Showing papers in "Wsq: Women's Studies Quarterly in 2008"

Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?

Abstract: The tide that appears on the cover of this journal is Trans-, not Trans, and not Transgender. A little hyphen is perhaps too flimsy a thing to carry as much conceptual freight as we intend for it bear, but we think the hyphen matters a great deal, precisely because it marks the difference between the implied nominalism of "trans" and the explicit relationality of "trans-," which remains open-ended and resists premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix. Our call for papers read: "Trans: -gender, -national, -racial, -generational, -genie, -species. The list could (and does) go on. This special issue of WSQ invites feminist work that explores categorical crossings, leakages, and slips of all sorts, around and through the concept 'trans-'." While gender certainly - perhaps inevitably - remains a primary analytical category for the work we sought to publish in this feminist scholarly journal, our aim in curating this special issue specifically was not to identify, consolidate, or stabilize a category or class of people, things, or phenomena that could be denominated "trans," as if certain concrete somethings could be characterized as "crossers," while everything else could be characterized by boundedness and fixity. It seemed especially important to insist upon this point when addressing transgender phenomena. Since the early 1990s, a burgeoning body of scholarly work in the new field of transgender studies has linked insights and analyses drawn from the experience or study of phenomena that disrupt or unsetde the conventional boundaries of gender with the central disciplinary concerns of contemporary humanities and social science research. In seeking to promote cutting-edge feminist work that builds on existing transgenderoriented scholarship to articulate new generational and analytical perspectives, we didn't want to perpetuate a minoritizing or ghettoizing use of "transgender" to delimit and contain the relationship of "trans-" conceptual operations to "-gender" statuses and practices in a way that rendered them the exclusive property of a tiny class of marginalized individuals. Precisely because we believe some vital and more generally relevant critical/political questions are compacted within the theoretical articulations and lived social realities of "transgender" embodiments, subjectivities, and communities, we felt that the time was ripe for bursting "transgender" wide open, and linking the questions of space and movement that that term implies to other critical crossings of categorical territories. This issue of WSQ centrally address the challenges presented to traditional feminist scholarship by the transgender sociopolitical movement of the past two decades, but it aims to resist applications of "trans" as a gender category that is necessarily distinct from more established categories such as "woman" or "man." Rather than seeing genders as classes or categories that by definition contain only one kind of thing (which raises unavoidable questions about the masked rules and normativities that constitute qualifications for categorical membership), we understand genders as potentially porous and permeable spatial territories (arguable numbering more than two), each capable of supporting rich and rapidly proliferating ecologies of embodied difference. Our goal is to take feminist scholarship in expansive new directions by articulating the interrelatedness and mutual inextricability of various "trans-" phenomena. Any gender-defined space is not only populated with diverse forms of gendered embodiment, but striated and crosshatched by the boundaries of significant forms of difference other than gender, within all of which gender is necessarily implicated. To suggest a few examples: do transgender phenomena not show us that "woman" can function as social space that can be populated, without loss of definitional coherence, not only by people born with a typical female anatomy and reared as girls who identify as women, but also by people reared as girls who identify as women but who have physical intersex conditions, or by people who were born with a typical male anatomy but who selfidentify as women and take all possible steps to live their lives that way, or by people born female who express conventionally masculine social behaviors but who don't think of themselves as or want to be men? …

Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Abstract: Placing Alison Bechdel's Fun Home alongside other graphic narratives, most notably Art Spiegelman's Maus (1993) and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2003), that explore intergenerational trauma and the role of the child as witness, seems both obvious and potentially inappropriate, even presumptuous. In writing about the Holocaust and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, respectively, Spiegelman and Satrapi take on histories that have been formative for global politics in the past century. In Fun Home, by contrast, there is no mass genocide or the same obvious connection to political debate, and the single death, that of Bechdel's father, someone who might be categorized (however problematically) as a pedophile, suicide, or closet homosexual, raises the possibility that there are some lives that are not "grievable," certainly not in a public context (Butler 2004, 20). But a queer, even perverse, sensibility not unlike Bechdel's draws me to idiosyncratic or shameful family stories and their incommensurate relation to global politics and historical trauma. I want to risk inappropriate claims for the significance of Bechdel's story, to read it in the context not just of Maus and Persepolis but also efforts to redefine the connections between memory and history, private experience and public life, and individual loss and collective trauma. Fun Home confirms my commitment (in An Archive of Feelings [2003]) to queer perspectives on trauma that challenge the relation between the catastrophic and the everyday and that make public space for lives whose very ordinariness makes them historically meaningful. And although Fun Home's critical and popular success obviously provides many entry points for readers (and warrants its sustained attention in this issue of WSQ), Bechdel's narrative of family life with a father who is attracted to adolescent boys has particular meaning for me because it provides a welcome alternative to public discourses about LGBTQ politics that are increasingly homonormative and dedicated to family values. I write more as a specialist in queer studies than as one in graphic narrative, but I hope nonetheless to articulate how Bechdel uses this insurgent genre to provide a queer perspective that is missing from public discourse about both historical trauma and sexual politics. The recent success of graphic narrative, a hybrid or mixed-media genre, and also a relatively new and experimental one, within mainstream literary public spheres suggests that providing witness to intimate life puts pressure on standard genres and modes of public discourse. I seek to juxtapose Fun Home with other prominent graphic memoirs such as Maus and Persepolis to show how its queer sensibility extends their treatment of the relation between individual and historical experience, so central to secondgeneration witness, especially through a more pronounced focus on sexuality. But I also want to situate Fun Home as part of other insurgent genres of queer culture, such as memoir, solo performance, women's music, and autoethnographic documentary film and video, including the traditions of lesbian feminist culture within which Bechdel's long-running Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip circulates. Standing at the intersections of both contemporary LGBTQ culture and public discussions of historical trauma, Fun Home dares to claim historical significance and public space not only for a lesbian coming-out story but also for one that is tied to what some might see as shameful sexual histories. WITNESSING SEXUALITY Dori Laub's claim, in the context of Holocaust testimony, that trauma is an "event without a witness" (in part because the epistemic crisis of trauma is such that even the survivor is not fully present for the event) takes on a different resonance in Bechdel's story about her father, who was run over by a truck while crossing the highway outside the house he was restoring (Felman and Laub 1991, 8O).2 In a literal sense, his death is an event without a witness (other than the truck driver, who thinks that her father might have jumped back into the road); and Bechdel and her mother's hunch that it is a suicide, or somehow connected to his complex sexual history, is ultimately only speculation. …

The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

Abstract: In July 2004, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on graphic novels, speaking of them as a "new literary form" and asserting that comics are enjoying a "newfound respectability right now" because "comic books are what novels used to be-an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal." However, this lengthy Times article virtually ignores graphic narrative work by women: the piece excerpts the work of four authors, all male; depicts seven authors in photographs, all male; and mentions women writers only in passing: "The graphic novel is a man's world, by and large" (McGrath 2004, 24, 30). This is not true. Some of today's most riveting feminist cultural production is in the form of accessible yet edgy graphic narratives.1 While this work has been largely ignored by feminist critics in the academy, interest is now growing from outside the field of comics, as we can see in recent essays in journals such as Life Writing, MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA.1 Feminist graphic narratives, experimental and accessible, will play an important role in defining feminisms that "could provide a model for a politically conscious yet post-avant-garde theory and practice" (Felski 2000,187). I use "graphic narrative," instead of the more common term "graphic novel," because the most gripping works coming out now, from men and women alike, claim their own historicity-even as they work to destabilize standard narratives of history.3 Particularly, there is a significant yet diverse body of nonfiction graphic work that engages with the subject either in extremis or facing brutal experience. In much American women's work, autobiographical investigations of childhood, the body, and (traumatic) sex-speciously understood as private, all-too-individual topoiare a central focus. Yet whether or not the exploration of extremity takes place on a world-historical stage (as in, say, the work of Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman), or on a stage understood as the private sphere (as in, say, the work of Alison Bechdel or Phoebe Gloeckner) should not affect how we understand these graphic narratives as political: the representation of memory and testimony, for example, key issues here, function in similar ways across a range of nonfiction work through the expansivity of the graphic narrative form, which makes the snaking lines of history forcefully legible. I am interested in bringing the medium of comics-its conventions, its violation of its conventions, what it does differently-to the forefront of conversations about the political, aesthetic, and ethical work of narrative. The field of graphic narrative brings certain constellations to the table: hybridity and autobiography, theorizing trauma in connection to the visual, textuality that takes the body seriously. I claim graphic narratives, as they exhibit these interests, "feminist," even if they appear discrete from an explicitly feminist context. Further, I argue that the complex visualizations that many graphic narrative works undertake require a rethinking of the dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that have tended to characterize recent trauma theory-as well as a censorship-driven culture at large. Unquestionably attuned to the political, these works fundamentally turn on issues of the ethical, in Lynn Huffer's important sense of the ethical question as "how can the other reappear at the site of her inscriptional effacement?" (2001, 3). I am interested in this notion of ethics as it applies to autobiographical graphic narrative: what does it mean for an author to literally reappear-in the form of a legible, drawn body on the page-at the site of her inscriptional effacement? Graphic narratives that bear witness to authors' own traumas and those of others materially retrace inscriptional effacement; they reconstruct and repeat in order to counteract. It is useful to understand the retracing work of graphic narratives as ethical repetitions (of censored scenarios). …

Transgressive and Transformative Gendered Sexual Practices and White Privileges: The Case of the Dyke/Trans BDSM Communities

Abstract: In this essay I explore the personal-political pleasures and limits of transgressing and transforming cultural/social/political categories of hierarchy through embodied, sexualized practices. To do so I analyze how dyke/ trans BDSM practitioners privilege the practice of transgressing and transforming gender boundaries by neglecting or marginalizing the conscious engagement with racial transgressions and transformations.1 In the essay I draw on my empirical study on dyke/trans-inclusive and queer BDSM communities. EXPLORING AND TRANSGRESSING BOUNDARIES THROUGH BDSM PRACTICES The frame for playfully engaging with and transgressing social hierarchies and norms, cultural taboos, and personal boundaries within BDSM is the construction of a social space (Schutz and Luckmann 1979, 48 f.) that is experienced as a safe space (Matt, Scout, Terry, United States, Tony, Germany), "playground" (Connie, Germany) or "field for experimentation" (Jonas, Europe).2 What qualifies the space as safe for playing and experimenting is in part general BDSM standards and characteristics, such as negotiating and establishing consensuality; communicating, respecting, and pushing boundaries; dramatizing and thus making visible and debatable power relations and stereotypes; emphasizing emotional and physical intensity in sexuality; and translating sexual fantasies into reality, most notably through role play. Yet the pushing of individual and sociocultural boundaries and the quest for intense bodily and psychological experiences also situates BDSM practices in a complex and sometimes paradoxical matrix of danger and safety: the risky nature of some BDSM practices necessitated the implementation of safety measures and ethics in the community in the first place.3 A frame of safety and consensuality ensured by certain commonly accepted standards of behavior simultaneously is exactly what enables some individuals to explore BDSM practices, while for others it takes off the edge or thrill by making things too safe and sterile when it is exactly the inherent risks or dangers that make this path worthwhile or sexy. The white bisexual femme Anya (Europe) considers BDSM an emotionally dangerous path in that one can never foresee what feelings certain acts might trigger, but like many other BDSM practitioners, she values transgression of one's own limits as a chance to grow. Indeed, for some of my interview partners the main incentive to practice BDSM is to explore and get to know one's own boundaries or push/transgress them, or both, within a framework of negotiated consent. Another great motivation for queers and trans people to engage in BDSM is that in contrast to everyday life, in BDSM spaces one can consciously choose and negotiate roles and identities for play. Therefore, the participants may agree upon the gender, race, age, class, or status one chooses for a scene in a consensual manner, and in this sense BDSM has the potential to become the playground Connie refers to. Additionally, the dyke+ community excludes eis men, straight BDSM practitioners and vanilla people who might have prejudices against grown-ups who love to play in this way or might not be able to cope with queer sexualities.4 As the white pansexual genderqueer femme Neila (Germany) points out, it creates a space that is perceived as devoid of predefined power relations in regard to gender and sexuality, if not in regard to other social power structures such as race or class. Therefore, most people who move in (and sometimes out) of the dyke+ BDSM communities share the view that "SM provides a safe space for people to fuck with their gender and also for their gender identity to be respected" and that gender is "not at all based on biology, because there are lots of people who don't identify as boys in their everyday life, but within SM context they'll be boys" (Matt), which sets this community apart from the gay male and straight BDSM communities as well as the vanilla dyke/ lesbian communities (Hale 2003). …

Transgender without Organs?: Mobilizing a Geo-Affective Theory of Gender Modification

Abstract: 1977, Halifax, Nova Scotia. My parents will work in their hometown, Halifax, until they save enough money to move to the country: not the neopastoral country of idyllic retirement, leisure, or quaintness, hut rather a place of quietude, crops, and the moral high ground that (at least reportedly) makes the country such a good place to raise kids. But just now, my mother works in the emergency room of the Halifax Infirmary, has recently married my father, and remembers having had a crush on Billy Conway in high school. Billy comes by Outpatients almost biweekly, and receives a day of psychiatric treatment when he asks the sympathetic but distant doctor for a sex change. One day, Billy arrives with his severed penis wrapped in a Kleenex, is made to dwell slightly longer in the psych ward before once again being released; he then promptly hangs himself in his boarding room in the city's North End. Soon after, when Billy's former doctor plans to marry an ex-nun (dyke?) he knows, a man who claims to be the doctor's lover arrives in the emergency room after his own suicide attempt. The doctor comes out as gay, but dies a year later of a then unfathomable virus. The infirmary closed in 1998 and was demolished in 2005, after Ron Russell, the minister of transportation and public works, condemned the building as "unsafe and unusable." When the ruggedly boyish character Moira debuted in season three of Showtime's (in)famous program The L Word, many of us working-class, rural, or butch dykes finally undid the collective knot in our boxers. Moira's impromptu move from Skokie to Los Angeles coincided with hir transsexual awakening, however, and s/he transitions to become "Max" in subsequent episodes. Relocating from Illinois to California puts Moira not only literally but also figuratively in different states: of mind, of identity, and of desire. The queer pilgrimage to the city is a far from innovative motif, and even in theories that are attuned to the role of place in queer life, the role of the rural is presumed to be inconsequential. For instance, Jay Prosser (1998) claims that narratives of pre- and post-operative transsexuality belie their authors' nostalgia for bodily homes that never existed, a style of feeling that not only shores up the power we attribute to hominess but also traces on our bodies a one-way journey home. As this model configures gender modification as a safe return rather than a risky exploit or experiment in embodied selfhood, Prosser finds relief in the "transgender ambivalence" (177) he finds in the narratives of non-operative gender-variant writers. Their ambivalence towards place, he argues, reflects and generates their nonteleological orientation to practices of gender modification. For both varieties of trans life, styles of affect are constitutive technologies of embodiment; how one is moved emotionally informs and illustrates the mobility of one's gender and one's home. Even in the transgender texts Prosser analyzes, however, the reader encounters linear and one-way trips from the country to the city supplemented, at best, with a short trip or two back to the protagonist's hometown. As an (albeit far more interesting) forerunner to The L Word's Max, Leslie Feinberg's character Jess in Stone Butch Blues moves from "the desert" (15) to Buffalo and eventually to New York City, while the protagonist of her other novel, Drag King Dreams, lives out her days in this same urban center. The many representations of Brandon Teena's life (especially in Boys Don't Cry) work in tandem with such representations of urban queer freedom, attributing Brandon's murder to regressive, purportedly rural, attitudes that are seldom imagined as characteristics of urban communities. Philosophical and political accounts of queerness all too often corroborate these valorizations of the urban; Kath Weston describes and decries the "Great Gay Migration" to the city (1995, 253), while Douglas Victor Janoff suggests in Pink Blood: Homophobic Violence in Canada that "smaller communities. …

Expecting Bodies: The Pregnant Man and Transgender Exclusion from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act

Abstract: EXPECTING BODIES: THE PREGNANT MAN AND TRANSGENDER EXCLUSION FROM THE EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACT In April 2008, news about an Oregon man's impending parenthood spawned a media tsunami across the United States and even internationally. "Man Is Six Months Pregnant," reported CBS news. "The Pregnant Man Speaks Out," announced People magazine as it hyped the first published show-all pictures. "Pregnant Man Is Feeling Swell," punned the New York Post. ABC news highlighted his television debut in its story "'It's My Right to Have Kid,' Pregnant Man Tells Oprah." "She's Pregnant, but She's a Man," headlined the Sydney Morning Herald. "Pregnant, yes-but not a man," huffed an editorialist in the International Herald Tribune. The riveting "pregnant man" lead drew readers and viewers further into the story. It was usually in the second paragraph that authences were provided with an explanation. The pregnant man was Thomas Beatie, a transgender man who had had "top" surgery and been on hormone therapy but had stopped taking testosterone in anticipation of getting pregnant. A quick and unscientific survey of the blogosphere indicates that the news was met with disbelief, curiosity, revulsion, annoyance, indifference, and, less often, celebration. Some bloggers felt that "she" was still a woman; others thought transitioning should mean Beatie had forfeited his right to give birth; still others (usually women) expressed annoyance at all the attention the first "pregnant man" was getting. A small proportion seemed to have no problem getting their mind around the idea. The story originally came to light at the end of March, when Beatie published a first-person account in the Advocate, a Time-like weekly magazine marketed to the U.S. gay community. In that essay, Beatie describes the travails he and his wife went through as they tried to find medical professionals who would work with them. Some refused to treat Beatie because of their religious beliefs; one physician told Beatie he would have to shave his beard; a third consulted with his hospital's ethics board and then turned him away (Beatie 2008). For trans people in the United States, much of Beatie's narrative resonated with their own experience. While it is rare, but not unheard of in trans communities, for people who have transitioned to give birth, his larger story of discrimination in the health care industry is depressingly familiar. T. Benjamin Singer has studied the inability of many medical professionals to provide appropriate care to people whose bodies somehow exceed conventional expectations. He examines the "terror" engendered by the unknown through a frame he labels the "transgender sublime," which he describes as the "conceptual limit to a service-provider's ability to recognize the legibility and meanings of trans identities and bodies" (2006, 616). The "common sense" of gender says that birth sex, gender identity, and the secondary sex characteristics that later develop will all be in alignment. But the histories, spatial arrangements, and physical terrains of trans people's bodies can confound conventional expectations. Some bodies are modified through hormones, various types of gender reassignment surgeries, or both, to produce bodies culturally commensurate with gender identities. In those cases, the perceived incongruence comes only from knowing the history of that individual's body. Other bodies, however, have unexpected configurations in their particular geographiesfor example, breasts with penises for some, male chests with vaginas in others-that produce a dissonance. (This dissonance, to be clear, belongs not to the trans body but to those gazers who have conventional gender expectations.) The more easily read and specific physical terrains of bodies, such as the presence or absence of facial hair, baldness, or patterns of musculature, can add a third layer of potential contradiction. (Ironically, these configurations of geography and terrain often are determined by one's lack of access to medical care. …

The Things We Cannot Say: Witnessing the Trauma-tization of Abortion in the United States

Abstract: What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.-Muriel Rukeyser, "Kathe Kollwitz" "Can you tell me what really happens at an abortion clinic?" My interviewer shifts forward, careful not to jar the camera she has leveled at me. It's a question I've been asked many times. I began working part time at an abortion clinic in 1996. In 2000, I began speaking to small groups-classes, student organizations, feminist organizations-about clinic work, and in 2003 I began researching U.S. abortion politics. Yes, I probably could tell her what really happens at a clinic, but I don't. Although a part of me wants to tell her that the patients at the clinic are women like her, like her mother, like me, that they come to us for help with mundane situations more often than with horror stories, I don't, because I am being recorded, and I am afraid. Instead, I ask her to be more specific. "Tell me about the really tough cases," she urges. She's already confessed that someone she is close to was conceived during rape, so I suspect that she wants to hear about women who live with violence and undergo abortion. This is a politically necessary narrative about abortion in the United States; often, pro-choice activists argue correctly that laws that limit (or ban) abortion revictimize women impregnated during rape, incest, and domestic violence. Careful not to violate patient confidentiality, I tell her about my relatively infrequent experiences with rape victims at the clinic. Why am I reluctant to talk about the majority of my clinic experiences? It would be disingenuous to deny that I fear that the common stories would disappoint my interlocutor. Each week I do intake medical history screenings and peer counseling sessions for two to four patients at the clinic. For approximately twelve to forty patients a week, I act as surgical advocate, standing next to the women as they have their abortions, coaching them through the procedure ("Now you may feel another dilation cramp; take a deep breath and blow it out") or distracting them with small talk if they prefer, proffering cool washcloths for their foreheads, basins in which to vomit, or my hand to be squeezed. Each of these women has shared a decision-making narrative during our screening process, and many retell those narratives to me while waiting to see the doctor or during their surgeries. Most of these narratives center around women's struggles with the ordinary-and, simultaneously, monumental-details of life: managing family economics, negotiating work and child care, setting priorities, and planning for the future. Not long ago, a coworker estimated that I have acted as a surgical advocate in more than seven hundred abortions. Usually the patients and their narratives stay with me for a few weeks at most and then begin to blend into a kind of abortion chorus in my memory. Often a patient will say to me, "You were here for my last abortion, too," and I smile, nod, and say, "I hope I was helpful to you," because I don't remember her abortion. The patient narratives that stay with me longer are the rarer or more traumatic situations. The stories of aborting fetuses conceived during rape or because of fetal anomaly and the narratives of forty-twoyear-old cancer sufferers and frightened thirteen-year-olds do not merge into that chorus in the same way. These stories are easier to remember, and auditors tend to respond to them with sympathy and support, another reason for my reluctance to share the more common situations. From my experiences talking about my clinic work, I have determined that there is a hierarchy of abortion narratives from a prochoice political perspective. There are abortion narratives that are considered politically necessary to tell (rape/incest/domestic violence victims' difficulty in obtaining abortion services, clinic personnel's struggles with antiabortion protesters, the risks of illegal abortion to women's health and welfare). …

Trans/Bolero/Drag/Migration: Music, Cultural Translation, and Diasporic Puerto Rican Theatricalities

Abstract: Bolero is a music of seduction. Wong Kar-wai knows it well, and that is why boleros accompany Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung extradiegetically as they become desperate lovers in Wong's In the Mood for Love (2000), a nostalgic film set in 1960s Hong Kong and interlaced with classic Latin American songs, interpreted by none other than Nat King Cole in a heavily accented Spanish. A movie for the new millennium, marked by its postmodern vanguardist style, but at the same time profoundly conservative, as Stephen Teo (2001) points out in relation to its traditional melodramatic romantic plot; a film in Cantonese and Shanghainese, with a soundtrack performed by an African American heartthrob well known for conquering many hearts, here and there.1 Wong's attraction to all things Latin American is well known. Earlier, in his deceivingly titled 1997 film Happy Together, the director had presented Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung as two melancholy gay male Hong Kong expatriates in Buenos Aires whose amorous travails anticipate those of In the Mood for Love. Among the first images in Happy Together is a stunning aerial shot of the imposing Iguazu waterfalls, accompanied by the music of the Brazilian Caetano Veloso, singing not in Portuguese, but in Spanish, as he does in his album Fina estampa. This linguistic gesture is reproduced by the Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar - a faithful lover of the bolero and of Latin American songs - in Talk to Her, of 2002, where we see a Spanish lady bullfighter and her male Argentinean reporter friend listening to Caetano, who sings "Cucurrucucu Paloma" in Spanish before their eyes. It is noticeable that it is the same huapango in the Spanish film as that in Wong's movie - a song by the Zacatecan composer Tomas Mendez that was immortalized by the great Lola Beltran. But here it is the androgynous Caetano, who years before had openly declared his attraction to a young, sun-drenched, male Bahian surfer in his song "O leaozinho" (The Little Lion), the same Brazilian singer whose large musical production is marked by ambiguity and sexual/gender games, as Cesar Braga-Pinto (2002) has observed; the same Caetano who sang in English, with Lila Downs, in Julie Taymor's 2002 film Frida, in which the grande dame of female masculine androgyny Chavela Vargas also appeared.2 In "Cucurrucucu," Caetano sings of a lover's lament for his absent love, crying, suffering, singing, moaning, passing through hunger, and finally dying of "mortal passion," after which his soul turns into a bird-love and death, tied together by the musical form. Accompanied by Caetano and the tango, the homosexual lovers of Happy Together reconstruct their lives as fleeting immigrants in Argentina and become local in their passion for futbol (soccer), mate (the herbal infusion), and beef, although, as Francine Masiello points out, the process is marked by the disjunctures experienced by Asian migrant workers, suffering from linguistic alienation and economic poverty, in the Southern Cone (2001, 141-43). The homoerotic passion itself is mediated by the dance in which the protagonists wordlessly engage in the privacy of their small rented room: a dance similar to that of Salma Hayek (in the character of Frida) and Ashley Judd (playing Tina Modotti) in a scene from Frida in which the two women dance while Lila Downs sings "Alcoba Azul," with the difference that in the latter, their public watches and desires them in silence. This musical passion is no coincidence: the tango, in many erotic and sentimental ways, is the Buenos Airean equivalent of the Mexican-Caribbean bolero, of the Portuguese fado, of the Southern blues, and of many other genres producing explicit songs of passion, as Iris Zavala (2000) suggests in El bolero: Historia de un amor. All these twentieth-century musical forms, clear markers of modernity (and of its inherent contradictions), are intercrossed with a profound desire for the impossible, for the perfect love: the longing for the painful recognition of that which is beyond reach. …

Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Abstract: Alison Bechdel's 2006 memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, makes a strong and explicit claim for the power of graphic narrative as witness. Employing the straightforward visual style developed over more than twenty years as creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, in Fun Home Bechdel explores her relationship with her father, Bruce, who died when she was in college. Although his death was declared an accidenthe was hit by a truck while working outdoors near their family's home in rural Pennsylvania-Bechdel is convinced it was a suicide, a sign of his deep unhappiness. The event occurs shortly after she comes out to her parents as a lesbian, an announcement that is followed by the revelation that her father, too, has struggled with his sexuality. In the memoir, Bechdel seeks to understand the connections between her father's life and her own and to work through the trauma that can accompany queer identity. Created in the shadow of a father who "used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not" (2006a, 16), however, Fun Home bears witness not only to Bruce Bechdel's trauma and its effect on his family, but also to the artist's effort to claim the authority to represent their story.1 Bechdel's comic style may at first seem almost "invisible" behind her exploration of other mediums, particularly photography and literature.2 Photographs and texts are critical to her effort to uncover her family's history, and she relies on them extensively in structuring Fun Home. Hillary Chute notes that a family photograph drawn by Bechdel appears at the beginning of every chapter (Bechdel 2006b, 1009), and these are carefully paired with phrases from works of literature relevant to this story of two English-teacher parents and their well-read daughter. In this context, what Bechdel has called the "usual cartoony style" she uses to draw most of the book seems to exist in service to the "real" documents and images it is used to explore (1009). Yet, as Ann Cvetkovich observes in her essay for this issue, the contribution of literature and photographs to understanding the story of a life are interrogated within the memoir, their usefulness as documentary evidence or narrative models held up to careful scrutiny (see pages 116 and 122, this volume). Photographs prove difficult to decipher, while overidentification with literature by and about other people threatens to throw lives off course. By framing each of her chapters with words and images that bear a complex relationship to each other, Bechdel reminds us that it is in the space between existing visual images and familiar storylines where we make meaning of our individual lives. Here, that is precisely the space described by comics. And while Fun Home casts doubt on our ability to interpret the visual and textual worlds around us, it also invests a particular faith in its author's chosen medium. Cvetkovich rightly identifies Fun Home as a work of what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemory (see page 113, this volume), a term for how the memory of trauma belonging to one generation can shape the memories of the next (Hirsch 1997, 22). In her ongoing study of postmemorial visual art, Hirsch has stressed the importance of "forms of identification that are nonappropriative," through which artists may communicate the memory of transmitted trauma without claiming to know it fully (2002, 88). This is accomplished most successfully, Hirsch maintains, by work that "allows for a historical withholding that does not absorb the other" but is also able to "expand the circle of postmemory in multiple, inviting, and open-ended ways" (88).3 Consistent with these ideas, Cvetkovich shows how Bechdel admits to being unable to truly know her father's trauma and thereby preserves the specificity of his story. Additionally, however, Bechdel relies upon the visual element of comics to bring the reader into her complex family history. As Hirsch has argued in Family Frames, "The individual subject is constituted in the space of the family through looking" (1997, 9), and throughout Fun Home, Bechdel highlights moments of perception that offer illuminating forms of knowledge crucial to her development as a woman, a lesbian, and an artist both within and outside the visual field proscribed by her father's watchfulness. …

Cutting It Off: Bodily Integrity, Identity Disorders, and the Sovereign Stakes of Corporeal Desire in U.S. Law

Abstract: DESCARTES THE WANNABE: AMPUTATION AND LIBERAL PHILOSOPHY In the Discourse on Method and Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, Descartes prefaces his much-famed cogito with a curious series of physical acts. Before announcing that he thinks, and therefore he is, Descartes first dismembers himself, asking what of his "I" would remain were he to amputate his ears, his arms, his eyes (Dayan 1995). Descartes concludes: "Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind" (Descartes 1986, 59). Even as Descartes degrades, discards, and dismisses physical experience in relation to human subjectivity, his "discovery" of a first principle ofthat humanity nonetheless depends on his traversement and modification of a corporeality that he calls his own. Invoking a prior "whole" body that properly belongs to or lies under the domain of his "I," Descartes arrives at his enlightenment through a fantasy of his ability to discorporate, take apart that supposed prior whole. His sovereignty of self follows from a sovereignty of corpus. Or, if a regime of sovereignty might bleed into a regime of property, his self becomes his own (Best 2004). In considering the political and inherited stakes of what makes a body one's own or sovereign, of what makes a body count as whole, and of the privileges that counting as whole might bring, I am writing this essay squarely on the backs of many infinite others. I do so in the hope of building an intellectual practice that responds to the exploitative, violent connections between the juridical sovereignty of the U.S. state and the enforcement of corporeal "wholeness" or "integrity." For example, Nikki Sullivan and Susan Stryker have an important forthcoming article on this very subject. Focusing on self-demand amputation and transsexual surgery, Sullivan and Stryker trace the concept of bodily integrity through histories of the sovereign in order to show how urgendy we have been missing a critique of "integrity" as an enabling fiction that works to legitimize all-too-material distributions of capital, property, and freedom in a contemporary sphere. In the end, Descartes, stripped of his limbs and eyes and ears at his own volition, triumphandy proclaims that he has become what he has always truly been, "a thinking thing" (Descartes 1986). The "thinking" aspect aside, I am struck by the ease with which Descartes elides into reification, into a thing rather than subject "I" with which he began. For Descartes, the assertion and imagining of agency that allows him to become an individuated subject also allows him to throw it all away, to become not a subject but a thing. In this sense, his self-amputation, his musculation into thing-ness marks the apotheosis and exemplary state of his newly minted subjecthood. How to read this moment, then, knowing full well that in the United States, the making of people-as-things was the juridical prerogative of hundreds of years of African chattel slavery, of laws that guaranteed that wives would function as the property of husbands and girls as the property of fathers (Best 2004; Farley 2004; Johnson 2003; Pateman 1988)? It seems easy to say that the problem here might be a notion of liberal consent, or agency - that what matters is whether "you" or "I" make me into a thing (Johnson 2003). Rather than attempt to scale the philosophical peak of Mount Agency direcdy, however, in this essay I will attempt to make a series of small cuts and observations into the sexed and gendered politics of bodily integrity in contemporary U.S. law. In doing so, I am leaving aside much work on the particularly raced character of U.S. state sovereignty, and on how the connections between bodily integrity and U.S. state sovereignty continue to organize around white supremacy. Here I am mindful of Timothy Mitchell's writing on the process by which writers fetishize, reify, and unify state effects and processes through the repetition of "the state" as a literary and substantive conceit. …

Reconstructing the Transgendered Self as a Muslim, Nationalist, Upper-Class Woman: The Case of Bulent Ersoy

Abstract: Winter of 2007. Another Sunday night, a new episode of Popstar Alaturka, a Turkish version of Pop Idol. Minority and human rights activist Hrant Dink has recently been assassinated by an ultranationalist youth and Turkey is experiencing one of the few notable instances of spontaneous collective action in the past two decades.1 It has been only days since tens of thousands of people marched in the streets, chanting, "We are all Armenians!" to express their sympathy for Dink and the Armenian community. Hence, the TV show opens with the popular Armenian folk song "Sari Gelin"-which, later in the evening, will lead to a rather long and interesting monologue by one of the jury members. This member is a glamorous lady in her fifties, wearing a haute couture dress revealing her long legs and shapely breasts. She expresses her discontent with the slogan "We are all Armenians!" Underlining the fact that she is "the Muslim daughter of Muslim parents," she emphasizes that no one can ever make her say she is Armenian or Christian. Claiming that it would be more acceptable if the slogan had been "We are all Hrant," she deems it intolerable for a Muslim person to say that s/he is Armenian-and therefore Christian. But who is this glamorous woman who seems in desperate need to underline her Muslim, nationalist identity? For readers who take an even slight interest in Turkish popular culture, the answer would be quite obvious. The person is Bulent Ersoy: a self-proclaimed expert on classical Ottoman music-though a singer of the popular genre arabesk-one of the first Turkish men to undergo sex change and the very first one to ask for a female passport, and a hater of transgendered prostitutes. Ersoy has been an extremely popular public figure in Turkey since the early 1970s and is very likely to remain so. Following Simone de Beauvoir's claim that "one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman," in this essay I seek to trace how Bulent Ersoy has "become" a Muslim, nationalist, upper-class woman. In doing so, I aim to understand the strategies that define spaces of abjection reserved for transgendered individuals in Turkey in the post- 1980s and examine the tactics for survival that are available to them.2 I will try to explore Ersoy's personal history in the context of events in Turkey since the 1970s and discuss the cultural atmosphere and dynamics of gender in the country in the light of Ersoy's narrative. A YOUNG, FLAMBOYANT MALE SINGER The renowned singer of classical Turkish music Bulent Ersoy was born as Bulent Erkoc in 1952 in Istanbul. Named after a soccer player, Bulent was the only son of an urban middle-class family. He was introduced to classical Turkish music by his grandfather, who played the zither, and his grandmother, who played the lute. Shown to have talent, he took private lessons with acclaimed musicians at an early age and later attended the conservatory. While he was still a student, he began singing professionally under the stage name Bulent Ersoy-the name Erkoc, meaning "brave ram," was probably too masculine for this rather androgynous young man, so it was replaced by Ersoy, "brave lineage." Ersoy is also easier on the tongue. Ersoy's first record came out in 1971. At that time, nighdife in the big cities, especially Istanbul, mainly consisted of Greek tavernas and nightclubs called gazinos. Those nightclubs provided the middle- and upper-classes with hours-long programs bringing together several singers as well as comedians and belly dancers. There would often be one lead singer, called an assolist, who would take the stage last and sing classical Turkish music. The extremely competitive atmosphere made it difficult to become a lead singer. At the time, many established lead singers sang arabesk, a genre influenced by Turkish folk and Middle Eastern music, that had come out in Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Stokes, one of the leading experts on arabesk, claims that it is "a music inextricably linked with the culture of the gecekondu, literally the "night settlements" which mushroomed around Turkey's large industrial cities after the Menderes government program of rural regeneration in the 1950s produced a large rural labor surplus" (1989, 27). …

Electric Brilliancy: Cross-Dressing Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

Abstract: In 1863, midway through the Civil War, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a local law against cross-dressing that prohibited public appearance "in a dress not belonging to his or her sex" (Revised Orders 1863). That city was not alone in this action: between 1848 and 1900, thirty-four cities in twenty-one states passed laws against cross-dressing, as did eleven additional cities before World War I (Eskridge 1999). Far from being a nineteenth-century anachronism, cross-dressing laws had remarkable longevity and became a key tool for policing transgender and queer communities in the 1950s and 1960s. However, although studies have documented the frequent enforcement of these laws in the midtwentieth century, far less is known about their operations in the nineteenth century, when they were initially passed. In this essay, I examine the legal and cultural history of cross-dressing law in one city - San Francisco - from the 1860s to 1900s. In particular, I explore cross-dressing law's relationship with another nineteenth-century institution that was centrally concerned with cross-gender practices - the dime museum freak show. Focusing on the complex, contradictory, and sometimes unpredictable relationships between legal regulation, cultural fascination, and gender transgressions, I develop three main arguments. First, I examine the legal work of cross-dressing law, documenting the range of practices criminalized, people arrested, and punishments faced. Observing that the law exclusively targeted public cross-dressing practices, I argue that it did much more than police the types of clothing that "belonged" to each sex; it also used the visible marker of clothing to police the types of people who "belonged" in public space. Second, I explore the relationship between cross-dressing law and a host of other local laws that targeted human bodies as public nuisances. In doing so, I argue that cross-dressing law was not an isolated act of government, exclusively concerned with gender, but one part of a broader regulatory project that was also concerned with sex, race, citizenship, and city space. Finally, I analyze the case of Milton Matson, a female-bodied man who was recruited from a jail cell to appear in a dime museum freak show in 1890s San Francisco. Based on this analysis, I argue that cross-dressing law and the freak show had similar disciplinary effects, producing and policing the boundaries of normative gender, albeit in incomplete ways. A DRESS NOT BELONGING San Francisco's Board of Supervisors did not initially criminalize crossdressing as a distinct offense, but as one manifestation of the broader offense of indecency. The full legal text stated: If any person shall appear in a public place in a state of nudity, or in a dress not belonging to his or her sex, or in an indecent or lewd dress, or shall make any indecent exposure of his or her person, or be guilty of any lewd or indecent act or behavior, or shall exhibit or perform any indecent, immoral or lewd play, or other representation, he should be guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction, shall pay a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars (Revised Orders 1863). In turn, this wide-reaching indecency law was not a stand-alone prohibition, but one part of a new chapter of the municipal codebook, tided Offenses Against Good Morals And Decency, which also criminalized public intoxication, profane language, and bathing in San Francisco Bay without appropriate clothing. Alongside these newly designated crimes, crossdressing was one of the very first "offenses against good morals" to be outlawed in the city. In 1866, the original five-hundred-dollar penalty was revised to a five-hundred-dollar fine or six months in jail; in 1875, it increased to a one-thousand-dollar fine, six months in jail, or both (General Orders 1866, 1875). Despite its roots in indecency law, San Francisco's cross-dressing law soon became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions. …

Judith Herman and Contemporary Trauma Theory

Abstract: Trauma studies constitutes a huge field today, keeping whole armies of theorists-philosophers, literary scholars, and historians as well as clinicians-very busy. There are many reasons for this, starting with the enormous and still growing interest in the Holocaust and other collective historical traumas (the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder, which first entered the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual in 1980, was based largely on symptoms of Vietnam War veterans), and extending to the increased clinical awareness of sexual abuse as a phenomenon of "everyday life" for both adults and children. There exists today both a wide consensus among theorists on a certain definition of trauma, and a strong and sometimes violent debate about specific aspects of trauma, notably as regards its relation to memory. The importance of Judith Herman's work is that she is one of the pioneering clinicians in the field as well as a major player in the theoretical debate. What is the consensus about trauma? Everyone seems to agree that a traumatic event "overwhelmfs] the ordinary human adaptations to life, as Herman puts it. "Unlike commonplace misfortunes," she writes, "traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death" (Herman 1992, 33). A more neurologically based definition would be that a traumatic event-or "traumatic Stressor"-produces an excess of external stimuli and a corresponding excess of excitation in the brain. When attacked in this way, the brain is not able to fully assimilate or "process" the event, and responds through various mechanisms such as psychological numbing, or shutting down of normal emotional responses. Some theorists also claim that in situations of extreme stress, a dissociation takes place: the subject "splits" off part of itself from the experience, producing "multiple personalities" in the process. The diagnosis of MPD (multiple personality disorder) was once very rare, but became quite common for a while in the 1980s and 1990s. Symptoms of MPD, according to clinicians who diagnose it, always indicate earlier trauma, even if-or especially ifthe trauma is not remembered by the patient. This is where we enter the contested territory of trauma theory. The most important subject of debate concerns the relation of trauma to memory and came about as a result of a number of legal cases in the 1980s involving recovered memory of sexual abuse. There are two very hostile camps here, as far as I can see, and both of them are linked in interesting ways to Freud. Members of the first camp, which includes clinicians such as Judith Herman as well as researchers, among them Bessel van der Kolk, believe firmly in the theory of dissociation, which is related to (though not identical with) the concept of repressed memory, or traumatic amnesia. According to this view, the more horrific and prolonged the trauma, the more the subject has a tendency to dissociate and therefore have no conscious memory of the traumatic event. Thus, a child or even an adolescent who is subjected to repeated sexual abuse by a family member may very well not remember it until he or she (the overwhelming majority being girls) enters into therapy as an adult; at that point, the patient may recover memories in a gradual process, sometimes with the help of hypnosis. Only by finally remembering the repressed trauma can the patient move on to recovery, that is, to "mastery" and healing. Judith Herman writes: The patient may not have full recall of the traumatic history and may initially deny such a history, even with careful, direct questioning. . . . If the therapist believes the patient is suffering from a traumatic syndrome, she should share this information fully with the patient. Knowledge is power. The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition. By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. …

Which Half Is Mommy? Tetragametic Chimerism and Trans-Subjectivity

Abstract: Imagine being told by a doctor that a twin, one you never knew you had, exists inside you. It is well known that fraternal twins arise from two fertilized eggs that develop into nonidentical siblings. Less well known is that these two zygotes sometimes overlap and fuse so completely as to develop into one body with two distinct sets of DNA, a phenomenon called tetragametic chimerism (Tippett 1983). We explore how this rare occurrence exposes complex links between understandings of DNA, human subjectivity, and definitions of motherhood. We focus on cases in the United States of two chimeric women, Lydia and Karen, who were subjected to genetic tests for parentage and subsequently deemed by medical authorities not to be the mothers of their children. The stories of these two women offer opportunities to investigate how definitions of motherhood are constructed, legitimized, and contested by and through science. According to Marilyn Strathern (1992), nature does not offer us an adequate basis on which to develop a culturally relevant model for kinship. Nevertheless, Western perceptions of kinship increasingly refer to genetic categorizations of bodies as means for defining legitimate mothers and fathers. Aryn Martin (2007a) suggests that there is something of the self that has "become bound up in cells, in response to a cultural rhetoric of genetic reductionism... facilitated by a broader political shift toward privatization and individual responsibility in the late twentieth century in America and in other advanced liberal states" (222). We outline the foundations that enabled this shift toward valuing genetic makeup as a component of modern citizenship. Specifically, we argue that the process of genetic testing works to publicly legitimate the effectiveness of the test itself while acting to stabilize a narrow and powerful definition of motherhood based on testable biological attributes. We then compare the performative aspects of the chimeric mother with notions of "passing" and offer a consideration of human chimerism as posthuman drag. Finally, we argue that the political implications of the established means used to define legitimate mothers extend beyond the trans-genomic quality of chimeric mothers to inform inquiry into reductionist arguments confronted by transgender parents and their children. For our analysis, we largely focus on the experiences of Lydia and Karen as they are presented in the New England Journal of Medicine, a National Public Radio interview, and a Discovery program with the tide IAm My Own Twin. We conduct a genealogy of the conditions that have led to the momentary unintelligibility of chimeric mothers within a genetic reductionist framework and extend this to other trans phenomena. Throughout the analysis, we apply Foucault's concept of biopower, whereby the chimeric individual undergoes a process of objectification and subjectification within a framework of technoscientific expertise and intervention. INTRODUCING THE MYSTERY The Discovery (2005) documentary first introduces Lydia, a Caucasian single mother with two young children and pregnant with a third, applying to receive welfare aid for her family. Through standard procedure, she and the African American father of her children took requisite blood tests to verify parentage. The lab results reported that the father was a match, but that Lydia could not possibly be the mother of her children. She and her family were subjected to multiple tests, emotional anguish, and accusations that she had obtained her children through illicit means. Even Lydia's father suspected she was not being honest about her conception and pregnancy. Eventually she was accused of welfare fraud and taken to court so that the state could determine parentage and reassign custody of the children accordingly. A tearful Lydia describes dropping her children off to day care with the concern it might be the last day she would see them. Unable to procure a lawyer because of the strength of the DNA evidence against her, she appeared in court alone. …

Transpedagogies: A Roundtable Dialogue

Abstract: Anne Enke, Darcy A. Freedman, Ednie Kaeh Garrison, Jeni Hart, Diana L. Jones, Ambrose Kirby, Jamie Lester, Vic Munoz, Mia Nakamura, Clark A. Pomerleau, Sarah E. VanHooser (Participants) AT THE KITCHEN TABLE (AGAIN) The eleven participants in this roundtable submitted their work for consideration to the editors of this issue of WSQ. Rather than include just one essay from authors, the editors wondered how it would work to include a group of authors who had proposed to tackle trans-focused pedagogical issues within women's studies. The editors invited us to moderate this "textual conversation" with the understanding that one of our mandates was to imagine practical ways to produce this more experimental form. To make space for the multiplications and unexpected convergences to pop out of this dialogue, we adopted the term "transpedagogies" as a coalitional concept that includes transsexual, transgender, and gender/queer pedagogical perspectives. While it is imperfect, we are excited by the outcome, as the results reflect a community effort to create a dialogical space that invites further participation. From our first readings of research-based abstracts, we identified a series of themes through which to frame ideas for how this varied group of participants might be placed in conversation with each other. The themes that emerged were named thus: Feminist Trans-Masculinities/ Femininities; TransCrossings: Cultures and Histories; Transgendering Male Privilege: Transguys in Feminist and Women's Studies; Transdisciplinary Work in the Academy; Making the Body In/Visible in the Classroom; and Transforming Women's Studies. With these themes as a jumping-off point, all the authors and coauthors wrote individual statements grounded in their teaching, scholarship, experiences, and theoretical affiliations. Subsequently, the authors and coauthors provided written shorter responses to two of the statements. And, finally, the authors and coauthors responded briefly to the responses written about their own statements. We compiled everyone's writing and sent the completed piece to all the participants. We then received feedback in the form of questions and suggestions as well as editorial corrections. We took all these and integrated them into the piece. Our guiding theme has been to engage in a conversation that would spark a wider, more diverse and expansive one among scholars, activists, and educators. We hoped to explore the experiences of transgender, transsexual, and gender/queer students and faculty within specific learning environments, such as women's colleges and doctoral programs, as well as the experiences of those teaching and working with variously trans and queer faculty and students. Because of space limitations, the published Transpedagogies Roundtable does not include all the original statements and responses, but the complete piece, including all works cited by the participants, is available online at http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/. DESTABILIZING GENDER IDENTITY Mia Nokamura Western transgender discourse presupposes that everyone has gender identity. As a Japanese, I argue that the concept of gender identity needs to be reconfigured to accommodate our gendered reality and that this will provide a vantage point from which to see where transgender studies intersects with interests of feminist as well as liberal-minded students. The concept of gender identity was introduced in the mid-twentieth century, and it naturally stemmed from the ideology ofthat time. Having examined the contemporary theoretical assumptions that informed the concept initially and looked critically at how it has proliferated in transgender discourse, I have come to believe that gender identity has been nourished indisputably by Western principles of the autonomy of the self (M. Nakamura 2006). In fact, the Japanese did not have a word for identity before the Westernized term was introduced, because there was no indigenous concept of "identity" in the Western sense. …

Perverse Citizenship: Divas, Marginality, and Participation in "Loca-Lization"

Abstract: Ordenanza de Convivencia Ciudadana y Sancion de Infracciones Menores Articulo 1°. Objeto. La presente ordenanza tiene por objeto consolidar las bases de la convivencia ciudadana en el Distrito Metropolitano y ia preservacion de la seguridad, el orden publico, el ambiente y el ornato de la ciudad, . . . y la utilizacion pacifica y armonica de las vias y espacios publicos del Distrito Metropolitano de Caracas. Capitulo I. De las infracciones relativas al debido comportamiento en lugares publicos Articulo 13 (decimotercero). Ofrecimiento de comercio sexual. El que ofrezca servicios de caracter sexual en la via publica, sera sancionado con multa de veinte (20) unidades tributarias, o la realizacion de algunos de los trabajos comunitarios establecidos en el articulo 38 de la presente ordenanza por un lapso de cuarenta y ocho horas. Ordenanza de Convivencia Ciudadana, Caracas, Venezuela Although sex work is not a crime in the Venezuelan penal code, on the streets of Caracas, the Ordenanza de Convivencia Ciudadana is the law of the land.1 These few words, which happily proclaim the terms under which citizens might harmoniously live together, also condemn many women, trans formis tas, and men to live in a daily negotiation, expensive and at times violent, with the agents of the state, in this case, the Policia Metropolitana de Caracas (PM). Convivencia ciudadana (citizenly coexistence) implies a social harmony that respects all citizens as long as they respect the law.2 But some citizens "live together" better than others, and the law always values some existences while marginalizing others. I had to get to know the Ordenanza de Convivencia Ciudadana (or simply ordenanza), and its accompanying definition of "citizenship," to understand the context of Avenida Libertador in Caracas, where dozens of transformistas undertake sex work nightly. I had to get to know the ordinance this way because it helped me understand the structural factors that overdetermine the violence and marginalization that are produced on a daily basis on these streets and upon these bodies. But the truth is that the ordenanza is just a tool for the PM. Before the ordenanza, there was the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes, before that another law, and always Morality, Order, and Good Citizenship. If the ordenanza is struck down tomorrow, the PM will find another way to police these transformistas. When I began my work in Venezuela, I didn't expect to engage with questions of citizenship and civil society. However, as I spent more time in an increasingly polarized political environment where mechanisms of participation and collective action became more and more contested, I began to turn to these words as ways to talk about my concerns.3 There are some sectors of the so-called civil society (sociedad civil) within which I function, specifically, the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and activists to HIV/ AIDS and movements to articulate identity, community, and culture for people of color in the United States. However, the limitations of "civil society," and in particular of NGOs, to respond to the concerns of queer and transgender people of color have informed the skepticism with which I approach such concepts as citizenship and civil society. Rather than approaching the survival of transformistas through political theory, HIV prevention, or the traditions in anthropology that attend to non- Western sexualities and gender systems, I focused my work on bodily and imaginative responses to marginalization through mass media. My fieldwork, in fact, is about these mechanisms and not about what I refer to in this essay as "GLBT civil society." But the distinction between those who see themselves as political actors of el ambiente and those who are automatically excluded (or who exclude themselves) from "political" possibility recurred both in my interviews with members of GLBT civil society in Caracas, and in my work on Avenida Libertador. …

Compulsory Gender and Transgender Existence: Adrienne Rich's Queer Possibility

Abstract: If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women should ever redirect that search; why species survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," originally published in 1980 in Signs and reprinted in numerous publications, immediately unsettled feminist thinking. That the article eventually faded from more recent feminist and queer studies debates has been explained as a result of supposed breaks: between essentialists and poststructuralists, second-wave and next-wave feminists, feminist and queer studies (Hesford 2005, 239). Yet the current interest in Rdch's work especially this particular article - over the past five years seems to suggest a renewed appreciation from a variety of feminisms for the kind of work that Rich was doing in her canonical piece.1 We were delighted to receive an invitation to revisit "Compulsory Heterosexuality" in this WSQ issue on "trans." Although trans issues are not specifically addressed by Rich, we draw our inspiration from the theme of this issue, to read transgender issues back into the piece's theoretical core. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" was devoted to denaturalizing heterosexuality. Rich's attention to the many ways heterosexuality was forced upon women began the job of teasing apart how heterosexuality might be understood as a patriarchal tool of control over women and the ways women - even feminists - reproduced it. At the time, this was a challenging idea for many feminists, and Rich knew it. She compiles irrefutable evidence of heterosexuality's coerced nature: "The female wage scale, the enforcement of middle-class women's 'leisure,' the glamorization of so-called sexual liberation, the withholding of education from women, the imagery of 'high art' and popular culture, the mystification of the 'personal' sphere" (223). But she also admits that "to acknowledge that for women, heterosexuality may not be a 'preference' at all, but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself to be freely and 'innately' heterosexual" (216). Denaturalizing something masked by power as organic, normal, the sign of mature sexuality, and the basic human social unit, was something Rich realized would unsetde many of her readers. Yet these self-identified heterosexual feminists were the very people Rich hoped to bring into solidarity with lesbian interests. The history of next-wave feminist and queer studies shows us that, for the most part, theorists heeded her call, following so much in the path of her critique that those in these and related fields today can take her then-radical claims as baseline assumptions in their work. Leaping then, from these baseline assumptions, we can take Rich's logic into the realm of trans theory and politics. In her denaturalizing of heterosexuality, Rich asked readers to reconsider it as a form of what she termed "male-identification." Coupling male-identification with the abandonment of "female-identified values," Rich seems at first blush to be grounding her argument in a simplistic, biologically based belief in the category "woman." Yet given her project and the conceptual logic of the piece, an idea of static, binary gender doesn't make sense. How can we resolve this seeming contradiction within her argument? …

Humans, Horses, and Hormones: (Trans) Gendering Cross-Species Relationships

Abstract: In this essay I discuss a brief autobiographical text from Dean Kotula's The Phallus Palace, a collection of narratives on aspects of female-to-male transsexual transition (Ken 2002). ' This essay is part of a larger project that engages animal studies to examine how species difference is deployed in demarcating boundaries between humans and other animals and in understanding species difference in the context of long histories of human dominion over, and perhaps longer histories of human intimacy with, animals. The project is equally invested in feminist and queer critiques of normative gender relations and in conventional psychoanalytic narratives of female development, with particular attention paid to cross-species and cross-gender identifications. Animal studies and feminist and queer analyses partner productively in thinking about material and semiotic relations across differences and about related questions of embodiment, subjectivity, and agency. In "Ken," the narrative that I analyze here, the author, Ken, tells a story of how his relationship with his horse was transformed during and by the former's hormonal transition. Ken's story speaks of the experience of transsexual embodiment and also of the experience of cross-species identification and relationality. The narrative combines an exploration of human-equine social relations with the experience of gender crossing, as relayed through Ken's experience of transition and its personal and social ramifications. Ken's reading of his horse's understanding of him as a sexed body locates the horse as representing instinctual and transparent responses. In Ken's reading, his horse, unnamed and decontextualized, acknowledges Ken as a natural being, a man, as marked by Ken's smell, over and above the technological mediation of the transition itself. In his story of transition, Ken is saying that nature, read as biology, determines culture (how bodies are socially gendered), while acknowledging the use of technology to alter nature/biology to make his body legible to both self and society. Through a cross-species relationship, Ken enlists his horse as a participant in the confirmation, and therefore maintenance, of hegemonic economies of difference, in a humanist employment of animality to confirm humanity, and in the phallocentric employment of woman to define man. How to make sense of this complicated tangle of reasoning? To begin, I identify key points in Ken's narrative of his relationship with his horse and how they relate to his experience of hormonal transition. Ken's horse proves instrumental in helping Ken to understand the embodied changes of transition and how these changes are perceived and received by human and nonhuman animals. The narrative plots questions of species difference by applying cross-species biological essentialism as a way of foregrounding the imperative of transsexual transition. The writing is framed by Ken's own trans-species and transsexual experiences, and, while functioning to affirm the personal and social validity of Ken's transition, it reduces the intersectional histories and materialities that engender this particular cross-species relationship and simplifies the questions of ethical responsibility that necessarily arise within the relationship. I then go on to suggest other ways in which the cross-species relationship might be translated to better account for the agential participation of both man and horse. The emphasis is on how narratives of relationality, with the self and others, can translate into lived relations and the concrete material consequences of these relations as they validate the subjective and agential participation of both human and nonhuman interactants. In asking how bodies become articulate within and across species difference through mutually transformative processes of domestication, I consider how nonhuman agency and subjectivity can be represented to more fully honor the diversity and specificity of bodies, identities, and beings that constitute the various worlds we inhabit as social, political, and cultural actors. …

Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic

Abstract: Translation is not merely an act of transferring information, but a process of knowledge production Thus, the idea of translating the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (EWIC) is an extension of EWIC itself, being a project conscious of the importance of knowledge production in the field of gender and women's studies and Islamic cultures1 Suad Joseph, the general editor of EWIC, expresses in her introduction the editorial board's awareness of the significance and consequences of producing encyclopedic knowledge about women and Islamic cultures EWIC was originally published in English with the aim of presenting state-of-the-art research in gender and women's studies and Islamic cultures to an English-speaking readership Moreover, the authors taking part in the production of EWIC are a group of specialized researchers in this area, who, though coming from various cultural backgrounds and disciplines, share an interest in women's studies and specialize in different parts of the world dominated by Islamic cultures The project attempts to define and present examples of specialized and crucial studies in this field, with the prospect of producing knowledge and encouraging novel and continuous research The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (E WIC) is an ongoing seven-volume interdisciplinary and cross-cultural project Joseph, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, worked with an advisory board of scholars and academics specialized in women's studies and Islamic societies, as well as a group of associate editors, in addition to the contributors The associate editors were each responsible for a specific region: Afsaneh Najmabadi (Turkey, Iran, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia as far as the borders of Mongolia, and the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union), Julie Peteet and Seteney Shami (the Arab countries in the Gulf, Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa, as well as Israel, Andalusian Spain, and Europe under the Ottoman Empire), Jacqueline Siapno (China, Mongolia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Asian Pacific and Australia), and Jane I Smith (Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas) Volume 1 alone includes forty-six thematic entries and twenty-two disciplinary entries, created by specialists-who, with very few exceptions, are women academics affiliated with American and British universities (Joseph 2003, xxi-xlix) THE TRANSLATION OF EWIC INTO ARABIC The idea of translating this encyclopedia into other languages, starting with Arabic, highlights several points First, it reveals the interest held by the editorial board and the publishing house in the wide dissemination of this work, beyond the boundaries of an English-speaking readership, to the extent of providing a free online Arabic edition Even given the worldwide lack of equality in access to the Internet, the initiative of providing EWIC for free to Arabic-speaking researchers and scholars is in itself a step that can only be appreciated and valued by those living in the Arab world who experience or recognize the inability of most academic institutions to provide such a resource via their institutions The requirements of annual subscription fees and Internet connection costs exceed the capacities of many (if not most) researchers and academics in the Arab world We hope that the online edition is a step preceding a low-cost print edition of EWIC in Arabic Second, beginning with Arabic in the project of translating the encyclopedia grows out of an awareness of Arab researchers' need for access to this work, in view of the fact that English, in the Arab world, is a language known by only a small number of researchers, and perfected by an even smaller minority, as the majority's educational backgrounds are Arabic based Therefore, an Arabic version of EWIC is, for many (if not most) readers, their only means of access to state-of-the-art studies and research in the fields of women's and Islamic cultures …

Everyday Atrocities and Ordinary Miracles, or Why I (Still) Bear Witness to Sexual Violence (But Not Too Often)

Abstract: Seventeen years after having been jumped from behind, beaten, raped, strangled into unconsciousness, and left for dead at the bottom of a ravine in a rural area in the south of France, I still—as I just did—occa- sionally bear witness to the assault. Why do I continue to tell this story? It certainly isn't because I enjoy doing so: at this point, telling the story is neither therapeutic nor retraumatizing. Frankly, after telling this story hundreds of times, to perhaps a million people (if one counts the readers of the Sunday New York Times), I'm bored by it. 1 But I continue to tell it, albeit with decreasing frequency, because doing so is bearing witness to something much larger, and much worse, than what happened to me per- sonally: namely, the atrocity of widespread and ongoing gender-based violence against women around the world. I also mention it, somewhat paradoxically, to reassure other victims of sexual violence that I've moved beyond it and don't feel the need to talk about it regularly any- more. Looking back on the several years before I was attacked, I see now that I was living a charmed life. I was newly married and had a full-time job I loved, teaching philosophy at Dartmouth, and enough energy and drive to teach additional courses at both New York University and Princeton, while sitting in on law school classes at NYU, taking tap dancing lessons in SoHo and musical theater classes in Greenwich Vil- lage, and singing jazz occasionally with friends in piano bars in the city. One term I managed to teach five days a week at Dartmouth and still spend every weekend in New York City with my partner going to cabarets and jazz concerts and Sunday night swing dancing at the Cat Club. And, then, wham! I lost it all, just that suddenly, and for a very long time, but—I can now report—not forever. In spite of my having

Family Hair Looms

Abstract: heirloom-2. something having special monetary or sentimental value or significance that is handed on either by or apart from formal inheritance from one generation to another.-Webster's Third International Dictionary In the last years of his life, my father's rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side became the repository of what had been his lawyer's office in the glamorous Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan. The office itself was small and chaotic, though my father claimed that he knew where everything was. My father's attachment to his office and the papers that filled it was intense, but at some point in the 1980s, the combination of his worsening Parkinson's disease and the economic demands of the law firm from whom he rented his space forced him to give up his name on the door. The Redwelds, the distinctive rust-colored containers of legal files, moved uptown. When I inherited my father's possessions after his death, I found, tucked away in his dresser drawers and in the Redwelds that I thought contained the history of his legal career, the unsorted memorabilia of our family: random items from past and forgotten lives-cemetery receipts for the upkeep of graves, report cards, loose photographs of unidentified subjects, magazines, newspaper articles, telegrams, letters in Yiddish, and the mysterious locks of hair that I allude to in my title. What was the point of my keeping what, on the face of it, was precious neither to me nor to anyone else-unless, through another kind of editorial decision, I could figure out whether there was something I could learn from what, as an academic, I called my archive, my material. Material for what? For a narrative I would some day construct about a family that had vanished without a trace. Or maybe just the opposite. This family, over generations, had left traces-in objects, in documents, and finally in me. What was missing was a story that would make sense of the silence that surrounded the scraps of information I had gathered, a story that would bear witness in the place of the absent voices. If I haven't already done so in a gesture of efficiency, at my death someone will toss this entire legacy into a black trash bag and it will all vanish down the garbage chute of history, completing the disappearance already in progress. But perhaps if I convert these objects into words, I can counter the vanishing act. I can share my objects and reinsert them into the wider history to which they belong. This is because my story branches into a network of narratives both characterized by their incompleteness and their interrelatedness. The story I'm trying to tell is both individual and collective. For example, if you click onto the web site jewishgen.org you can see, through criss-crossing tracks of virtual connection, the attempts of many other third-generation descendants of an Eastern European world, shattered at the end of the nineteenth century into the shards and scraps of diaspora, to make sense of a fractured past. The objects-in particular, the locks of hair-photographs, and documents in my personal safekeeping for which I am seeking an interpretive framework take on meaning in relation to a world to which I have no direct access beyond their limited material dimensions. My objects bear witness, as it were, to the existence of a community to which I belong only remotely, but that I can invoke when I insert them into this historical context. The hair was stored in a once-elegant cardboard box. I believe that after my grandmother's death in 1954, my father kept the locks previously saved by my grandmother, without necessarily knowing their origin. While I can safely guess that this hair belongs to my father's side of the family (on my mother's side everyone had bonestraight black hair), what does it mean to inherit something when you don't know for sure to whom it belonged? In this case, since the hair is unassigned-and, we might say, unlike a letter, unsigned-what is the status of possession of hair? …

How Metaphor Works

Abstract: Bits of food on the floor represent abundance and decay The removal of a lens cap is history and memory loss Weedy lawn means rain’s exuberance and the absence of love Sexual desire is an uncapped marker and an overturned bucket The tear in her skin means sugar The tear in her skin means the Industrial Revolution Is a page of the Koran and a bit of food on the floor A sleepless night is a hard commute and a broken zipper News of a bombing and a locked museum Are blood in an infant’s veins Excess is a streaming ribbon or a streaming ribbon a song A distant cloud is the perfection of the present and a mark of inattention The end of the honey is one’s mother’s death and one’s mother

Nou Mande Jistis! (We Demand Justice!) : Reconstituting Community and Victimhood in Raboteau, Haiti

Abstract: On November 9, 2000, sixteen of twenty-two defendants were convicted in Gonai'ves, Haiti, for their participation in an April 1994 massacre at Raboteau, a poor seaside community in Gonaives. A week later, thirtyseven more defendants were convicted in absentia, including the leaders of the 1991-94 military dictatorship, which followed a military coup, and the heads of the paramilitary group FRAPH (Revolutionary Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress, later renamed the Revolutionary Armed Front for the Progress of Haiti). The United Nations lauded the Raboteau trial as a "landmark," the "longest and most complex [trial] in Haiti's history," and "a huge step forward" for the Haitian justice system (United Nations Commission on Human Rights 2000). Scholars have also described the Raboteau trial as the most important human rights trial in Haiti (Farmer 2005, 80) and "the single successful attempt to partially cleanse the country of the terror of the 1991 coup d'etat" (Fatton 2002, 155). During the trial, two massacre survivors, Rosiane Profil and Deborah Charles, provided some of the most spectacular testimony for the prosecution, their eyewitness descriptions of the events on the day of the massacre and the display of their dramatically visible scars compelling counterevidence against defendants' accounts of the massacre. Their testimony also buttressed the prosecution's contention that the junta violently attacked the entire community as part of their campaign of systematic political repression. Drawing from research for a documentary on the trial that I coproduced, in this essay I examine the women's court testimony alongside alternative, communal testimony, especially in protest songs circulating in less authorized sites: demonstrations, sit-ins, and commemoration marches (Cynn and Hirshorn 2003). I argue that failing to supplement Charles and Profil's gendered representation as "political innocents" in the official record with this alternative testimony risks reinforcing the gendering of the women as passive and helpless individual victims, ignoring the radical dimensions of their claims, and reproducing the violent erasures that the women sought to resist. Haitian women had participated in the revolution and occasionally had been targets of state violence, but prior to the Duvaliers' regime (1957-86) they were regarded, like children and the elderly, as dependents-political innocents subject to special protection (Trouillot 1989, 166-67). Not permitted to vote until 1950 and classified as legal minors until 1979, women contributed to the nation as reproducers of male national subjects, as mothers and wives, with legal marriage and economic dependence on husbands operating as markers of class and social status that were closely linked with national identity (Schiller and Fouron 2001, 134-35). Violence instituted by Francois Duvalier during his 1957-71 dictatorship transformed social and family relations and redefined conceptions of women as "political innocents." Women were no longer protected qua women from state repression, but subjected to indiscriminate gendered violence-rape and sexualized torture-in retribution for their own political activism, as well as that of their male relatives and acquaintances (Trouillot 1989,166-67; Charles 1995,139). The system of violent repression and terror implemented by Duvalier and his paramilitary force, the Tonton Makout, has become emblematic; in the context of Africa, Achille Mbembe uses the term "tonton makoutization" to index the excesses of corruption and coercion of "new institutions charged with administering violence" to found or shore up authoritarian regimes (2001, 83). However, as Carolle Charles argues, Duvalierist violence directed against women had the paradoxical effect of politicizing women. Duvalierism effectively suppressed any independent women's movement, but Haitian women who were exiled in the diaspora formed organizations influenced by anti-imperialist struggles and the North American women's movement (1995, 140, 146-47). …

"From the Mouth of the Raped Woman Rivka Schiff," Kishinev, 1903

Abstract: When the swine broke into the attic through the roof, a few of them jumped on the Zichec daughter first. They slapped her and formed a circle around her. She fell on the floor from the blow. They raised her dress, turned her face downward and her behind upward and began slapping her on her behind with their hands. Then they turned her around again, parted her legs, covered her eyes and her mouth so she wouldn't scream; one climbs on top of her and the others kneel down around her and wait for their turn. They all did what they did in front of all the people in the attic. A few jumped on top of me and my husband. He wanted to escape and I'm behind him. They attacked him: Give money! Miti Karsilechic wanted to taunt me, and asked me for money. I asked for pity: Don't touch me, Miti, you have known me and have been acquainted with me for many years. I don't have money. Several of them ripped my dress from behind, and one slapped my cheek and said: If you don't have money, we'll enjoy you in another way. I fell to the floor and Miti is on top of me doing me. And the rest of the gang around me, waiting. My husband and the rest of the jews in the attic saw Miti on me. My husband gave them the silver watch and a necklace. They thought the necklace to be gold and until they finished examining it, my husband jumped to the ground [level]. There they beat him. The rest of the Jews also jumped. Only I and Simi Zichec remained. They mocked and taunted me: "It seems you never in your life slept with a goy-now you will know the taste of a goy " I don't know how many were with me, certainly no less than five and possibly seven. When they finished doing-they went down one by one. One goy came up-Bubichec-and said: Hide in the corner because soon other thugs will come up. In a moment I'll come with my wife and bring you down. I sat in the corner in my underclothes, and at that moment Simi Zichec came and sat with me. We are both sitting silent and mute. Immediately one came up and began calling his friends. He saw that there is no one and left. Later approximately four more came up. One kneeled above me as if he was feeling sorry for me. He saw the earrings and ripped them off my ears and wanted to torment me again. At that moment the honest goy Bubichec came up and in front of his eyes Simi and I were had, each by two. The goy tried to cunningly stop them and said: "But you are Christians and daughters of Israel are forbidden to you. " But they wanted to beat him as well and he was afraid and attempted to only save lives: "Do what you want with them, just don't kill them. " The four finished and the goy helped me cover myself with a shawl and Simi held my hand and that's how we descended the attic, and the swine behind us. Accompanied by the goy, Sima and I went to my mother's house in the Vagazal-Tabakari-(Sima also has an aunt there) and found that there everything was destroyed as well. I returned to ask for my husband. I did not know where he is, dead or alive? Crushed and shattered, a receptacle of shame and filth, I returned to the courtyard in my home, perhaps I will find him-and saw a woman running away from there and ran after her. "Where is my Bube " asked the woman (Bube also lay in the attic). I consoled her that no one was killed. We came to the yard of the ritual bath-the woman had some relatives there and had previously lived there-where I fell, fainting. My husband and Bube were also there. There we slept and on Tuesday morning my husband and I escaped naked and barefoot to Kolresh and on Wednesday we returned to Kishinev. All the merchandise in our store was taken and we were left without anything. -Testimony of Rivka Schiff as written down by H. N. Bialik On April 6, the last day of Passover and the first day of Easter 1903, a wave of attacks against the Jews of Kishinev, capital of Bessarabia, began. For two, and in some areas three, days, homes and businesses were destroyed and looted; men, women, and children were beaten, mutilated, and murdered; women were gang-raped. …

Emmett Till's Ring

Abstract: On July 13, 1945, Mamie Till received a telegram at her home in Argo, Illinois, notifying her that her estranged husband, Private Louis Till, had been killed in Italy.1 The Department of Defense subsequently sent her his personal effects, including a silver ring he had bought in Casablanca, engraved with his initials and a date, May 25, 1943. During the following ten years, their son, Emmett Till, would occasionally try on his father's ring. Since Emmett was only four when Louis Till was killed, the ring was always too large for him. But in mid-August 1955, as he packed for what was to have been a two-week visit with relatives in Money, Mississippi, he tried the ring on again. Still too big for his ring finger, it now fit the middle finger perfectly. Emmett and his mother agreed that he could wear the ring on his trip to show his cousins and his friends. In her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, written with Christopher Benson, Mamie Till-Mobley recalls that during the conversation about the ring, Emmett asked her about his father: We had talked about the fact that his father was a soldier in World War II and that he had been killed overseas. The only thing I could tell him at that point was the only thing I was told by the army. The cause of death, I explained to Emmett, was "willful misconduct." I didn't know what that meant, and when I tried to find out, I never got a satisfactory answer from the army. A lawyer and friend, Joseph Tobias, had tried to help in 1948. But he was told by the Department of the Army there would be no benefits for me due to the willful misconduct. (TillMobley and Benson 2003, 103) This incident occurs at the point in the narrative when Emmett's mother has begun to realize that her little boy is becoming an adult. In the preceding pages, she describes his heightened sense of responsibility, his first date, his impromptu driving lessons, his insistence on vacationing with his cousins instead of traveling with her, her hopes for his future. By giving Emmett his father's ring, she thus acknowledges his growing independence and maturity. Furthermore, she binds him symbolically to his paternity and his patrimony, despite the fact that irreconcilable differences had torn his parents' marriage apart. As he boarded the train called the City of New Orleans on Saturday, August 20, at Central Station, Chicago, Emmett kissed his mother goodbye and gave her his wristwatch to keep, telling her he wouldn't need it in Mississippi. Although he removed his watch, he decided to wear the ring. Eleven days later, on Wednesday, August 31, Robert Hodges, a seventeen-year-old white fisher, discovered Emmett's mutilated body floating in the Tallahatchie River, even though his murderers-J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant-had tied a cotton gin fan around his neck in hopes of weighing him down.2 For allegedly whistling at-or saying something inappropriate to-Bryant's wife, Carolyn, in their store, Emmett had been killed. According to his mother's description, his tongue had been choked out of his mouth and left hanging onto his chin. His right eyeball was resting on his cheek. Only two of his teeth remained in his mouth, and the bridge of his nose had been broken. His right ear had been cut almost in half and one of his murderers had taken a hatchet and cut through the top of his head from ear to ear. He had also been shot through the head (Till-Mobley and Benson 2003, 135-36). Given its condition, it is thus little wonder that Tallahatchie County sheriff H.C. Strider scrambled to get Emmett's body buried in Mississippi as quickly as possible. He and other local law enforcement officials wanted to try to minimize the impact of a heinous crime that had already captured national attention. Once Emmett's mother, then known as Mamie Bradley, learned that plans were being made to bury her son in Mississippi, however, she insisted that he be returned to Chicago. …

Trauma and Research: Bearing Responsibility and Witness

Abstract: More than fifteen years after its initial publication, Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery remains the standard reference point of trauma studies, providing a common language for endeavors as varied as psychiatric analyses of traumatized individuals, critical examinations of literary representations of trauma, and sociological studies of shared traumatic experiences. Herman clearly stresses the importance of disinterest and neutrality in her work with trauma survivors, describing "disinterest" as "abstaining] from using [one's] personal power over the patient to gratify her personal needs" and "neutrality" as "'not taking sides' in the patient's inner conflicts or try[ing] to direct the patient's life decisions" (1992, 135). Note that these definitions say nothing about the need for emotional disinterest or moral neutrality. Rather, they require that a distinction be carefully made between emotionally and morally laden interactions, that is, those related to inner conflicts and life decisions, and emotionally and morally driven actions, such as gratifying personal needs, taking sides, or directing decisions. In fact, Herman emphasizes the importance of emotional and ethical engagement-a sense of empathy and a "committed moral stance"-insisting that "it is not enough for the therapist to be 'neutral' or 'nonjudgmental.' . . . The therapist's role is ... to affirm a position of moral solidarity with the survivor" (178). And yet Herman is also acutely aware of how uneasily such sentiments sit in certain scientific circles: "Early investigators often felt strong personal bonds and political solidarity with trauma survivors, regarding them less as objects of dispassionate curiosity than as collaborators in a shared cause. This kind of closeness and mutuality may be difficult to sustain in a scientific culture where unbiased observation is often thought to require a distant and impersonal stance" (240). Indeed, investigators who emotionally and ethically engage with their research-interviewers who experience and express "strong personal bonds and political solidarity" with their subjects-will likely often be seen as veering dangerously close to the boundary between social science and social work. Thinking about this tension while reflecting upon early research encounters of my own of which I am particularly not proud, I cannot help but question the appropriateness of "unbiased observation" in trauma research. Two brief examples come immediately to mind. The first involves a young boy who repeatedly beat his head against the seat of the couch as I asked him, repeatedly, about past victimization by his parents. Although I knew that the upsetting nature of my interview was directly implicated in this boy's distress, I neither stopped the interview nor stepped outside the role of the interviewer. When the interview's results later showed suicide ideation, my supervisor expressed deep concern for the research project, not the research subject-"If the kid offs himself, we'll lose the data!" The second example involves a rape crisis counselor who spoke extensively of her own history of sexual violence and then suddenly said, "OK, welcome to the Rebecca'-shares-too-much section," and divulged her plans to engage in sex work the following night. Although I knew that the intimate nature of my interview was directly implicated in this disclosure, again, I neither stopped the interview nor stepped outside the role of the interviewer. When Rebecca called me late the next night from a hospital emergency room-"Things didn't end well"-I found myself immediately back in interviewer mode; my field notes read: "I'm detached, impartial, 'clinical' on the phone. Typing on laptop at first, but soon began to write instead by hand-worried she might hear the keys. Imagine if she knew I was taking notes. . . ." When I am honest with myself now, I admit that these were times when I hid behind the scientifically sanctioned borders of emotional and ethical disengagement. …

Destinations of Feminist Art: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract: When women's movements challenge the forms and nature of political life, the contemporary play of powers and power relations, they are in fact working towards a modification of women's status. On the other hand, when these same movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are subjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratie order. This latter gesture must of course be denounced, and with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of women. Indeed, that gesture plays on a certain naivete that suggests one need only be a woman in order to remain outside phallic powers. -Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Feminism's headline-grabbing conflicts with New York City's museums have usually been addressed to straightforward equal-opportunities issues. Damning statistics about the low numbers of women artists are accompanied by photo-friendly scenes of placard-waving women. This is a mission that the Guerrilla Girls art collective has combined even more effectively with the use of theatrical costume. In January 2007, wearing their signature gorilla masks to maintain anonymity, two Guerrilla Girls took the platform at the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) first-ever feminist conference, "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." Among the list of eminent and emerging scholars and artists present were Marina Abramovic, Ute Meta Bauer, Beatriz Colomina, Coco Fusco, David Joselit, Geeta Kapur, Carrie Beatty Lambert, Lucy Lippard, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Wangechi Mutu, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Martha Rosler, Ingrid Sischy, Anne Wagner, and Catherine de Zegher. "The Feminist Future" was the first in a yearlong round of feminist-centered events in the art world. These have included panels at the College Art Association conference in New York organized by the Feminist Art Project; the establishment of a center for feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum with the permanent installation of Judy Chicago's monumental work The Dinner Party (1974-79); and two major exhibitions, Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (with further venues to follow, including MoMA's contemporary art venue, P.S.I).1 Perhaps as an attempt to remedy the atrocious record on women artists in New York's museums, these two major exhibitions of feminist-engaged art were women-only affairs. Following Irigaray's warning, however, we must pay careful attention to the form that feminism takes as it enters the mainstream museum world. The complicities it ends up enduring in the name of "woman" may not in fact benefit that half of the sky. Although the statistical approach is a necessary means of pressurizing museums to improve their policy on gender equality, it is a far less adequate format for presenting the more complicated issues of sexual difference and artistic representation. Before actually viewing these two ambitious exhibitions and attending MoMA's inaugurating conference, I had hoped that the nearly four decades of feminist art, art history, and theory taken up there would assert themselves with a degree of intensity and complexity that would knock me off my feet. Alas, they did not. Perhaps this is an overly tall order, considering the framing dates for the two exhibitions and MoMA's infancy in matters feminist. To be sure, certain occlusions and limitations became visible to me immediately. With WACK! focused on 1965-80 and Global Feminisms addressed to art by a younger generation of women born after 1960 (with works made mostly after 1990), the 1980s seem to have dropped out of the picture. That decade saw feminism embarking upon its first serious period of self-examination. The celebration of universal sisterhood was complicated by differences, of power, geopolitics, sexuality, and so on, and psychoanalytic approaches such as Irigaray's asked difficult questions about the unconscious as well as women's complicity with masculinist structures of power. …