Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”
Posted: Mon, Apr 7, 2025
Study of trans phenomenon vs. trans studies
Medical sciences: “gender identity disorder”
Mainstream feminism: appropriation, fetishization, “rape”
Sandy Stone: “How, then, can the transsexual speak? If the transsexual were to speak, what would s/he say?” (1991, 295)
- Trans studies: positioning trans people as subjects rather than objects of study/knowledge.
Trans monstrosity
Helen Joyce recently says that she excludes trans people from her feminism “for two reasons—one of them is that every one of those people is a person who’s been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world.”
Stryker: she is right, but not for the reasons she thinks.
- Transsexuality, especially the desire and practice of physically altering one’s genitalia, poses an existential threat to the dominant social order, which presumes a “natural” sex.
- Gender is part of a symbolic system that confers meaning and intelligibility onto our bodies and selves.
- Bodies literally do not make sense and cannot exist in our social world unless they can be made to fit into some gender boxes.
- Transsexuality challenges this gendering system in a way that homosexuality does not: it “represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of fixed genders upon which a politics of personal identity depends” (238).
- Medicine functions socially to contain and manage this threat.
In-class activity
Working as a group, please identify the analogies and disanalogies that Stryker sees between herself and Frankenstein’s monster.
Reclaiming monstrosity
| Frankenstein’s monster | The transsexual |
|---|---|
| Created by science but more than what the creator intends them to be | Created by science but more than what the creator intends them to be |
| Has no language -> Learns language to claim subjectivity | Has no subjectivity -> Appropriates language to claim subjectivity |
| Knowledge of their creation ignites a rage against its creator | Knowledge of their creation ignites a rage against its creator |
| Cannot exist authentically as themself in this world | Cannot exist authentically as themself in this world |
| Not human | Rejects humanism, identifies with Frankenstein’s monster, embraces animal/human/technology as one |
| Their very creation and existence are experienced as a violent violation | Their very creation and existence are experienced as a violent violation |
| Rage stems from failure to satisfy dominant norms of human embodiment | Rage stems from failure to satisfy dominant norms of gendered embodiment |
| Confronts and eventually kills its creator | ?? |
Reclaiming: “Just as the words ‘dyke,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘whore’ have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. . . . The affront you humans take at being called a ‘creature’ results from the threat the term poses to your status as ‘lords of creation,’ beings elevated above mere material existence” (240).
Trans rage: “Transgender rage is a queer fury, an emotional response to conditions in which it becomes imperative to take up, for the sake of one’s own continued survival as a subject, a set of practices that precipitates one’s exclusion from a naturalized order of existence that seeks to maintain itself as the only possible basis for being a subject” (249).
Stryker’s words to Victor Frankenstein
“I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself” (240–41).
- Cis people’s genders and bodies are just as “unnatural” as trans people’s.
- Gendering is a process that violates all of us—it is a “universal cultural rape of all flesh” (250).
- There is a kind of transformative power to be gained by owning one’s monstrosity, unleashing one’s rage, and naming and defining oneself on one’s own terms, rather than hiding in the comfortable intelligibility afforded by the dominant social order.
G.L.O.S.S., “Masculine Artifice”