Thought for the Day

[bcholmes]

These are my words to Victor Frankenstein, above the village of Chamounix. Like the monster, I could speak of my earliest memories, and how I became aware of my difference from everyone around me. I can describe how I acquired a monstrous identity by taking on the label "transsexual" to name parts of myself that I could not otherwise explain. I, too, have discovered the journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bodies of creatures like me since the 1930s. I know in intimate detail the history of this recent medical intervention into the enactment of transgendered subjectivity; science seeks to contain and colonize the radical threat posed by a particular transgender strategy of resistance to the coerciveness of gender: physical alteration of the genitals. I live daily with the consequences of medicine's definition of my identity as an emotional disorder. Through the filter of this official pathologization, the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed as the confused ranting of a diseased mind.

Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival.

— Susan Stryker, My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix — Performing Transgender Rage

I keep coming back to this essay. Probably because it's perhaps the only one that I know of that writes on this topic.

Comments

[cigfran-lwyd.livejournal.com]

not the same, but related: http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2007/01/seam-of-skin-and-scales.html

[sarah-dragon.livejournal.com]

Both pieces resonate with me. I have always had the distinct impression that I was never alternative enough and even on occasion trans-enough. Maybe that seems like a stupid idea. We have so many labels and so many words that describe in the voice of dispassionate science or very passionate advocacy, that one feels compelled to list genus, family, and species as part of any introduction or conversation.

My most memorable personal encounter was with a female friend who berated me for being a man who was "taking away" her role as a woman, just like men have taken everything away. Suddenly I was a misogynistic Cortez plundering the Aztec gold of womanhood so I could reign as empress and snub other men? It was crazy, but it is how she felt.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

This particular cisman has never thought of this before; but the idea of viewing Frankenstein as a transgender narrative is awesome.