Abstract
A conception of transgender identity as an ‘authentic’ gendered core ‘trapped’ within a mismatched corporeality, and made tangible through corporeal transformations, has attained unprecedented legibility in contemporary Anglo-American media. Whilst pop-cultural articulations of this discourse have received some scholarly attention, the question of why this ‘wrong body’ paradigm has solidified as the normative explanation for gender transition within the popular media remains underexplored. This paper argues that this discourse has attained cultural pre-eminence through its convergence with a broader media and commercial zeitgeist, in which corporeal alteration and maintenance are perceived as means of accessing one’s ‘authentic’ self. I analyse the media representations of two transgender celebrities: Caitlyn Jenner and Nadia Almada, alongside the reality TV show TRANSform Me, exploring how these women’s gender transitions have been discursively aligned with a cultural imperative for all women, cisgender or trans, to display their authentic femininity through bodily work. This demonstrates how established tropes of authenticity-via-bodily transformation, have enabled transgender to become culturally legible through the wrong body trope. Problematically, I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of ‘acceptable’ transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain.
Highlights
In May 2015, the Olympic athlete and reality television star formerly known as Bruce Jenner appeared in a long-awaited TV interview with the television journalist Diane Sawyer
I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of‘acceptable’transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain
In constructing the maintenance of a suitably feminine appearance as the route to authenticity, happiness and ontological security, the wrong body discourse, as it is produced through the scripts of body culture media, has worked to mitigate the potential for trans visibility within the popular domain to disrupt common-sense understandings of personhood as contingent upon identification as discreetly male or female
Summary
Transgender identities attain coherency in representational form through the extent to which groups of established and recognisable, historically and culturally specific images, discourses and epistemologies feed into one another within the text, in order to produce ‘transgender’ as a legible subject position that makes sense within a particular social and historical context Adopting this conceptual framework, the emergence of the wrong body discourse as a commonsense explanation for gender transition, can be explained, at least in part, by the vast cultural recognisability and commercial appeal of media narratives in which, often costly, lengthy and painful, transformations to the external body, through cosmetic surgery, dieting/exercise and fashion/beauty makeovers, are valorised as means of ‘working on the self that enable greater authenticity’ (Heyes, 2007). The circulation of transgender celebrities such as those I have interrogated here, works to delineate an ‘ideal’ trans subject, one who is eager to embrace the solutions to overcoming feelings of dysphoria and depression through making use of the technologies of self-improvement offered by the by the commercial domain
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