Public Parts: Psychoanalysis, the Study of Religion, and Trans Subjectivity

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the role transphobia plays in feminist theory and culture at the end of the twentieth century, using the concept of fetishism and close, symptomatic reading to do so. I begin with an introduction that outlines a critical genealogy of fetishism attentive to the outsized role the phallic woman plays in these discourses in the twentieth century. After outlining my key terms method, and style, I continue with close readings of the work of four prominent feminist thinkers invested in psychoanalytic critique and interested in trans life, each of whose work falls into transphobia in different ways and to different ends. Chapter 1 focuses on the work of Catherine Millot, a prominent Lacanian psychoanalyst and author of the 1984 text Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality; Millot imports the transphobia of US feminist religious studies scholar Janice Raymond into a French psychoanalytic context, which I analyze and place in context alongside Lacanian psychoanalysis’s ongoing investments in transness. I then turn to Judith Butler, perhaps the best known (gender) theorist today, attending to Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), texts with different approaches to transness. Elizabeth Grosz, noted feminist theorist and author of Volatile Bodies (1994), is the focus of Chapter 3. Lastly, I look to a pioneer of trans studies, Jay Prosser, and his monograph Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, to examine how feminist transphobia conditions his scholarship. In Millot, transsexuality is a fetish object used to resolve the impasse between life and death in the aftermath of her lover and analyst Jacques Lacan’s death. Butler offers a useful and engaging approach to trans theorizing in Gender Trouble, only to return to an understanding of binary sex as ground in Bodies That Matter, an idea out of step with their broader corpus. I analyze what we might be able to learn from such an eruption of transphobia in an otherwise supportive thinker’s work. Grosz offers a theoretical paradigm and approach to materiality that appears at first amenable to trans life, but expressly refuses such a reading. Here, a commitment to binary sexual difference—and a refusal of trans possibility—conditions her scholarship beginning in Volatile Bodies and continuing in her more recent turn to Darwinism. Lastly, Prosser’s scholarship draws a stark dividing line between the transsexual and what he calls the “queer transgender,” abjecting and objectifying the latter in order to stabilize and legitimate the former. Throughout, I examine how we come to understand (trans) subjectivity and its relation to both psyche and material, and what the recurrent interest in trans genitality may teach us—about ourselves, about those who read us, and about bodies in general.