#thaemlitz

Terre Thaemlitz - "Soil"

"Both MTF and FTM transgenderism also involve a tremendous amount of self-surveillance, particularly through the social pressure to "pass" as either a man or woman. In this sense, transgendered identity involves a similar multiple self-awareness as surveyor and surveyed. However, a key difference emerges when we consider how the subject/object formula relates to the physical body. For women, the physical body remains reconciled with the object aims of the act of surveillance. Whether a woman is judged "womanly" or "unwomanly" the physical woman's body remains visible and identifiable as the target of such qualitative judgments. However, in the case of the transgendered body the physical body is not reconciled with the object aims of the act of surveillance. For example, when a MTF is judged "womanly" or "unwomanly" ("passable" or "unpassable", "gorgeous" or "a mess") the target of such qualitative judgments is not the transgendered body, but the woman's body. Similarly, an FTM's "manliness" is judged in relation to the ability to invoke images of a man's body. Both the "success" and "failure" of a transgendered person's appearance point us toward expectations of a physical body other than the one before us. As transgendered people, we come to survey ourselves in relation to a foreign body. In this way, the physical transgendered body exists on a social plane that is both invisible and unconsidered, by both the transgendered person and other observers. Despite the many processes of surveillance involved in formulating a transgendered identity, in most cases the physical transgendered body itself remains completely unsurveyed. Whereas the majority of identity politics have focused on a disenfranchised social group's struggle for "visibility", within transgendered communities the struggle for "visibility" seems to be nothing more than the struggle for an alternative "invisibility". I find this alternative invisibility inspiring because, with the proper spin, it implies that the transgendered body has, in effect, eluded dominant systems of representation and operates below radar. There is potential freedom in that awareness - perhaps not a transformational or redemptive freedom, but a freedom of the moment. A spell to break all spells...."