Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture

FIN DE SEXE, Transsexuality and the Death of History

FIN DE SIÈCLE, FIN DE SEXE TRANSSEXUALITY AND THE DEATH OF HISTORY When exactly did history die, and how? Was its demise sudden and catastrophic , as the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima shattered , once and for all, any lingering belief in Western myths of progress? Or did it go more slowly, gradually dissolving into glossy media images and nostalgic simulations of an ever more enigmatic past? At what point in time did the idea of history become history, did it become possible to say, “that was then, this is now”? And how does this perception of a temporal gulf between “then” and “now,” between the era of past history and posthistoire, tally with the claim that we no longer possess a historical consciousness? Finally, what is the connection between discourses of the end of history and the end of sex? How does our sense of historical time relate to changing perceptions of gender and sexual difference? 6 I begin some tentative responses to these questions by pointing to the many references to transsexuality and transgenderism in much postmodern thought. Why has the transsexual become such a popular figure in postmodern theory? In The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard writes, “the sexual body has now been assigned an artificial fate. This fate is transsexuality—transsexual not in any anatomical sense but rather in the more general sense of transvestism, of playing with the commutability of the signs of sex . . . we are all transsexuals.”1 Here Baudrillard’s metaphor seeks to capture the dissolution of once stable polarities of male and female. Sexual nature becomes sexual artifice, inner self turns into performance, depth is replaced by surface. Sex is simply the deployment of the signs of sex through the skillful manipulation of clothing, bodies, and gestures. According to Baudrillard, such celebrities as Madonna, Michael Jackson, and La Cicciolina underscore our contemporary fascination with the exaggeration, parody, and inversion of conventional signs of sexual difference. Poststructuralist theory echoes and intensifies these practices of gender bending and blending. In many cases, it provocatively challenges the reality and stability of the male/female divide. On the one hand, theorists like Derrida, Deleuze, and Baudrillard profess their desire to “become woman” by aligning themselves with a feminine principle of undecidability and masquerade. On the other hand, feminists increasingly appeal to metaphors of transvestism to stress the mutable and plastic qualities of the sexed body. The most influential feminist theorists of recent times, Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, have both tried to break out of the prison house of gender by thinking of gender as a performance rather than an identity. Gender is something you do rather than something you are, and this doing is uncertain, unstable, and contingent. “Fin de siècle, fin de sexe,” the epigram coined by the French artist Jean Lorrain to express the affinities between gender confusion and historical exhaustion in the late nineteenth century, seems even more apt for our own time.2 As our millennium winds to its end, writers are looking back to the last fin de siècle and plundering its repertoire of references to decadence, apocalypse, and sexual crisis. Yet these references are also acquiring new meanings, as images of sex and gender connect up to postmodern stories about history and time. As the male/female divide becomes ever more fragile and unstable, it is claimed, so we are also witnessing a waning of temporality, teleology, and grand narrative. The end of sex, in this view, echoes and affirms the end of history. Phallocentrism and linear time are the evil twins of modernity, closely intertwined in a symbiotic relationship. Their joint demise is a foregone conclusion, as binary logic and historical totalities give way to an altogether more ambiguous and indeterminate condition. Indeed, the idea that history has come to an end is perhaps the most ubiquitous commonplace of postmodern thought. F I N D E S I È C L E , F I N D E S E X E 138 My aim in this chapter is not to prove or disprove such claims. The end of history is clearly not a thesis that is amenable to empirical adjudication. Rather, I want to think about who is making these claims and why. What does it mean to talk about the death of history? To what extent does such a claim reaffirm the order of time that it appears to negate? How do changing...