Entering Transmasculinity , livre ebook

Intellect Books - matthew heinz

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232 pages

English

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Description

Entering Transmasculinity is a holistic study of the intersecting and overlapping discourses that shape transgender identities. In the book, Matthew Heinz offers an examination of mediated and experienced transmasculine subjectivities and aims to capture the apparent contradictions that structure transmasculine experience, perception and identification. From the relationship between transmasculinity’s emancipatory potential and its simultaneously homogenizing implications, to issues of gender-queerness, sexual minorities, normativity and fatherhood, Entering Transmasculinity the first book to synthesise the disparate areas of academic study into a theory of the transmasculine self and its formation.

Chapter 1

The Transmasculine Patient

Chapter 2

Norming Abnormality

Chapter 3

Finding One's (Male) Self

Chapter 4

A Man's Man

Sujets

Vie de famille

Parentalité et Éducation des Enfants

Gender Studies

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Matt Heinz

Parenting

Art

Cultural Studies

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 avril 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783205707
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3840€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Cover image: TRANSformation © Damian Siqueiros ( www.damiansiqueiros.com )
Production managers: Claire Organ and Matthew Floyd
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-568-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-569-1
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-570-7
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
TRANSformation: Damian Siqueiros
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Transmasculine Patient
Chapter 2: Norming Abnormality
Chapter 3: Finding One’s (Male) Self
Chapter 4: A Man’s Man
Conclusion
References
Index
Permissions Granted
The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation of online contributions granted by Tim Chevalier, Sunny Drake, FTM Australia, Davy Knittle, Thomas McBee, Stefan de Villiers and Max Zachs.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation from Morty Diamond’s (ed.) 2004 From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond , San Francisco, CA: Manic D Press.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation from Nicholas Teich’s 2012 Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue , New York: Columbia University Press.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation from translation of Franz Kafka’s works granted by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University.
TRANSformation: Damian Siqueiros
The cover photo is part of my new photo series, TRANSformation. The series does not deal directly with transgenderism but with the intriguing questions that arise from it. It raises questions about what sex and gender mean, questions that would be unimaginable without the existence of trans bodies.
Trans bodies are vessels for asking larger questions about the social need to superimpose the myths of gender unto the body according to its sex. The process occurs almost seamlessly as long as sex and gender align in a heteronormative and binary way. Destabilization, conscious or unconscious, arises from discrepancies within the anatomy itself and of course from its relationship with social gender norms. TRANSformation challenges the idea of the seemingly natural concordance between sex and gender in which female equals woman and male equals man, contesting the historical paradigm of biology as destiny.
TRANSformation archives a beautiful aesthetic resolution through the appropriation of the language of figurative painting, referencing painters such as Michelangelo and the Mannerists. Using an aesthetic that belongs to the past to speak about contemporary topics, it invites us to look at the latter from a historical perspective, and to look in retrospect at art history for signs of non-conforming depictions of the body (as it is the case of women in the Sistine Chapel).
Exploring the topic through dancers in movement, the images shift from being descriptive to being narrative. We are obliged to see these transgender bodies in social and historical context. Superposing the bodies against the backdrops of Renaissance and Baroque period churches completes this exercise. The technical process by which the images are created and the use of churches (a public space, religion) become a metaphor for the constructed character of gender.
This project strives to suspend the rules and question the myths that oblige us to believe that gender and sex are natural and fixed traits. The purpose of this confrontation with the spectator is to produce conversations that lead to an understanding of gender diversity, as well as a way of achieving equality for the sexes that goes beyond a narrow binary notion or beyond narrow binary notions of gender.
Damian Siqueiros ( www.damiansiqueiros.com ) is a Montreal-based photographer and visual artist.
Foreword
I remember the exact moment in which I consciously decided to move forward with medical transition.
It was a sweaty summer in the bay area, and like the previous mornings that season, I had spent it sitting at my desk for hours watching video after video on YouTube of testimonials from young transmen. At the time, I identified as ‘transcurious’ – an identity I felt reflected my deep interest but fear of transition – and was enamoured with the way that so many of the young men candidly expressed their journeys to anonymous audiences.
I was in love with their audacity to be free.
That particular day I watched a video of a very popular vlogger who reminded me of myself: talkative, philosophical and cocky. Like most of his videos, this one was shot in black and white and had an experimental arthouse feel to it. But unlike the other daily tellings of facial hair growth, or how his voice has dropped, he shared a poem he had written about self-acceptance and its possibility of creating a new type of masculinity. A masculinity that doesn’t harm but loves. One that is liberating instead of restrictive.
This person years younger than me understood my fears and I allowed myself to listen. It was then that my soul shifted and it was then that I knew that I would be ok.
And I’ve been ok.
I remain grateful to the stories of the young men who have inspired me to live openly, honestly and without shame – many of who line the pages of this book.
This text is a wonderful theoretical inquiry into the lives of a community of people that have created ourselves in images that sometimes challenge and other times are complicit with gender norms.
matthew, thank you for providing men like me a document of our agency.
Kortney Ziegler, PhD
Preface
One of the key pieces of literature that has shaped my understanding of the world, from the time that I was a young, idealistic, and politically driven ‘alternative’ girl in a German high school to now, a pragmatic, politically worn male-identified Canadian university dean in my late forties, is Franz Kafka’s (1919/2003) Auf der Galerie ( Up on the Gallery ). Interpretations of the piece, which consists essentially of two long sentences offering contrasting versions of a circus moment in time, abound. My own understanding is perhaps closest to that of Bianca Theisen, whose interpretation maintains the centrality of the text’s ambivalence and its success in not just juxtaposing but maintaining parallel realities. This, in essence, is what this book is about – the inevitability of being oriented and orienting others by competing discourses about transmasculinity. Theisen (2002, p. 178) argues that ‘Kafka’s circus turns doubly transgress the reality of cultural codes already transformed in the circus, a mass medium still very popular in Kafka’s time’. Whether we are surrounded by scholarly critical cultural studies texts, television portrayals, medical diagnoses, sociopolitical analyses or informational counseling pamphlets, what remains is the irrefutability of living in a world that forces us to physically respond, much as Kafka’s circus spectator does, to manifestations of gendered lives, be it in our sensory perceptions, everyday conversations, processing of mediated information or intellectual understandings. It does not seem to matter so much whether the mass medium is the circus, reality television or Web content – all offer culturally mediated constructions of identities that are, at least partially, grounded in our physical properties. ‘The ambivalence of the text’s final gesture offers no clear exegesis to the incongruities and contrasts set up by the two paragraphs’, Theisen (2002, p. 175) suggests in regard to Kafka’s text. Being doomed to, or privileged by, such permanent double vision could lead to an existential paralysis of sorts were it not for the basic human needs that inevitably drive us to make choices. This inevitability of entering discourses, in this case, discourses of transmasculinity, can also be meaningfully illuminated by the perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1966) philosophy of being. His central tenet – that existence precedes essence – forces us to take a critical look at the ontological assumptions of transmasculine articulations of being. As this analysis will demonstrate, a fundamental belief in an essential, innate identity that lies at the core of transmasculine lives provides a compass for many in the contested terrain of transmasculine representations. At the same time, however, manifestations of transmasculinity that focus on the self-reflexivity revealed by human consciousness populate this discursive landscape. Sartre’s notion of ‘nothingness’, with its emphasis on the necessity of negation, sheds light on rhetorical strategies and discursive approaches to understanding one’s own transmasculinity as that which it is not, one’s consciousness always being consciousness of something. His philosophical approach acknowledges the impossibility of escaping discourse, perhaps most effectively in his play No Exit (1944), which stages the futility and inevitability of human freedom to make choices, capsulized in the famous exclamation ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’. The spirit of this utterance appears mirrored in the query ‘Does it matter what your gender is when you never leave the house?’ posted online by a frustrated female-to-male transgender individual (Captain Awkward 2013). Transmasculine people, like other trans-identified people, are acutely aware of the conundrum that, according to Sartre, characterizes the human condition. Our visibility to others ruptures our self-understanding, necessitating in