts of subject formation that depend upon such visually articulated limits.
At one point in The Acoustic Mirror, Silverman assigns “meaning and materiality” to the two sides of this “most radical of all subjective divisions” (the
“symbolic castration” of the subject upon its entry into language) that one finds in the voice.189 But, what is the materiality of the voice? Perhaps it is vibrating air. Perhaps it is non-linguistic sound. Her suggestion is not bound to visual articulation, but it doesn’t exactly work. The “material” is rarely meaningless. Said differently, it is difficult, or impossible, to access “the material” outside of meaning. For example, the sound of a judge clearing her throat in front of a courtroom is outside of language, but one only interprets this as nonsense at one’s own peril. Even a hiccup or a scream is not necessarily exempt from signification: “it appears that we are dealing with a voice external to structure, yet this apparent exteriority hits the core of the structure: it epitomizes the signifying gesture precisely by not signifying anything in particular, it presents speech in its minimal traits, which may later get obscured by articulation.”190 As
Lacan writes of the gaze, the scopic counterpart of the object voice: “in so far as the gaze, qua objet a, may come to symbolize this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of
188 Silverman, Acoustic, 44.
189 Silverman, Acoustic, 80.
190 Dolar, 29. 111 castration…it leaves the subject in ignorance of what there is beyond the appearance.”191
In Seminar XX, Lacan uses the pithy slogan “the habit loves the monk” to aid in explaining this dynamic between the objet a as a bit of the Real, or a rupture in presence, and the ideal-ego, or imaginary stand-in for the subject.192 I discuss this slogan in the first chapter of this project, and it bears repeating here not only for its articulation of a reversal of causality in signification, but also for the visual counterpoint that it provides for the voice. The slogan indicates a line of causality running not from raw material to fully formed meaning, but the other way around, and also not quite. It is a reversal of a French expression: “l’habit, ne fait pas le moine,” which is, “literally, ‘the habit does not make the monk,’” and,“figuratively, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ or ‘appearances can be deceiving.’”193 Lacan’s update takes the presumed stability, or essence, of the interiority of the subject and places it in a position of uncertainty and inauthenticity. In other words, the habit is not obscuring anything because there is nothing underneath it that is more stable, or essential, or authentic. Neither the body, nor the subject, are more essential than the imaginary illusions that stand in for them—and this is precisely because one does not have access to the body or the subject outside of their appearances. The habit loves the monk, because the monk is the object-cause of its desire, perturbing it and sustaining it in its illusion.
191 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 77.
192 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 6.
193 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 6. 112
In his introduction to A Voice and Nothing More, Dolar attempts an equivalent slogan for the relationship between the voice and the object voice, taking up what he admits is the unlikely example of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Wolfgang von
Kempelen’s 1769 chess automaton in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” From
Benjamin’s claim that, “the puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the service of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened,” Dolar formulates the question: “how can a puppet enlist the services of the one who is operating it, who is literally pulling its strings?”194 The connection between the operation of this puppet and the voice remains unclear until Dolar mentions the speaking machine, which accompanied Kempelen’s automaton (and, which was actually a hoax because the life-like puppet with whom people played chess was controlled by a small person in a seemingly transparent box at its base) at public events.
The speaking machine, “a wooden box which was connected on one side to bellows
(rather like bagpipes) which served as ‘lungs,’ and on the other to a rubber funnel which served as ‘mouth,’ and had to be modified while ‘speaking,’” imitated, rather successfully
(although the quality of its reproduction was poor and it had a very limited vocabulary), the sound of human speech.195 Unlike its life-like counterpart, the speaking machine did nothing to conceal its non-human nature—at least, not in terms of its visual appearance.
The function of the speaking machine was to legitimate the automaton, or “thinking” machine, by revealing its inner workings.
194 Dolar, 5.
195 Dolar, 10, 8. 113
But, even as the speaking machine’s mechanical exterior suggested itself as the engine driving the automaton, displaying it with the automaton would have been something like parading a naked monk on stage and then bringing him a habit several minutes later if it weren’t for the voice that the speaking machine emitted. This voice endowed the speaking machine with an illusion of interiority that the automaton did not of itself possess. “It is,” Dolar writes, “as if the voice could subjectify the machine, as if there were an effect of exposure—something becomes exposed, an unfathomable interiority of the machine irreducible to its mechanical functioning.”196 Something in the disembodied voice that the speaking machine emitted enabled it to conjure up an imaginary of embodied presence and to associate this presence with its mechanical chassis. More fascinating still, something in the voice of the speaking machine enabled it to subjectify the voice of the speaking machine: “it [endeavored] to produce speech, some meaningful words and minimal sentences, but at the same time it actually [produced] the voice in excess of speech and meaning, the voice as an excess, and that was the point of fascination.”197 Exposed to the voice, the voice develops an unfathomable, irreducible sense of interiority.
The reason that the voice of the speaking machine works so well as an illustration of this embedded interface of the voice as meaning and the voice as excess is not only because the fact that the machine is a machine enables its voice to be divorced from an association with the human from the outset, but also because the voice that the machine
196 Dolar, 8.
197 Dolar, 10. 114 emits is not perfectly articulated. The quality of the speaking machine’s reproduction of the voice was not excellent, and this further underscored what Dolar calls, “a mysterious jump in causality, a breach, a limping causality, an excess of the voice-effect over its cause.”198 It doesn’t make sense that in the voice emitted, or, perhaps better said, sputtered from the speaking machine listeners would discern a sense of subjectivity. Yet, these very non-human “obstacles” turn out to be assets to the voice insofar as they serve to isolate the voice as its own, disembodied and fleeting, conduit for the subject and its imaginary manifestations. To quote, following Dolar, yet another slogan of Lacan’s:
“there is cause only in something that doesn’t work.” 199 The object voice, the object- cause of desire, as a point of fascination or a shot of terror, only emerges “at the point of a hitch in causality.”200 Such moments, such gaps in causality, are precisely the ones in which the interplay between the voice as a site of meaning, presence, and self-presence, and the voice as the impossibility of all of those things emerges.
A recently released film that takes seriously the interface between the voice and the object voice and, particularly, the implications of this aural interplay when it comes to concepts of gender is Una Mujer Fantastica, directed by Sebastián Lelio.201 The film tells the story of Marina Vidal, a trans woman living and working in Santiago, Chile, and her thwarted attempts to grieve the sudden death of her partner: Orlando Onetto, owner of a
198 Dolar, 10.
199 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 22.
200 Dolar, 10.
201 Lelio, Una Mujer, 2018. 115 textile company and thirty years her senior. Orlando dies early on in the film of an aneurysm that begins in Marina’s arms and comes to a fatal conclusion in an emergency room in downtown Santiago. His death is cause for concern on the part of doctors and criminal investigators, who assume that Marina is a sex worker; and it is an intolerable shock for Orlando’s family, who are unable to accept his relationship with Marina as anything other than sexual perversion. Beyond dealing with the invasive suspicions of medical and legal systems—to the point that she has to go through a medical examination and a photo shoot to ensure that there was not a physical altercation between Orlando and her before his death—Marina meets verbal and physical abuse at the hands of Orlando’s ex-wife, Sonia, and his adult son, Bruno—both of whom, at various moments, express humiliating confusion over Marina’s sex, and reduce her relationship with Orlando to a product of mental illness. Unfortunately, the violence and discrimination that Marina faces in the wake of Orlando’s death are not remarkable in Santiago or anywhere else around the globe. What is particularly notable about Marina’s narrative, however, is the sound of her voice. Specifically, the sound of her voice as it emerges “in excess of speech and meaning” to jarringly punctuate and complicate her subjective re-construction in the face of multifaceted mistreatment over the course of the film.
Before the film’s viewers see Marina, they hear her voice. Her entrée into the film comes on the quick salsa notes of Héctor Lavoe’s “Periodico de Ayer” (performed by
Fernanda Carreño), which sounds in the background as Orlando walks into a hotel cocktail lounge framed in a medium close-up shot that tracks his movement from one side of the lounge to the other—past the unfocused image of the stage where Marina and 116 her bandmates are performing. It isn’t until Orlando reaches the far end of the lounge and he and Marina exchange a few flirtatious glances, which the film portrays in a classic shot/reverse-shot sequence, that viewers connect Marina’s voice to her face and body onstage. Introducing Marina in this way, if only for a few seconds, privileges aurality over visuality as a mode of representation. More specifically, it privileges a particular kind of aurality (song) over visuality in its introduction of Marina—associating her, from the start, with a sonic form that exists in a site of tension between meaning and that which is beyond meaning; meaning and that which cannot mean at all.
Song, as Dolar writes, “brings the voice energetically to the forefront, on purpose, at the expense of meaning.”202 It makes language its vehicle, not just revealing but relishing the limits of its sense making capabilities. The aim is not necessarily to enunciate lyrics clearly but, instead, to use them as a structure for other aspects of the voice—such as timbre, amplitude, or tempo—to manipulate and/or transgress. Song exposes the limits of speech without succumbing to the impossibility of meaning. It
“entails a reversal, or a structural illusion: the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed.”203 It
“turns [the voice] into a fetish object,” a substitute for meaning lost.204 By revealing the
202 Dolar, 30.
203 Dolar, 31.
204 Dolar, 30. 117 limits of speech, song “evokes the object,” the bit of impossibility embedded in the voice,
“and obfuscates it; fetishizes it, but also opens the gap that cannot be filled.”205
While it may seem incidental that Marina’s entrance into the film is aural and musical, this fact becomes an increasingly significant counter-narrative as the film progresses and Marina is subjected to repeated hostile inquiries from other characters into
“who” and/or “what” she is. Most of these interrogations concern Marina’s visual appearance: the emergency room doctor looking her over and asking if “Marina” is a nickname; Bruno asking if she’s “had the operation” and defending this invasive remark by claiming “I don’t know what you are;” Sonia admitting: “I’ve spent a year wondering what you look like. It’s different face to face,” and: “when I look at you, I don’t know what I see. I see a chimera. A chimera.”206 Although the film offers various visually articulated “responses” to these inquiries—most of which involve fragmented, or otherwise strategically placed mirror images—its most unsettling, and most interesting, retorts are aural.
These aural “assertions” appear throughout the film, seemingly a propos of nothing, and they portray devolutions of Marina’s voice—often from the “object of immediate and intense attention and of aesthetic pleasure” in song, to the object of uncanny fascination.207 The first occurs on the day after Orlando’s death. Alone in the subterranean garage of Orlando’s apartment building, Marina lets a fragment of the first
205 Dolar, 30, 31.
206 Lelio, Una Mujer.
207 Dolar, 30. 118 lyric of “Sposa son Disprezzata,” an aria from Geminiano Giacomelli’s La Merope, escape her throat. Like the death of Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but less prolonged, the sound that this word makes as it leaves Marina’s mouth traces a grotesque break from the captivating sonic façade of the voice in song.208 Though it is not mechanical in the sense of being produced and reproduced by a non-human machine, there is a mechanistic quality to the voice in song—especially the well-trained voice in song, which, as the film eventually reveals, Marina’s is—that lends it a touch of the impersonal. The singing voice can appear seamless in a way that the voice in conversation, with its necessary inconsistencies and spontaneities, cannot. Thus, the sputtered fragment (“Spo…sa”) that Marina lets out is like the crackle of a record, a CD skip, or a brief jump from an imperfection in an mp3 file—it reminds the listener of what there may be beneath the song, which is, nothing. Just as there was nothing beneath
Kempelen’s thinking and speaking machines, only the object voice. And, even in this sonic break it is not the object voice that emerges but, rather, an evocation of the object voice—an evocation of aural dynamics of meaning making.
Another, perhaps more obvious, way of reading these sonic moments would be as emotional breakdowns in response to Orlando’s death and the social and familial resistance that Marina faces in its wake. A sense of inconsolable, almost inhuman, grief is particularly notable in Marina’s second sonic break in the film, which occurs just after the first one, once Marina has settled back into the apartment for her first night there without
Orlando. Alone in their bedroom, Marina walks over to Orlando’s side of the closet,
208 Kubrick, 2001. 119 submerges her head in his hanging suits and lets out a moan that sounds less like a human in pain and more like the communication of a blue whale, or the sound of ship horn.
Exiting the closet, she lies down on the bed she used to share with Orlando and takes a deep drag on a vaporizer. On her exhale Marina lets out yet another low-pitched, almost mechanical, groan. The groans are, unquestionably, embodiments of Marina’s grief, but they are also more than that. These private moments of grief are the first in which Marina is able to “let her hair down,” so to speak. As such, the temptation arises to link the sound of her voice in these moments to a kind of rawness, or authenticity. Not only that, but also as a result of the modulation in the pitch of Marina’s voice in these groans, the temptation arises to read this very deep pitch as a more “authentic” version of Marina’s voice and, by association, her sex.
Just as gender employs the image (whether it be a mirror image, a selfie, or a magazine cover photo) as an “ontological catalyst” for the subject and its categorization as female or male, so does it employ/produce the “recognizably” male or female voice.209
The voice, just like the image, becomes part of a documentation and construction of the corporeal “real” that gender controls. The appearance of a mobile application like speech pathologist Kathe Perez’s Exceptional Voice App, in 2013, which advertises itself as “The
World’s FIRST Transgender Voice Training App,” is a great example of the way contemporary gender systems view the voice as an important and malleable signifier of gender.210 The banner at the top of the home page of the company’s website features the
209 Preciado, 112.
210 Preciado, 42; “Eva,” Kathe Perez. 120 unattributed quotation, “I pass until I open my mouth” followed by: “Can you relate? Eva will guide you step-by-step to express yourself as the person you know yourself to be.”211
The application comes in two versions, Eva F and Eva M, and each offers a variety of purchasable lessons and tools to train one’s voice to sound either female or male. Taking advantage of the user market opened up by an increased popular awareness around gender and gender transition in recent years—in which gender is synonymous with sex, but also acts as a means of controlling sex; where gender uses the lure of the fiction of identity to make sex into a malleable commodity; where one’s sense of being either a man, a woman, or neither, not only green lights, but also seems almost to necessitate, physical interventions on one’s body—Eva provides an aural training program to satisfy and stoke the demand for a means of transforming the voice to align with cultural ideals for aural masculinity and femininity.
Applications like Eva profit from the idea that, as Flusser suggests of the image, the sound of one’s voice exists in a loop of mutual constitution with the individual:
“[one’s voice becomes] more and more like the receivers want [it] to be so that the receivers can become more and more like [one’s voice wants] them to be”212 The voice as a site of recognition and self-recognition becomes an anticipated stand-in for the subject.
It becomes “all the subject can be sure of...coming to meet him/[her],” in its retroactive production.213 Eva, the audio track in Wynne Neilly’s Female to ‘Male,’ the 99,600
211 “Eva,” Kathe Perez.
212 Flusser, Technical Images, 54.
213 Lacan, Ecrits, 684. 121 results that appear if one searches Youtube for “mtf voice transition” (a search for “ftm voice transition” will yield 55,700 results), some of which belong to years-, or decades-, long archives of users’ transitions, among other examples, would suggest that Flusser’s model is transferrable from the visual to the aural realm. They would suggest that the voice is a malleable signifier of gender that can be self-reflexively controlled.
Except, the point of Flusser’s model is that the self-reflexive control that one imagines oneself to have over one’s visually articulated subjectivity is hardly control, and even less so in the aural realm. The experience of listening to a recording of oneself and looking at a picture of oneself with someone else is completely different. One can, generally, look at a photograph of oneself without recoiling from a sense of misrecognition. The same is not, generally, true when it comes to hearing the sound of one’s voice. As Chion writes: “upon hearing our recorded voice for the first few times, we have all had the experience of hating it and finding it too high-pitched and much less full than we imagined.”214 The primary reason for this has to do with a mixing of perceived sounds from internal and external sources when one speaks. When one hears one’s voice on a recording the sonic stimulus that one receives is external, but the mode through which one receives one’s voice on a daily basis is both external and internal.
When one speaks, one hears the sound of one’s voice by way of air conduction (in which sound waves travel into the ear, strike the ear drum whose vibrations travel to the inner ear and then to the brain) and bone conduction (in which the activation of one’s vocal
214 Chion, Sound, 95. 122 chords sets off vibrations in one’s skull which eventually reach one’s inner ear).215 Due to the acoustics of one’s skull, the vibrations that travel up to it from the vocal chords register as deeper in pitch when they are picked up by the inner ear and then processed by the brain.216 One’s voice, as a result, tends to sound deeper when one hears it during the act of speaking than it does when one hears it played back through speakers—which is to say nothing of the distortions that the sounds of one’s voice undergoes in the processes of simulation and compression that digital audio recording entails.217
This form of aural self-misrecognition is hilariously dramatized in a 2002
Saturday Night Live skit called “Gay Voicemail,” starring Alec Baldwin.218 In the skit,
Baldwin plays a character named Larry who works in the corporate office of a drainage pipe distribution company and has just received a promotion. The scene opens with Larry sitting at his desk as his co-worker Todd walks in, congratulates him on his promotion, and suggests that the only thing Larry has left to do is to set up his voicemail greeting.
As soon as Todd leaves his office, Larry presses a button on the phone and an automated, female, voice sounds: “Welcome to Telex voicemail systems. To record your outgoing message, press one.”219 Larry smiles, presses another button on the phone, listens to further instructions from the automated voice and, finally, as the audience looks on, records his voicemail greeting: “This is Larry Henderson. I’m not at my desk. Please
215 Feltman, “Your Own Voice.”
216 Feltman, “Your Own Voice.”
217 See Sterne, MP3.
218 Miller, Saturday Night Live, “Gay Voicemail.”
219 Miller, “Gay Voicemail.” 123 leave a message.”220 When he is finished recording, the automated voice sounds again.
This time, it prompts Larry to press the number two on his phone if he would like to review his message. With a look of curiosity on his face, Larry presses a button on the desk phone and listens as the recording of his voice is played back to him. To Larry’s, and the audience’s, surprise, however, the voice that emerges from the speakers on his desk phone—with its noticeable assibilance and higher pitch—is markedly different from the voice that Larry and the audience thought they heard just minutes before.
The gag, of course, is that Larry’s recorded voice has the stereotypical sound of a
North American, English-speaking gay man’s voice, and he is the only person amongst his family, friends, and co-workers who remains unaware of this fact. As the bit goes on,
Larry records several more messages (each with an increasingly deeper pitch), and each time he reviews his messages he is met with a campier, more stereotypically “gay” playback. His final recording, a rushed “Hi, it’s Larry. I’m not here,” is translated to
“Hiiii, Miss Larry St. Marie is definitely not at her perch!”—emphasizing, to the point of hyperbole, the gap between Larry’s perception of himself and the way that others perceive him when it comes to the sound of his voice.221
To be sure, part of the lack of connection that Larry experiences when he hears his voicemail greeting has to do with the fact that the sound of his voice on the recording is not mixed with the deeper pitch that the internal vibrations of his spoken voice contains; but, for Larry, it also has to do with the particular social significance of the sound of his
220 Miller, “Gay Voicemail.”
221 Miller, “Gay Voicemail.” 124 voice. For individuals acculturated to a way of speaking that, within the United States, is stereotypically associated with gay men, Larry’s voice on the greeting sounds “gay,” and identifies him as a gay man—or, at the very least, a man whose sexuality may be in question in the United States in 2002. When Larry hears his voice on the recording, the revelation that it “sounds like that” resonates doubly, revealing that the way he sounds to others is quite different from the way he sounds to himself and that may also indicate something about his sexual preferences that he may or may not have already recognized.
As Dolar writes,
“If voice implies reflexivity, insofar as its resonance returns from the Other, then
it is a reflexivity without a self—not a bad name for the subject. For it is not the
same subject which sends his or her message and gets the voice bounced back—
rather, the subject is what emerges in this loop, the result of this course.”222
Regardless of how Larry actually identifies in terms of his sexual orientation, what this skit makes absolutely—and hilariously—clear is that this vibrating air, often understood as an unmediated expression of the individual, is always, regardless of the ways in which one tries to manipulate it, strikingly other than that which the individual herself presumes it to be.223 The subject is always strikingly other than that which the individual presumes it to be.
Returning, now, to Marina and her bedroom groans, what makes these sounds remarkable is not simply the way that their low pitch highlights a discrepancy in the
222 Dolar, 161.
223 See Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, Language and Sexuality. 125 normative alignment that gender demands from voices and bodies, but the focus that they bring to an otherness embedded within the voice—an otherness that reaches beyond any concerns with normative gender designations. The groans critique the desire to suture
“recognizable” modal voices to “recognizably sexed” bodies that undergirds the aural production and management of gender by both evoking and disrupting that suturing function. Where the gag of “Gay Voicemail” lingers, for laughs, on the dis-alignment, or failure, to suture Larry’s exterior aspect, his non-recorded voice, and his recorded voice, the groans not only highlight a contradiction between Marina’s exterior aspect and normative expectations for the way that her voice should sound, but they also embed a non-human timbre into her voice that complicates any such lingering.
While the discrepancy between the very low pitch of Marina’s groans and her female exterior appearance prompts a disruption in her adherence to normative ideals for gender and sex, this is something of a familiar, or expected disruption. The film has already contextualized Marina, particularly through degrading interactions with the emergency room physician and the police officer that he called to take her information, in such a way that the pitch of these groans is unremarkable (one expects that Marina—a person who was assigned male at birth—would likely have the capacity to achieve such low pitches with her voice). Because the very existence of gender as a social designation depends on being able to observe the in-distinctions between bodies in order to instigate its own distinctions and, thus, preserve sexual difference (and/or control the emergence of
“new” sorts of somatically managed identificatory differences), even as a moment of disruption, a discrepancy like this one can easily be integrated into gender’s system of 126 control. This is an example of re-entry, to put it in systems theory terms—where the distinction sexual difference/sexual in-difference reenters the form and in-difference becomes a part of sexual difference. Observing this reentry, one finds a paradox but the paradox does not prevent the continued function of the system. Like Octave Mannoni’s formula for the fetish, “I know very well, nevertheless…,” gender proceeds in its demand for distinction in spite of the fact that in-distinction is what fuels its mechanism. 224 As a result, the distinction (the identity) produced within gender’s system becomes fetishized
—it becomes a bulwark against castration, or the loss incurred by one’s entry into the symbolic.
The more significant disruption occurs, not in the discrepancy between Marina’s perceived sex according to these sounds and her perceived sex according to her exterior appearance, but between the inhumanity of these sounds of grief and Marina’s visibly human exterior. It is the fact that Marina’s voice sounds a bit like a ship’s horn or a blue whale’s call that brings the listener closer to a sense of the object voice in her voice.
These non-human timbres cause listeners to become aware of the voice in a way that they otherwise would not. As Dolar writes: “We can almost unfailingly identify a person by the voice, the particular individual timbre, resonance, pitch, cadence, melody, the peculiar way of pronouncing certain sounds.”225 The individual “fluctuations and variations” of a voice do not “contribute to meaning,” but they are indispensible to human speech—“the norm itself cannot be implemented without some ‘personal touch,’ the slight trespassing
224 Octave Mannoni qtd. in Dolar, 68.
225 Dolar, 22. 127 which is the mark of individuality.”226 These “fingerprint” qualities, paradoxically, enable a norm for “recognizable” human speech.227 When Marina’s groans veer into non-human territory they “[reproduce] the pure norm without any side effects” or individualities and, in this way, they begin to “[confront listeners] with the object voice, [and] its disturbing uncanny nature.”228
Almost, but not quite, confronting the object voice by way of two different kinds of vocal discrepancies, the groans enact a complicated and evocative disavowal of the impossibility at their core. To return to Mannoni’s formula: one knows very well that the first groan came from Marina, but nevertheless one also perceives something other in the groan that erodes its connection to her as its source. One knows very well that the second groan came from Marina (its sound is, indeed, synchronized to the visible movement of her lips and the exhale of vapor from her mouth), but nevertheless the sound of the groan remains incompatible with its source. They operate in place of an impossible confrontation with the gap between the voice and its source.
The groans are acousmatic—sounds whose sources cannot be seen. But, then, so are all voices. Even standing in front of someone who is speaking, one does not see the source of the voice that one hears—“the voice comes from inside the body, the belly, the stomach—from something incompatible and irreducible to the activity of the mouth.”229
226 Dolar, 22.
227 Dolar, 22, 36.
228 Dolar, 36.
229 Dolar, 70. 128
For the cinematic context, Chion has described the acousmatic voice as a voice that cannot be seen, yet which is included in the diegetic space of a film. A voice that one experiences, Chion writes, “as if [it were] wandering along the surface, at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle.”230 The first groan, which Marina emits while her head is buried in Orlando’s closet is a straightforward example of a sound without a source. The second, which she lets go while the camera holds her in a high angle medium-close up shot as she lies on the bed exhaling vapor, even more closely replicates the sense of a sound that lingers on the surface. It is an example of standing in front of someone and yet still not seeing the source of their voice.
If a voice is presumed always to be seeking a body, it quite easily becomes one more cog in a biopolitical machine where gender acts as a mechanism for controlling sex: intervene on the body to make it adhere to visually articulated ideals for sex, intervene on the voice so that it normatively aligns with the body. “But the more you think about synchronization,” Chion writes, “the more aware you can become…of the arbitrariness of this convention, which tries to present as a unity something that from the outset doesn’t stick together.”231 Arbitrary, but nearly unavoidable, sound and image are a “privileged pair.”232 From a very young age human attention appears to be specially attuned to synchronized sounds and images, with the image acting as the magnetizing force in this
230 Chion, The Voice, 23.
231 Chion, The Voice, 126.
232 Chion, Sound, 150. 129 combination.233 Without a frame of its own, sound is readily subjected to the confines of the image and the image takes credit for sounds that “appear to emanate naturally from” it.234 Because of its presumed naturalism, breaking—even simply exposing—this relationship between sound and image is a difficult task.
With their combination of pitch, timbre, and shot distance within a realist and correspondent mise-en-scène, Marina’s groans do a good job of simultaneously denaturalizing the coupling of sound and image, voice and body, and demonstrating its tremendous force. They provoke the impossibility of the object voice within the voice and the desire to cover over, or find a stand-in for, this impossibility. In this way, in contrast to the starkly categorical and visually informed language that other characters use to describe Marina in terms of her sex (notably, at no point in the film does another character comment on Marina’s voice), the groans offer a productively paradoxical position on the matter. To remarks like Sonia’s and Bruno’s, and institutional procedures like the medical photoshoot she endures after Orlando’s death, the groans, indirectly, propose a paradigm shifting non-solution. Instead of making “sense” of Marina they not only expose the arbitrariness of the mechanism that would attempt to accomplish this task, but also the representational visual medium through which it is expected to be accomplished. They are able to do this so effectively because, at the same time as the groans expose the arbitrariness of the alignment of sounds to sounds and sounds to images in the service of normalizing gender systems, they also highlight deep
233 Chion, Sound, 150.
234 Chion, Sound, 151. 130 undercurrents of desire fueling these mechanisms of alignment. The same disruption
(caused by the pitch and timbre of the groans) that prompts one to question the connection of these sounds to Marina underscores and activates a desire to make that connection without question.
This indirect, paradoxical, and paradigm shifting critique of the visually conceived and articulated sense-making systems at the heart of gender continues and becomes more complex with the jarring and out-of-place bits of song that appear throughout the film. Beyond highlighting the desire for alignment that characterizes contemporary systems of gender, these bits of song suggestively link to a larger course of training in which Marina participates in a conscious process of vocal alignment. As viewers learn towards the middle of the film, when, seeking refuge from various antagonisms, she pays a visit to her voice teacher: Marina is an opera singer. For the attentive listener, the rendition of “Sposa son Disprezzata” that she does during her lesson provides an ostensible source for Marina’s first jarringly emitted fragment of song in the film. It also seems to explain the haunting trill that Marina emits while taking Orlando’s car through the carwash (before the lesson), and another disturbing trill (after the lesson) that escapes her mouth, seemingly without her volition, as she walks down a hallway to her sister’s apartment after a night of dancing. And, if one is looking for a final point of closure in this musical trajectory, the film ends with Marina performing an aria from
Handel’s opera Xerxes, “Ombra Mai Fu,” for a live audience.235
235 Lelio, Una Mujer. 131
By training her voice to sing opera, Marina not only trains her voice to become a fetish object par excellence—with opera, in particular, as Dolar writes, “the dramatic tension between the word and the voice [is] put into its cradle, and their impossible and problematic relationship [presents] its driving force”—but she also activates a trajectory that runs counter to what one might call the normative telos of contemporary gender systems.236 In “Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality,” Laura Horak uses
“hormone time” to describe the temporality of the YouTube transition videos, which I mentioned earlier, that have become a fairly common way for individuals to document the changes in their bodies as a result of the intervention of surgical, hormonal, and other technical means. In general, in these videos, “time begins with the first shot of testosterone or HRT pills (hormone replacement therapy) and is measured against that date, even years afterward.”237 This is precisely the kind of temporality that Wynne Neilly critiques in “Female to ‘Male,’” and, though it doesn’t involve hormones, it is also the kind of temporality that Perez’s Exceptional Voice App prompts and profits from. As
Horak describes it: “Hormone time is linear and teleological, directed toward the end of living full time in the desired gender. It borrows a Christian temporal structure—time begins with [a] moment of rupture and points in a particular direction.”238 And, the direction in which it points, Horak goes on to explain, is “a utopian future, in which the
236 Dolar, 30.
237 Horak, “Trans on YouTube,” 579.
238 Horak, 580. 132 subject experiences harmony between the felt and perceived body.”239 In the mainstream popular version of this temporal logic, Marina would train her voice to sound female so that she can pass as female. By any other permutation of this logic, she would still drive at bridging a gap that cannot be filled between the psychic and the somatic, the interior and the exterior. Marina does neither.
One needn’t piece together all of Marina’s musical moments and fragments throughout the film, from her introduction with “Periodico de Ayer” to her exit with
“Ombra Mai Fu,” and synthesize a narrative trajectory from them. Though Marina’s first aural fragment does sound quite a bit like the first word in “Sposa son Disprezzata” the fact that she sings this aria during her music lesson doesn’t explain why the fragment slipped out of her mouth earlier in the film. Neither of the trills that she lets out seem to have any direct connection to “Sposa son Disprezzata” or “Ombra Mai Fu.” These haunting oscillations of pitch on the same note are more productively considered in terms of the flexibility and mobility of the voice they demonstrate, especially in comparison with the image, than they are lumped into a forward moving trajectory towards some sort of aural/ontological closure. Each piece, and especially the fragments, functions effectively on its own to foreground and complicate questions of aurality and gender in the film.
In spite of the various moments of aural anti-synthesis that Marina’s vocal fragments enact, however, the film also invites a narrative reading with Orlando’s death acting as the suggestive rupture from which Marina spends the rest of the film
239 Horak, 580. 133 restructuring herself. What’s interesting about this is that, even if one were to read
Marina’s aural development across the film as aiming at a moment of “harmony between the felt and perceived body,” the film would still culminate with a final performance that profoundly complicates such alignment. This is not in small part because “Ombra Mai
Fu” was written to be sung by a castrato voice.240 Thus, if Marina’s performance of this aria signifies a moment of closure, then Marina finds closure by approximating the
“female” voice of a surgically altered, highly trained, male bodied singer, not to mention, a voice that sang the high pitched “female” range in a way that was distinct from female singers and his unaltered male peers. She finds closure in a voice that, allegedly, performed the “female” voice better than any female bodied singer ever could.241 In fact, when castrati entered the musical world in sixteenth century Italy, as Bonnie Gordon explains, they were considered “a pragmatic solution to the problem of female voices… their surgery and training gave them high voices without the problematic bodies of women who were considered dangerous and excessive at best.”242 Castrati were, quite literally, superior substitutes for women when it came to the aural performance of femininity.
The sentiment that castrati performed a better version of the female voice and femininity than female bodied singers is echoed in modern and contemporary writing on castrati, perhaps most famously in Barthes’ reading of Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine in S/
240 Hicks, “Serse,” 2.
241 Gordon, “About the Cut,” 650.
242 Gordon, 652. 134
Z. Barthes describes the Italian voice as one created by “singers without sex,” and he calls this “logical…as though by selective hypertrophy, sexual density were obliged to abandon the rest of the body and lodge in the throat, thereby draining the organism of all that connects it.”243 A slightly different version of this sublimation of sex from its typical dwelling place in visually articulated bodily exteriors appears in Balzac’s story, when
Sarrasine, the story’s eponymous protagonist, says to Zambinella, the castrato who lives publicly as a female, “that angelic voice, that delicate voice, would be an anomaly coming from any body but yours.”244 Both Barthes and Balzac reverse Chion’s logic of the acousmatic voice as a sound in search of a source. Here, the source must mold itself to the sound. As Barthes explains: “the body produces the voice and the voice justifies the body.”245
How is it that such a reversal of the relationship between voice and body, sound and image, works for the castrato? The castrato’s “superior” substitute for the female voice appears, in part, to correspond with Roof’s argument that, “femininity is always already masculinity, [and] no one operates femininity better than men do.”246 Although she makes this claim specifically in relation to gay male drag queens, the statement, on its face, also appears to bear relevance to the ease with which the castrato is able to inhabit ideal femininity aurally, and all but erase the female body in the process.
243 Barthes, S/Z, 109.
244 Barthes, S/Z, 109.
245 Barthes, S/Z, 176.
246 Roof, Gender, 189. 135
Roof’s comment that femininity is already masculinity and that men are the privileged operators of femininity is an elaboration on the asymmetricality of social genders, especially as they are theorized in the work of Lacan and Luce Irigaray. The ideal feminine represents the impossible position towards which one must work and the ideal masculine the impossible position from which one must avoid falling. These positions are established by their relation to the Phallus: “the signifier of the impossible fullness of meaning…the element in which excess and lack collide.”247 The Phallus is not the penis, though the resonance of that association abides and is not meaningless. Roof describes it as, “the key signifier of sexual difference’s asymmetry…a signifier (rather than an organ) that stands in for having it All in cultures whose symbolic order locates wholeness on the side of what can be seen.”248 Ideal masculinity is constructed around having the Phallus, or having it all, whereas ideal femininity is constructed around being the Phallus insofar as the Phallus is that unachievable site of excess and lack.249
Becoming the Phallus, for the drag queen (whom Roof reads as an example of a vertiginous dynamic of gender) means enacting “the perpetual deferment of the phallus that we know is there somewhere.”250 Usually through fairly blatant gestures and modes of dress, drag queens make this act of deferral (which often refers to a literal penis in some way) obvious to their audiences. Because the ideal feminine is about achieving the
247 Žižek, 60.
248 Roof, Gender, 14.
249 Roof, Gender, 174, 190.
250 Roof, Gender, 191. 136 unachievable, the drag queen’s campy rendering of this pursuit is one of its best approximations.
As the drag queen’s dynamic is vertiginous (her conscious performance of being the Phallus is founded on seeing herself being seen performing ideal femininity) a key part of her Phallic deferral, Roof explains, is the deferral of speech. If/when the drag queen speaks, the voice short circuits her predominantly visually articulated embodiment of the feminine ideal. In other words, the sound of the drag queen’s voice (which will, presumably, be within the normative range for a male voice) has the function of revealing the queen’s possession of the object that she worked to keep hidden in her quest to become that object. But, this rupture is by no means irreparable. Instead of breaking down the queen’s performance, her voice becomes integrated into her vertiginous dynamic. It becomes one more signifier that “[makes] obvious the circulating inter- referential modes of gender” of which the vertiginous dynamic is composed. Through its temporarily provocative display, her voice “secures the mastery of the object of desire by seeming to break the illusion by which the subject becomes the object.”251
Castrati, of course, were not drag queens or even, of necessity, individuals who engaged in any sort of performance of the feminine outside of their song. The gender dynamic that they inhabit does not appear, in a general sense, to be constructed around a conscious wielding of social and taxonomic signifiers of gender. They, too, enact a deferral of the Phallus except, where the drag queen figure, in rather literal ways, works to hide the Phallus from sight, one might say that the castrato hides the Phallus in plain
251 Roof, Gender, 192. 137 sight/sound. Although castrati are understood—rather inaccurately, because castrati underwent orchiectomies, not penectomies—to lack a literal phallus, one cannot say that they do not have the Phallus in the way that Woman does not have the phallus. Indeed, rather like the drag queen, part of the lure and the lore of the castrato is the disavowing knowledge that the object of desire (the phallus) is there, somewhere. The apparent loss of their privileged taxonomic signifier of gender, activates a logic of fetishization: “I know very well that this singer does not have the object, but I will look for it in him all the same.” It is by this logic that the Phallus is transferred to the castrato’s voice. His voice becomes the site of both having and being the Phallus. It becomes an acousmatic fetish object that “cannot be neutralized with the framework of the visible” but, instead,
“makes the visible itself redoubled and enigmatic”—as in Sarrasine’s comment that
Zambinella’s voice would be an “anomaly” if it were coming from any other body.252
So, what does it mean that Marina’s narrative concludes with a performance that imitates just such a voice? To fully understand the significance of this final scene, one should consider, in addition to its relationship to the various fragments of song that precede it in the film, the fragments of images that initiate this performance. By way of mirror images throughout, the film enacts and comments on the self-reflexive scopic, or vertiginous, mode through which gender asserts its control on Marina. Some of these mirror images (Fig. 22) rather obviously point at the limitations of the visual as a foundation for subjectivity, while others focus on the perniciousness of these self- reflexive scopic loops in constructions of subjectivity in spite of their limitations. All of
252 Dolar, 79. 138 the mirror images point to a vertiginous dynamic as a dominant force in gender’s control over Marina’s subjectivity.
Figure 22. Sebastián Lelio, Una Mujer Fantastica, 2017. Image downloaded from
https://observancyfilmblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/24/una-mujer-fantastica-a-fantastic-
woman/ in August 2018.
Particularly important contextualizations of Marina’s enmeshment in a vertiginous gender regime are a couple of shots that closely precede Marina’s performance of
“Ombra Mai Fu.” The first is a pair of images that depict Marina alone in a new apartment just before she leaves to attend her recital. The pair begins with a long shot of
Marina in profile lying naked on a twin sized bed. From the profile shot, in which
Marina’s knees are bent as her feet lie flat on the bed, viewers can see that Marina is looking at something in her crotch. When the film cuts to a close-up of Marina’s perspective, the object of interest is revealed to have been a small compact mirror positioned over her genitals and reflecting back an image of her face (Fig. 23). 139
Figure 23. Sebastián Lelio, Una Mujer Fantastica, 2017. Image downloaded from
https://observancyfilmblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/24/una-mujer-fantastica-a-fantastic-
woman/ in August 2018.
The image literalizes the dynamic of seeing oneself being seen seeing oneself (in this case, actually by her pet dog and implicitly by the film’s viewers) in relation to the
Phallus. The compact obscures the overvalued site of taxonomic signifiers of sex and replaces it with a mirror image. It is a kind of short circuit to the voyeuristic fetishization of Marina throughout the film. Marina’s mirror image is like an eye staring back through the keyhole at a voyeur. At the moment when the object that Marina has been “hiding” throughout the film is on the brink of being revealed, Marina’s reflection appears and severs the desire that had been building up around her status with regard to the Phallus throughout the film. This image and its revelation bluntly underscore the relationship between the penis and the phallus, the centrality of the subject’s positioning with regard to this object of excess and lack, and the self-reflexive scopic mode of representation which predominantly establishes these relationships and positionings. 140
The second pair of significant images in relation to Marina’s final performance appear while she is sitting in her dressing room directly before she takes the stage. The first (Fig. 24) is a head and shoulders medium-close shot of Marina looking just to the left of the camera’s lens and framed by a mirror hanging on the wall behind her.
Figure 24. Sebastián Lelio, Una Mujer Fantastica, 2017. Image downloaded from https://
variety.com/2017/film/awards/a-fantastic-woman-narcos-win-2017-fenix-
awards-1202632870/ in August 2018.
In this mirror is the reflection of an illuminated vanity mirror’s frame. Not unlike Annie
Leibovitz’s photograph of Caitlyn Jenner in her bathroom, the shot places Marina in the center of a mise en abyme. The play of mirrors and incorporation of the photographic apparatus, here, is less obvious and operates differently than it does in Leibovitz’s photograph. Leibovitz captures Jenner in profile with her eyes closed and head thrown back sitting between two mirrors, her camera reflected in a mirror to Jenner’s right side.
Through its blatant inclusion of the photographic apparatus and Jenner’s irreverent posture, that photograph displays a sense of mastery over the vertiginous scopic dynamic in which it presents her. 141
By contrast, Marina’s situation in this recursive scopic scene is less self-
conscious. She is alert and serious as she looks into the film’s camera—which occupies
the place of the mirror that she is, suggestively, looking into—and instead of revealing
the film’s camera in a reflection, this shot inculcates the camera’s perspective into the
scopic dynamic. The film displays Marina’s involvement in a self-reflexively scopic
dynamic of gender as sincere—seeing herself being seen seeing herself as female is not something that Marina pretends to have mastery over, or even be aware of, at least not in
this shot.
Figure 25. Sebastián Lelio, Una Mujer Fantastica, 2017. Photographed by the author in
2018.
The insularity of Marina’s involvement in a vertiginous dynamic is solidified in the second image of the pair (Fig. 25.). This image is strikingly similar (but in reverse) to another of Leibovitz’s photographs from Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover shoot where Jenner’s image is triplicated in her boudoir mirrors. Here, the film’s camera demonstrates, from a medium-long remove, Marina at the center of the narcissistic scopic focus that forms the 142 bedrock of the vertiginous regime. Unlike the Leibovitz photo—in which Jenner stands with her back to two mirrors looking out and Leibovitz is reflected in one of the mirrors with her camera as she looks in—Marina stands with her back to the camera, which is not reflected in any of the mirrors. Whereas Jenner is pictured as taking an irreverent, nonchalant stance with regard to the gaze of the photographic apparatus (she looks past it), Marina and all of her gazes are turned inward. In comparison to Jenner, Marina treats this scopic production of herself as precious—something to be safeguarded and consolidated. It is as if she acknowledges the vertiginous dynamic by which gender shapes her subjectivity in terms of a position in reference to the Phallus, but doesn’t want to be observed in this acknowledgement.
Figure 26. Sebastián Lelio, Una Mujer Fantastica, 2017. Image downloaded from
http://homenewshere.com/middlesex_east/movie_review/
article_f6f37412-0dc4-11e8-89da-d316dcf0e02f.html in August 2018.
Understanding Marina’s, perhaps reluctantly, self-conscious relationship to gender’s scopic production and maintenance of her subjectivity helps to set the stage for the film’s final scene (Fig. 26). Here, she does not so much see herself being seen seeing 143 herself in a particular relation to the Phallus, as she sees herself being heard and then seen in a particular relation to the Phallus. Like the castrato whose part she sings,
Marina’s voice in this final performance flips the switch on traditional dynamics of image and sound: the image gets folded back into the voice rather than the voice getting folded back into the image. Marina’s voice justifies her body—makes it forgettable or a fetish, excuses it for its absent (or hidden) phallus. Her voice takes on the phallus (or lack thereof) that the film strategically frames in dialogue and images but intentionally avoids revealing.
For viewers who are able to pick up on the vertiginous resonance of the mirror images that precede it, and who are familiar with “Ombra Mai Fu,” Marina’s voice will not only represent a triumph of the aural over the visual, but also of the constructed over the essential. For them, the voice will become a self-conscious declaration not only that sounds have the potential to smash the structural boundaries that images impose on the subject, but also that the ideal feminine is best achieved by a body that’s been engineered
(through vocal training and, perhaps, surgery) to achieve that impossible purpose. In this way, the vertiginous dynamic hasn’t been evacuated from Marina’s performance, just reorganized around an aural mode of positioning. Now the voice is the thing to be looked at, the stain that offers itself to be seen in place of being seen.253 Except, it can’t be seen and when it comes back to one’s ears it isn’t the same voice at all.
Nevertheless, sound and image are a tenacious pair. In spite of its complexity,
Marina’s voice does not transcend, but rather justifies, her body. Her visual presence
253 Roof, Gender, 181. 144 abides and remains significant in relation to her vocal emissions—if only to showcase the brilliance of the aural in comparison to its understated visual counterpart. Even, perhaps especially, in a film like Spike Jonze’s Her—which is premised on a man who falls in love with the “female” voice of his computer’s operating system—there is no point at which the voice exists outside of, at least, the imagination of visually articulated physical boundaries. And, as Dolar says of Kempelen’s speaking machine: it is “just a mechanism emitting voice, but thereby producing the most human of effects, an effect of interiority.”254 Although it gestures at the possibility of thinking the aural beyond the visual, the voice beyond the body, sex out of sight, Una Mujer Fantastica does not quite achieve that end. The best it does—and this is, to be sure, a valuable contribution to the conversation—is to illuminate the dynamic tension between aurality and visuality that enables gender to continue to control bodies and sexes in contemporary culture.
254 Dolar, 10. 145
Conclusion
After examining some of the visual and aural modes of representation that subtend many contemporary popular, medical, and legal concepts of gender, it is simultaneously very simple and rather complicated to imagine how things might be otherwise. While it has never been the case that individuals have experienced anything like one-to-one correspondence with subjective ideals such as “woman” or “man,” the social influence of the psycho-social-media apparatus—also known as gender—that promotes and manages such psychical alignments with asymmetrical, binary, imaginaries of sexual difference is extremely pernicious. Contemporary popular, medical, and legal discourses hold gender out as a self-reflexive sense of being female, male, or neither intimately tied to a sense of being a subject. Using the fiction of personal agency over one’s subjectivity as a lure, gender compels individuals to regulate themselves—their bodies and desires—to align sexed ideals for bodily materiality with, or with reference to, stereotypical, conscious psychic understandings of masculinity or femininity.
More so than any lack of imagination for its different possible manifestations beyond binary ideals for heteroreproductive sex, one of the greatest obstacles to thinking more expansively about gender is the idea that it is something with which one might identify. The supposedly agential act of self-definition embedded in gender (as an identity) paradoxically enables gender (as an apparatus of dynamically interrelating 146 desires, drives, and socio-cultural circumstances) to enforce a sexual status quo around binary, heteroreproductive ideals for bodies and desires.255
Media systems are pivotal in facilitating this substitution of consciously constructed gender identities for more complex, changing, conscious and unconscious, psychical relationships to questions of sexual difference—they also, quite easily, expose such substitutions for the fictions that they are. The equivocality of certain media forms as modes of suturing the fiction of the subject becomes strikingly clear, as I have demonstrated throughout this project, with the example of selfies. Like the mirror image, the selfie totalizes the “fragmented or inco-ordinate subject.”256 It “conceals,” even in non-infants, “the fragmentation of [their] drives,” providing individuals with a “fiction” on which to base “a coherent identity in which [they] can recognize [themselves].”257
However, this totalization and the satisfaction that it brings is provisional and temporary.
The image must continually be replaced, because every moment of totalization is also a moment where the subject is split—where “the subject finds or recognizes itself through
255 I use the word “identify” here to denote a conscious declaration of the relation of one’s internal sense of self to socially recognized categories of being. This mode of conscious identification is not analogous to the process of identification laid out by Freud and then elaborated upon by Lacan. The demand that Freud describes, as Jacqueline Rose explains in terms of Lacan’s theoretical structure of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real, is directed at lost objects, objects that cannot be given, and non-existent objects. Rose, Sexuality, 183. This demand is not consciously wielded at these objects. In fact, if one were to break down the various ways in which individuals “identify,” in the sense that I am using this word above, one would find a relationship between demand and an external object that is entirely unbeknownst to the individual who perceives herself to be in the process of identification.
256 Rose, 173.
257 Rose, 53. 147 an image which simultaneously alienates it, and hence, potentially, confronts it.”258 And this is true, according to the Lacanian account, not only of the mirror image or the selfie but of any “object which reflects,” including those which are heard and touched.259
And so, the selfie (but also the voice as a recognizable and idealized bearer of meaning) becomes, as the editors of Original Plumbing put it referring to transgender individuals: “an essential documentation of our existence.”260 This is not because, as the editors seem to suggest, these forms of media actually document or substantiate the existence of transgender, or any other, people. Rather, it is because the act of documentation is essential as a means of deferring the split in the subject that defines the subject. These modes of documentation are essential because without them one would have to confront the constitutive incoherence of one’s subjectivity.
Although the mirror image, the selfie, and (in a different way, because of differences in the ways that seeing and hearing operate) the voice serve as temporary modes of subjective totalization for all individuals, the attention that the editors of
Original Plumbing draw to transgender individuals, in particular, is not unwarranted. In recent years, transgender people have come to represent, in an outsized way, the nexus of subjectivity, media, and bodily materiality, in phallically organized “cultures whose symbolic order locates wholeness on the side of what can be seen”—or, I would argue,
258 Rose, 174.
259 Lacan qtd. in Rose, 53.
260 Mac and Kayiatos, 2. 148 heard, in ways that correspond with particular visualized ideals of wholeness.261 These individuals have been singled out, and also defined, by the fact that in cultures where
“anatomical difference comes to figure sexual difference”—where largely visually articulated ideals for bodily (specifically genital) materiality, “[become] the sole representative of what that difference is allowed to be”—they have attempted to negotiate this sexual difference with reference to these figures of difference.262 More specifically, if one accepts a Lacanian logic of sexuation, these individuals have attempted to employ these figures of difference to negotiate a complex set of relations to the questions of whether or not they “have it all,” and whether or not they think that the objects of their desire “have it all.”263 The trouble with this is that, as Chase Joynt suggests, more often than not, “the penis is, in fact, not the problem to be solved.”264
Addressing the lack of connection between individuals’ sexuations and the imaginaries of binary, anatomical sex meant to stand in for these sexuations requires addressing the psycho-media mechanism by which these figures of sex are produced and managed in the first place. One hears steady echoes of McLuhan’s concept of servomechanitude in the editors’ emphasis on the dependence of their community on photographic representation.265 Just as the executive is the servomechanism of his clock
—bending himself to the demands of its dials—transgender people are, the comment
261 Roof, Gender, 14.
262 Rose, 66.
263 Roof, 173.
264 Joynt, 89.
265 Mac and Kayiatos, 2. 149 suggests, servomechanisms of the front-facing camera, shaping their existence around photographic self-documentation.266 One could draw this out even further, and— following Flusser’s theorization of the servomechanistic feedback relation between events and images in contemporary media culture—argue that the end of transition, as implied by the editors’ comment, is not to become aligned with a particular figure of sex, but to be visually, and aurally, documented in the process of figuring this status.267
Joynt describes this feedback loop between individuals and their self-reflexive images—which produces, manages, and may very well stand in for, the figures of sex with which genders are meant to identify—at work in his commentary on the practices of
“visual documentation” frequently engaged in by people who start taking testosterone.268
As Joynt explains, the videos that these individuals create of themselves “are most often progress narratives that move from points of previous fracture toward present clarity,” and they act as a kind of confirmation of a “fallacy of pre-dictated gender behaviour.”269
To put it in the language of the Original Plumbing editors’ comment, the videos—or the selfies to which the editors refer, or the sound of one’s voice being trained to align with an sexed ideal, among many other media forms—are essential documentations for, rather
266 McLuhan, 46.
267 Flusser argues that “Current events no longer roll toward some sort of future but toward technical images. Images are not windows; they are history’s obstructions. The goal of the political demonstration is not to change the world but to be photographed… And this initiates a novel sort of interaction, a feedback between image and event. The event dines on images, and images dine on events.” Flusser, Technical Images, 56.
268 Joynt and Hoolboom, 109.
269 Joynt and Hoolboom, 109. 150 than of, the existence of the “type” of individual that they will produce. One is led to presume, by way of an array of psychic and socio-cultural forces, that creating a visual or aural document of oneself gives one control over one’s existence as a subject. But, as
Flusser argues, and the visual, aural, and written commentary of Joynt and others bear out, documentation dictates existence; not the other way around.
To begin to think differently about gender, then, one might start by considering the embedded relationship of the psychical and media systems that subtend it and, perhaps, select an approach that does not actively fuel this loop of bodily materiality and visual and aural representation. Of himself, Joynt claims: “I’ve cried only a handful of times since having a hysterectomy, which is certainly not the number of times I’ve had a reason to, never mind the times I’ve actually been in pain…I’m not compelled to make a movie about it, though—at least not directly.”270
270 Joynt and Hoolboom, 109. 151
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