My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rageстатья из журнала
Аннотация: I am not the * rst to link Frankenstein’s monster and the transsexual body. Mary Daly makes
the connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein
Phenomenon,” in which she characterizes transsexuals as the agents of a “necrophilic invasion” of
female space (69-72). Janice Raymond, who acknowledges Daly as a formative in= uence, is less direct when she says that “the problem of transsexuality would best be served by morally mandating it
out of existence,” but in this statement she nevertheless echoes Victor Frankenstein’s feelings toward
the monster: “Begone, vile insect, or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust. You reproach me
with your creation” (Raymond 178; Shelley 95). It is a commonplace of literary criticism to note that
Frankenstein’s monster is his own dark, romantic double, the alien Other he constructs and upon
which he projects all he cannot accept in himself; indeed, Frankenstein calls the monster “my own
vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave” (Shelley 74). Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond
and others of their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular golem? (1)' e attribution of monstrosity remains a palpable characteristic of most lesbian and gay representations of transsexuality, displaying in unnerving detail the anxious, fearful underside of the current
cultural fascination with transgenderism. (2) Because transsexuality more than any other transgender
practice or identity represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of * xed
genders upon which a politics of personal identity depends, people who have invested their aspirations
for social justice in identitarian movements say things about us out of sheer panic that, if said of other
minorities, would see print only in the most hate-riddled, white supremacist, Christian fascist rags. To
quote extensively from one letter to the editor of a popular San Francisco gay/lesbian periodical:Referring by name to one particular person, self-identi* ed as a transsexual lesbian, whom she
had heard speak in a public forum at the San Francisco Women’s Building, the letter-writer went on
to say:When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I * nd no more reason to mourn my opposition to them-or to the order they claim to represent-than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity
to the human race. I do not fall from the grace of their company-I roar gleefully away from it like a
Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell.
Год издания: 1994
Авторы: Susan Stryker
Издательство: Duke University Press
Источник: GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Ключевые слова: Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
Открытый доступ: bronze
Том: 1
Выпуск: 3
Страницы: 237–254