Trans-representation

Abstract

The article discusses a specific incidence that occurred during a study undertaken by the author that analyzed transsexual representation: "I made one of my participants cry. Jessie, a self-identified male-to-female transsexual, was dismayed after reading a completed study in which I examined the narrative construction of her gender. Wiping tears from her eyes, she said, "You have taken away the identity I have worked all my life to build . . . Who am I if you take this away?" I was pained, for my desire was to deconstruct gender, not erase her identity. Yet, Jessie appeared diminished, slumped in her chair, shoulders crumpled, and tears on her cheeks. How did I make such a mess?" In this article the author discusses four modes of transsexual representation that have emerged since the first recorded sex reassignment surgery in the 1920s to the present-hermaphroditic, sex-gender misalignment, queer, and material embodiment. The author then rereads Jessie's narrative through these forms of representation in order to explore how each might function in emancipating gender from heteronormativity and Jessie from analytic erasure. The author concludes by rethinking the tension between Jessie and her narrative using Deleuze and Guattari's idea of content and expression.

Transgender and gender expansive education research, policy and practice: reflecting on epistemological and ontological possibilities of bodily becoming

“…(146) It is important, therefore, to understand that the study of gender from within the field of transgender studies is not coextensive with that of queer studies with its embrace of an anti-normative logics, or with some branches of feminist studies with an expressed commitment to gender abolition or cisnormative commitment to gender embodiment (Hines 2017;Namaste 2009). In fact, there is evidence that epistemological violence (Teo 2010) has been enacted in the inappropriate use and application of queer theory in imposing a heteronormative lens to make sense of a transgender person's own embodied understanding of their gender identity and personhood (Kaufmann 2010). Such a reliance on a queer antinormative logics as a basis for understanding the materiality of transgender embodiment raises important questions about the epistemological limits of queer theory, with its emphasis on a deconstructive analytics that fails to account for and do justice to an understanding, phenomenologically speaking, of trans bodily ontological understandings, which 'recognizes the circumscribed agency of embodied subjects who mobilize around their body image to sustain their life projects' (Rubin 1998, 271).…”

Revisiting a Boy Named Jim

“…We are prompted, therefore, to ask reflexively: How can we become attuned to the diversity within each participant’s perspectives, recognizing that our own selves are implicated in how we selectively hear? Kaufmann’s (2010) study of trans-representation, discussed earlier, reflects on her initial preference for what she took to be her participant’s most reportable voice; in Riley Chisholm and my dementia study (Chisholm & Bischoping, 2018), meanwhile, our different projections about whether the participants’ situation was liveable arguably led us to focus on the transcripts’ more hopeful or more despairing passages. An elegant data analysis method that can aid us is the I-poem (Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, & Bertsch, 2006), which isolates moments when participants speak of themselves, and directs us to listen specifically for such diversity.…”

“…Qualitative scholars concerned about the politics of representation have been adopting practices such as consulting the communities that they are studying to obtain feedback on draft research papers. Educational psychologist Jodi Kaufmann’s (2010) draft analysis of an interview on gender identity, conducted with Jessie, a male-to-female transsexual, offers a cautionary case in point. Kaufmann, concerned about the rigidity with which sex–gender binaries are medicalized and societally regulated, was eager to highlight the moments in Jessie’s narrative when she troubled these binaries.…”

Affirmative Critique as Minor Qualitative Critical Inquiry

“…Encounters with new materialist thinking and new radical theories of race and whiteness (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012;Hames-García, 2008;Kaufmann, 2010;Lenz Taguchi, 2012;Rai, 2012;Saldanha, 2006) offered a way out of this impossibility of going beyond the split between language and reality. It was through this work and eventually an extensive reading of Guattari (1983, 1987) that a concern of how to practice critique and resistance when opposing transcendental and humanist traditions in cultural theory was materialized.…”

“…Despite a strong interest in social justice and possibilities offered by critical cultural theories when starting to weave a research curious of stuck bodily experiences and these aspects bearing on thinking of how to perform critical qualitative inquiry, the real intensified as hard to grasp within this epistemology (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008;Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2013;Jones & Jenkins, 2008). Encounters with new materialist thinking and new radical theories of race and whiteness (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012;Hames-García, 2008;Kaufmann, 2010;Lenz Taguchi, 2012;Rai, 2012;Saldanha, 2006) offered a way out of this impossibility of going beyond the split between language and reality. It was through this work and eventually an extensive reading of Guattari (1983, 1987) that a concern of how to practice critique and resistance when opposing transcendental and humanist traditions in cultural theory was materialized.…”