Whipping Girl by Serano Julia

Author:Serano, Julia [Serano, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780786747917
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2009-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

9

Ungendering in Art and Academia

People use books on gender to invisibilize transsexuals.

—Kate Bornstein1

Sometimes I think they just don’t want to hear the real stories. I get cynical and think, who wants the everyday details of someone’s life when you can use people with intersex to fulfill erotic fantasies, narrative requirements, and research programs?

—Thea Hillman2

IN PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, I discussed how most depictions of transsexuals are designed to reinforce the idea that female and male are distinct, mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes. The same can also be said for depictions of other gender-variant people (i.e., those who deviate in some way from societal expectations of femaleness and maleness). In this chapter, I describe a more recent, reciprocal phenomenon—which I call ungendering—where gender-variant people are used as a device to bring conventional notions about maleness and femaleness into question. In theory, any person can be ungendered (simply by dwelling on the aspects of their gendered appearance, expressions, and identity that differ from the norm), but this practice seems to most often focus on transsexual and intersex people. While these two groups face very different social and medical issues because of their gender difference, they both tend to be targeted for ungendering because their physical bodies are in some way at odds with their identified and lived genders. Here, I discuss the practice of ungendering as it occurs in cissexual works of fiction (e.g., movies and novels) and in academia. In both cases, ungendering is an exploitive process, involving both the appropriation of gender-variant bodies and experiences while erasing intersex and transsexual voices and perspectives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.