Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (review)

Although feminist continental philosophy has explored the question of the body from different perspectives, it could be argued that it has yet to do justice to the materiality of the body (despite many attempts) or to give an account of sexual difference that does not marginalize the experiences of intersex and transgender people. Gayle Salamon’s book Assuming a Body addresses not only these issues, but also the often contentious divide between feminist and transgender communities. Through a series of readings drawn from both sides of the feminist-transgender divide, Salamon attempts to “enrich and broaden the mostly gender normative accounts of bodily materiality offered by psychoanalysis and phenomenology” as well as to “understand transgendered bodies as embodying a specificity that is finally not reducible to the material” (8). Over the course of seven chapters, she lays out an account of embodiment drawn from psychoanalytic, phenomenological, transgender, and sexual difference theory that takes its materiality seriously without minimizing its ongoing implication in an open-ended and temporal process. In doing so, she tracks a notion of the “felt sense” of the body that she insists emerges from the unfolding meaning of an embodied subject who is inevitably entangled with the social and cultural production of normative gender and sex even when the latter comes into tension with that subject’s felt sense of gendered and sexed embodiment.

Salamon contends that the lived experience of one’s embodiment has a history of its own. Just as feminist theory should engage the reality of transgender lives more fully, transgender theory should avoid describing transgender identity as rooted in a “pure” experience of material reality; overlooking the history of how the “felt sense” of embodiment arises can shut down the productive reworkings of materiality that could ameliorate the lives of transpeople and open us all to a broader range of lived experience. Exploring the connections between feminist continental theory and trans-theory—the kind of exploration that Salamon engages in this book—could lead not only to such reworkings, but to an understanding of sexed and gendered identity that doesn’t reduce the transgendered subject to the “constitutive outside of binary gender” (98).

Although sympathetic to attempts, such as Jay Prosser’s in Second Skins, to counter the marginalization of transsexuality, especially in feminist and queer theory, by foregrounding the materiality of transgender lives and insisting that “the transsexual body is ‘unimpeachably real,’” Salamon argues in chapter 1 that this kind of approach puts the transsexual body in a “domain of plenitude and fullness” that ultimately renders it beyond the realm of resignification. She contends that psychoanalytic approaches to the body, such as those of Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, Didier Anzieu, Paul Schilder, and Judith Butler, as well as Sigmund Freud, have more promise for feminist and transgender theorists than attempts to ground identity by appeal to an ostensibly nondiscursive bodily materiality. The psychoanalytic theories she explores could be extended to overcome their binary bias in order to enable an affirmation of one’s materiality through a reconfiguration and resignification of the lived meanings of those materialities: “To affirm a materiality—or, to be less abstract, to insist on the livability of one’s own embodiment, particularly when that embodiment is culturally abject or socially despised—is to undertake a constant and always incomplete labor to reconfigure more than just the materiality of our own bodies. It is to strive to create and transform the lived meanings of those materialities” (42).

In chapter 2, Salamon presents a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sexuality as the exemplar of transcendence; sexuality is a desiring relation to the other or the world in which my body becomes “the vehicle through which I am compelled into relation with the world, where it is finally only that relation that gives me a body” (56). This reaching out to the world entails a phantasmatic register that Merleau-Ponty reconfigures, “transforming it from a register characterized by a lack of...