Trans/scriptions: Homing desires, (trans)sexual citizenship and racialized bodies

Abstract

The idea for this chapter is born of a deep frustration with the “imagined community” of transsexual belonging. Consumed by questions of belonging, I write in order to understand how our attachments to the perplexing edifice of “home” shape the theoretical routes that we take, the journeys that we embark on and, in the case of transsexuals, the transitions that we make across borders of gender and/or national identity, among others. I write because I am frustrated by transsexual theory’s failure to take into account racial and ethnic differences without resorting to imperializing gestures; because I am tired of reading the kind of theory that Susan Stryker ingeniously describes as limiting itself through an “around the world in eighty genders” approach-a narrative smorgasbord of “gender exotics, culled from native cultures around the world” (Stryker 2006: 14). But, above all, I continue to write because of both my deep respect for trans theory, as well as my skepticism towards it, because it is within these zones of ambivalence and contradiction that we might envision a way forward. With these paradoxes in mind, my questions are as follows: To what “home”1does the trajectory of transition, the act of border-crossing, lead the already in-between diasporic, gender liminal subject? Who is the correct and proper citizen that gets to speak in the name of a transsexual subjectivity? How can we engage in a more nuanced understanding of the re-circulation, regulation and re-inscription of the “transsexual empire” in postmodernity? How do we account for the differentimaginings of transsexual mobility within a locality? How do we maintain the relationality of trans-identity without slipping into a formless cultural relativismwithout rooting ourselves into isolated social and geographical locations? And finally, what are the tacit knowledges that permeate trans scholarship? The title of this chapter, “Trans/scriptions,” borrows loosely from Avtar Brah’sintroductory chapter in her seminal text Cartographies of Diaspora. Brah’s ruminations on situated identities in unstable cartographies of intersectionality have provided a solid foundation for my own conceptualization of differential inscriptions of signifiers of belonging on (trans)sexual and racialized bodies across space and time (Brah 1996: 1-10). Most importantly, her analysis of “homing desires”—which she theorizes as distinct from the desire for a “homeland”—is an invaluable framework through which diaspora and transsexuality may be brought into dialogue with each other (Brah 1996: 197). Yet, this chapter seeks to do more than simply highlight the ways in which racial exclusion within trans theory has resulted in an unspoken white privilege. I prefer, instead, to envision this as a theoretical excursion into the turbulent waters of identity politics. Therefore, in the spirit of risky ventures, this journey will be undertaken with neither a map nor a destination; for it is precisely through exploring those stubborn islands of thought-through challenging our own investments in the protective cocoon of homeliness-that we may envision a trans politics that is critical of its (re)turns to “home.” Before moving on, and to make some of my critical allegiances more apparent,this chapter intends to problematize both “transsexuality” and “transgender” for their lack of engagement with the imaginary and affective conditions of “trans” belonging.2 Indeed, several contemporary gender theorists have already argued that the catch-all phrase “transgender” emerges from the Anglo-American gay and lesbian community (Namaste 2000: 2; Sullivan 2003: 99-118; Wilchins 2003: 141-42). But, as this chapter illustrates, “transsexual” carries its own imperialist baggage, achieved through the “imposition of a particular world view and conceptual framework” (Namaste 2000: 103). Within both transsexual and transgender scholarship, trans people continue to be “rhetorically inscribed in the articulation of specifically nationalist political programs” that effectively conceal histories of imperialism and social relations of racism (Namaste 2000: 98). Reduced thus to the purely figural, the deployment of spatial and temporal metaphors can only implicitly and securely locate the (trans)sexual citizen as one marked by the values and norms of the Anglo-American majority. Ultimately, this chapter calls for a much-needed phenomenology of transsexualconsciousness that firmly situates narratives of (dis)embodied dissonance in specific historical and political frameworks. Initially conceptualized as a piece of “homework,” my preoccupation with the “homing desires” in trans theory stems from my perception of trans politics from the (dis)embodied location of an East Indian/Arab immigrant in Canada who has spent most of his life in Kenya. So, if I seem overly occupied with my task of transcribing the multi-placedness of “home” in diasporas onto the lived realities of transsexuality it is because, to borrowfrom Stuart Hall, “all discourse is ‘placed’, and the heart has its reasons” (Hall 2003: 234).