My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

Abstract

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.