Subject: Re: Apologies, and question
From: Susan Stryker (mulebaby@ricochet.net)
Date: Mon Aug 09 1999 - 11:14:20 CDT
Howdy Howdy:
Allucquere Rosanne Stone wrote:
> Mea Culpa
And Here I was thinking that I was being the flaky one for not ever
getting back in touch with you.
I still want to talk with you about the Transgender Studies
Institute--it's still a gleam in my eye. Gil Herdt has brought it up
with the faculty in Sexuality Studies, and they are supportive. That's
hurdle # 2 succesfully cleared (Gil himself being #1). Gil's been in
Amsterdam all summer, so clearing hurdle #3 hasn't been particularly
urgent, hence my lack of motivation to pin you down for a time to talk.
This fall, however, Gil and I will take the proposal to the Dean of Arts
and Sciences, whom Gil assures me is eager to make the Sexuality Studies
program a world-class draw for SFSU. So I really expect by the end of
academic year 99-00 we will have the foundations laid for a transstudies
institute, which can grown into an academic program, chairs,
professorships, etc. over the next several years. I still hope for your
input an participation there.
So bring me out to Austin in the spring--let's do something together,
and then we can talk all kinds of shop talk. There's a dyke film
studies grad student type person at UT I keep running into at various
festivals, and she keeps making noises about bringing me out, too. Can't
remember her name off the top of my head, but perhaps some kind of
coordination is in order.
I'm still doing a one-day event at Stanford in conjunction with my SSRC
post-doc, and hope you are still interested in doing that. I'll
hostess/talk about my work, probably let Joanne Meyerowitz do a talk on
tranny history in general, have Don Laub prattle on about the clinic,
and have you (if you are still interested/available) represent the
former patient's view and all talk about all the groovy perspectives to
emerge from folks who've had their parts whittled--little did they know.
To top it off, Stanford now has four tenured trannies on faculty (!!),
and I want them to do a panel about current campus issues. Date TBA, but
late winter/early spring.
> I leave for Austin for the fall semester in ten days or so.
> Fuckshitpiss. But I'll be back. We do own this termite-ridden money
> pit, after all. So it's a total miss, unless you're in town and feel
> like roaring down here sometime in the next ten days.
Possible, perhaps. I'm leaving town the 15th through Labor Day. Maybe
I can get down to SC this week, though, especially if I could
reinterview you about your early days in San Francisco and your
conncetions to the whole Jan Maxwell scene. Looking at my calendar,
Wednesday the 1th or Thursday the 12th are my only options. Or if you
want to make the schlep up here, Saturday the 14th Jordy Jones is having
a Ta-Ta for Now party prior to his move to LA to do his MFA at Cal-Arts.
I know he'd love to see you, and I'll be at the party too. Should be a
cool queer hip artsy fartsy techo savvy gathering on 15th just north of
Market. Hopefully the weather will be nice.Have you ever managed to see
Gendernauts, btw?
> ------- End of Mea Culpa Section -------
>
> Ok, here's the question. I'm writing the entry on Transgender for the
> Routledge Encyclopedia of Women's Studies, having won out over Janice
> Raymond in what academics might call a fierce battle.
Congrats! Heh-heh.
I respect your
> scholarship, politics, and dedication, so I'd appreciate any words of
> wisdom from you about what you think ought to be included in the piece.
Ah shucks, ma'am. But thanks--I'm honored that you think so.
> Routledge's intention is to have entries elsewhere in the book, such as
> "Transsexuality", "Transvestism", "Cross-Dressing", and so forth, which
> will point to the Transgender article. This means the article has to
> represent a highly divergent group with what I think are sometimes
> incompatible politics, and do it in 2500 words. I'd cite you as a
> contributor. If this is okay with you, what high points do you think I
> should hit?
I find it helpful to distinguish between the "universalizing" potential
of the category transgender (essentially an acknowledgement of the
soci-cultural/historical variation in sex/gender/sexuality/embodiment
constructs-- the "there have always been transgendered people" argument
a la Feinberg's Transgender Warriors) and the narrow "minoritizing"
potential of the term, (referring to self-identified populations of
individuals predominantly in 20th-century Western Europen contexts,
though increasingly of global importance due to the operations of
transnational capitalism and the dominance of American culture in this
mode of production).
To follow the historical narrative of this later use of the term, the
most important early point would the coinage of the precursor
"transvestite" by Hirschfeld in 1910, which at that time included the
"entire spectra of desire" you gesture towards in your manifesto. I
think it would also be important to make mention of the term's
conceptual relationships to intersexuality and homosexuality, and how
these were all seen as interrelated conditions in early 20th century
sexology. The most important conceptual backdrop for the early
20th-century history is the new endocrinological model of sex
difference, which played havoc with Victorian notions of men and women.
Devising elaborate schema of sexual classification was a favorite sport
of lots of biologists, psychologists, criminologists, etc. right on up
through Kinsey--and until modern genetics upset the apple cart again
when it cracked the DNA code in the 50s. It's during the
"edoncrinological regime," however, between the '10s and '50s, that most
of the medical interventions still deployed in attempts to manage
gendered embodiment were invented.
The '50s are a significant turning point for the new attention to that
new word, transsexuality, popularized 1949-54, largely due to queen
Christine. I make an argument about how a new (postmodern, for lack of a
better term) epistomological regime begins to take shape after the
A-bomb and concentration camps and computers and television change the
terrain of signification, and how transsexuality is the paradigmatic
form of gendered embodiment for these conditions. But we don't need to
go there just yet. The main point is that a new environment comes into
being in the US and Europe postWWII, one in which sexual identity
politics and minority social movements of various sorts really move to
center stage as agents of cultural change and political mobilization.
Out of the closets and into the streets for many types of people. Kinsey
was tremendously important here for fostering networking between what
were then called "sex variant" folks. Foucault made quite
literal--sexological discourse providing the basis for new forms of
sociability predicated on minoritized identity. All that Virginia Prince
rigamarole come out of this phase.
1966 is the big turning point, in which "sex-change" becomes
domestically possible in the US with the opening of the Hopkins clinic.
Publication of Benjamin's Transsexual Phenomenon. And--this is the focus
of my work right now--the Compton's Cafeteria Riot in the SF's
Tenderloin. We had Stonewall three years early, and nobody remembers it.
There was this huge burst of transgender militancy here, which produced
the programs at the Center for Special Problems, Stanford, the National
Transsexual Counseling Unit--the first wave of peer-run, politically
progressive trans services. Really phenomenal, totally forgotten.
Point--trans liberation was part of the sexual revolution before it was
dropped, dissed, and dismissed by The Movement. But I don't need to
lecture you about your youth. You're probably one of the best sources
for the whole icky 70s mess so I'll just shut up.
The next thing I'd hit in a 2500 word version would be the consolidation
of the Benjamin Standards, in 1979-80 and the creation and official
pathologization of GID. I might be focussing too much on the
medicalized/psychiatrized elements but believe that these
medical/pathological categories and practices are actually the motor
behind the proliferation of transgender categories--do you want to cut
your dick/tits off or not? That becomes the "operative" (pun intended)
question against which other transpostions define themselves.
After that, AIDS would be the next big thing--it's what pulled trannies
back into coalition with other sexual minority groups, and led to the
conceptual shift known as "queer." Among transgender communities of
color, the real mobilization and beginnings of new organizations and
institutions and new sources of funding are getting under way by around
1989, in the second wave of response to AIDS. That doesn't hit middle
class/white trannies like me until 1991 or 1992. As far as I know,
Transgender Nation SF was the first "queer" transgender group to emerge
in the current regime. It started as a focus group of Queer Nation SF,
and was founded by Anne Ogborne, Carol Klienmaier, Christine Tayleur,
Crystal Bailey, Dawn Holland, and me. It's what inspired Riki Anne
Wilchins to form Transsexual Menace and Cheryl Chase to found the
Intersex Society of North America. The organization was short-lived but
its legacy is huge.
Intellectually, your Post-Transsexual Manifesto was a huge turning
point, and the conduit in critical discourse where transgender issues
once again flowed into the heart of vital cultural processes. I know it
rocked my world--I still vividly remember thinking "Thank God--somebody
else did this piece of work and now I don't have to. I can build on
this." Most everybody else I know in academic transstudies feels the
same. The other big deal from that period was Leslie's Transgender
Liberation pamphlet. Shortly thereafter, Kate's Gender Outlaw. I may be
mistaken, but I think my old GLQ article "My Words to Victor
Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix" was the first piece of
transgender scholarship to be published in a peer-reviewed academic
journal (November 1994). I know for a fact that the 1998 GLQ special
issue I did was the first special issue of a major journal devoted to
transstudies.
The 1994 Queer Studies Conference in Iowa was where the Transgender
Academic Network was established, which grew into the e-lists that are
still up and running. Some of us at that initial meeting had met
previously at the 1993 March on Washington, which is where trans
politics emerged onto the national GLB scene.
The Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon murder called greater attention to trans
stuff in the mid 90s, both in the LGBT community and more broadly. It
really helped spur the growth of TMenace, as did the controversy around
the Michigan Women's Music Festival. By 1996 there's so much going on
that it's difficult to pick out a coherent narrative anymore. But a
theme I'd dwell on if I were writing the entry would be the heightened
level of media fascination--all the movies, the talk shows, the sly
transgender fashion ads--the mainstreaming, in short--which usually
perpetuates a masculinist fantasy of escape from embodiment through
commodity consumption and completely ignores the legal and economic
plight of most transgender lives. That, and the role of the internet,
the web, and other new communications technology in fostering the
explosive growth of the organized transgender community.
Jeez, looking back over this it all seems so rushed--and so much left
out. Give a call or drop a line if I can be of any assistance with more
specific items of research. Let me know if Wednesday or Thursday works
for you.
xx,
Susan
510/205-5180 (c)
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