Queer Imaginative Bodies and the Politics and Pedagogy of Trans Generosity: The Case of Gender Rebel

Abstract

In this chapter, I take up parts of the documentary Gender Rebel (2006) as an example of a text that can be read as participating in a cultural politics that expands the terms of “gendered humanness” by challenging normative understandings of what constitutes the “proper” gendered body for biological females. In my analysis, I focus on the lives of two “women” whose genderqueer embodiments can be read as a complex personhood under the sign of the masculine (Halberstam, Telling tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and transgender biography. In Passing: Identity and interpretation in sexuality, race, and religion, pp. 13–37, 2001) that enables the “women” to work on undoing restrictive gender norms, as these have played out on the site of the body, in order to inaugurate more livable lives. From this perspective, the narratives about genderqueer embodiments represented in Gender Rebel become one way to “relate the problematic of gender and sexuality to the tasks of persistence and survival” (Butler, Undoing gender, p. 4, 2004). My own specific analysis is situated within the broader context of what Judith Butler refers to as the “New Gender Politics that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory” (2004, p. 4). Along these lines, by drawing from the theoretical insights of queer and trans (gender) theories, this chapter explores the notion of the “queer imaginative body” where queer imagination is understood as a form of “embodied criticality” functioning as a politics that undermines the hegemonic terms of gender arising from a system of bigenderism. Situated within a discussion of the politics and pedagogy of trans generosity, the chapter concludes with a critical reflection on the pedagogical significance of taking up queer masculine embodiment (e.g., the body of the “genderqueer female-to-male [FTM] trans man”) as a site of generosity within the women’s studies classroom. In this way, I advocate what I refer to as a pedagogy of trans generosity. I argue that, because the queer masculine embodiments of biological females run the risk of being positioned across any number of cultural and social locations as a threatening “Other,” especially in relation to delimited understandings of the category woman, a pedagogy of trans generosity becomes a necessary critical intervention to challenge this viewpoint. Such a pedagogy, I attempt to initially work out here, provides an opportunity to situate queer masculine embodiments within a language of possibility that draws attention to the innovative quality of these embodiments as sites of generosity. That is, by way of their ongoing processes of becoming, they generously expand the meanings, as well as the possible range of lived experiences, of the (female) body and of gender/sexual identity in ways that queer these concepts so that they provide greater sustainability to a broader array of bodies and identities. From this perspective, a pedagogy of trans generosity opens up the possibility of framing queer embodiments more generally as forms of “bodily generosity” that can potentially become a resource for students in terms of imagining their own bodies and identities as sites of “endless becoming.”