Trans, Time, and History
2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/23289252-7090003
ISSN2328-9260
Autores Tópico(s)African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues
ResumoQuestions of time and chronology have risen to the forefront of scholarship in queer and trans studies in recent years.1 Carolyn Dinshaw has advocated for anachronistic "touches" across time, Roderick Ferguson has envisioned queer "palimpsests with residues of earlier discourses and histories," and C. Riley Snorton has highlighted intersections of blackness and trans as a condition of temporal possibility—as "movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival" (Dinshaw 1999; Dinshaw et al. 2007: 180; Snorton 2017: 2). Beyond this, a wave of new conferences and publications has explored "trans temporalities," further demonstrating how methods of accounting for and thinking through time have become increasingly relevant to scholarship on trans subjects (e.g., Lau 2016; Fisher, Phillips, and Katri 2017).2 In an influential essay, Kadji Amin has welcomed this "critical focus on the temporal underpinnings of transgender as a historical category [which] . . . may open the way toward a more transformative politics of justice" (2014: 219). It is to this crux of temporality and temporal crossing—always linked to overlapping modes of history, historiography, and historicity—that our issue of TSQ speaks. "Trans*historicities" joins surging interest in gender and sexuality as they relate to both patterns of time and the writing of history, advancing critical trans politics while simultaneously articulating and confounding our investments in reading, engaging, and cocreating historical pasts.The notion of a historical past is intricately interwoven with considerations of chronology (time as succession), periodization (time as segmented into units), and the specific cultural experiences of movement and change that undergird how we view our position within time. Efforts to move ostensibly backward in time—to the historical underpinnings of trans—have long been attractive to scholars and activists. Pioneering works such as Kate Bornstein's 1994Gender Outlaw and Leslie Feinberg's 1996Transgender Warriors laid unabashed ancestral claim to gender-nonconforming lives in the past, and they did so to legitimate trans identities in the present. Bornstein, in ways that remain problematic yet illustrative for us, invoked the history of indigenous cultures, writing, "My ancestors were performers. In life. The earliest shamanic rituals involved women and men exchanging genders. Old, old rituals. Top-notch performances. Life and death stuff. We're talking cross-cultural here. We're talking rising way way way above being a man or a woman. That's how my ancestors would fly. That's how my ancestors would talk with the goddesses and the gods. Old rituals" (143). Here, Bornstein draws (necessarily ahistorical) points of comparison between twentieth-century trans experience and that of a utopic, precolonial past, with which she expresses a deep affective bond. Bornstein's claim also naturalizes gender variance in the present by appealing to a shared transgender history, bracketing the "shamanic" as a romanticized, primordial system that exists outside civilizational time and place. As Evan B. Towle and Lynn Marie Morgan have noted, "The danger of portraying the transgender native in this way is that it can perpetuate stereotypes about non-Western societies, with their 'shamanic rituals' and panoply of gods" (2002: 478). It also risks consigning Native peoples to a past that is seemingly irreconcilable with the present or the conditions of modernity.A number of scholars have rightly criticized Bornstein, Feinberg, and others for their decontextualization and appropriation of indigenous "ancestors," calling on such authors to "situate gender dynamics in specific historical and cultural contexts," as well as in specific relations of power (Towle and Morgan 2002: 471).3 The editors of the recent TSQ issue "Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary" have pointed out that the burgeoning field of trans studies has yet to adequately grapple, especially in historically nuanced ways, with whiteness, indigeneity, and settler colonialism, nor to "engage with decolonizing as an epistemological method and as a political movement" (Aizura et al. 2014: 309). As Kai Pyle argues in this issue, white queer "claims not only appropriate Two-Spirit history but also minimize the trauma of settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy that affects Two-Spirit people." Recent scholarship in trans studies has therefore warned against efforts to identify a universal transgender identity across time, even as they acknowledge that within the first iteration of the field, figures such as Feinberg and Bornstein "engaged in the kind of identity politics necessary to gain speaking positions within discourse, and consequently featured a good deal of autoethnographic and self-representational work" that did not prioritize historically grounded reflections on race or settler colonialism (Stryker and Aizura 2013: 3).In some ways this trajectory of trans history resembles that of gay and lesbian history, which once saw social historians and cultural critics looking to the distant past to historicize same-sex desire and locate the origins of LGB identity. These early "ancestral" histories gave way to queer theories that—to use the phrase of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—drew on Michel Foucault's "Great Paradigm Shift" to suggest that homosexuality emerged as a discrete identity only toward the end of the nineteenth century (the debate between the two approaches became known, famously, as "essentialism" versus "constructionism"). Queer critiques emphasized the alterity of the past, respect for the contingency of historical phenomena, and the perils inherent in reading contemporary identities backward in time (Doan 2013). Indeed, such projects—inspired by Foucault's History of Sexuality (whose genealogical method remains a guiding force, as we see in this issue of TSQ)—have tended to foreclose the possibility of any continuous, transhistorical narrative of LGB experience that precedes the formation of modern concepts of sex and selfhood (Halperin 2002; Herring 2007). If we extend this logic, as some scholars have suggested, one cannot write a parallel history of "transgender" or "transsexual" before the advent of the very vocabulary that generated its subject; to do so would risk divesting past gender practice of what made it meaningful in its own time and place. It might also erase what scholar-activist Reina Gossett has called the "different and beautifully expansive" language of gender diversity in history (Boag 2005: 479–80; Beemyn 2013: 113; Walker 2015).Unsatisfied by this stark choice between ancestral essentialism, on the one hand, and radical altericism, on the other, some scholars have preferred theories of queer or trans temporality—that is, visions of time as asynchronous and nonnormative, and thus enabling of community formation, often through "touches" or "binds" that connect marginalized peoples across time (Dinshaw 1999; Dinshaw et al. 2007; Freeman 2010).4 Imagination often functions in such works as a means to rethink the past and our relationship to it: speculation about what might have happened, strategic anachronisms, and even defiance against the "tyranny of historicism" (Freccero 2006; Nardizzi, Guy-Bray, and Stockton 2009: 1) have all become hallmarks of queerly temporal projects. Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta, creators of the 2015 film Deseos /رغبات (Desires) and interviewed in this issue of TSQ, for instance, offer just such transhistorical speculation and the rejection of any imperative to be entirely faithful to the historical record. Their film stages an imaginary conversation between two women: Martina, who is "real" (based on archival documents), and Nour, who is "fictitious" (based on historical context rather than on any particular documented individual). In the words of Mikdashi and Motta: The criminal court of colonial New Granada prosecuted Martina in 1803 for being a "hermaphrodite" after being accused by her female lover of having a body that was "against nature." Martina was tried in a court of law and ultimately set free after medical doctors appointed by the court were unable to find evidence of her lover's accusation. This story is documented in the 1803 legal case found in the Archivo General de la Nación [General Archive of the Nation] in Bogotá, Colombia. Meanwhile in Beirut, Nour married her female lover's brother after her mother found them making love. Although Nour's story does not occur in a courtroom, nor is it found in a legal case, notions of Islamic and late Ottoman laws, cultures, and histories condition her narrative. (Motta 2015)One the one hand, Deseos /رغبات speaks to the legibility of historical subjects who are marked in some way as "hermaphrodites," "sodomites," or "lesbians." At least provisionally, it accepts those categories and, in doing so, it offers answers that cannot be supplied by other means, and it spurs new forms of kinship with the past. On the other hand, the film's imaginative and temporal crossings rest on a refusal to assume that we can ever fully know historical subjects. And such a refusal ultimately "rests on differences—differences that confound, disrupt, and render ambiguous the meaning of any fixed binary opposition," be it between male and female, past and present, fantasy and historical record (Scott 1999: 177). Other scholars and artists have likewise explored aspects of "trans temporality" or "transgender time," offering further challenges to traditional chronology while highlighting the temporal dislocations necessary for self-narrativizing in autobiography, for refusals of settler colonial time, and for identifying echoes of transgender in history (Fisher, Phillips, and Katri 2017; Mills 2015).History often lends legitimacy to a community's claim that it belongs in the here and now. Given the frequent citation of history by policy makers, there is no doubt that—at least in certain contexts—we imagine a political value in rendering communities visible within history (Currah 2017: 449–50). Take, for instance, the deeply historical statement on the occasion of the North Carolina "bathroom law" of 2016 by US Attorney General Loretta Lynch (2016): "This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry." In making such a statement, Lynch embedded the issue of trans access to bathrooms within a long genealogy of political struggles for rights—visualizing an overarching narrative of national progress—amid our inherited legacies of racism and homophobia.Yet, as Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (2017) have noted, increasing trans visibility creates a double bind: while it promises legitimacy for certain individuals, it erases others, especially those who are economically precarious, who are of color, or whose means of self-representation are limited by systemic racism and sexism. Similar erasures result from what Johannes Fabian has termed the "denial of coevalness," that is, when academics write about racialized others in the present as if they lived in the past, or as if certain people's presents represent other people's futures (Fabian [1983] 2014: 35; Rifkin 2017). As Fabian shows, "such use of Time almost invariably is made for the purpose of distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer," for they are negated a place in "our" here and now ([1983] 2014: 25). With this in mind, scholars have urged trans studies as a field to reject any interpretive stance that views racialized or "non-European gender-variant cultural practices as timeless 'traditions' bound to a particular location to which they are indigenous and authentic, and which are perpetually at risk of being polluted or diluted by the introduction of exogenous modern forms" (Stryker and Aizura 2013: 9).How might we deal with these multiple and interconnected binds—of sameness and difference, presence and absence, "tradition" and "modernity"—while also acknowledging our own cravings for (queer and trans) histories? What is it about the gesture of comparison to the past—be it ancestral, asynchronous, or properly contextualized—that provokes such urgency now? How are scholars, artists, curators, and others negotiating these tensions through transhistorical work? We envision this issue as a moment of pause to reflect on new and diverse projects that explore these questions, and that offer a productive set of approaches to trans, time, and history that we call here "trans*historicities."Authors Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura devote a section of their anthology Transgender Studies Reader 2 to "Timely Matters: Temporality and Trans-Historicity." It is to this latter term, trans-historicity, that we turn our attention, and that serves as an inspiration for our framing of this issue. "Timely Matters" showcases the methodologically, conceptually, and geopolitically diverse work of five scholars—Mary Weismantel, Deborah A. Miranda, Karma Lochrie, Robert Hill, and Afsaneh Najmabadi—as they engage in cross-temporal analyses that resist ahistorical equivalencies. Through their essays, in the words of Stryker and Aizura, such scholars "envision different methods for excavating pasts that certainly contained gender-variant cultural practices, without necessarily imposing the name 'transgender' on those historical moments" (2013: 11). In doing so, they offer trans as a methodology for thinking about the potential of texts, bodies, artifacts, and narratives from different times and places to reshape our present. They are also attuned to questions of historical context and change over time (whether or not they explicitly use the term historicity).While these scholars differ in their specific topics and approaches, what they share is an interest in making cross-temporal and interdisciplinary comparisons of "gender-variant cultural practices," yet without essentializing those practices or yoking them to progressive teleologies or to timeless traditions. This speaks to the possibility of writing trans history that precedes the relatively recent coinage of the terms transsexual and transgender—a project that scholars have already begun in earnest (e.g., Stryker 2008; Chiang 2012; Strassfeld 2013; Cleves 2014, 2018; Sears 2015; Karras and Linkinen 2016; Skidmore 2017; Campanile, Carlà-Uhink, and Facella 2017). Indeed, we do not abbreviate all histories of gender simply because past categories accord imprecisely with present ones; we write about women in the distant past even as we acknowledge that premodern subjects dovetail imperfectly with the modern term woman (which, of course, few gender studies scholars would characterize as a coherent and intelligible category even now). As Stryker and Aizura write, the field of trans studies wonders "why we think 'man' and 'woman' are any more transhistorical, or less contingent, than any other category of identity, and why we persist in the presentist fallacy of ontologizing a current framework and imposing it on the strangeness of the past" (2013: 6). Allowing the "strangeness of the past" to resonate across a chronologically expansive, historicized framework, as scholars have already suggested, can prompt us to view with new skepticism the seemingly unambiguous categories of "man" and "woman" (Block 2014). Such studies can also enrich our understanding of past gender variance, while preventing us from drawing facile conclusions about what is new or unique about our own era.5At its most basic level, the goal of this issue of TSQ is to theorize historicity in relation to trans, taking Stryker and Aizura's formulation of "trans-historicity" as an invitation to think more carefully about their suturing. As we suggest below, both of these concepts are complex, paradoxical, and mutually illuminating: trans helps us think about time, historical analysis helps us think about trans, and historicity helps us interrogate the nature of evidence and its attendant notions of facticity and historical authenticity. We focus attention here on the prefix trans as a method for understanding crossings of time—as in the "trans-temporal" or "transhistorical"—and in ways that encompass the multiple and paradoxical meanings that have accrued to the term historicity. In doing so, we seek to put new scholarship—bridging trans studies, historicist inquiry, and queer temporality—into productive conversation to think specifically about history, its meanings, and its place in identity and community formation.Our approach necessarily challenges the ways in which some queer theorists have set up the figure of "the historian" as a straw man, as if the discipline of history has a priori investments in empiricism and positivist claims of historical truth (for a summary, see Traub 2013; Doan 2013). In our view, such representations unfairly caricature historicist methods by ignoring how historians, at least since the nineteenth century, have engaged with and deeply theorized discursive constructions of (the discipline of) history, as well as their own conflicted relations with archival sources and other forms of historical evidence. While some historians no doubt still view their profession as a transparent retrieval of historical "reality"—keeping aloft the sentiments of nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, who claimed that the goal of history was "to show how it essentially was (wie es eigentlich gewesen)" (Ranke 2011: 86)—historians have long grappled with problems of narration, representation, speculation, and imagination, as well as with multiple ways of accounting for time and its progression. But, even Ranke himself deeply questioned the meaning and so-called authenticity of historical sources (Berding 2005: 47).At the same time, historians must acknowledge that in recent years much inventive rethinking and recasting of terms near and dear to them—chronology, archives, the past—have taken place outside the discipline of history (e.g., Cvetkovich 2003; Love 2007; Arondekar 2009; Freeman 2010). With this in mind, we suggest that responses to difficult questions about the methods and meanings of historical practice must be situated in debates across the disciplines and yet on the terrain of history. To advance this project, our present issue of TSQ unites perspectives from scholars located inside and outside the historical disciplines to look closely at how we might write histories of "trans before trans" and, beyond that, how the conjoining of trans and historicity might reconfigure our notions of chronology and periodization more broadly.By organizing this issue of TSQ around the concept of trans*historicities—with an asterisk and in the plural—we wish to push further on Stryker and Aizura's provocation and its implications for thinking about time and the past through the lens of trans. Why historicity? What does that term and concept offer us that history alone does not? Stryker and Aizura's use of trans-historicity (as opposed to trans-history) is suggestive, especially because they do not define the term explicitly in their volume. Its open-ended use points to just how much might be filled in, something that an even partial genealogy of the word suggests. Historicity is a term fraught with meaning, historically labile, and resistant to easy categorization. Its richness and unfixity resemble nothing so much as the heterogeneity and indeterminacy that we tend to associate with queer and trans. The linkage of trans and historicity in trans*historicity, moreover, suggests how these two analytics might be mobilized together usefully in ways that are relevant to the time-based relations we explore here.While it is beyond the scope of this introduction to fully articulate all of the invocations and iterations of historicity in philosophy, history, literary criticism, and other fields, we want to draw attention to some of the central issues that orbit the term, and that bear directly on our present purposes, namely, problems of chronology, human agency, periodization, and imagination. Although never part of a unitary method, historicity can be traced back at least to the eighteenth century, when the concept became embedded in debates about the nature of time, as well as in considerations of the relationship between past, present, and future. Historicity has its etymological roots in the Latin historicus, which conveys a sense of both "history" and "the historical," and, at its most basic level, historicity is about making sense of things within their proper socio-temporal contexts. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term today simply as "historical authenticity," and, indeed, historicity is often used interchangeably with historicality (that is, the historical actuality of persons, objects, and events as opposed to their grounding in myth, legend, or fiction). Yet we follow here scholarship that suggests that historicity's meanings are both more subtle and more capacious. Scholars have begun to identify historicity as a useful analytic—along the lines of spatiality or materiality—that communicates a dynamic, mutually conditioning relationship between subjects and objects (Hirsch and Stewart 2005). According to Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart—editors of a special issue of History and Anthropology dedicated to "Ethnographies of Historicity"—historicity "draws attention to the connections between past, present and future without the assumption that events/time are a line between happenings 'adding up' to history. Whereas 'history' isolates the past, historicity focuses on the complex temporal nexus of past-present-future" (262). While we disagree that history (as a discipline, practice, method, or lived experience) necessarily "isolates the past," in what follows here we note that the operations identified by Hirsch and Stewart are hardly a new feature of historicity: for at least two centuries, the term has been essential to considerations of just this problem of individual and collective experiences of time.Nearly from its inception, historicity has operated as a site of contention, serving to demonstrate opposing points of view. Some of its earliest proponents, for instance, sought to prove or disprove the bible as "fact" (and hence notions of divinely ordained time), while others challenged any notion of human experience as continuous, progressive, and ultimately culminating in a religious or secular enlightenment. Historicity developed most fully as a philosophical and historiographical concept through the divergent views proposed by two nineteenth-century schools of thought known as German Idealism and historism. Certain influential philosophers associated with German Idealism, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), staunchly committed themselves to teleological models, with the latter developing his ideas around the evolution of historical consciousness. Hegel proposed in The Philosophy of History, for instance, that the "History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom," and that such consciousness was first recognized by the ancient Greeks and later realized by the Germanic nations, with human potentiality replacing divine providence as the engine of progress (1956: 19).As the late twentieth-century philosopher Peter Koslowski explains, the "discovery of historicity was caused by the emphasis on world history and historical development in the philosophy of history expounded in German Idealism. When the German historians after Hegel further developed the historical method they felt the need to give more room to the singular, the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the contingent, and the free" (2005: 3). These later German historians, including Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–84), helped found the nineteenth-century German philosophical and historiographical school that came to be known as historism. Proponents of historism criticized several aspects of historical teleology and, significantly, they did so primarily through the concept of historicity (particularly that of individual human experience), with the result that the term accumulated a wide range of meanings and implications as the twentieth century wore on. Awareness of historicity implied an intimate connection with the past, and it made possible the dialectic between human identity and historical narrativization—the latter conceived of as always partly imaginative. In Droysen's own words, man "is in history, and history is in him," and perhaps for this very reason "historical research draws an imaginary picture of the past" (quoted in Wittkau-Horgby 2005: 63, 65).At its heart, historicity gave voice to impassioned critiques of the absolute—that is, it was invoked to make arguments against the existence of divine, natural, universal, or other fundamental laws, including reason itself—that supposedly governed human experience and provided temporal continuity through historical linearity. Embedded in the term was a distrust of any grand theory or absolute narrative of world history or development. Later generations of thinkers came to view with growing skepticism Hegel's notion of the existence of a single and absolute progression of time as ordained by God (critiquing, for example, Hegel's idea of world history that reaches toward human consciousness and the realization of human freedom). Indeed, even Ranke demonstrates a certain skepticism about such grand narratives. Yet, Ranke still placed history within a providential framework that he envisioned as both objective and scientific, if always a part of God's plan. He therefore shared in some version of the historical-theological view of history advocated by earlier thinkers such as Schelling and Hegel. Overall, however, proponents of historism were to become increasingly invested in historicizing the different branches of knowledge, finding diachronic laws of history (that is, how phenomena, especially language, evolved over time), acknowledging the importance of historical context, and basing their conclusions on specific historical sources and documents while, at the same time, interrogating the authenticity and reliability of those sources (Koslowski 2005: 5).Perhaps, most importantly, the concept of historicity, as developed through certain strains of historism, came to subject everything to processes of historical change. Thus, even the divine was subject to the effects of temporality, a stance that made virtually all phenomena available for philosophical and political critique. From at least the nineteenth century, historicity was therefore wrapped up in explorations of the nature of time and its progression, and in deeply ontological questions of historical being. Moreover, historicity also stoked debates about history's relation to empirical truth: whereas some cited the concept of historicity to bolster the validity of history as a universal science, others, including Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), pointed to the inherent dangers of ever envisioning history as an empirical field. For Nietzsche, history as "science" led to a fixation on the past and relativized all cultural phenomenon (Wittkau-Horgby 2005: 71–72).A host of later continental philosophers—including Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), Michel Foucault (1926–84), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), among others—were equally, if not more, invested in the concept of historicity. For Foucault, historicity's potential lay in its ability to account for processes of change, particularly the ways in which discrete cultures forged systems of power, through which identity could be produced or subverted (Malpas 2006: 60). As Foucault reminds us in The Order of Things, "a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time," but it too resists those very temporal taxonomies (2002b: xxv). Building on notions of historicity in existentialism, as well as of sequence and narrative among Annales school historians (including Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, and Lucien Fèbvre), Foucault, in the preface to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality,noted that his own turn to "the very historicity of forms of experience" led him to try to "bring to light the domain where the formation, development, and transformation of forms of experience can situate themselves: that is, a history of thought" (1984: 334). As Foucault explained, history was best understood in this context as discontinuous in sequence and constructed of multiple temporal series that "overlap and intersect, without one being able to reduce them to a linear schema" (2002a: 9). In Foucault's and his contemporaries' works, historicity could thus provide a means to interrogate linear or teleological notions of time, to foreground ruptures and discontinuities, and to evaluate the existence of transcendental ideas and experiences. As the literary theorist Krzysztof Ziarek has indicated, "historicity acts as a force of temporal dislocation. . . . [It] both lets the event emerge into presence and withholds (full) presence from it, keeping the event disjointed and incomplete" (2001: 14). From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, historicity traveled a long way from its earliest associations with "historical authenticity."Over the course of that period, debates also raged about the ontological and epistemological implications of historicity. For s
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