Debbie Mayne's Trans/scripts: Performative Repertoires in Law and Everyday Life
2008; Routledge; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14791420802206841
ISSN1479-4233
Autores Tópico(s)African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues
ResumoAbstract Complementing existing literatures on agency, I suggest a fuller engagement with the work of Judith Butler to emphasize the embodied practices of performative repertoires as a critical source of judgment and invention. Putting Butler into conversation with James Scott's concepts of public and hidden transcripts, this essay helps explain how subjects productively negotiate the discursive circuitries of their domination to make life more livable. To contextualize the argument, I analyze the actions of Debbie Mayne, a maleto- female transsexual, who prompted her own arrests to resist legal interpellations discordant with her own sense of self. Keywords: AgencyTranssexualsPerformative RepertoiresPublic and Hidden TranscriptsLaw and Everyday Life Acknowledgements I would like to thank first and foremost Joanne Meyerowitz for directing me to Mayne's archive and unselfishly sharing her archival research with me. Professor Meyerowitz and C. Jacob Hale provided useful comments on an earlier version of this essay. Jeff Bennett, John Louis Lucaites, Gust Yep, Marouf Hasian, Jr., Dana Cloud, and Dilip Gaonkar, and the student participants of the 2006 National Doctoral Honors Conference engaged in lively discussions that improved this essay. Finally, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Inc. allowed me access to their archives. This essay is derived from the author's dissertation, Legal Trans/scripts: Transgender Rhetorics of Law and Everyday Life. Notes 1. I borrow Debbie Mayne's pseudonym from Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Even though Mayne's name is part of the public record, the use of archival materials located in the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (KI) necessitates the use of pseudonyms. 2. "What They Say About [Debbie]! Man Has Sex-Switch Operation, Flaunts Finery at Sad Cops," The Keyhole, 2 March 1956; and, "Man-Woman Cleared," file: Debbie Mayne (D.M.), ONE/International Gay and Lesbian Archives (ONE), University of Southern California, Los Angeles (USC). See also "Office Clerk Cleared of Charge of Masquerading," Los Angeles Times, 15 February 1956, box 2/4 clippings, Virginia Prince Collection (VPC), Oviatt Library, California State University at Northridge, Northridge, CA (CSUN). 3. "What They Say." 4. "Well, Is It [Debbie] Belle or [Debbie] Bill?" and "[Debbie]'s He or She as Case May Be." These clippings lack any source information but they can be found in box 2/4 clippings, VPC, CSUN. A legal brief filed by the City Attorney and Mayne's lawyer confirms these facts of the case; see, "Stipulation of Facts (SOF)," Debbie Mayne (D.M.) Folder, box 6, Series IIC, HBC, KI. 5. "Well, Is It?" 6. "Office Clerk." 7. "Man-Woman Cleared." 8. In 1941 Barbara Richards convinced a judge that she had experienced a "spontaneous sexual metamorphosis" and received a legal order to change her legal name and sex. See Joanne Meyerowitz, "Sex Change and the Popular Press: Historical Notes on Transsexuality in the United States, 1930–1955," GLQ 4, no. 2 (1998): 167. 9. The SOF lists the date of her legal name and sex change as "on or about November 30" while some newspaper accounts list the date as November 18 ("What They Say"). Regardless, by the time of her trial Mayne was already legally recognized as a woman. 10. For more on what Judith Halberstam terms "the bathroom problem," see Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 20; and, Jodie Marksamer and Dylan Vade, Gender Neutral Bathroom Survey (San Francisco: San Francisco Human Rights Commission, 2002). While we might be tempted to assume that transpeople enjoy greater legal protections today than they did in the 1950s, trans legal protections are typically local in nature and rarely enforced. The best collection of work on trans legal struggles and victories is Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter, ed., Transgender Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 11. Marouf Hasian, Jr., "Legal Argumentation in the Godwin–Malthus Debates," Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001): 184. 12. John Louis Lucaites, "Between Rhetoric and 'The Law': Power, Legitimacy, and Social Change," Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 445, emphasis in original. 13. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 2. 14. Scott, Domination, 199. 15. Scott, Domination, 4. In many ways, the concept of hidden transcripts complements our understanding of vernacular rhetorics and discourses. In terms of vernacular rhetorics, Gerald Hauser asks us to pay more critical attention to the ways in which individuals publicly engage issues through their everyday activities. See Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). In a different key, Kent Ono and John Sloop suggest the concept of vernacular discourses to mark everyday forms of "communication that [are] assumed to be for the direct purposes of supplying information to more limited demographic groups within" a polity. See Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 13. The importance of studying the often ignored texts and practices of the oppressed was originally developed in Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, "The Critique of Vernacular Discourse," Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19–46. The study of hidden transcripts thus extends the critique of everyday interactions to understand the multiple discursive agendas operating in these public exchanges. 16. Scott, Domination, 199. While Scott's work is not concerned with the interactions of those living in liberal-democratic polities, public and hidden transcripts are present in them. Without equivocating different modalities of domination, the dynamic relationships between domination and resistance are a constant condition of any culture. As a result, Scott's work can be easily translated to contexts beyond his own work. 17. Here I use the phrase "repertoire" in a manner similar to Diana Taylor to signify "embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge." See The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 20. 18. Dwight Conquergood, "Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance," Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 82–3. 19. John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 20. Sloop, Disciplining, 20n16; 24. 21. Charles Morris, "Archival Queer," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9 (2006): 147. 22. While scholarship in the vein of Janice Raymond's transphobia and Bernice Hausman's skepticism of trans agency is less common today, these arguments still circulate in the work of psychologists such as Michael Bailey; see Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979; reprint, 1994); Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and, Bailey, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003). Readers familiar with Hausman's work might ask how my project differs from her reading of transsexual narratives. The simple answer is one of methodology which informs our perspective on discourse, identity, and agency. In her preface, Hausman explicitly states her reliance on "'official discourses' of transsexualism—those produced both by medical personnel and by transsexuals" (viii). As should be clear from my attitudinizing frame, official discourses or public transcripts provide a distorted and/or incomplete picture of intersubjective exchanges. Thus, when Hausman claims that we can best discern transsexual agency (meaning a "compulsive relation to technology" and medical interventions [140]) by reading medical discourses about and by transsexuals (3–4, 110), I am skeptical of the reliability of such a tautological perspective. To be fair, Hausman concedes, on several occasions (110, 129, 131, 143), the influence transsexuals have had in crafting trans medical standards and care. However, Hausman's concessions have to be tempered against her suspicion of transsexuals as "dupes of gender" (140) who reinforce the stability of sexual and gender identities, claims that I find difficult to accept when we read the hidden transcripts of transpeople. Moreover, in a recent review of Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed, Hausman maintains that academic "politics" designed "to put transsexual and transgender people on the map as the authors of their historical identities" runs counter to "many feminist writers on the topic, including myself, who have tended to see transsexuals' social emergence as an effect of historical transformations in technology, in meanings of sex and gender, and in social mechanisms to subordinate women." See "Book Review," Journal of Medical Humanities 26 (2005): 197. Setting aside the obvious political implications of Hausman's own reading of transsexuality, her continued suspicion of transpeople is all the more peculiar given her professed interest in a Foucaultian reading of transsexual narratives (Changing Sex, vii). On my reading, one that is influenced in important ways by Butler, the more faithfully Foucaultian approach is to ask how transpeople resist the modalities of their domination. 23. I recognize that using Butler to theorize trans subjectivity is a potentially controversial project given the number of critiques directed at Butler's reading of transsexuality. For example, Vivian Namaste suggests that Butler's employment of psychoanalysis ignores the specificity of trans corporeality, especially in her analysis of Paris is Burning. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 13–23. In a similar vein, Jay Prosser rereads Butler's interpretation of Sigmund Freud to support the claim that Butler elides the materiality of the transsexual body. In its place, Prosser offers a theory of transsexual embodiment that accepts sex as a material reality outside of discourse that persistently troubles the explanatory power of performativity. See Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 21–60. However, Gayle Salamon reminds us that "any insistence on a bodily materiality that is outside of and opposed to discourse about bodies is not, of course, located outside of discourse: the call itself proceeds discursively." See "The Bodily Ego and the Contested Domain of the Material," differences 15 (2004): 118. Moreover, Salamon defends Butler's performative/discursive perspective of sex against Prosser's "paradigm of embodiment that thinks a material body overlaid with a layer of social/imaginary," as Butler "encourage[es] us, rather, to think the ways in which their emergence is, phenomenologically speaking, simultaneous" (114). Finally, Butler's Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), written years after Namaste's and Prosser's indictments, more fully takes up the issue of transsexual embodiment, especially in her analysis of David Reimer (57–74). 24. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 15. 25. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)," in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994), 130. My recuperation of Althusser is also influenced by two recent articles in the field of rhetorical studies. First, the fusing of rhetoric and psychoanalysis offered up in the work of Joshua Gunn and Shaun Treat recuperates fantasy as an enabling moment of subjectivity. See "Zombie Trouble: A Propaedeutic on Ideological Subjectification and the Unconscious," Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 144–74. In their words, ideological subjectification "provid[es] limits" (164) but also "generates the very agential maps that enable us to locate its contradictions and constructedness" (163). Second, in her prolegomenon on rhetorical agency, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell favorably employs Butler's revision of Althusser. See "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–19. Campbell locates rhetorical agency in the production of identity as "individuals accept, negotiate, and resist the subject-positions available to them at given moments in a particular culture" (4). In light of this proposition, Campbell defines rhetorical agency as "the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one's community. Such competency permits entry into ongoing cultural conversations and is the sine qua non of public participation, much less resistance as a counter-public" (3). As should be clear, this essay shares substantial common ground with Campbell. However, the publicist orientation of Campbell's definition invites further scrutiny. It may be the case that hidden transcripts embolden subjects to take public actions but we should not assign a necessary location or teleological destination to agency—in other words, the proper response to anxiety over the loss of sovereignty is not necessarily publicity. To do so forecloses investigations into the resistant possibilities of our quotidian practices and effectively resituates rhetoric within the logics of influence, a move that negates the benefits of rhetoric's engagement with poststructuralism. Moreover, evaluating agency through public optics makes us blind to the ways in which agency is a constant, embodied process rather than an endpoint marked by the legibility of one's actions. In the spirit of a friendly amendment, I would complement Campbell's definition by expanding it to include instances of subject-negotiation that evade public detection as a way to account for the performative repertoire of hidden transcripts. 26. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5. 27. Butler, Excitable Speech, 32. 28. Butler, Excitable Speech, 33. 29. Butler, Excitable Speech, 26. 30. Butler, Excitable Speech, 15–16. 31. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) as well as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), esp. 194. 32. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits Of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. 33. Butler, Excitable Speech, 16. 34. Judith Butler, "What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue," in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 317. 35. Butler, Undoing Gender, 8. In this journal, Dana Cloud suggested that Butler's politics (as well as other forms of poststructuralist theory) "risk[s] perpetuating an ideology of resignation to existing social relations." See "The Matrix and Critical Theory's Desertion of the Real," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 4 (2006): 330. Of particular concern for Cloud is her fear that poststructuralist theory collapses the discursive and the material into one and thus neutralizes the antagonisms necessary to generate radical democratic politics. In short, this critique seems unfounded because the constant motion of performativity calls attention to the malleability of discipline, exposing it as a dynamic force rather than a determinative foreclosure of agency. Performativity generates sufficient antagonisms to produce agency—discipline and domination are constantly reworked, exposing structures as unstable sets of discursive formations in a perpetual state of undoing. 36. Butler, Psychic Life, 10. 37. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 20. 38. See, Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, esp. 102–4. 39. D.M. to H.B., 10 December, 1955. 40. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 46. 41. D.M. to H.B., 13 November 1953. 42. D.M. to H.B., 29 December 1954. In these letters I have chosen not to correct the spelling or grammatical errors or even employ the (sic) as the numerous errors would disrupt the flow of the letters. 43. H.B. to D.M., 30 December 1954. 44. C.E. to H.B., 15 March 1954. 45. H.B. to D.M., 15 March 1954. 46. D.M. to H.B., 17 March 1954. 47. Benjamin used intermediaries, including a transwoman scheduled for surgery with Mayne in Mexico, to counsel Mayne in this period. While he would not provide Mayne with a definitive course of action, Benjamin remained skeptical of the Mexican doctor, Dr. [F.]. See, H.B. to C.S., 14 February 1955, C.S. to H.B., 2 March 1955, H.B. to C.S., 10 March 1955, and 1 April 1955. 48. D.M. to H.B, 17 April 1955. It is worth noting here that I do not understand transsexuality as a purely medicalized identity that is complete or finished with hormonal or surgical intervention. As Kate Bornstein explains in Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), trans identities, like all identities, are better understood as a process of becoming without any predetermined teleological destination. 49. D.M. to H.B., 6 October 1955. 50. H.B. to D.M., 10 October 1955. 51. D.M. to H.B., 10 December 1955. 52. D.M. to H.B., 12 December 1955. 53. C.S. to H.B., 14 August 1955; C.S. to H.B., 9 September 1955; A.D. to H.B. 11 November 1955; and A.D. to H.B., 16 November 1955. 54. H.B. to A.D., 14 November 1955. 55. A.D. to H.B., 21 November 1955. 56. H.B. to A.D., 2 December 1955. 57. H.B. to D.M., 12 December 1955. 58. Steve Pile, "Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance," in Geographies of Resistance, ed. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 23. 59. D.M. to H.B., 13 December 1955. Despite the date, it seems clear that Mayne is responding to Benjamin's 12 December 1955 letter. 60. H.B. to D.M., 22 December 1955. 61. H.B. to D.M., 11 February 1956. 62. D.M. to H.B., 14 February 1956. 63. See D.M. to H.B., 9 April 1956; H.B. to D.M., 9 April 1956; and, D.M. to H.B., 18 April 1957. 64. See, for example, the following two articles written by legal scholars wary of everyday practices of resistance: Michael McCann and Tracey March, "Law and Everyday Forms of Resistance: A Socio-Political Assessment," Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 15 (1996): 207–36; and, Jeffrey Rubin, "Defining Resistance: Contested Interpretations of Everyday Acts," Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 15 (1996): 237–60. 65. Butler, Undoing Gender, 29. 66. Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 14. 67. Butler, Undoing Gender, 20. 68. Butler, Undoing Gender, 4. Kathleen Lennon makes a similar argument when clarifying what she sees as Butler's vague use of terms such as "livability" and "livable life." Lennon proposes that we think of livability and intelligibility in the following manner: "intelligibility consists of people being able to 'find their feet' with each other in everyday interactions. It is this kind of making sense to ourselves and others which I would suggest is necessary if life is to be livable." See "Making Life Livable: Transsexuality and Bodily Transformation," Radical Philosophy 140 (2006): 28. 69. Austin Sarat, Marianne Constable, David Engel, Valerie Hans, and Susan Lawrence, "Ideas of the 'Everyday' and the 'Trouble Case' in Law and Society Scholarship: An Introduction," in Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases, ed. Austin Sarat, Marianne Constable, David Engel, Valerie Hans, and Susan Lawrence (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 3. 70. Butler, Undoing Gender, 101. 71. Butler, Undoing Gender, 8. 72. Bulter, Undoing Gender, 101. Additional informationNotes on contributorsIsaac WestIsaac West is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa
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