Recently, "trans" has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. As a prefix, "trans" can attach itself to other words to express or describe movement and change, as it does in the terms "transnational" or "transmedia." Trans is also an adjective when it is part of a word that signifies an identity or expression. Trans has worked as an adjective to destabilize established ideas about gender as it makes new senses of what gender can mean for trans people.
Much of the study of life writing is about the study of identity and the possibilities for lives that stories of identity make possible. In that spirit, Trans Narratives: trans, transmedia, transnational represents an opportunity for critical work about life writing by trans people to be featured, as it seeks to interrogate the idea of trans in multiple registers, bringing a prefix to the center of the current field of life-writing studies. It aims to understand through life writing and its theory what trans means when we talk about identities and bodies, and to understand better what the critical terms transmedia and transnational can mean for the field of life writing.
The Chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
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Becoming Culturally (Un)intelligible: Exploring the Terrain of Trans Life Writing
By Evan Vipond
ABSTRACT
This article offers a metatheoretical exploration of how we think through, understand, and categorize trans life writing. It explores Judith Butler’s theory of cultural intelligibility, the use of the waves metaphor, the conflation of trans life writing with coming-of-age and coming-out stories, and counternarratives of cultural unintelligibility.
Introduction
Life writing enables trans writers to claim authorship of their identities and experiences.1 This in itself is a revolutionary act because trans persons continue to be denied their subjectivity and systemically silenced through institutional erasure.2 As a genre, trans life writing offers new ways of understanding gender identity and embodiment that challenge the “rulebook of gender,” which dictates that everyone is assigned either female or male at birth and that this assignment is based on an unchangeable biological “truth.”3 This article offers a metatheoretical exploration of the convergences and dissonances that occur within and across feminist theory, transgender theory, and trans life writing. I consider what Clare Hemmings refers to as the “technologies” of trans life writing—rhetorical devices such as the born-in-the-wrong-body discourse and childhood stories of cross-gender identification—which “are so consistently reproduced that they are understood to ‘speak for themselves’ without further elaboration.”4 I draw from Judith Butler’s theory of cultural intelligibility, which posits that gender is constituted through “a regulated process of repetition,” to understand the ways in which trans life writers become recognizable to their readers as gendered subjects.5
While all self-life writing is self-constituting and thus performative, trans life writing involves a specific form of self-constitution: one’s gender identity.6 Although trans life writing can be understood as performative (i.e. brought into being through language), this article moves beyond the discussion of whether trans identities are inherently performative or somehow more performative than cisgender (i.e. nontrans) identities. Rather, I use cultural intelligibility as a tool to theorize how one’s gender identity becomes legible to others through the use of language and repetition.
Cultural intelligibility determines “in advance what will qualify as the ‘human’ and the ‘livable.’”7 As black feminists and scholars of color have theorized, the category of human, from which people of color have historically been excluded, is confined to that of the white, heteropatriarchal, masculinist, Eurocentrist, ableist, bourgeois male.8 What constitutes the human is invariably the white cisgender masculine subject. While white trans persons may be folded into the category of human through cultural intelligibly, trans persons of color, who face disproportionately high rates of violence compared to their white counterparts, are excluded.9 Thus, the desire and need for trans life writers to make their stories legible is not simply a matter of identification or belonging; it may mean the difference between life and death. It is therefore understandable that trans persons may (re)construct narrative tropes while sharing their life stories in order to make themselves legible to their readers.
This article draws from six mainstream trans life writing texts published in English between 1967 and 2017—specifically, Christine Jorgensen’s Christine Jorgensen, Jan Morris’s Conundrum, Mario Martino’s Emergence, Chaz Bono’s Transition, and Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty. These texts are considered mainstream because they were published by well-established publishing houses and are marketed to the general (read: cisgender) public. Furthermore, all of these authors are able to articulate their stories in a culturally intelligible way, have achieved some level of material or personal success, and are openly trans at the time of publication. They are predominantly gender-conforming trans women and trans men who have accessed transition-related medical care, such as hormone therapy and gender-confirming surgeries (GCS). Their accounts engage with and contest western medical discourses of sex, gender, and transsexuality,10 and consequently reflect the ways in which these discourses both inform (through circulation and repetition) and regulate (through medical and legal gatekeeping) trans identities and subjectivities.
While these texts are in no way representative of the vast spectrum of trans identities and subjectivities, as mainstream texts they allow me to track the hegemonic (and counterhegemonic) discourses of trans life writing in English over the past fifty years. In doing so, I do not seek to find a singular or definitive narrative of transition or trans subjectivity, since “[t]o replace one truth with another suggests that the … problem is simply one of omission.”11 Rather, I seek to create new openings, or what Alexis Shotwell refers to as “open normativities,” for thinking through trans life writing as a distinct genre of life writing and as a crucial site for the knowledge production of gender identity and trans subjectivities.12 These “open normativities” challenge the homogeneity of the “transnormative narrative,” which delineates a singular or closed narrative of what it means to be trans and what it means to transition from one gender to another.13
This article is organized into four sections, each of which offers a metatheoretical exploration of how we think through, understand, and categorize trans life writing. The first section examines trans life writing through Butler’s theory of cultural intelligibility. I argue that through the repetition of certain narratives and tropes, trans life writers become culturally intelligible as normatively gendered subjects. Intelligibility, however, is contingent on one’s proximity to whiteness and being able to articulate one’s gender according to white norms and standards of beauty. In repeating the same narrative tropes over and over, mainstream trans narratives are largely confined to a singular normative white narrative, preventing the proliferation of gender identities and trans subjectivities.
The second section troubles the use of the waves metaphor, which arranges trans life writing into generational cohorts. The designation of a so-called first wave of trans autobiographies echoes the metaphor of the first, second, and third wave that is frequently deployed in the retelling of feminist history. While the wave model offers a quick and easy way of classifying trans life writing, the metaphor also works to homogenize the authors and their works, and thus limits our understanding of the past.14 Consequently, intergenerational similarities and intragenerational differences may be flattened and overlooked.
The third section challenges the interpretation and theorization of trans life writing within the genres of coming-of-age narratives (the Bildungsroman) and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) coming-out stories. I argue, rather, that trans life writing should be considered a genre in its own right. I caution that reading trans life narratives through the structural framing of a coming-of-age narrative reduces gender self-determinism and transitioning to simply growing up, while aligning stories of transition with LGBQ coming-out narratives conflates the experience of coming to terms with one’s sexuality with coming to terms with one’s gender identity and embodiment.
In the final section, I return to Butler’s theory of cultural intelligibility by engaging with counternarratives that speak back to the cisgender reader by refusing recognition and embracing cultural unintelligibility. I discuss the significance of Kate Bornstein’s “anti-autobiographical” work Gender Outlaw, in which Bornstein refuses to become culturally intelligible by rejecting the patriarchal bigender system.15 Furthermore, I discuss Mock’s memoirs as integral sites of intervention in the overwhelmingly white canon of mainstream trans life writing. Mock’s texts provide insights into the intersections of transphobia, misogyny, racism, and classism that others fail to consider. Ultimately, I argue that through counternarratives, trans life writers may relinquish their intelligibility and, in doing so, allow for new understandings of trans identities, subjectivities, and embodiments that exist outside of the bigender system and whiteness.
When Jorgensen underwent GCS in 1952 in Denmark, she did not have the everyday language or medical jargon to make her gender transformation culturally intelligible to others. The emergence of the trans body in the mid-twentieth century would not have been unlike what Butler describes as an “impossible scene … a body that has not yet been given social definition, a body that is, strictly speaking, not accessible to us [i.e. the cisgender reader].”16 Dr Harry Benjamin popularized the use of the medical term “transsexual” in his 1966 publication The Transsexual Phenomenon, fourteen years after Jorgensen underwent GCS. Accordingly, Jorgensen had to make her gender identity and her gender history intelligible to both herself and her readers without the use of a previously established vocabulary or narrative. Joanne Meyerowitz discusses the importance of Jorgensen’s text, explaining, “If she could establish herself as a ‘normal’ woman, then she might change the commonplace understandings of what constituted sex, and she might protect herself and others from the ridicule she endured.”17 Trans life writers have subsequently made use of the vocabulary established by Jorgensen and medical professionals, echoing the narratives and tropes of their predecessors that have become legible and legitimate through their continued repetition.
Jay Prosser observes that “previous transsexual autobiographies provide a narrative map” which is available for trans persons to replicate and, in doing so, become culturally intelligible.18 However, in repeating the same tropes over and over, trans stories have largely been confined to a singular normative narrative, which ultimately “flatten[s] complexity and close[s] down flourishing for others.”19 Consequently, the continual rearticulation of the hegemonic narrative of being “born in the wrong body” brings trans persons into being through recognition: “One ‘exists’ not only by virtue of being recognized, but, in a prior sense, by being recognizable.”20 Trans persons must author a coherent narrative that is recognizable and intelligible to their readers, as well as themselves, in order to assume an intelligible gender (i.e. woman or man). “‘Intelligible’ genders,” Butler explains, “are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity.”21 Retrospectively, trans writers might seek to establish continuity across their gender history to make themselv...
