| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is a theoretical analysis which seeks to map existing critiques in queer and trans scholarship on gender embodiment and offer a novel conceptual intervention. More specifically, it focuses critique on the logic systems underlying the Western conceptualisation of trans embodiment and the production of the transnormative subject in the contemporary United States - phallogocentrism, representationalism, and humanism - and provides a theoretical alternative based in Baradian posthumanist philosophy.
This thesis analyses the way in which mainstream American society conceptually approaches nonnormative gender and sexuality as it exists outside the contexts of heteronormative Western identity politics, specifically critiquing the phallogocentric logic underlying normativity, evident during the LGBT rights movements of the 1980s and 1990s. The social imposition of the heteronormative gender binary is questioned without taking away the agency and validity of the individuals who uphold it. Rather, it puts the focus on the contemporary discourses (legal, medical, and social) that dictate the material conditions of the body that permit inclusion within Western society, particularly American citizenship. Furthermore, it critiques the Western habit of rejecting nature and biology while relying on sociolinguistic structures as an indication of reality.
Inviting biology back into the conversation of the trans experience without falling into bioessentialism, Baradian posthumanism gives nature back her agency and reminds us that nature is not fixed, but rather is in an ongoing process of becoming. In doing so, posthumanism offers an ontological shift from linguistic representations to discursive practices by calling for a witness to nature’s performativity. Through this reconceptualisation, transgender embodiment can be understood as natural variance rather than social deviance. | |
