Trans Phenomenology and Epistemic Justice

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2018 Feeling as Knowing: Trans Phenomenology and Epistemic Justice B. Lee Aultman The Graduate Center, CUNY How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2960 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] FEELING AS KNOWING: TRANS PHENOMENOLOGY AND EPISTEMIC JUSTICE by B LEE AULTMAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 B LEE AULTMAN All Rights Reserved ii Feeling as Knowing: Trans Phenomenology and Epistemic Justice By B Lee Aultman This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _________________ _________________________________________ Date Paisley Currah Chair of the Examining Committee _________________ _________________________________________ Date Alyson Cole Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Paisley Currah Alyson Cole Linda Martín Alcoff THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Feeling as Knowing: Trans Phenomenology and Epistemic Justice by B Lee Aultman Advisor: Paisley Currah This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenological claims about trans experiences, and embodied knowledge more generally. It also addresses the conception of ordinary affects, or feelings of self-adjustment in everyday life, and their political implications for trans people. Traditional literatures on the political tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of institutional interpretations of courts, elections, and protest movements. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans politics and theories of ordinary life. These literatures often reduce political movements to their presumed universal intentions for constitutional equality and legal parity. Theories of life, for example, biopolitics and recent attention to neoliberalism, more often describes trans people as effects of power relations. Bodies are disciplined bodies otherwise evacuated of any sense of agency and being. In the most generalized instances, trans people are represented in two ways. On the one hand, they possess a liberal desire toward a normative life of assimilation. On the other hand, they are rebellious, possessing an anti-normative desire to abolish sex/gender binaries altogether. Each of these representations of trans people severely impairs understanding their how gender nonnormative forms of life actually live in under ordinary circumstances. These representations also reduce the richness of trans knowledge claims. Such commitments create the conditions for misunderstanding, and misreading, the complexities of trans histories, narratives, iv and even what it means to possess an embodied sense of selfhood. These misunderstandings create the conditions for many continued forms of epistemic injustice, a form of injustice that is characterized by the reduction of a person’s, or a group’s, capacity to engage in claiming knowledge about the world as well as the production of knowledge itself. Descending into what this dissertation calls the “trans ordinary” is a means for arguing that feeling, that is to say the live sensations during scenes of ordinary moments, serves as a co-present condition for knowing and thus making claims about the world. This work is a theory of feeling as knowing. v Preface The Latina philosopher and phenomenologist Mariana Ortega, whose work I found exceptionally incisive and inviting, write about “hometactics” in her book In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Really, the term is articulated at the very end of her erudite discussion of marginally gendered and racialized selfhood. She argues that writing that book was an exercise in finding herself, in locating a home in a series of academic worlds that might feel uninviting. I didn’t know it yet, but I too wanted to write an extended dialogue about our attachments to gender and what this dissertation (intentionally or not) might do to complicate movements toward or away from those attachments. I had felt an uneasy but durable sense that political science in particular and theories of the political in general lacked a sustained conversation with the plurality of gendered existence. It was at first a stinging realization that transgender and gender nonconforming (trans) political life had (and has) been given very little attention other than what investigators find as reactions to institutional action against trans communities, a study of their social movements, or the backlash when their constitutional rights were asserted. So, what are we thinking about when we think about gender? Bodies, sex, experiences, identity, subjectivity, theories, living moments, and/or psychic states? Are they common and shared by all or simply personal and isolating in nature only to us? To get at some answers to these broad questions, this work is situated within the larger literatures of queer theory, political theory, and transgender studies. My visit to the Transgender Archives in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2015 proved to be one of the most transformative events in my graduate career. The archive, in general, has a peculiar kind of affective economy. It is often cold and silent. Few people are there. Books don’t speak. The experience of the daily walk to the archive (I was on campus as a visiting scholar and vi the Archive was only a few building away), the routine of requesting the cart of boxes that I had requested the day before and interacting with the pleasant staff gave it a more relational feel. Sifting through pages of books and newspapers, adult magazines and stickers, pins and other ephemera, I was often up and out of my seat scanning material into my online cloud storage. I read closely any word that might indicate something political in the ordinary lives these files contained. It could simply be the description of a scene at a pageant or an eruption of violence in a protest. Often I would find headlines concerning the death of trans people. It struck me that each folder contained not only words—but life. There were texts that merely represented facts, such as newspapers and academically oriented books. But there were personal effects, diaries, poems, stream-of-consciousness notes, and other miscellanea. These words were typed by human hands. Most were typed by trans people long since passed away. It was history in the present, what Walter Benjamin might have called human knowledge in the nucleus of time. But I was affected, particularly, by a typewritten page, stuck between two old newspaper clippings, so out of place. A single line on a blank page. I scanned it (see image below): Image 1.0 Scanned Fragment from the Archives The mystery of this note, its affective attachment of this short typed piece I still carry with me, haunts this dissertation in a way. I find these perennial words of Thomas Paine’s “American Crisis” moving anyway. But, I wonder if not all times, in the sense of our ordinary coming undone, isn’t somehow always already trying our souls. Through the many literatures I started vii searching in order to find meaning in the process of what this dissertation will be frequently referring to as “meaning-making,” Lauren Berlant’s work stuck out the most. She argues that everyday life is filled to some extent with a broad array of attachments and that these attachments, however banal, create the conditions for our own unhappiness. This is particularly heightened when the ordinary comes under siege. As I will repeatedly explain throughout the following chapters (perhaps to a fault), the ordinary is how everyday life (from pain to joy) is folded and otherwise justified so as to make do. When these concerns of making do are jeopardized, when “The fantasies that are fraying include, particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy...the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like accomplishment” (Berlant 2011, 3). If being trans these days means putting up with open political hostility, denied access to health coverage, bathroom access, and continued sustained everyday violence—then, indeed, these are trying times. Affect theory could be described as observing how things affect, and are affected by, other things. It’s a nebulous term—affect—that describes an array of unthought and taken-for- granted forces that shape our orientations to the world around us. To be affected by ordinary circumstances offers insight into where everyday life emerges as more than variables in a complex discourse. To feel at home, to be at home, to rest in bed, to feel upset, the feelings of anxiety or sadness, the amorphous feelings that circulate in our ordinary day on a commute, all compose our attunement to the world. Indeed, to be in the world is human being—to belong in a world, to act in a world, to associate in a world. So to invite affect from ordinary life into our thinking about gender would be critical to thinking gender, full stop. (As an exercise: begin to viii sense your body’s shape and position in which is currently situated; notice how it relates to the space and objects within it, the feeling of the elastic bands from your clothing, the tightness or looseness of your pants or dress, the way a shirt falls over your chest, or the tingle of hair over your eyes or neck.

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