From Trans* as Impasse to Affective Passing: Exploring Gender Identification In and Through Fictional Performance

Abstract

Following gender studies scholarship, Western norms consider “real” gender to be unambiguously, bodily identifiable (Stone 1992; Butler 1993; 1997, 152; [1990] 1999; Prosser 1998; Stryker and Whittle 2006). Conversely, both theatrical performance and trans* individuals’ claims of experienced gender have been painted as deviations from this standard – as examples of masquerade (Butler 1995, 136; Ginsberg 1995, 16). To contribute to societal and academic debates on gender, performance, and trans*ness, this thesis learns from trans* performances about what it takes to perform and be perceived as a gender identity. Approached as examples of passing, they incite contemplation on how binaries of reality/masquerade, authentic/deceptive, and being/not-being govern, inform, and standardize mundane and fictional intersubjective identification. To embrace identification as heteromorphic, indeterminate, and continually evolving, my primary contribution consists of reconceptualizing passing. Methodologically guided by conceptual deciphering, this thesis therefore asks: how might learning from trans* fictional gender performances about the identificatory relationship between performer and perceiver help us reconceptualize passing? To find answers, my first chapter studies Elliot Page’s, Maddie Blaustein’s, and L. Morgan Lee’s performances in The Umbrella Academy, Pokémon, and A Strange Loop. Examining Judith Butler’s work on gender masquerade, my second chapter questions the indexical power of performative acts to presence the multiplicity of gender, thereby redefining the discernment between mundane performativity and theatrical performance. A third chapter comprehends how gendered, racialized sociocultural connections between observability and reality curate (fictional) bodies as (un)identifiable by scrutinizing classical empiricism. Finally, my fourth chapter destabilizes frames of trans* passing as deceptive to retheorize passing through philosopher Brian Massumi’s work as the perceiver’s affective shifting between cognitive states of gender qualification. Overall, I aim to challenge conceptions of “real” gender as intrinsically materially, stably, and self-evidently identifiable. Concomitantly, foreclosing such assertions refutes the connotative merging of passing with trans*, imperceptibility, and deceit/unreality.