Abstract
In this chapter, I take up parts of the documentary Gender Rebel (2006) as an example of a text that can be read as participating in a cultural politics that expands the terms of “gendered humanness” by challenging normative understandings of what constitutes the “proper” gendered body for biological females. In my analysis, I focus on the lives of two “women” whose genderqueer embodiments can be read as a complex personhood under the sign of the masculine (Halberstam, Telling tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and transgender biography. In Passing: Identity and interpretation in sexuality, race, and religion, pp. 13–37, 2001) that enables the “women” to work on undoing restrictive gender norms, as these have played out on the site of the body, in order to inaugurate more livable lives. From this perspective, the narratives about genderqueer embodiments represented in Gender Rebel become one way to “relate the problematic of gender and sexuality to the tasks of persistence and survival” (Butler, Undoing gender, p. 4, 2004). My own specific analysis is situated within the broader context of what Judith Butler refers to as the “New Gender Politics that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory” (2004, p. 4). Along these lines, by drawing from the theoretical insights of queer and trans (gender) theories, this chapter explores the notion of the “queer imaginative body” where queer imagination is understood as a form of “embodied criticality” functioning as a politics that undermines the hegemonic terms of gender arising from a system of bigenderism. Situated within a discussion of the politics and pedagogy of trans generosity, the chapter concludes with a critical reflection on the pedagogical significance of taking up queer masculine embodiment (e.g., the body of the “genderqueer female-to-male [FTM] trans man”) as a site of generosity within the women’s studies classroom. In this way, I advocate what I refer to as a pedagogy of trans generosity. I argue that, because the queer masculine embodiments of biological females run the risk of being positioned across any number of cultural and social locations as a threatening “Other,” especially in relation to delimited understandings of the category woman, a pedagogy of trans generosity becomes a necessary critical intervention to challenge this viewpoint. Such a pedagogy, I attempt to initially work out here, provides an opportunity to situate queer masculine embodiments within a language of possibility that draws attention to the innovative quality of these embodiments as sites of generosity. That is, by way of their ongoing processes of becoming, they generously expand the meanings, as well as the possible range of lived experiences, of the (female) body and of gender/sexual identity in ways that queer these concepts so that they provide greater sustainability to a broader array of bodies and identities. From this perspective, a pedagogy of trans generosity opens up the possibility of framing queer embodiments more generally as forms of “bodily generosity” that can potentially become a resource for students in terms of imagining their own bodies and identities as sites of “endless becoming.”
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Notes
- 1.
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer theory has emerged from, has been impacted by, and has contributed to several intellectual locations within the academy. By this, I mean three things. First, queer theory arises out of a broader set of intellectual movements in academia, particularly critical feminist theory and critical literary studies, as well as French poststructuralist philosophy (specifically the work of Michel Foucault) and postmodernism. Regarding the latter, queer theory can be situated within the postmodern turn in sexuality studies as a more radical version of social constructionism that “offers a postmodern critique of metanarratives of identity” (Beasley, 2005, p. 125). Second, queer theory draws from and develops certain ideas and concepts within the overall field of gender and sexuality studies, most particularly having to do with the politics of identity. And, third, queer theoretical work can be found across a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including in the field of education, and, hence, has impacted disciplinary knowledge production. Taking into account these three points, then, it can be said that queer theory is marked by an ongoing intellectual history. Therefore, while queer theory continues to evolve theoretically and politically, thereby defying any singular or set definition, certain meanings and practices can be connected to it, however temporary, as a critical methodology and as a form of gender and sexual politics. In this way, queer theory “does function in specific—albeit complex and somewhat ambiguous—ways in particular contexts, and in relation to particular issues” (Sullivan, 2003, pp. v–vi). Queer theory, in other words, is not an empty or floating signifier. Rather, “‘in the face of a resolved and insistent unknowability, it remains clear that queer [theory] means’” (Sullivan, 2003, p. 47). One specific and recurring meaning, for instance, is Annamarie Jagose’s widely quoted characterization where “queer [theory] marks a suspension of identity as something that is fixed, coherent and natural” (1996, p. 98), making possible a rejection of identity categorization per se by emphasizing multiplicity, fluidity, and instability. In addition, queer theory rejects binary identity models—such as straight/gay or man/woman—“leading to ‘a more generic critique of identity-based theories and politics’” (Beasley, 2005, p. 164). By engaging in a critique of identity binaries, queer theory focuses on what has been excluded or devalued from these binaries by the heteronormative order. In so doing, queer theory illustrates how identity binaries themselves are socially constructed, and hierarchically arranged, within relations of power.
- 2.
By the phrase “identity politics,” I am referring to particular social movements organized around specific marginalized identity categories (e.g., gay or woman) that work to serve as the basis of inclusion/membership into the category/movement. I use other phrases, such as “categories of identity” or “binary models of identity,” in order to differentiate these from the more specific meaning associated with identity politics. However, in this section of my chapter, I am emphasizing that all identity-based categories are political in the sense of creating boundaries and borders, “insiders” and “outsiders.”
- 3.
I specifically use the phrase “trans studies” in reference to discourse production about subjects who engage in forms of, or seek recognition for, “cross-identification, identity ‘migrations,’ or ambiguous identification” (Beasley, 2005, p. 152). In this sense, trans studies represents a broad arena of theorizing about any number of trans categories, including transvestism, transsexualism, and transgenderism, among many others. While some scholars use the word transgender, rather than the phrase trans studies, to denote this broad arena, I generally agree with Chris Beasley’s formulation that transgender seems to increasingly signify a “focus on a particular category of persons/issues within or under the coverall label ‘Trans,’ who ‘do gender’ in non-normative ways… .Transgender theorizing in this setting means a Postmodern or Queer version of Trans Studies” (2005, pp. 161–162).
- 4.
The concept of female masculinity is introduced in Judith Halberstam’s (1998) Female Masculinity.
- 5.
Judith Butler’s 1990 publication, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, has been significant in providing a vocabulary for developing queer theory. However, Gender Trouble is first and foremost situated within the context and concerns of feminism and feminist theory, and in particular within debates about the efficacy of feminist identity politics. Drawing from other postmodern thinkers, especially from the work of Michel Foucault, Butler construes “resistance to power as resistance to identity itself” (Beasley, 2005, p. 100). For feminism, this means, according to Butler, that it must problematize its use of the identity categories of women and gender, its traditional terms of reference. Butler’s resistance to identity politics, in this case to feminist/gender identity politics, highlights her concern that the deployment of identity categories, such as “women,” as if they were natural, unified, and stable categories, (1) conceals how these categories are actually socially and politically constructed and (2) “homogenizes those in the category and creates a ‘political closure.’ This closure creates a norm that excludes everybody who does not fit, and polices those within it to ensure that they continue to do so. Feminist identity politics … produces fixed meanings of ‘women’ which [f]eminism claims to resist” (Beasley, 2005, p. 166). Accompanying her critical appraisal of identity politics is her discussion of a constructive stress on the unstable, incoherent, nonnatural, and “performative” account of gender and its possibilities for feminist politics in advancing a more egalitarian social order; and significantly, this postmodern feminist account of gender performativity has been one substantially important discourse for inspiring queer theorizing and critique.
- 6.
As an antinormative knowledge project that offers a deconstructive critique of normalizing ways of knowing and of being, queer theory pursues the critical strategy of denaturalization—that is, of showing how gender and sexual identities, such as gay or straight, masculine and feminine, are not natural, transhistorical categories, but rather are thoroughly socially constructed within particular cultural and historical contexts and are constructed as hierarchical binaries forged within relations of power. In short, to denaturalize sexual identities is to argue that such identities have histories. Within such a critical framework, gender and sexual identities are no longer assumed to be natural, biological facts but rather understood as formed “in the course of human history and culture” (Oksala, 2007, p. 11); in this way, sexuality, for example, “is not an essentially personal attribute but an available cultural category—and it is the effect of power rather than simply its object” (Jagose, 1996, p. 79). A classic illustration of the strategy of denaturalization can be found in French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Foucault offered the influential claim that the homosexual was not a name that referred to a natural kind of being. Rather, he argued that such an identity category was constructed by, and thus emerged out of, nineteenth-century scientific and medical discourses that required the specification of individuals in order to regulate and persecute peripheral sexualities and practices (Oksala, 2007). As Foucault writes: “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (1990, p. 43).
- 7.
Due to space constraints, I focus my analysis on Jill and Kim only.
- 8.
The term boi has any number of different meanings depending on how it is understood and lived out by specific individuals and groups within the broader LGBT culture. In discussing Jill’s genderqueer identity in Gender Rebel, I use boi to generally refer to a female-born or female-bodied person who only partially identifies as female or as a woman.
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Rodriguez, N.M. (2012). Queer Imaginative Bodies and the Politics and Pedagogy of Trans Generosity: The Case of Gender Rebel . In: Landreau, J., Rodriguez, N. (eds) Queer Masculinities. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2552-2_16
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