This Is Only A Test. Of Confidence. My Confidence.

Foucault and the Transgender Body
Introduction

The body is a site of struggle over power, identity, and intelligibility. The body has also been constructed within the social sciences as that which is always, already there—the common denominator for all humans despite their cultural differences.[1] In terms of gender, the assumption seems to be that biological sex is a concrete and immutable fact of life and that gender is the cultural interpretation of that reality; gender does not necessarily follow from sex. While this disconnect appears to allow a certain degree of flexibility and openness in anthropological gender studies, I would argue that this model for understanding gender leaves many questions unanswered while assuming far too much. By identifying a particular site of bodily struggle—ultimately a particular body—and providing a Foucaultian analysis of that struggle within the context of power, science, and the soul, the sex/gender disconnect, as it has been understood, can be complicated.

The Transgender Body as a Site of Struggle

According to Virginia State law, a transgender person wishing to amend their birth certificate to reflect their correct gender may do so when they have undergone a series of medical and legal procedures. In 2001 a transgender male[2] attempted to modify his birth certificate after having completed the complex and time-consuming state-mandated requirements and was turned away because he had not undergone phalloplastic surgery. Although the individual had received a hysterectomy, double mastectomy, and hormone therapy, the Virginia Office of Vital Records deemed his body unacceptably female, despite their lack of legal authority to do so (Lambda Legal, see attached article). Although this was resolved before the issue was brought to court and the individual was able to amend his birth certificate successfully, this struggle exemplifies the interconnected nature of power, knowledge, science, and state control. Furthermore, according to Foucault, we cannot imagine these phenomena as being separate from one another. Rather, power, knowledge, science, and state control implicate and co-constitute one another in the effort to make bodies knowable and therefore subjects of discipline (1977: 354).

Lambda Legal, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender legal advocacy group, published this story in an effort to raise awareness concerning the negotiating one might be required to do in order to amend their birth certificate as a post-operative transgender individual. While this publication is surely helpful and meaningful to its intended audience, there is much left unsaid beyond the initial outrage over the requirement of a penis to be considered male under the law or by society at large. It seems that this question could be expanded to include a critique of the other legal and medical requirements for gender legitimacy as well as the legal and cultural implications of a system of “birth certification” which necessarily includes one’s designated sex and therefore, one’s assumed gender.

The Invention of the Body

Our bodies become marked and organized in various sexed, raced, and classed ways from the moment we enter the world. Judith Butler describes these sexual classificatory markings as “conditions of intelligibility” or the “primary conditions of personhood”. For example, when a baby is born in the United States the first question posed is, “is it a girl or a boy?” Therefore, upon entering the world, one’s first prerequisite for knowability is one’s sex (Butler 1990: 16-17). Instead of naturalizing this primary condition of intelligibility as a biological fact one is merely subjected to, an attention to the constructed-ness of the seemingly obvious body is necessary. Furthermore, if it is generally assumed that biological sex and gender are disconnected insofar as gender does not depend upon sex, why is it that sex has gone unquestioned as that which is outside of the realm of the constructed? Butler asks the question; “what if it was always already gender?” in which case “it would make no sense…to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category” (1990: 7). If this is true of the most identifiable and seemingly basic aspect of the body, sex, what does this mean for the body as a whole?

The body, asserts Foucault, has been invented as a knowable object through historical processes and for specific ends (1990:139). He claims “historical processes were involved in what might seem to be the purely biological base of existence” (1977: 353). Additionally, the invention of the body has not been a neutral process—it carries with it the power to punish, know, and exclude.

Disciplining the Body

In “The Body of the Condemned,” Foucault elaborates upon the relationship between power and knowledge within the scientifico-legal complex. In short, the body is constructed as a scientifically knowable entity and as a result, power can be exercised upon it within the framework of legality, science, and what we might call “enculturative” practices (Foucault 1977: 354). Foucault also notes that in modern prison systems it is not the body being worked upon by systems of legitimated power as much as it is the soul being molded in order to discipline the body more “humanely” (1977: 353). This is not to say that the body is not being highly regimented, but that the soul, as the subject of education, psychology, and humanistic claims, is the way “into” the body (1977: 355-56). Nor is it to say that these notions apply only within the context of prisons, but rather that the prison might serve as an analogy for more pervasive, epistemic systems of power and domination. This idea is especially salient in terms of the transgender Virginian’s attempt to subvert that which had been written, filed, and made official concerning his body.

As with all individuals, the transgender Virginian’s body and soul have been the subjects of scientific knowledge and classification. Therefore, we might apply the widely used sex/gender disconnect to the transgender body in terms of its relationship to the soul. Just as one’s sex is understood as being caught up in the materiality of the body, one’s gender is assumed to be part of the soul. It could then be reasoned that the disciplining of the body’s sex is performed through the disciplining of the soul’s gender, which turns the previously held sex/gender disconnect on its head.

Before one can even begin the medical, bodily procedures to undergo a sex change, one must prove one’s self, or soul, to be in need of a transformed body: a body that accurately reflects the soul. What seems to be presupposed all along is that the body and the soul must somehow match up, and not only match up, but do so in an intelligible fashion. In other words, a binary opposition is being employed in both the heteronormative and transgender body—a male body must be paired with a male soul, meaning that the body must be reconstructed to “fall in line” with the soul. While the transgender body may appear to us as highly transcendent and somehow breaking free from cultural constraints, could it be that the transgender body is still equally subjected to systems of gender binaries and scientifico-legal control? Even when a body may seek to escape the disciplining forces it has been subjected to, “there is no recourse to a “person,” and “sex,” or a “sexuality” that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produce and regulate those concepts for us…” (Butler 1990: 32).

Producing the Normal

It is important to understand the seemingly isolated dispute between the transgender Virginian and his state’s legal process as an event that is not only concerned with his body, but all bodies. Because gender is relational, in that male depends upon female and “normal” depends upon “deviant” in order to exist at all, the punishment of one body by illegitimating it in the eyes of the law does not only mark that body as deviant, but literally produces unmarked bodies as always already normal (Foucault 1977: 353-54). Modern science has claimed to “know” biological sex in such a way that even the transgender soul can look to science to make the body knowably transgendered. But what kinds of knowledges have been disqualified[3] in the making of transgender possibilities? Why is it that we have no cultural space for a third gender, especially seeing as it has been done many times over in other cultural contexts (Herdt 1993)? Foucault might answer this question by calling attention to the productive aspects of exclusion and punishment—it is as if all were deemed normal, no one would be. He reminds us that “the body is…directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it: they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it…force it to emit signs” (1977: 353). In other words, the body is never neutral and it has been invented in such a way that knowledge has power over its movement, intelligibility, and very existence.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New

York: Routledge.

Douglas, Mary. (2004) “External Boundaries” in Anthropological Theory. McGee, R. Jon

and Warms, Richard L., eds. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Foucault, Michel. (1977) “The Body of the Condemned” in Discipline and Punish: The

Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books.

Foucault, Michel. (1990) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One. New

York: Vintage.

Foucault, Michel. (1980) “Two Lectures” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and

Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Herdt, Gilbert, ed. (1993) Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in

Culture and History. New York: Zone Books.

Lambda Legal. Amending Birth Certificates to Reflect Your Correct Sex. Lambda Legal

Defense and Education Fund. 3-11-06

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[1] I am referring here in particular to Mary Douglas’ work “External Boundaries.” In it, she complicates the body politic, yet assumes the body as immutably biological—ultimately non-constructed—and focuses her attention upon the ways the body has been used as a symbol of society (Douglas 2004: 526-27) .

[2] In the interest of anonymity, the article cited did not specify a name.

[3] I am referring here to Foucault’s notion of “disqualified knowledges:” those experiences, memories, and “facts” which have been deemed unreliable, inadequate, and unscientific (1980: 418).