The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [38]
The exploitation of the cultural sphere, and the symbolic manipulation of the world, is the ecological niche that humans have developed; just like beavers cut down the trees to make their environment, we turn the world into language. That’s what humans do, and I really think that gender is about how the cultural system interfaces with the organism. Part of how you are as a being, part of what we are evolved to be, part of our neurobiological capacity that evolved words is that capacity to self-reflexively place oneself in a cultural context.
For me, gender is both the cultural system through which you internalize as a subjective being, as an identification, how you situate yourself in language; and how other people situate you in language. And it’s done through these very complex mechanisms that no one discipline in the sciences or the humanities is able to fully address. There needs to be an interdisciplinary gender studies. Because, so far, all of the theory and the research has come from a body of knowledge that has never had to be critical of its own foundational assumptions. And so it just becomes another vector for naturalizing particular kinds of ideological agendas. So I think that critically conscious transsexual or transgen-dered people, who can reveal the ideological constructions of the sex/gender systems, have this tremendous work in front of us. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to get funding to do that work.
You know, in the orisha religion, there is a being whose name means “the destroyer of patterns through whom the shape of the cosmos is revealed.” There is that sense of disruption that the trans figure brings, that rupture through the social construction of gender, and the revelation of the new, the different, the other. I once wrote a piece called “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamonix.” It’s about speaking as a monster, and that sense of disruption that we transsexual people stage for other people. It’s about trying to speak from this embodied place, that is technologically constructed—but is it human or is it not? There are many things about me that are very different from you. And I need to be able to speak the truth of my own process of embodiment.
Q: I am sure that there are many trans gendered or transsexual people who would be very insulted to be viewed as monsters.
[Laughing] Yes, when I wrote it, people said, “That’s not an effective tool for organizing.” But I don’t fear my monstrosity. The word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrere” (just like the words “remonstrance,” “demonstrate”) and the noun means “to show something,” and usually it was to show something about the supernatural. Angels and monsters are actually very closely linked, in that both show the providence of God and something about the nature of being. The word “monster” also has the subsidiary meaning of “assembled from incongruous parts.” The classical monsters were the sphinx, the gryphon—the idea being these things combine elements that are not supposed to be together, but that their being together, being alive, demonstrates something supernatural, superhuman, and makes them beings that the gods speak through.
Q: What do you think about the assimilationist versus outsider argument that is so heated in the trans community today? Should transsexuals try to pass or should they stand out? Should they value and project their differences or should they strive to be just another person on the block?
I think of myself as a queer. Non-separatist, but anti-assimilationist. Saying that “I’m just like you” doesn’t really get me where I want to go. In many ways, I am “just like you” but those aren’t the parts that give me trouble. And so that insistence on my ability to be fully