Assuming a Body by Gayle Salamon

Author:Gayle Salamon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/Gay and Lesbian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

WAVE OF MUTILATION?

The New York Times article is accompanied by two pictures of Shane Caya, a transman discussed in the article. The first is a shot of Shane, his ex-partner Natasha, and their three-year-old child. All three are smiling as Shane lifts the young child into the air. The second depicts Shane from the waist up, without a shirt on. He sports a head of short, salt-and-pepper hair, an upper arm covered with tattoos, and a muscular, well-sculpted male chest. The caption on the photo reads:

Shane Caya displays his mastectomy scars.

The caption shocks, not because of its tone—fairly matter-of-fact, really—but because of the mismatch between what it reports and what the reader first sees, which is simply a male body. No matter how normal-looking Shane’s chest is, what it is made to show, according to the caption, is not his masculinity, but a violence done to femininity in order to achieve that masculinity. The caption sees missing breasts, rather than a male chest, and we the readers are asked to read his body for evidence, to search the photograph for the scars that trace the lower contour of Shane’s pectorals—the “tell” that would ostensibly give the lie to that maleness. This is, by now, a familiar mode in photographs that accompany media coverage of transfolks. A photograph of a “normal-looking” transperson will be shown next to a caption or sidebar that announces either their trans status or their surgical status, functioning as the “reveal” that offers the transperson’s portrait as a game of spot-the-missing-gender. In this case, the second photograph is positioned underneath the first, as if it were negating or undermining the picture of familial happiness above it. There is a triple shaming in this portrayal, for Shane is both recalled into femininity with the invocation of his former breasts and named as the agent of his own castration. The photographic strategy of framing transition as that which ends familial happiness is also enacted at the level of narrative; Shane and his partner break up, we are told, because of his transition.

These sorts of photographic strategies serve, finally, to rearticulate the difference of transpeople, their irreducible dissimilarity from both the lesbians they are understood to have been and the men they are now wanting to become. The article seems to take some pains to reassure us that even if transsexuals walk among us, we will always be able to pick them out. That rhetoric mimes a different kind of war where cultural anxiety about difference is mobilized to fuel a war on terror in which we are told always to be alert because potential terrorists could be hidden among us. In each kind of war, danger is embodied as difference masquerading as sameness, precisely the affront the lesbians in the article locate in the bodies of transmen. And, in each kind of war, preemptive violence is offered as the only weapon effective against such an enemy.

Insisting that this is a picture of Shane’s scars rather than Shane’s pecs offers his chest as “the horror of nothing to see.

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