Across and Beyond 005: Frankenstein's Monster
A short newsletter this week. Ms. H and I have been celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary and so I’ve been pleasantly focused this week on enjoying this milestone.
I do want to bring to your attention to two texts that focus on the intersection of science, medicine and the transsexual body. Transsexuals live and thrive in the nexus of medical pharmacology, plastic surgery and the history of medicine and science.
We wouldn’t exist without medical science. Our existence both reflects the advances of medicine and the anxieties those advancements can induce in people.
Susan Stryker’s My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage was performed and published nearly a quarter of a century ago.
Stryker’s title derives from the scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which the monster first speaks back to its maker, revealing itself as something other, and something more, than its creator intended. She turns this literary meeting into a metaphor for the critical encounter between a radicalized transgender subjectivity and the normativizing intent of medical science. In doing so, she claims her own transsexual body as a monstrously powerful place, situated outside the natural order, from which to speak and write and act.
Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (excerpted here) arrived fifteen years later. Preciado declares that Testo Junkie is a "body-essay", and writes of his use of testosterone as a way of undoing gender inscribed on the body by traditional narratives shaped by capitalism and the false naturalism of sexuality and reproduction.
Medical-technical regimes are complicated applications of boundaries to bodies.
Another kind of example: the different legal-medical regimes that apply to getting a nose job versus a dick job. Your nose is your private property. If you think it is too big or too broad or something, that’s your concern, as are any complicated racialized assumptions about the Platonic form of perfection of the nose. But if you want a dick job, that’s something else. Removing one, or having one constructed on your body, is not a matter of the body as your private property. It’s a matter of your body as a thing whose normative sex and gender is assigned by the state. (McKenzie Wark)
Enjoy your week.