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Title: Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism Author: Anonymous Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: queer, insurrectionary, feminist Source: Retrieved 10 July 2013 from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100918213213429
This essay deals with the discursive and material histories of people I
refer to as “trans women,” which I broadly define as anyone not
assigned-female at birth who experiences their bodies as female, lives
their gender in a way that could be taken as female, and/or identifies
as woman/trans-female-spectrum/transfeminism. I rather begrudgingly use
this term with a degree of hesitance as it certainly erases the
complexities of my gender experience, but I aim to broadly relate to
those who have been coercively assigned a gender category other than
Woman but who still inherit much of the legacy of such a category.
Trans people remain strangers and outcasts within much of the
contemporary discourses of insurrectionary feminism. Essays about
“male-bodied” perpetrators of sexual assault and “socialized men and
women” seem to leave much to be analyzed about the ways in which trans
people have historically related the functioning of gender systems and
the development of capitalism as a system. It is in this context that we
discursively intervene with that which we might term insurrectionary
trans-feminism, an analysis which distinctively analyzes the ways in
which trans bodies relate to the legacy of capitalism and the
possibilities of living communism and spreading anarchy. This is
distinctly not a plea for inclusion, nor is it an articulation of
identity politics, but rather an articulation of why we might be
invested in insurrection and communization with those who share our
desires and perhaps a preliminary set of ideas on how our
positionalities might be used in such processes. In order to imagine the
possibilities of subversion, however, we must first recognize the
historical relations of capitalism to the formulation of the trans
subject.
The relation between capitalism and the trans subject is a contentious
one. While many theorists such as Leslie Feinberg have sought to piece
together a universal, ahistorical narrative of trans people throughout
history across the world, we see such a task as ultimately failing to
take into account the precise economic and social conditions which gave
rise to each specific instance of gender variance. Gender nonconformity
is not a stable or coherent phenomenon which appears in history due to
the same conditions, rather it contextually can have a multiplicity of
meanings. While it could certainly be useful to analyze the ways in
which capitalism has instituted binary-based gender systems as a means
to organize reproductive labor in colonial contexts with different
gender systems, for the purposes of this essay we will begin with the
notion of the transsexual in context of the early 20^(th) century United
States, where the first narratives of transsexuality began to appear.
These narratives are intimately tied to the rise of capitalist ventures
in experimental medical procedures which gave rise to the the first
forms of gender reassignment surgery. By the 1950s, transsexuality had
gained public attention in the United States with gender reassignment
surgery of Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen’s narrative, as some
narratives just twenty years before her, became a model for the
transsexual identity narrative, in which the subject feels that she is
in the “wrong body” and that surgery has made her feel whole and
relieved the immense feeling of body dysphoria now that she is a real
woman. It is in this narrative that we find the experiences of gender
dysphoria taking shape to define a concrete subject position of “trans.”
At the same time, as capital has created the ability for trans
individuals to modify their bodies in the ways that they see fit, it has
also, with biomedical and psychological apparatuses, proliferated the
means by which to discipline the trans body. Two of the most notable
apparatuses to this effect are the Standards of Care, which enforced
rigorous standards of femininity and passibility as a necessary first
step towards access to medical technologies of transition, as well as
the “charm schools” which accompanied many GID clinics which sought to
properly resocialize trans women as “proper ladies” with manners, grace,
and all of the feminine wiles of “natural women.” The trans subject’s
desires are easily molded into that which can be profitable to
capitalism, whether it is countless sessions of laser hair removal
sessions, gender reassignment surgeries, or hormone therapy. That is,
trans subjectivity is bound to the conditions of capitalism and
disciplinary techniques which have given rise to it. We deploy these
words carefully, however, as we also recognize the ways in which
“radicals” and “feminists” have deployed the very same as a means of
constructing trans women as capitalist-created penetrators of vanity and
artificial artifacts of femininity. Yet the constructedness of the trans
subject and the trans body is no more tied to the history of capitalism
and domination than the constructedness of woman as an identity and a
body, or the constructedness of racialized identities and bodies.
We do not mean to imply that trans identity is based upon a particular
form of body modification or access to medical technology, but rather
that these early narratives of trans experience and the disciplinary
techniques shaping such identities are foundational in the ways in which
trans identity has grown, whether in the broadening terms of
constituting a political “trans community” on the basis of sharing a
feeling of dysphoria or the emergence of genderqueer as a politicized
subjectivity which has become delight of postmodernism. Transfeminism,
then, has emerged as theory dedicated to an articulation of the trans
speaking subject. Yet capitalism has an ever expanding amount of room to
incorporate an infinite amount of gendered subjectivities which can be
rendered value-creating to capital. In this way, trans theory faces
limits similar to feminist theory, which has produced a feminized form
of capital which is no less brutal in its form. The task, then, is to
create an insurrectionary theory which is based on rendering trans
bodies without function in the process of value creation, which
necessitates their very identity as trans, as woman, as human. As trans
people, we feel corporeality forcibly pushed onto us in an attempt to
render us intelligible, to use the state of our bodies to comprehend our
gender and sell us “more natural-looking” bodies. We feel our bodies
outweigh our chosen identities when we interact with others and do not
pass. As trans women, as we experience the legacy of trans subjectivity
within capitalism, we also feel the weight of the corporeality of women
in capitalism crush our existences. We experience the implicit violence
in gendered division of labor every time we are raped and beaten and
condescended to and treated as a hot she-male sex toy. Yet it is in this
experience that we might see the possibilities of human strike for the
trans woman.
Trans women experience corporeality in a unique way. While capital hopes
to continue to use the female body as proletarian machine to reproduce
labor-power, trans women’s bodies cannot produce more workers and is
constantly already viewed as denaturalized. Perhaps in valorizing this
inoperability in reproduction, and willfully extending it to all forms
of reproductive labor, we see the potentiality of human strike. Ways of
extending this remain to be seen, but in this affront to
capitalist-produced nature and matrices of heteronormativity which are
crucial to the functioning of capitalism, we see the kinship between the
human strike of trans women and the materialization of a
non-reproductive, purely negative queer force. It seems that the trans
woman too has no future, and thus through the building of this negative
force might have a stake in wrecking everything and abolishing herself
in the process. In any case, we do not have the answers that will render
society inoperable, that will end the social reproduction of this world.
Yet as trans women, we know that every strike against capital is a
strike against the mechanisms of gender oppression, and that every
strike against the gendered violence in our lives is a strike against
the machinations of capital.
gender strike is human strike,
some deceptive trannies.