| Transgendernormativity |
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| Global Warning | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 17 July 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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There's somethin' happenin' here
What it is ain't exactly clear There's a man in a dress, over there Tellin' me I got to beware Stop, children, what's that sound?
Everybody look - what's goin' down. -- Buffalo Springfield
For What It’s Worth (more or less) Transgendernormativity is everywhere. It is always already present in our individual and collective psyches, social institutions, cultural practices, and knowledge systems.
In this column we will discuss ways of unpacking transgendernormativity through a critique of orthodox transgenderism. In doing so, one of us will address the three aspects of transgendernormativity:
One of us will conclude by exploring the need for more scientific research in the discipline by engaging the productive tensions between constructive and deconstructive impulses.
Transgendernormative Orthodoxy shatters the concept of male and female as distinct categories, placing marriage within an abstract model of gender bipolarity. Transgendernormative standards are divorced from biology and unlinked from patriarchal expectations of linear continuity and, as such, allow gender to be flexibly determined by individual interaction during any particular social dialogue.
A Transgendernormative Identity changes sex or inhabits a third (or multiple) sex, androgynous, or fluid identities at will. A post-structuralist theory of transgender disassociates sex and gender, modeling both as societal constructs, and emphasizes the technologisation and commodification of the body. Post-structuralism denies body limitations and eliminates transgendered subjective experience. This approach argues for the deconstruction of gender binaries and their replacement with a gender spectrum where gender is in a constant, fluid state of conceptualization.
Transgendernormative performance asks how the transgendernormative gender/sex presentation destabilizes sexual binaries and the traditional transsexual narrative. Judith Butler’s concept of gender fluidity provides a discursive structure aligned with the lived experiences of transgendered people. The exposure of the transsexual narrative as a false construct creates a space for transgendernormative narrative and identity to move as a fluid signifier. The significance of the transgendernormative performance is profound and offers some of the most tangible and dramatic examples of gender/sex non-conformity, thus moving the performance beyond destabilization into deconstruction.
Stop!My head hurts.I can’t go on with this post modern academic bullshit.
I haven’t a clue how all this nonsensical doublespeak relates to the real life I live, the one in which I am married, keep a house, have five kids, put out a newsletter, write for a website, run a non-profit transsexual organization, and maintain a professional job with the Government of the United States that consumes 40-50 hours a week or more of my time. I don’t think I have time to worry about performance, transgendernormative, queer, straight or otherwise.
If I do think of transgender performance, I think of ads like this:
Fresh Meat 2006
The Fifth Annual Transgender & Queer Performance Festival Artistic Director Sean Dorsey June 15 & 16 at 8:00pm; June 17 at 7:00pm & 10:00pm ODC Theater Tix: $15 (res. HIGHLY recommended!) Fresh Meat celebrates its Fifth Anniversary with a dazzling lineup
featuring some of the nation's finest trans and queer performers. Transgender dance theater, homo hip hop, gravity-defying aerial dance, gender-defying theater, queer taiko, tranny glam rock and more! Now that’s Transgendered Performance!
If you want to bet your life on that ivory tower university-speak, god bless you. I hope you have a full and happy life.
But don’t tell me that I am the one with delusions or that it is those of us born transsexual who are lying to themselves. Don’t you dare demand we accept your transgenderist bull that people born transsexual are the ones who are confused about Gender Identity.
Get yourself a transgendernormative life and just shut up about it.
In the process you can leave us poor deluded transsexuals alone and allow us lucky few, we happy few, we band of sisters and brothers, to pursue our quiet lives, accurs'd that we are not you.
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep It starts when you're always afraid Step out of line, the man come and take you away Stop, hey, what's that sound?
Everybody look - what's goin' down? -- Buffalo Springfield
For What It’s Worth |
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