#but i can share a link here on tumblr so you can get yourself psychoanalyzed through my ocs WSHJGFDHGJF

[ruvviks]

good evening mutuals how are we all doing

[liberalfartsdegree]

seeing a number of people here and elsewhere talk about NBC’s H*annibal series in terms of trans politics with largely 2 main sub-themes: 1. that the relationship between the two central characters “feels” t4t and 2. that the story captures something “trans” in the way that it deals with social ostracism, violence, and (ostensibly) the relationship between creation and destruction. 

To the first, I’ll say that I too am not immune to pointing at characters on TV and saying “that’s trans” for fun, and it can be fun to look at villains for that moment because its satisfying or whatever. 

But to the second, and the way in which it connects to the first, I’m profoundly sad about the way that it sounds like people are connecting to it. The article I’ve seen a lot of people float is about “creation through destruction” focalized through the writer’s experience of their top surgery and DIY piercing/tattooing experiences. I guess I’m struggling with the contiguity that’s established between those practices, and the kind of “self-making” (which isn’t always non-violent) that trans people often go through with the kind of violence on that show. Full disclaimer, I had to turn it off--I couldn’t bear to “read around” the way that psychological abuse and cruelty was the only way to express needs and desires, not to mention the unmitigated gore of the show I found very challenging. 

It reminds me of my experience of reading Nietzsche--which the show references explicitly. The afterlife of Nietzsche has a weird multivalent presence. On face, Nietzsche is a violent racist, misogynist, anti-semite, white-supremacist, etc. and his philosophy explicitly and repeatedly invokes violence in every manifestation as a means of accessing and reinforcing power. However, in reading Nietzsche, ESPECIALLY in “enlightened” contexts with other readers (who I respect and trust! I’m talking about smart people doing good faith readings) there is an explicit desire to recover Nietzsche--to say “well, but his method” or “yes, and his structure of thinking is still useful.” I can’t fully reject this approach either! If nothing else Nietzsche developed a genealogical method that was instrumental in the kinds of reading that I care about. But The real task is’t to stop there, it can’t be to stop there, because we have to hold in our mind the fact that these meanings we can read in the text are co-constituted by the most repugnant and violent imaginings possible. 

Looking at the moment that hannibal is having, my first thought was a question--why are so many people who I would like to consider myself in community with (young AFAB trans people) finding solace in this show that I can’t bear to look at? The article (which I’m not linking deliberately because I am reflecting, not trying to start discourse) seems to be in good faith--I fully believe the writer finds immense power in what they called the “creation from destruction” they read in the text. There was a slip in the discussion though--the writer saw the cutting into of their own body reflected more in the psyches of Hannibal and Will Graham instead of the actual destroyed bodies depicted on screen. I think that’s super interesting if deeply sad: the body was externalized to the dead bodies on the show, while the mind was transposed into the cerebral lead characters. 

I don’t care to psychoanalyze that too much. Like, is it because AFAB trans people I’ve seen tend to connect with stories about the externality of bodies as a way to process dysphoria and lived experiences of misogyny etc? Sure maybe, but I think that kind of symptomatic reading strikes me as almost self-indulgent (that old tumblr meme about ‘some people need murder to cope’ comes to mind). 

I guess I’m just seeing a confluence of something here--and I don’t know how to name it without spending more time on this than I need to--which comes down to a sense that the body is a vehicle for psychological distress and that modification (”creation out of destruction”) of the body is reparative, held at the same time that the body is only ever external to the mind, and seeing violence done to bodies is ok as long as it creates something for the mind seeing it. 

And that’s just not true!!!! I mean like, everyone’s reading and life experience is different and there’s no one way to “be” trans and I’m not trying to prescribe a way of being for anybody. But like reading Nietzsche, taking that message out of that show seems to ignore the horrific, repugnant violence which is  its precondition. I think it’s essential to see the elision between the violently dismembered bodies in the show and the creation/destruction of Will Graham (and I’m not even getting into the psychological violence Hannibal does against him which is nightmare-inducing). Transposing that onto the self seems to miss that key slippage in the show between “bodies that matter” (thanks judy) and the ones that don’t. Taken in real life, either the person’s own body becomes the site of this violence (as happened in the article) or the violence becomes externalized to an Other who matters even less than the person doing this reading (wherever abjection settles itself--from t*kt*k it seems like these readers are nb AFAB people who are trying to negotiate their own expressions of gender within their attachment to femininity who often direct this need for violence against “masculine women” whatever that means)

ive spent way too long on this idk just like what would it be like to experience your dysphoria as contiguous with your experience of yourself and with your embodied experience and recognize the urge to violence as predicated on a construction of something abject, and to instead reject that and start over from a place of care

(and im not subposting at you @ keneinahora if you see this--of course I’d love to hear your thoughts if you want to share them, but this isn’t intended as a weird passive-aggressive callout. I hope that it’s clear from writing this that I’m not addressing any single individual and the value that media has on an individual scale).