Female Impersonation by Carol-Anne Tyler

Author:Carol-Anne Tyler [Tyler, Carol-Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415916882
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2002-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

C H A P T E R F I V E

THE SUPREME SACRIFICE?

TRANSSEXUAL IMPERSONATION

It’s amazing. I sort of wanted to get rid of it and [then] spend the rest of my life trying to get my hands on one....

—TULA, A BRITISH MALE-TO-FEMALE TRANSSEXUAL MODEL

Postmodernity is fascinated with the failure of sexual difference. From television talk shows to poststructuralist theory, the apparently increasing “in-difference” of the sexes is a central issue. As more women hold jobs formerly reserved for men and more men take an interest in such “feminine” things as clothes, cosmetics, and children—a trend advertisements in particular imply—the sexes seem less and less distinct.1 But whether this in-difference is viewed as a sign of contemporary culture’s health or sickness, it is most often seen from a masculine perspective, which must come as no surprise to feminists critical of the masculinist assumptions of patriarchal society. For the androgynous society, like the androgyne him/herself, as a number of writers on androgyny have pointed out, is usually discussed in terms of feminized masculinity.2 It is female impersonation that is the subject of countless talk shows and a considerable number of poststructuralist essays. Untill very recently, male impersonation —aside from the brief interest sparked by the Billie Tipton story—has not figured centrally for postmodernity.3 Though there is substantial disagreement about the significance of female impersonation in the various discourses circulating about it, they all represent it as transgressive. Because the female impersonator appears to be an impersonator rather than a “real woman,” his gender act reveals gender to be an act and not a nature, putting in question commonsense assumptions about biology and sexual identity. Furthermore, in patriarchal culture, femininity is devalued. As a number of feminists have demonstrated, in it woman is constructed as man’s other, a negative alter ego he needs in order to feel complete. The feminine, therefore, is associated with lack, what man must repress in order to be whole and fully masculine. Its uncanny return in impersonation is a fearful reminder that no man is fully masculine and whole, while the lure of the alternative set of values it represents—values linked to another way of relating to the self, to others, to speech, and to desire, according to feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray—threatens to undermine not only masculinity but also the patriarchal society it sustains.

Because “becoming woman” appears to promise an antiphallic identity and epistemology, many male poststructuralist theorists have advocated it. Feminist theorists, however, have been suspicious of this trend, wondering if it might not be the latest strategy for mastering the loss of mastery associated with the feminine.4 Could masculine narcissism be supported rather than subverted by female impersonation? This is the question feminists leave open for investigation when they refuse to assume that because a man seems feminine, he is feminine. Like psychoanalysts, they do not take the phenomenon at its face value but attempt to uncover the hidden desires it may express in disguised or distorted form. For if femininity is a signifier, as

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