My otherwise quite boring town is blessed with a film festival for queer cinema. The festival offers an impressing variety of films and visiting the festival makes the autumn somewhat more bearable.
I happened to watch two documentaries about transgender. Interestingly, they dealt with the topic in very different ways. The first one I watched, Red without blue, revolved around a pair of twins, one of whom had changed her gender. It would be misrepresenting the film if one were to say that it dealt with the topic of transgendered people. The story was not about that, it didn't form the centre of the narrative, even though the film did bring up some interesting perspectives on gender. The other, Boy I am, was far more political in that it was explicitly dealing with some debates over transgender and its relation to feminism and butch lesbianism. The experiences of three different guys were presented. It was interesting to hear them talking about why it was important for them to be seen as male (male in a way that is reflected in their bodies), in the eyes of others. The protagonists were talking about identity, having a particular form of body, and being confronted with expectations about conformity to the two-gender stereotype.
Red without blue was a far from perfect documentary. The soundtrack was clumsy at times, and some of the more experimental landscape fragments were slightly out of place. (I don't know why a story has to be backed up by 'haunting' music and beautiful landscapes) Anyways, there was one quality of the film that was positive and also quite rare when looking at the way most documentaries are done. It didn't so much transgress from ordinary narrative structure as it avoided certain ideas about what a narrative should be all about. There were no voiceover. Even if the film did focus very much on how the people involved understood themselves and each other, we were never deceived into thinking that there is one single way in which one understands something. Things were, it seemed to me, never made easy or clear-cut.
The reason why I was so happy about the lack of generalizations and all-out descriptions is that questions about gender are often transformed into quite strange questions about identity. From a perspective where identity is the most important, it is quite easy to forget that I do not understand myself in isolation from the different things that I am presently involved with, the people that I care about, the questions I am confronted with. And the same goes for my understanding of who you are. It is not that I have some overall perception of your 'identity' or your 'self-presentation'. If we want to talk about what it means to understand other people, we should rather look at the different situations in which these questions arise. There are many examples of this in Red without blue. The mother of the twins reflect on whether she would want to say that it makes a difference that her son is now her daughter.
I must confess that I regard quite much of the interest in 'identity' as a sad self-preoccupation: the most important thing is how I am perceived by you - not what I am in my relation with you. As if the main task in our lives is to produce a self-presentation with which we are satisfied, a (re-)presentation that we think is corresponding to our inner "identity". From this point of view, I often have difficulties with much of what is said about transgender and sexualities.
Some of what made these documentaries so important is that they both ask questions about how we talk about and understand ourselves as gendered being. And if there is any sense in that at all. One of the feminists and theorists interviewed in Boy I am, Judith Halberstam, brought up some of the difficulties when grappling with the topic of transgender. Does transgender represent an acceptance of the two-gender system? In other words, are people who biologically change their bodies with the aim of matching expectations about what a specific gender looks like accepting that gender is basically something biological? Note: what this really shows is how inherently troublesome it is to make a general division between sex and gender. I am not saying this in order to make things supposedly of a physical nature fluffy and theoretical, I am trying to understand something. When we talk about expectations about what 'woman' and 'man' looks like in bodily terms, we are not really talking about 'sex' in opposition to 'gender'. Or so it seems to me, at least.
I think there can be no real answer to the question whether 'transgender' necessarily implies an essentialist bias. I think Halberstam provided reasons for why this is so. I would say that there cannot be an answer because "body" is important for people in very different ways. This also goes for those people who change some parts of their bodies. In Boy I am the FTM:s talked about many different things that were connected with their choice to go through with the operation. One of the guys interviewed in the film talked about being sick of the constant questioning about his sex. Another interviewee talked about his discomfort with his body: his experience of moving breasts, closing one's eyes when seeing oneself in a mirror, being enraged that one's body has a particular shape.
I think one thing that makes this so difficult is that our experiences of our bodies, and the bodies of other people, cannot be separated from what it means to perceive something from a point of view where a bodily dimension becomes important. I.e. talking about bodies becomes important in particular contexts and those contexts are themselves embedded, in different ways, in our lives, in the difficulties with which we struggle. I am not clear about how to express this clearly. Perhaps: we cannot simply pick out a bodily dimension from our lives by saying that this is, in a non-problematic way, the physical stuff we are made of. But the problem is that this point easily turns into quite strange ideas about how "a bodily dimension" is permeated by "politics" or "ideology" or that everything physical is, as anything else, a construct. What I am struggling with is how to express the different problems we might have with our bodies without reducing these problems so as to mould them into one form.
We don't, in fact, see ourselves and others as moving bodies. - We do see dead bodies in morgues, don't we? "Are you afraid of seeing a dead body?" But at the same time it is a person, and not a dead body, I am mourning at the morgue.
When I see you approaching me I do not see a body that looks like you. If I realize that the person I saw was not you, I simply say that I thought I saw someone else. When I am chased out of the toilet because I am assumed to have went to the wrong one, what that person sees is not a body that doesn't belong. What, then, do they see? A woman /a man?
Of course there is a bodily dimension in our lives that is made apparent in specific situations. Having a headache, being out of breath, acknowledging that one is nervous when one's stomach is rumbling. But there is no neutral pieces of flesh that 'constitute the human form'. There just aren't such things.
What is it to see 'a woman' or 'a man'? Do we always see women and men when we see people? These are, as far as I am concerned, hard questions. "I saw you running towards me with a big grin on your face" Does it make sense to say that I see a woman? I wouldn't think so. "I saw a man beating up another guy." "I saw a man waving in a window." "That night I saw her holding hands with another girl." "A man came into the bar and I saw him ordering two beers and a tequila - for himself." "I suddenly noticed that he was a man and not a woman." "This morning I once again witnessed that man's jealosy of his business partner." I guess there is no one thing that would link these example to one single meaning of "seeing somebody as a man/woman". But what is it that we have understood when we have said that there is no such thing as seeing somebody as a man or as a woman in general? What is the bearing of the point?
Of course, pointing at the things I have done just now doesn't in any way solve problems of feeling alienated from one's body. What it does show is that it is not much we can say about bodies and gender in isolation from specific examples and thuse it would be confused to see 'transgender' as related to e.g. 'lesbianism' or 'gender' in one single way. What a boring conclusion, you might say, and of course you are right.
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