Abstract
This chapter explores how the trans- body can function to disrupt, or displace normative binaries, in ways that raise parallels with the bodily experiences of migrant subjects. This comparison is located in narratives of transition and journey, in which the trans- body can nonetheless refine and redefine categories of home and belonging. The ways in which gender variance and trans-national mobility operate in these texts force us to think about how bodies are read, as well as what they themselves narrate. Working alongside cyborg theory, the chapter highlights processes of cultural translation, of multilingual, multi-voiced writing, and of the adaptations (or re-animations) of these texts into different formats to suggest new ways of reading the body as text, and the text as body.
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Notes
- 1.
I am thinking about ‘queering’ as a concept ‘mobilized by exclusions’ here, see Kilian (2014, p. 85).
- 2.
‘Sexuality’s biological base is always experienced, culturally, through a translation .’ Blackwood (1986, p. 5), emphasis added.
- 3.
In a 2014 survey conducted by Pace 48% of trans people under the age of 26 said they had attempted to kill themselves, compared to about 6% of the general population of the same age. See Day (2015). 2015 also saw two high-profile suicides of trans-gender inmates placed in all male prisons in the UK. The Blacktranslivesmatters campaign was also founded with the aim of increasing awareness of the discrimination, abuse and violence suffered by trans- people of colour in the US, under the wider umbrella of Blacklivesmatter movement.
- 4.
- 5.
Jones-Rogers (2015). However, these discourses still hinge on an inequality rooted in constructions of whiteness both in terms of perceived purity (the ‘One-Drop’ rule), as well as its construction as a generic or invisible identity category. As Ahmed notes, ‘whiteness is only invisible to those who inhabit it’, cit. Yancy (2014, p. 47). Ijeoma Oluo also points out that racial ‘“Passing” is and was only available to a select few, and in that it functioned as a ticket out of the worst injustices of racial oppression’, ‘is a story filled with pain and separation’, not a ‘story of liberation’ (Oluo 2017).
- 6.
Stryker (2006, p. 7, emphasis added). Here we can draw parallels with the new field of ‘transability’, as defined by Arfini as a ‘progetto sul corpo che aspira all’acquisizione di una disabilità’; ‘performance di embodiment radicale (che) si relazionano in maniera critica con gli standard normative corporei’ [body project that aspires toward the acquisition of a disability; a performance of radical embodiment that questions normative bodily standards]. See Arfini (2010, p. 343).
- 7.
‘These are not counter or different stories, these are forgotten stories that bring forward, at the same time, an epistemological dimension: an epistemology of and from the border’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 52).
- 8.
Grémaux (1994, p. 243). This recalls two related, more recently reported cases of girls performing as boys in other national contexts, one in Egypt and one in Afghanistan. In Egypt, homeless women and children are reported to sometimes resort to dressing as men in order to live their precarious and often very dangerous lives with increased freedom, safety and opportunity. Interestingly, Patrick Kingsley suggests that presenting as boys is also a means of ‘feeling more at home in public spaces’, which in Egypt are usually a male domain. See Kingsley (2015). In Afghanistan, Jenny Nordberg carried out five years of fieldwork into the practice known as ‘bacha posh’, where parents without male sons bring their daughters up as sons until puberty. Creating a quasi ‘third’ gender category in the country, many then have to be forcibly ‘turned back into women’, creating considerable resistance and confusion. See Nordberg (2014).
- 9.
This anticipates considerations I make in Chapter 4 around the ‘leaky’ nature of female bodies and their alignment in feminist philosophy with the notion of a certain seepage or fluidity in borders and categories which can lead to productive and creative agency. On this topic, see, for example, Irigaray (1985), Shildrick (1997), and Longhurst (2000).
- 10.
This Nordeste region of Brazil was the first to be discovered and colonized by the Portuguese and other European nations, and has significant links to the slave trade. The consequent presence of a significant black population seems to be a source of disturbance for Princesa, something which is interesting to reflect on as she herself moves through trans-Atlantic crossings, and her physicality is ultimately commodified in turn.
- 11.
See Anzaldúa (1987, p. 58). This expression of a linguistic hybridity is a common feature of trans-national and trans-gender narratives, for example in works by Christiana de Caldas Brito (where the mixture of Portuguese and Italian is termed ‘portuliano’), and Brigid Brophy’s (1969) novel, In Transit . ‘Ce qui m’étonnait c’était qu’it was my French that disintegrated first’ (Brophy 2002, p. 11).
- 12.
‘A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription’ (Stone 1991, p. 294).
- 13.
On the multiple adaptations of Princesa’s narrative, see Shvanyukova (2012).
- 14.
This innovative platform was constructed to mark the twentieth anniversary of the initial publication of the narrative. See http://www.princesa20.it/progetto20/. Accessed 5 March 2018.
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Bond, E. (2018). Trans-gender, Trans-national: Crossing Binary Lines. In: Writing Migration through the Body. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_3
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