#above the Village of Chamounix: performing transgender rage

[bi-hop]

having read the manga now... I still think they're t4t but in a new unprecedented fashion. I have no idea what's going on with Laios, but take my hand...

[ghelgheli]

sorry if you've already answered this but i just read your post about whipping girl and found it so so so insightful!! i was wondering if you have any other recommendations for books/articles/etc. about transmisogyny and the lives of tma people. thank you in advance!!

I'm glad it was helpful! this is the second ask on the subject I've let pile up, because I want to do my best with it but I'm also far from an expert. I think half the work of answering "transmisogyny syllabus" questions is explaining why it's so hard to do so in the first place.

one of the tools of hegemony is the epistemic violence it works against its subjects; this is essential to transmisogyny, thru which we have historically been rendered unable to so much as record our existence, let alone theorize from it. it is incredibly difficult for a tma person to access the institutional devices of knowledge-making, most of all the university. even when we do it is typically for the institutions we work under to shoehorn our work into the hegemonic model, stymieing actual progress. so theories and histories of transmisogyny have had to progress in a patchwork, often informal fashion, upstream and at personal risk. I am not going to be able to give you books that I would recommend without criticism, because the epistemic violence of transmisogyny has made it virtually impossible to write such a book. but with that said, here are some recommendations:

- this post multiplied my understanding of transmisogyny manifold, and was one of the most clarifying things I've read on the subject

- hands off our lives, our stories, and our bodies, is imo essential to anyone interested in a theory of transmisogyny that actually engages with its manifestations in the global south

- I enjoyed My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker for the vibes

- two historical excavations of transmisogyny: Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive: Re-Membering Trans Feminine Life and Death in New Spain, 1604–1821 by Jamey Jesperson and ‘Selective Historians’: The Construction of Cisness in Byzantine and Byzantinist Texts by Ilya Maude

- Romancing the Transgender Native is good for learning the trappings of ahistorical and idealist "third gender" attributions

- especially (but not exclusively) if you are yourself a trans woman/transfem/tma, consider reading fiction by trans women/tma people, like Serious Weakness by Porpentine Charity Heartscape (check tws) or LOTE by Shola von Reinhold

- Jules Gill-Peterson's A Short History of Trans Misogyny is great for some case studies in global transmisogyny, and a decent materialist approach. but I think she makes the same mistake serano made re: equivocation of transmisogyny with the oppression of femininity, and she would have done well to read the second article on this list. her histories of the transgender child is also good, though not especially focussed on transmisogyny

- follow @ bloomfilters on twitter

if this looks like a hodgepodge that's because it is on account of what I said in the first two paragraphs. I am really not an expert and I am sure there are others who could give you much more. but to echo a friend, you may be just as likely to get something out of a game or a song written by a tma person as you are an essay. every medium can be an opportunity to plunge the roots of our theorizing deeper.

[cannibalbite]

"My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage" by Susan Stryker.

[becuzitisbitter]

I made my third game today between classes. Chamounix: Facing the Monster is a collaborative game for 1-4 players inspired by My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker

[frankensteinofficial]

(from My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker)

A monster is that which eludes gender definition. Ways of knowing are gendered — visual information intake as male and auditory information intake as female — so the monster problematizes gender because “he” is visually disturbing but verbally eloquent. I am thinking so hard right now

[communistkenobi]

hi nick communistkenobi, could you drop the name of the good essay ab trans people? re: tags of your recent post

Yes! I was reading My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker. It's a heavy read and includes detailed discussions of trans suicide and social exclusion, so just fair warning on that front. It was also written in 1994, so some of the lingo or phrasing is obviously outdated.

There are a lot of really good passages in this essay that I could quote, but I think the following section best encapsulates what Stryker is trying to argue:

I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. Just as the words “dyke,” “fag,” “queer,” “slut,” and “whore” have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like “creature,” “monster,” and “un-natural” need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being called a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence.

As in the case of being called “it,” being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities. “Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”

[fragbot]

I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.

- from "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," Susan Stryker (x)

[crippleprophet]

i want to thank you for your post from a few months ago about abandoning the idea that health is good. it's helped me process and unpack just how much the health framework has damaged me (and everyone; you could get multiple phds exploring how the concept of health categorizes and controls bodies!). and those ideas have extended beyond my personal life to my academic and professional writing and my interactions with loved ones - they've reached and impacted a lot of people.

i was a disabled child in a family of career athletes; the health paradigm was deeply engrained at an early age. now that i'm finally shaking those teachings, i've gotten a lot out of reanalyzing ideas i've always framed through a health lens. if it doesn't matter if i "eat healthily," since that's a meaningless concept, then how and why do i choose what i eat? why do i want to stretch regularly, if not because it's healthy and my doctors said it will improve my disability? how does my relationship with substance use change when health is taken out of the equation?

in these questions, i often find there's deeper and more satisfying reasons for my feelings and actions. this process reminds me of my experience with transness, in a way. reconsidering the concepts and assumptions underpinning a framework, deciding the whole framework is useless to you, and exploring what lies beyond it. thank you for opening such a freeing and fascinating door :-)

oh, woah, this absolutely made me cry, i truly can’t express how meaningful this is for me. (as you might know from following my blog lol) i’m homebound & only see two people in person unless i’m at the doctor, so this feeling of connection to other folks in my community is so deeply valuable, i really can’t thank you enough 💓💓

i definitely relate to the sense of rejecting health leading to a changed perspective on, like, everything in my life + prompting more intentional ways of engaging with my choices, routines, etc. following that theme of community, lineage, & ideas that ripple out, i’d love to take the time to mention just a few of the scholars, ancestors, comrades, & friends who have been life-changing for me in this area!

while there is a lot of transformative & vital work within disability studies, there’s still a lot of structural barriers against sick people’s contributions to formal theory + a lot of direct & indirect reinforcement of health as a good thing in the field. so i’ve found in many cases more resonant work in trans studies, mad studies, & postcolonial studies, by people affirming the pathology of their own identities & positions. just a few favorites of mine from within, across, & outside of these fields, in no particular order:

Sandoval-Sánchez, A. 2005. Politicizing abjection: in the manner of a prologue for the articulation of AIDS Latino queer identities. American Literary History. 17(3), pp.542-549.

Fritsch, K. 2013. On the negative possibility of suffering: Adorno, feminist philosophy, and the transfigured crip to come. Disability Studies Quarterly. 33(4).

Barounis, C. 2013. “Why so serious?” Cripping camp performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 7(3), pp.305-320.

Abrams, T. and Adkins, B. 2020. Tragic affirmation: disability beyond optimism and pessimism. Journal of Medical Humanities.

Stryker, S. 1994. My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: performing transgender rage. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. 1(3), pp.237-254.

Sexton, J. 2011. The social life of social death: on Afro-pessimism and black optimism. InTensions Journal. (5).

these were all immensely profound to me, but this last work, following Fanon, was such a complete & total frame shift for me that i feel the need to include some of it here (emphasis added):

This is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death.

This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality.

[…] In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative— “above all, don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389). In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos.

To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living.

if you want a pdf of any of these & are unable to find one feel free to hmu (although they will likely come with my annotations lol). this was a major topic of my master’s thesis for my disability studies degree (which was actually about disabled trans people, so i love that you connected this process of rejecting normality to transness in your own experience – i relate to that a lot) & i’m also happy to share that research with anyone who’s interested :)

i also have relevant thoughts & reblogs in my “stay sick” tag here (which i’ll add to this post) & my “embracing abjection” tag here + more broadly on my main.

& just a few of the many folks whose work + lives have shaped mine: @kelpforestdwellers @heavyweightheart @librarycards @crutchbutch @gatheringbones

i would also (always) absolutely love to hear more about your thoughts + writing if you would like to share! thank you again for taking the time to share this with me, i appreciate it more than i can say 💓💓

[astriiformes]

trick or treat!

It just wouldn't be Halloween if I didn't give someone Susan Stryker's "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage"

[nullandvoidgames]

Chamounix: Facing the Monster is a collaborative game about a creature confronting its monstrous creator for 1-4 players. It is inspired by the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and the unparalleled essay & performance art piece My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker.

In the game, players will play as both the creature and its creator. Each round the players work together as the creator to excuse their actions, and then take turns shredding those excuses as the creature until the two finally meet and the game ends.

Pay what you want. https://nullandvoidgames.itch.io/chamounix-facing-the-monster

[c-e-mcgill]

I have a new essay out from CrimeReads today! I had tremendous fun writing this one, exploring some of the queer history of Frankenstein/horror in general, and how that informed my writing of Mary in Our Hideous Progeny.

(And of course, I had to touch on Susan Stryker’s legendary essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage“!)

You can read my essay for CrimeReads here. And don’t forget – Our Hideous Progeny is finally out today in the US, available in a bookstore near you!

[bi-hop]

Dungeon Meshi (2014-2023) // My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (1994)

I am always rotating this particular passage in my head in relation to this blond. please help me-

[ghelgheli]

My own experience as a transsexual parallels the monster’s in this regard. The consciousness shaped by the transsexual body is no more the creation of the science that refigures its flesh than the monster’s mind is the creation of Frankenstein. The agenda that produced hormonal and surgical sex reassignment techniques is no less pretentious, and no more noble, than Frankenstein’s. Heroic doctors still endeavor to triumph over nature. The scientific discourse that produced sex reassignment techniques is inseparable from the pursuit of immortality through the perfection of the body, the fantasy of total mastery through the transcendence of an absolute limit, and the hubristic desire to create life itself. Its genealogy emerges from a metaphysical quest older than modern science, and its cultural politics are aligned with a deeply conservative attempt to stabilize gendered identity in service of the naturalized heterosexual order. None of this, however, precludes medically constructed transsexual bodies from being viable sites of subjectivity. Nor does it guarantee the compliance of subjects thus embodied with the agenda that resulted in a transsexual means of embodiment. As we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more, and something other, than the creatures our makers intended us to be. Though medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate naturalness as their effect, engaging with those very techniques produces a subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve. Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist. (...) To encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of the natural order. Confronting the implications of this constructedness can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My transsexual body literalizes this abstract violence. As the bearers of this disquieting news, we transsexuals often suffer for the pain of others, but we do not willingly abide the rage of others directed against us. And we do have something else to say, if you will but listen to the monsters: the possibility of meaningful agency and action exists, even within fields of domination that bring about the universal cultural rape of all flesh. Be forewarned, however, that taking up this task will remake you in the process. By speaking as a monster in my personal voice, by using the dark, watery images of Romanticism and lapsing occasionally into its brooding cadences and grandiose postures, I employ the same literary techniques Mary Shelley used to elicit sympathy for her scientist’s creation. Like that creature, I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life worth living. I have asked the Miltonic questions Shelley poses in the epigraph of her novel: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?” With one voice, her monster and I answer “no” without debasing ourselves, for we have done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.

My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage, Susan Stryker (1994) [pdf]

[cannibalbite]

"My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage" by Susan Stryker.

[lefthandofanarres]

"Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking it until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival." - Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix— Performing Transgender Rage

[sonicfrontiers]

I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. Just as the words "dyke," "fag," "queer," "slut," and "whore" have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like ‘"creature," "monster," and "unnaturaI" need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being called a "creature" results from the threat the term poses to your status as "lords of creation," beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called "it," being called a "creature" suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities. "Monster" is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, "divine portent," itself formed on the root of the verb monere, "to warn." It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, "Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening." Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.

Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (1994)