Theorizing Transgender Embodiments

Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body is a brilliant book that marks an important milestone in theorizing transgendered embodiments. Chapter 1 develops a reading of the psychoanalytic concept of the “bodily ego,” which Salamon finds “of particular use in thinking transgender because it shows that the body of which one has a ‘felt sense’ is not necessarily contiguous with the physical body as it is perceived from outside” (14). She positions her reading of the bodily ego as a correction to Jay Prosser’s Second Skins, which uses that concept to locate the materiality of transsexual bodies as prediscursive.¹ Aligning most closely with Paul Schilder and Kaja Silverman, Salamon insists that “the constituent parts of the body cannot be thought as biologically given prior to their assemblage” by the body schema, which serves as “a mediating entity between self and world” and renders the body accessible only through psychical mediation (30).

In chapter 2, Salamon turns to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to argue that our lived experiences of embodiment emerge through desire and proprioception in the relational space between self and other. This is a groundbreaking move, for it allows Salamon to account for embodiments across the spectrum of transgendered identities, rather than follow Prosser in privileging transsexuality. Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between “body” and “flesh” proves useful for understanding the moment in the film Boys Don’t Cry at which Lana Tisdell declares that she knows that Brandon Teena is a man because she has “seen him in the full flesh” (58). Here Lana recognizes a “flesh” defined not by the body’s material contours but by Brandon’s felt experience of male embodiment. Salamon’s use of phenomenology to affirm transpeoples’ self-perceptions marks a crucial and much-needed shift within psychoanalytic approaches to transgender, many of which at best have occluded such feelings or at worst have pathologized them as “delusional.”

Chapter 3 further develops Salamon’s observation of the importance of desire and sociality in the formation of transsubjectivities by focusing on San Francisco’s rich variety of lived embodiments. Breaking down the theory/life distinction by observing that “gender as it is lived and embodied is, in some powerful sense, always already theorized,” she develops an extended critique of writers who — like Prosser — posit a transgendered body that is accessible to understanding prior to theorizing and social construction (72). She ends with the challengingly astute observation that many trans writers share the same questionable assumptions about prediscursive materiality that animate the work of one of the most vocal critics of transsexuality, Bernice Hausman.

Salamon turns to tensions between transgender studies and feminism in the next chapter. Among its many strands is a brief examination of women’s studies, queer studies, and LGBT studies as sites at which broader cultural patterns of trans exclusion can play out. Salamon’s discussion of these institutional formations is schematic, but nonetheless useful for future transfeminist theorizing. The strongest thread in the chapter reveals distressing parallels between literal violence against transmasculine persons and the rhetorical violence at work in shifting feminist responses to female and transmasculinities. Salamon observes that feminist rhetorical violence against FTMs has worked in tandem with lesbian recuperation of the formerly abjected figure of the butch, at the price of sanitizing the latter of any signs of masculine identification. This logic — also present in narratives that exonerate femmes of responsibility for abandoning transitioning partners — illuminates a continued anxiety about the meaning of lesbians’ attraction to masculinity.

The chapter on transfeminism ends with a call for deeper interrogation of the assumptions about sameness of gender, sexuality, and identity at work in lesbian and feminist anxieties about FTMs, and chapter 5 answers that appeal by reading the “Place, Interval” chapter of Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference against its essentialist, heteronormative grain.² Salamon embraces Irigaray’s “insistence on locating difference at the heart of relation” but rejects her assumption that sexual difference is “legible at the surface of the body” (142, 138). Chapter 6 furthers this argument...