{"id":128418,"date":"2018-08-13T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=128418"},"modified":"2018-08-13T14:42:14","modified_gmt":"2018-08-13T18:42:14","slug":"the-historical-future-of-trans-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/13\/the-historical-future-of-trans-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"The Historical Future of Trans Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature\u2019s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.<\/em>\u00a0\u2014Michel de Montaigne<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi<\/em> wouldn\u2019t have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors\u2014the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappae mundi<\/em> weren\u2019t intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world\u2019s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places\u2014Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho\u2014appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, Jerusalem, at the very center of this map, was the moral center of the medieval world. The map\u2019s graphic histories were organized chronologically, with the outermost strata of the circular map representing the deepest, most sedimented layers of recorded history and theology.<\/p>\n

Bounding Africa, due east of the Nile, was a corridor of oddities, a single-file parade of queer embodiments and types: the Blemmyae and Troglodytes, Himantopodes, Cynocephali, Amazons, Marmini, and Monocoli. These foreign, \u201cabnormal\u201d people, marginally situated in this uniquely \u201cAfrican\u201d space (though it was erroneously labeled Europe), were characterized by the peculiar adaptive technologies of their bodies: the Blemmyae were depicted as having mouths and eyes lodged in their breasts; the Sciopods were distinguished by their giant foot, which grew out of a trunk-like leg at the center of their body and which shielded them from the sun. Particularly interesting among these foreign peoples is the figure identified as \u201chermaphrodite\u201d; unlike the other figures represented\u2014the race that exclusively ate food through straws, the hirsute peoples that walked on all fours\u2014the hermaphrodite was not a cultural or site-specific identity. If every other form could be understood, from the cartographer\u2019s European vantage, as a foreign but intelligible adaptation to the world\u2019s varied topography, the hermaphrodite\u2019s difference was ambiguous, a maladaptive representation of corporeal strangeness and sexual illegibility. Though most of these \u201cmonstrous races\u201d were rendered naked, thereby signaling their non-European primitivity, the hermaphrodite was unique insofar as their uncanniness was solely a matter of their genitals. That is, if each other example of a monstrously raced person was monstrous for their general strangeness, the hermaphrodite was monstrous for genital strangeness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is odd that the hermaphrodite would be represented as specifically African, excluded from the European continent, as if to suggest there were no European hermaphrodites. In fact, European Middle Ages canon and civil law dealt rather extensively with the hermaphrodite\u2014who they might marry, how they might dress, where they might live\u2014indicating, through this voluble legal opining, their definite presence in European society.<\/p>\n

It is unclear what the map\u2019s figuration might represent in today\u2019s terms\u2014perhaps the intersex body, perhaps the transgender body. The term hermaphrodite<\/em> has fallen from use, as has invert<\/em>,\u00a0another term once used to describe someone who today may or may not identify as trans or gender nonconforming. In part, the difficulty of ascribing a contemporary meaning to the Hereford Mappa Mundi<\/em>\u2019s hermaphrodite is one of category error: though intersex and transgender are hardly new realities, they are new identities, new terms by which we might better know ourselves\u2014or, in a more suspicious reading, terms by which we might better be known, categorized, metabolized, identified. The category that we call transgender emerged only in the midtwentieth century, a product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexology and emergent surgical and endocrine technologies. It\u2019s difficult, if not impossible, then, when rooting through the historical record, to know how we might today refer to historical subjects in excess of binary gender without falling into the snares of anachronism.<\/p>\n

Under the banner of new terminology, queer theory and trans theory\u2014primarily fixed in the outer strata of contemporary academia, cartographically unlocatable\u2014have attempted to theorize the transgender body and the technologies that enable its \u201cplasticity\u201d or its \u201cfugitivity.\u201d Central to these theories is the way in which the trans body\u2014sometimes through endocrine and\/or surgical technologies, sometimes not\u2014undoes our understanding of what a body might be or how a body might become. Transgender is heralded as a potentiality for divine escape, a bridge toward the posthuman, the fabulous and fabular techno-body. In such theorization, technologies of bodily unmaking and remaking extend the Utopian promise of \u201cdestroying gender\u201d\u2014or at the very least unsettling some of our most securely held gender values. A quintessential gloss of this view: the transgender body is seen, in Jack Halberstam\u2019s phrasing<\/a>, as \u201cfuturity itself, a kind of heroic fulfillment of postmodern promises of gender flexibility.\u201d\u00a0(Something of a buzzword in queer and trans theory, futurity<\/em>\u00a0is not simply the future, the soon-to-be; rather, futurity<\/em> refers to the queer still-to-come, the excess and potential of the not-yet-here, that subjects actively orient themselves toward in the present.) Thus, transgender becomes the logical extension of late capitalism\u2019s dream of flexibility, self-fashioning, unconstrained potential. But as the late queer theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz notes, we don\u2019t all get to be the princesses and princes of futurity. For those who are poor, those who aren\u2019t white, those who can\u2019t or won\u2019t pass as cisgender, futurity might have less to do with the ecstatic transgression of posthumanism than it does with wondering whether you\u2019ll keep your job tomorrow or have a place to sleep tonight. Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s critique gently but resolutely reminds us: the yoking of transness, or queerness, with futurity is optimistically proleptic.<\/p>\n

But we might also ask: Why do those who affirm a kind of trans vanguardism assume that promises of gender flexibility are specifically postmodern? In a beautiful turn\u2014or return (as Freud writes, \u201cthe finding of an object is in fact a re<\/em>finding of it\u201d)\u2014contemporary transgender writers are finding the language appropriate to represent the transgender subject in the historical archive. At a moment in which academic trans writing fancies our bodies as sites of dizzying transgressive potential, and popular journalism remains obsessed with litigating which bathrooms our genitals do or don\u2019t belong in, trans fiction writers and poets are offering a new cartography of the trans body\u2014one that looks to the past rather than the future.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Jordy Rosenberg\u2019s brilliant novel,\u00a0Confessions of the Fox<\/em><\/a> (June 2018), reimagines Jack Sheppard\u2014the notorious English jail breaker of the early eighteenth century, immortalized in John Gay\u2019s 1728 The Beggar\u2019s Opera<\/em>,\u00a0William Hogarth\u2019s 1747 Industry and Idleness<\/em>,\u00a0Bertolt Brecht\u2019s The Threepenny Opera<\/em> (1928), and the Brit glam rockers Chicory Tip\u2019s B-side track \u201cDon\u2019t Hang Jack\u201d (1971)\u2014as a young trans man. While one might argue that Rosenberg\u2019s vertiginous footnotes and citations announce a decidedly postmodern project, the real invention, and intervention, of Rosenberg\u2019s project is his amplification of a trans archive. Alongside contemporary critical theories of resistance and self-determination, he situates the trans body in intertexts\u2014Defoe\u2019s The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard<\/em>,\u00a0Bailey\u2019s Canting Dictionary<\/em>, the 1714 Vagrancy Act, Georges Arnaud de Ronsil\u2019s A Dissertation on<\/em> Hermaphrodites,\u00a0<\/em>Spinoza\u2019s Ethics<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>Behn\u2019s Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave<\/em>\u2014that are early modern rather than exclusively postmodern. If trans theory imagines the trans body as the harbinger of a techno-future, Rosenberg looks instead to an earlier historical moment. This allows him to reimagine the flexibility of transness while casting\u00a0the term transgender<\/em>\u00a0aside. It\u2019s not incidental that Sheppard is so lithe that he contorts himself through the ducts in his escape from jail. Rosenberg does away with other wounding and calcified clich\u00e9s: the scene of self-recognition in a mirror or the sensational descriptions of the trans body. Instead, Rosenberg takes a different tack, imagining a flexible trans body, where flexibility has both everything and nothing to do with the body. Sheppard\u2019s transness is incidental, one characteristic among many. Equally, if not more, important is Sheppard\u2019s proto-Marxism, his keen understanding of the exploitation of the laboring body. That Rosenberg finds an ally in Marx isn\u2019t surprising; Marx was himself writing about the derangements and rearrangements\u2014the hard limits of flexibility\u2014of a body wrecked and worn by vampiric capitalism.<\/p>\n

Of course, Rosenberg doesn\u2019t completely disregard the term transgender<\/em>. The novel\u2019s frame narrative concerns a trans academic, Dr. Voth, who happens upon the as yet unauthenticated Confessions<\/em> of Sheppard. A pharmaceutical-cum-publishing company with tentacular investments in Dr. Voth\u2019s heavily surveilled university (\u201cYou know how it is with neoliberalism these days \u2026 Everything\u2019s a subsidiary of everything!\u201d) presses Dr. Voth into editing the manuscript for publication. Sullivan, the company rep, celebrates the \u201cearliest authentic confessional transgender memoirs known to history.\u201d Dr. Voth corrects him\u2014\u201cWestern history\u201d\u2014tacitly agreeing that the text is a \u201cconfessional transgender memoir,\u201d but Dr. Voth is not as rabid to name and commercialize it as such. It is as though the two are speaking entirely different languages. In his Confessions<\/em>, Sheppard, seeking to understand his gender, reads the encyclopedia entry on \u201cSexual Chimeras.\u201d A footnoted back-and-forth between Dr. Voth and Sullivan on that section of the text ensues: Sullivan asks Dr. Voth to provide \u201cSPECIFICITY TO THE MEANING OF SEXUAL CHIMERA AS IT IS USED ABOVE. READERS NEED TO BE ABLE TO VISUALIZE.\u201d Dr. Voth\u2019s response: a marbled page. The sexual chimera will be described with no more specificity.<\/p>\n

In the New York Times<\/em> Book Review<\/em>, Garrard Conley describes this homage to Tristram Shandy<\/em> as \u201ckey to [Rosenberg\u2019s] narrative. It serves primarily as a rebuttal to an indignity many transpeople have faced at some point in their lives: the intrusive gaze of a non-transperson eager to glimpse their genitals. This novel is an antidote to that gaze.\u201d But Rosenberg\u2019s novel is that and more. If the marbled page serves as a corrective to what Montaigne calls \u201cthat deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us,\u201d it is a corrective insofar as it both refuses the standard neoliberal trans narrative and opens up the possibility of an entirely new cartography of trans literary genealogies. By turning to the historical archive, Rosenberg brilliantly threads a connection between the eighteenth-century trans body, histories of mass incarceration and colonialism, and today\u2019s struggle for life under late capitalism\u2019s brutal indifferences. Such a move gestures toward something more than the possibilities of the singular transgender body: Rosenberg\u2019s novel wants us to think about the possibilities of coalition, the possibilities of a collective becoming.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus is the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. The ninth-century scholar Remigius of Auxerre writes that \u201cHermaphroditus signifies a particular lasciviousness of speech that obtains when the reasoned search for truth is neglected and the superfluous adornment of speech above all pursued.\u201d That is to say, Hermaphroditus is concerned with the pleasure and play, the sensual excess and ornamentation of poetry.<\/p>\n

Pulling from an even more distant past than Rosenberg, Jos Charles, in her dazzling poetry collection feeld<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(August 2018),\u00a0takes her language from the Middle Ages\u2014from this language of pleasure, trauma, excess, and enfleshment. If Rosenberg\u2019s novel refuses the contemporary discourse of transgender, then Charles shatters that discourse from the outside in and turns it into something only distantly, hazily recognizable. In Charles\u2019s hands, the language itself transitions, defamiliarized, and in its new spellings, it opens to a poly-vocality where words contain hidden meanings. Most everything in feeld<\/em> is a pun\u2014or two, maybe more, at once. A \u201cfeeld\u201d is a place where something might grow (or lie fallow or rot), or the agrammatic past tense form of to feel<\/em>. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in her book Touching Feeling<\/em> that internal to the word feeling<\/em>\u00a0is a double meaning: \u201ctactile plus emotional.\u201d In this double meaning, feeling<\/em> implies both the body and the feeling that moves it as it moves through it.<\/p>\n

Charles writes transness as form and deforming, informing, performing, dendriform:<\/p>\n

a tran lik all metall is a series of sirfase in folde\u00a0 \/\u00a0 wee
\ncall manie of thees foldes identitie\u00a0 \/\u00a0 sum spase shufles
\nbetweene \/\u00a0 trama or hemorage or othere\u00a0 \/ this is 1<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Transness, for Charles, is something folded, involute, and invaginated. This in part explains why the most promising language to articulate\u2014and disarticulate\u2014transness is not that of the future but that of the past: it is something to be folded back on itself. The very structure of transness is one of folding and refolding such that \u201cpitt from plum,\u201d \u201ca whord from its thynge,\u201d or the horse knowing \u201cthe feeld from its bit\u201d is always a series of labyrinthine returns, of chiasmatic touching between histories and potentials, without the simple linearity and cleanliness of a straight line.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

What Confessions of the Fox<\/em> and feeld<\/em> share with trans theory is an orientation: they\u2019re after some queer elsewhere, a distant vision of liberation. These texts are about change, about looking out onto the horizon, squinting at the faintly emergent outlines and forms, and rushing to meet them\u2014or, as Charles calls it:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 a figure
\napeerynge\u00a0 \/\u00a0 inn the distanse<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But where trans and queer theory provide a program\u2014however strategically articulated\u2014offering us a way forward, Charles and Rosenberg do not. Transgender is, for them, elusive\u2014and necessarily so. To pin it down in space would contravene the acrossness, throughness, and beyondness of trans. Rosenberg\u2019s novel concludes with an explicit rejection of directions: \u201cYou will not need a map.\u201d There\u2019s no path to follow to get us where they\u2019re going. However much of the queer horizon unfolds before us, Charles and Rosenberg are already there, at the other side of the feeld, deep in the archive, waiting for us to turn back.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

RL Goldberg is a Ph.D. candidate in English and humanistic studies at Princeton.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature\u2019s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.\u00a0\u2014Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1571,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[15707,15891,35015,35011,35023,35020,35008,35010,35018,35013,35016,35017,35014,35022,35024,35012,35007,35021,35019,1322,35009,23101],"class_list":["post-128418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-amazons","tag-bertolt-brecht","tag-confessions-of-the-fox","tag-cynocephali","tag-feeld","tag-garrard-conley","tag-hereford-mappa-mundi","tag-himantopodes","tag-industry-and-idleness","tag-jack-halberstam","tag-jack-sheppard","tag-john-gay","tag-jordy-rosenberg","tag-jos-charles","tag-jose-esteban-munoz","tag-marmini","tag-michel-de-montaigne","tag-remigius-of-auxerre","tag-the-threepenny-opera","tag-tristram-shandy","tag-troglodytes","tag-william-hogarth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Historical Future of Trans Literature<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"At a moment in which popular journalism remains obsessed with litigating bathrooms, trans writers are offering a new cartography of the trans body\u2014one that looks to the past rather than the future.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/13\/the-historical-future-of-trans-literature\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Historical Future of Trans Literature by RL Goldberg\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 13, 2018 \u2013   Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. 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