Trans Embodiment and Identity
This topic concerns how trans people experience and theorize their bodies and identities, including accounts of transition, embodiment, and the relation between feeling and the material body.
Definition
The study of how transgender people inhabit, narrate, and theorize their bodies and gendered identities, including the lived dimensions of transition and the relation between psychic and material embodiment.
Scope
It examines theoretical and first-person work on trans embodiment, including Jay Prosser's attention to the body narratives of transsexuality, Gayle Salamon's philosophical account of bodily being, and Susan Stryker's affective writing on transgender experience. It treats how these works engage with and sometimes complicate the constructionist and performative theories dominant in queer studies, presented descriptively.
Core questions
- How do trans people experience the relation between their felt gender and their physical body?
- Do performative theories of gender adequately capture the reality of transition and embodied identity?
- What can first-person trans accounts contribute to gender theory?
Key theories
- Body narratives of transition
- Prosser's argument that transsexual experience involves a felt relation to the body and a narrative of becoming that a purely performative account of gender, emphasizing surface and discontinuity, can underdescribe.
- Assuming a body
- Salamon's phenomenological and psychoanalytic account of how bodily being is assumed rather than simply given, theorizing trans embodiment without reducing the body to brute matter or to discourse alone.
History
Stryker's 1994 essay gave a powerful first-person voice to transgender experience and theory. Prosser's Second Skins (1998) foregrounded embodied narratives of transition, sometimes in tension with Butlerian performativity, and Salamon's Assuming a Body (2010) developed a sustained philosophical treatment of trans embodiment.
Debates
- Performativity and the felt body
- Whether performative theories of gender, with their emphasis on surface and citation, can account for the deeply felt embodied dimension of trans experience, or whether they need supplementing by phenomenological and narrative approaches.
Key figures
- Jay Prosser
- Gayle Salamon
- Susan Stryker
Related topics
Seminal works
- stryker1994
- prosser1998
- salamon2010
Frequently asked questions
- Does trans theory reject the idea that gender is performative?
- Not wholly, but some trans theorists, such as Jay Prosser, argue that performative accounts emphasizing fluidity can underdescribe the felt, embodied reality of transition and identity.