Today I wanted to focus on transphobia and I thought that two of the articles were especially deep and profound.
I want to focus on transphobia. I think for me transphobia is obviously an important area of concern.
I think that it's a practical way of getting a handle on the dynamics of oppression in class.
We saw that with Hale's pieces and I think that transphobia is sort of the concrete way or homophobia and misogyny.
These kind of discreet concrete manifestations are good diagnostic tools for getting a beat on understanding the operations of oppression in detail.
So that's kind of what I want to look at today.
I was thinking before we get into the transphobia stuff, I had some things that I still wanted to talk to about in terms of the Hale.
Do you feel like going down that path a little bit more?
Because I think that it's going to actually set up for some of the stuff that we wanted to do today with the transphobia stuff.
So we never really talked about it. The title last week was what? Limonality, right?
But we never really talked about what was going on with limonality. Why call that last week limonality? What Hale had to do with limonality?
So that's what I want to talk about.
So does anyone know what I mean when I talk about limonality?
The state of being betwixting in between and I think that this term is going to be used theoretically as a returner.
It referred to particular kinds of rituals, social rituals in which individuals were between, not quite in the state of say adult.
But it's supposed to connect a sense of betwixting between in between, not quite fitting in.
And this has been thought by some to be an important concept, an important tool in understanding what resistance looks like and also in terms of understanding oppression.
And we see this getting played out in Hale quite a lot and there's a theme that is working through these pieces that I wanted to bring to the surface
so that I could draw, I want to draw a distinction between two different kinds of limonality that I see in Hale.
I'm not sure he totally distinguishes them and I think that distinguishing them is kind of important.
So Hale is big on analyzing these concepts, so we have the first of these are lesbians women.
And we have this analysis of the category of women and it turns out that the category of women is considerably more complicated than what the natural attitude might have taught us.
The natural attitude might have taught us that it's kind of dry, it's yes or no, there's a clear cut answer.
With Hale's analysis of a family resemblance model of the concept, we get something that is fuzzier and we get the possibility of in-betweens and overlaps and so forth.
It may not be clear whether or not a person falls inside the category or not.
So for example, his answer to the question are lesbians women while some are, some aren't and for some there's no fact of the matter.
Are you guys with me on this?
So on his ideas, I'm going to try to draw this and I'm not sure it will be especially limited here, hopefully we'll see.
So you end up with these categories where you can either fit right in the middle or you can be up towards the edge or you can fall outside the category or maybe you're in between.
And so he sees these categories as kind of fuzzy and you see this in some of his other pieces where you have f to m and butch.
When he talks about tensions and conflicts between, you know, among butch individuals who are assigned female at birth, identify as butch.
And so again with Hale, the idea is that it's going to not be cut and dry, there's going to be some overlap and there's going to be some like no fact of the matter stuff.
These categories end up being fuzzy, overlapping, not neat, kind of messy, right?
We can't specify necessary and sufficient conditions for membership.
So one of the things that comes out, especially in the piece at Hale's piece, Tracing a Ghost and Memory on My Throat, he's trying to articulate a kind of a subject position, a kind of a place in which he can sort of mount a kind of resistant voice.
And his idea is this, he wants to talk about a dislocated location.
Do you know what I mean by this? He talks about the north plate, do you remember that? Being dislocated, about this actually being an important place to speak from.
So he's going to go into any category. He's sort of marginal with respect to many of them. There's no sort of central paradigmatic category within which he fits.
So that's an idea of in between, isn't it? I'm going to call it categorical liminalities.
The idea is that he doesn't fit in any one particular category, so he flits at the margins of all these different categories. Did you get that from it?
And he argues that this is important to claim as a subject position as a possible resistant position rather than trying to do a kind of violence to himself by trying to force himself to fit into this or that category.
Now, I just want to bring up what is for me an important point, which is tied to this is the fact that often, so you think about this in the case of Butch and FTM, these categories are also portals to subcultures.
Different subcultures, different communities, and some of these communities are overlapping connected with each other, but different subcultures.
FTM is his work and he talks about this idea of worlds. So it's not just that he's talking about a kind of a categorical liminality, there's also a way in which he's talking about how he doesn't fit into any one of these different worlds,
which to speak in an overly simplified way would be called different subcultures.
Are you guys with me on this so far? Okay.
So here's where I want to, I guess this is maybe a critique or a worry about something that is going on in Hill's work, which is, and it's one of the reasons why I like his piece on Leather Dyke, Boys and their Daddy so much,
because he always seems to introduce a different kind of liminality there. It's a little bit different than categorical liminality, I don't want to open that up.
He talks about this idea how in resistant subcultures, there's cases in which we have re-signification, body parts are renamed, retooling.
So we have re-naming is also its actual, you know, the parts take on a different significance in terms of the negotiation of intimacy within these particular subcultures.
What we're talking about here is not, right, in calling this, in refusing to call this a vagina and calling this a fuckhole or another, right, I mean, this is not just a re-naming.
It's a radical reformation of how intimacy is being negotiated.
So here's a final, a final thing that also changes, and I think this is kind of the point that I really want to press on, is that the meaning of words are also considerably variable and contested.
What I mean, we talked about this when we were talking about the TT-101 at the very beginning, I was like dancing around, can't give a definition, right, because people fight about this, right, it's open, different interpretations for different terms.
Transgender might mean one thing to one person and something different to a different person altogether.
So the very meaning is not just the different body parts of different categories put to them, but what those categories mean, what those words mean, the interpretations of those words are also very different.
Does that make sense to you?
Okay, meaning of words is also up for graphs.
Why am I insisting upon this?
Well, I'm insisting upon this because whether or not you're categorically liminal, whether or not you're marginal with respect to a particular category, right?
As I say, I take the category woman and I go, I fall right here, I'm liminal, categorically liminal with respect to the category woman, because I'm MTF or something like that, or maybe I fall outside of it.
In saying that, I'm assuming a particular interpretation of the meaning of the word, I'm saying that these features matter more than others.
So I could be rehearsing as Hale does the dominant conception of what woman means, right?
He picks himself to be rehearsing the dominant meaning, where in the dominant meaning, presumably if you're a trans woman, if you fit into this category, it's going to be, you know, just by hair, right?
It's going to be liminal on the dominant reading.
But if we allow for the possibility of retooling, if we allow for the possibility that these words mean different things in resistant contexts, then if we take woman in a different meaning, right?
So, like, in many of the subcultures in which I travel, trans women freely refer to themselves as women, and it's not in this sense that we just made it under by hair.
No, why take myself as a paradigmatic trans woman, right?
And many trans women see that as suggesting that they fit, it's mapped out in the category of women.
Well, that suggests that there's a different, but probably the word woman means something a little bit different.
Different meaning, a different interpretation assigned to it.
Because this is not just about, I mean, put it this way.
In the case of a liminal, categorically liminal case, where it's like, does it make it in or not? Is this a woman or not?
Is this a butch or an F2M? In between, it's a hard case. It does categorically liminal.
But if there's an issue whether or not, is this a hard case or is this an easy case?
If that's what's going on, then that difference suggests to me that there's a difference in meaning being described to the word.
Does that make sense to you?
I have another question. Are you intending that we look at this as kind of a self-identity kind of thing?
Or more as like how society might play somebody?
I'm looking at it in terms of culture.
I'm looking at the terms of culture, but I'm also looking at the terms of self-culture.
So I'm not talking about it as an individual. I'm not talking about an individual.
So suppose I come out to you and I go, today I am a teapot. You say to me, you are not.
You do not understand what the word teapot means, or you're being playful, or you're a philosopher or something.
That's individual. And I'm not saying that I'm not offering you pieces about language that individuals can necessarily make a word mean whatever they want it to mean.
I guess it's a tricky question as a philosophy of language, about private language, public language, and all that kind of stuff that maybe some of you are familiar with.
I'm actually talking about the dominant cultures.
And you know, the existing cultures.
This is too crude, this split that I'm doing, but let me do it anyway to bring up the point.
So it's not a split between what culture imposes on you and what you self-identify as, but it's a class of cultures.
It's a class of mainstream culture and a resistant culture.
What I'm saying is, you know, Hill talks about this in the Levitite Boys piece.
He's talking about self-culture. He's talking about like SM culture, Levit culture, which is not sort of like mainstream culture.
And there's different ways of doing things there, right?
And body parts mean different things there. Words mean different things there.
And so my point was, is that in my experience, for example, when I hang out with like, you know, my trans friends and we're doing trans-activist stuff and we're like, you know, conducting our business and being social and communing together and so forth.
It's not like we see ourselves, it's not like we might be women, right?
We use the word woman in a particular way in which anyone who self-identifies with it counts with some qualifications.
But it's not controversial in the same way. Does that make sense to you?
My claim then is that there's a different gender practice going on at the resistant cultural level, right?
You know, and I'm talking about women who say, I'm a trans woman, I am all women, and I have a penis.
And I like my penis. I'm going to keep my penis.
And I'm 100% smack dab right in the middle. No questions about it. I am all women, right?
And folks are like, yeah, cool, right? Yeah. That's like, there's an important contingent of trans women who feel this way.
And it's not questioned. It's not controversial. It's not open for debate.
And my point is that it's a different cultural practice that's allowed for in this resistant place.
Does it make sense to you?
Where the words are meaning something different maybe than what they mean in a dominant context.
Not entirely unrelated, mind you. Not like, I'm going to mean, you know, teapot by woman or something.
It's connected. But its meaning has significantly altered.
The practices of gender, the practices by which those terms are used, has significantly altered.
I was going to, I guess like a critique that I had of Hale was just that I kind of felt like he didn't really mention the work of Ansanbua.
He talks a lot about like order lands and like the way that things collide. And I'm not saying that, like, I think that Ansanbua is like the in-person to talk.
Well, it's something about, I think, I'll give him a pass because he's talking about being able to go on a cruise.
Who's like, does that, you know, he's blossoming. She's written some stuff on Ansanbua and sort of modeled some of her work.
Yeah, because then, like I guess, and also like this, like when he was talking a little bit about like negotiation.
I think the other thing too that like, they highlight in terms of like seeing an agency is that like within these subcultures or these liminal spaces,
like sometimes like you're able to negotiate with another person or something else in order for you to kind of be able to just be who you want to be in that liminal space.
But I guess another, like in terms of that concept of negotiation, like I was also kind of thinking a little bit about like Ansanbua's work and her work on like differential consciousness.
Yeah, from her methodology book.
And I think he's trying to draw on his idea similar with the dislocated location.
But what I want to try to do is actually draw where I think that what he's doing is a little bit different.
And I think maybe either conflating something or missing something important.
And that's kind of what I'm building up for.
Maybe I'm not sure it's sort of a similar point that you're making or not.
We'll see if I get there.
So let's come back to this.
This is a project like, you know, we have the recent court case with boys in Olsen, right?
So they're talking about gay marriage.
And one of the things they did was put a historian up and talk about what marriage was.
So they talked about coveture and the role of a woman in this kind of thing.
And they talked about how it changed.
So it sounds like what Hale was trying to do is say that they're, because there's a simple wish by appealing to this change.
Then you can say, oh, well, policy change, right?
We don't even see marriage like that anymore.
In the same way, it sounded like Hale was saying, hey, you know, there's this shift that's happened with what means to be a female.
And we could change maybe all of that.
Maybe, but I mean, I wouldn't say that it doesn't necessarily need to be historical.
It can be, but I would also say it's simultaneous on where you are and what culture will you.
So the significance of, for example, the social progress of marriage is going to vary not just over time, but at a moment.
Like what it means is going to depend upon who's doing the interpreting.
Because I thought I was having a problem with what was the practical indication of what he was doing.
But if it parallels with that, then that makes sense to me.
So yeah, what I think Hale is saying is that he's emphasizing this idea of categorical liminality,
of falling to the side of all these categories, being pushed out of the categories,
not fitting quite into the categories, being marginal with respect to the categories,
and using this marginality as a resistant space.
But he also, he wants to, I think, critique the idea that this is all a wonderful, resistant place
because he thinks that there is a possible void and kind of objection where there's no categories
within which one can situate oneself.
And it kind of falls out altogether.
