Abstract
Exploring narratives of trans embodiment as a journey home, this article offers a conceptual reading of the trans body as an archive built and performed in ways that make it compatible with the dominant discourses that govern its narrative. Drawing on personal narratives, the article then offers individual and alternative ways of building one’s home in the pursuit of one’s subjectivity.
Why this desire for a body archive, for an assembly of history’s traces deposited in me? (Singh, 2018: 29)
Going Home
Reflecting on the discursive nature of the home, the domestic space par excellence, this article problematizes narratives of trans embodiment as a journey home. It does so by drawing on Derrida’s notion of archive as a ‘house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates . . . those who command’ (Derrida, 1995: 15) to explore how archives of ideal images, enactments, histories and gender representation materially build structures that house normative narratives and project them onto the body, encouraging individuals to dissipate or simplify – or forget, to use the terminology of the archive – their own complex histories in favour of more palatable, unambiguous, no-space and no-time embodiment, easier to recognize and govern. While concepts such as home, personhood, embodiment, and archive discussed in this article have rich and contested histories in Western and non-Western traditions that can be explored from a multitude of angles, this article – both for reasons of length and scope – is informed by contemporary historical constructions, far from universal, commonly used when theorizing experiences of transition. These are partial but offer useful conceptual models through which it is possible to reflect on returning home as a metaphor for transition and the emerging of dissonant forms of trans subjectivities.
We know from a number of trans accounts and autobiographies (Cray et al., 2013; Grace, 2016; Martino, 1977; Morris, 1974; Thompson and Sewell, 1995) that home holds an ambivalent significance for trans individuals: whether it is described as the destination of a lifetime, or a place to run away from and leave behind, the imagery and affects commonly associated to home appear characterized by complex dualities. In many of these stories, home is not a safe space. Some feel deprived of a sense of homeliness, others are made homeless as a result of being trans (Cray et al., 2013); others, still, have no home to return to, at least not until after gender reassignment which, according to the archetypal trans narrative, is the moment when the sensation of ‘feeling at home’ is finally achieved.
In his 1998 book Second Skin, Jay Prosser identifies home as the final and only possible destination of trans embodiment: a destination that can be reached only through transition – there is no other way. In his examination of trans experiences, Prosser focuses on returning home as the final segment of a four-stage journey made of ‘suffering and confusion; the epiphany of self-discovery; corporeal and social transformation/conversion; and finally the arrival home’ (Prosser, 1998: 101). Prosser notes that the arrival home can take place only if the doctor authorizes treatment (i.e. hormonal therapy or surgery) which is conditional, in his view, on the ability of the individual to perform a coherent embodiment. Going home, then, broadly refers to the material body which, finally re-gendered, or we could say rehomed, and free from the ambiguity that kept it stray, can finally ‘return home’ (Prosser, 1998: 101).
Just like with any other institutions, it is difficult to imagine the home away from the corners, lines and shapes of its architecture. Yet the home does not necessarily think of itself primarily as an institution (Wigley, 1994), despite the centrality of its relations, symbols and practices in our modern life. This may be because the institutional function of the home makes sense only when observed from the outside, while the story it tells itself from the inside is usually one of domesticity, informality and warmth. The sense of familiarity as well as friction, or sometimes repulsion, that we feel when we think of our home is determined primarily by its physical space: rooms, the colour of the walls, the corridors, the drive home – these are images with which we instinctively associate and, at the same time, from which we instinctively feel alienated. This split emotion generates in us a sense of ‘primordial homelessness’ (Wigley, 1994: 208).
In his work, architect and theorist Mark Wigley argues that spaces we know and inhabit are instituted through ‘a sustained pathology of disavowal’ (Wigley, 1995: 15): spatial marginalization, exclusion, segregation, prohibition and abandonment are all ‘spatial instruments’ through which specific discourses are harboured. In this paradigm, spatial boundaries such as separations, corners and walls play a double role: they reclaim an absence by filling that physical and metaphysical void with their presence. These structures, however, are not empty objects that sit there neutrally. As Gaston Bachelard wrote, ‘a house [. . .] is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space’ (Bachelard, 1969: 47): they come with their own syntax of ideas, images, language and codes that, on the one hand, become constitutive of that space and of intimacy and, on the other hand, mark space around them, introducing a new dimension, producing a new narrative and marking the territory around them. Without this exclusion, there is no sense of structure, there is no sense of home (Wigley, 1995: 15). For all its apparent warmth and familiarity, the home conceals participation in an ambivalent economy of violence, and through displacement inscribes itself within the very dynamics from which it appears to withdraw: namely, what is inside is haunted by whatever it is that stays out. What is alluring in a home is precisely what makes the space of the home so exclusive, dominant and intolerant.
Going home, however, is not just about conquering a familiar space, or a familiar body, and feeling at ease in it, presumably after being away from it, or perhaps having never been in it before. It is also an indication that the home – an institution, after all – is ready to welcome the individual, to ‘process’ it, to make him/her its own. Being at home is then the concretization of that mutual recognition. Feeling at home in one’s home – feeling at home in one’s body, the right body – becomes an urgency.
The home also symbolizes a physical demarcation between what is inside and what stays out. Hooks (1989) and Ahmed (1999) argue that the inside of the home is not a fixed or pure space protected from the dangers and fears of the outside world, but rather one of inevitable tensions and alienations, where mythologies of domestic bliss and security harbour a phenomenological condition of homelessness. Indeed, while walls formalize boundaries, the inner and outer world are never fully separated. What is inside not only continues to be visible through the windows, but somehow leaks out through the walls. The outside – with all its sounds, colours and affects – infiltrates what is inside, traverses our intimate selves and emerges into a perfect balance of anguish and joy, warmth and distance, comfort and alienation. Homes house memories and experiences, but can also discursively produce the same fears and anger we wish to leave outside. ‘I longed for the feeling of warmth, like when your feet are freezing and you slip on a pair of really thick woollen socks’ (Thompson and Sewell, 1995: 249). For Ray Thompson, that perfect balance between inner and outer world remains an impossibility: the outside of the body – the skin – is a ‘false outer casing’ (Prosser, 1998: 68), its disjuncture from the idea of the body (inner home) prevents him from feeling warmth. He waits for surgery, experiences depression – his inner world is in turmoil and erupts out of his skin in the form of blisters. His struggle is material: his skin is damaged (Prosser, 1998: 76), his legs weakened, his body cannot stand the tension. The conflict between his inner and outer body becomes destructive: he wants to destroy his body – ‘slash [my] face, punch [myself] to bits’ (Thompson and Sewell, 1995: 199) – which, far from feeling like a home, is perceived as an ‘inadequate container’ (Prosser, 1998: 76).
Ray’s frustration grew: his experience of bodily dislocation was reflected onto his spatial surroundings: ‘The house – like his inner body – became neglected, dirty, and fell into despair . . . “the walls of protection that I had carefully built around myself, I was now breaking them – since my body is not my own, I cannot feel the warmth of it, so I am cold, very cold, on the inside”’ (Thompson and Sewell, 1995: 248, 249). The home becomes hostile, unfamiliar: ‘You know that all the things in the room should be recognizable, but they aren’t, and you’re looking, looking, looking for that familiar something, always trying to look beyond, but there is nothing’ (p. 249). Nothing but surgery can fulfil this type of yearning, as Prosser explains: ‘the point of every narrative is, after all, to return home’ (Prosser, 1998: 76).
The tension between one’s home and the impossibility to return to it if not as a gendered body raises a number of concerns. The first pertains to the univocal understanding of trans subjectivities as one-way journeys committed to the gender binary. Here, we face the contradiction of individuals who find themselves excluded from the one space they spend their entire life trying to reach, to finally return home. This characterization inevitably strengthens the gender binary, which is the very thing that made them homeless in the first place, and further excludes those trans individuals who do not identify within it and reject that model of home. As architect and theorist Henry Urbach argued, the home is ‘a regime of (almost) compulsory heterosexuality’ (Urbach, 2000: 347) which antagonizes all those who choose less linear forms of subjectivity or may decide to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of alternative forms of embodiment. Will those trans individuals who choose to never own a home, or to build their home upside down, be viewed as an obstacle? The second set of questions, as observed by Lucas Cassady Crawford’s reflection, pertains to the concept of ownership within the mythology of the trans body as a home (Crawford, 2010: 527). At the forefront of this paradigm is the idea that identity is naturally and univocally stable and ‘a matter of ownership’ (p. 528). 1 Now, this sense of ownership is ambivalent: it can refer to ‘be[ing] one’s own’ (belonging to oneself), which is what Prosser argues, but it can also mean to belong to – become a member of – one of the other gender. The affiliation would be problematic in at least two ways. First, it marks a line between those who can have, or hope to have, access to that privilege, creating or reinforcing hierarchies (for example, what does one have to do to belong a little more?). Second, it implicitly poses a demand for representation: the more and better one ‘does’ their chosen gender, the more and better one is perceived as familiar, domesticable, and safe. This visibility is key in the constitution and reinforcement of that privilege. Similarly, owning a home, which is crucially different to feeling at home, is, metaphorically and materially, a privilege. More than anything, it means to have the opportunity to look at what’s outside from a specific perspective. In the instance I am analysing here, the foundations of this home are heteronormative: the body that will own it will commit to the institution of gender.
The privileged relationship between gender and property ownership is ancient and not at all prerogative of trans embodiment. Interestingly, in the Greek polis, property ownership was linked to the ‘local’ and allocated on the basis of ethnicity and gender: only male natives were granted citizenship and the right to own a property. The integrity of gender and ethnicity was crucial to the preservation of patrimony and the right to own a home. This excluded large portions of the population that did not meet the requirements, such as women and foreigners who were left with the only option of renting rooms (Nevett, 1999: 7–8). The distributive function of domestic space worked on two levels: on the one hand, it surveilled over the purity of identity; on the other hand, it regulated social relations between residents (Aureli and Giudici, 2016: 109) from different classes and backgrounds. Naturally, this system conflated public and private spheres: as the right to owing a home relied on ethnicity and gender, surveillance within the domestic home was total (p. 109), which drastically weakened, if not completely erased, the separation between the polis inside the aikos. It was only in the fifth century, with the first shifts in the legal requirements for citizenship, that we start to see examples of idea of privacy attached to domestic households (Humphreys, 1993: 20–1) and clearer demarcation between public (polis) and private (aikos) spheres (Nevett, 1999: 7).
As observed by Crawford (2010), given the limited routes that lead home for trans narratives and the narrow parameters for body transformation within those gendered routes, the difficulty to imagine trans embodiment outside of transition comes as no surprise. Nor is it a surprise that many trans narratives are constructed around the idea that, to feel ‘at home in one’s skin’ (Prosser, 1998: 61–2), 2 one needs to transform that skin rather than imagine new modes of being.
Paolo Virno argues that the house as architectural apparatus is motivated not only by a need for protection from the hostility of an outer world, but also, principally, by the necessity to establish a rituality and to perform it according to a given model of order – according to Virno, home is a performed rituality. Its very function is to reiterate pre-established patterns and, as an instinct to self-preservation, build thicker walls in order to avoid or minimize environmental threats: ‘Once the house became a fixed point, it also became a burial place for its members. This practice demonstrated a desire for . . . the reproduction of social relationships across generations’ (Virno, 2010: 79). This form of ritualization can be effectively viewed as the other side of domesticity, that is, the production through identification of a dominant spatio-temporal where it is possible to both retreat and simultaneously repossess one’s place in the wider society. Further, as Crawford notes, given the concept of home in our society is cemented in the hetero-normative structure of the family, to imagine the trans body as a home reinforces the binary system in ways that end up being detrimental (Crawford, 2015: 27) to at least those beyond-the-binary trans-identified individuals who resist domestication and image their home differently. Indeed, the act of institutionalizing a ritual transforms the home into a temple, and ‘the house inevitably becomes a way to occupy and claim ownership of a place, as well as a space’ (Aureli and Giudici, 2016: 105). Far from being homely, this home we own – a ritual performed – ceases to be a private space and becomes a collection of symbols through which we who inhabit it perform somebody else’s story.
Building Archives
Despite the limitations of documents, the complexities and flaws intrinsic to processes of historicization, archives are committed to collecting, remembering and keeping stories alive. Visitors of archives are not merely passive viewers but become part of those processes, for with their interest they vitalize the archive by participating in the preservation of memory. On a most basic level, the archive is a place where documents are stored. Yet this process of acquisition and conservation in which the archive is invested can also become a broader concept that relates to the kind of knowledge produced, for it is inevitable that the visitor visits the archive with a question, an interest, an absence, a desire and, in the search for information, privileges certain texts, stories, and events and neglects, displaces or manipulates others.
Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) offers important insight that can help reconsider the archive not only as a spatial tool – a place one visits – for protecting memories, but also as the origin of our obsession with preserving. Like archives, we collect objects, artifacts, memories, symbols, moments and emotions compulsively, repeatedly, nostalgically. 3 Evoking the relationship between processes of inscription, such as organization and production, and psychic processes, such as memory and trauma, Derrida lays out all the contradictions inherent in archives, by their very nature carriers of compulsion and violence.
‘The concept of the archive’ 4 in Derrida is traced back to the Greek term arknē, whose etymology has a double significance: it means both commencement and commandment and, as Derrida explains, this ambiguity is not coincidental: commencement (origin) and commandment (command) are the two fundamental elements, both constitutive of the archive, binding it to law and power. What is interesting here is that the archive was a space of both enormous privilege and great power. The presence of magistrates, the main governing body, made it at once the beginning of authority and the reinforcement of authority (the commencement and the commandment): it was physically constituted by the function of storing documents under the control of a few selected people, yet it remained a public political space in its performed authority, which explains why, for Derrida, the defining characteristic of the archive is violence. Violence occurs as soon as a document is archived, for this act triggers what he defined elsewhere as ‘the force of law’: it is the implicit establishment of a new rule, or a norm, and the immediate deployment of an ad hoc apparatus that will enforce it. Once the document is archived, it belongs to the archive, which will determine which aspects of that document are relevant (to the archive) and worthy of care and which will be obscured.
[It] ought to lay down the law and give the order, even if this means contenting itself with naming the problem, that is, the subject. In this way, the exergue has at once an institutive and a conservative function: the violence of a power (Gewalt) which at once posits and conserves the law. . . . What is at issue here, starting with the exergue, is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence. It is thus the first figure of an archive, because every archive, we will draw some inferences from this, is at once institutive and conservative. (Derrida, 1995: 9)
While the violence intrinsic in the act of archiving, which could be viewed as a pulsion but also a survival instinct (the archive is, after all, only committed to its own preservation), could be considered positive, for it rids the archive of the old to make space for the new; what is negative is the control it exercises over its documents and how its partial obliteration of memory ignores parts that are more or less important, thus producing certain narratives and excluding others. This manipulation represents what Foucault defines as ‘the law of what can be said, the system which governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (Foucault, 1979: 129). While Foucault’s primary concern is to unveil the discursive rules that govern the different epistemes of knowledge, 5 with Derrida such knowledge can only be exercised through the archive: ‘[t]here is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratisation can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation’ (Derrida, 1995: 11). Indeed, ‘there is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside’ (p. 14). In other words, the archive is not only where power is exercised but also where it becomes discursive through the repeated compulsion of memorization, repetition and reproduction. Visiting the archive is first and foremost an act of surrender to its violence. This inevitably propels a movement of the outside into the inside, where the document is archived, and imposes on the visitor a regime of knowledge (i.e. familiarity with the archive and its structural organization, shelving system, categorization, reference lists, etc.) that reflects the archive’s institutional function. This con-penetration of the outside with the inside – which is nothing other than the closeness of authority (the law) that advances through an oscillating movement that pulls in and pushes out – and the apparent openness of the archive that invites in without ever being fully accessible, is key in Derrida’s work. It becomes a constitutive praxis, or what Wigley calls the ‘uncanniness of haunting’ (Wigley, 1995: 167): a space becomes a space only insofar as it is haunted by a violence of which it itself is innocent. In other words, this is not a type of predetermined violence directed to the innocent visitor; it is rather a type of violence that operates by absence and, as Wigley suggests, sanctifies by repression (Wigley, 1995: 146): it is a type of violence that infiltrates space constituting it.
If we accept this, we also accept that to live inside a space – inside a house, the architecture of a home – means to at least be aware of this constitutive ‘archetypal violence’ that is the very essence of that space. If, as Wigley suggests, spaces are always institutional and the secret of their constitutional violation is the very basis of their power (Wigley, 1995: 153), we can imagine that, in the same way, the institution of the home keeps the same secret: the walls mark a division whose stability is determined by what those walls conceal, a kind of disavowal, which resists space, challenges it and, at the same time, reinforces its constitutional systemic violence becoming subordinate to it (part of it). Our home, the home we yearn for, is then for Derrida the material and conceptual repetition of that compulsive system of domestication; it could not be otherwise, for to desire something and to name it is always to locate that desire within (disciplinary) space (Stoller, 1992). This patriarchal model of power manifested through commanding and repressing that propels the archive is, according to Caputo, what motivated Derrida to challenge its discourse by exposing the factitious way in which relations and histories are fabricated, and how narratives of rupture and exclusion shape up: ‘The illness, the disorder, the crisis, the evil (le mal) that besets a culture that depends on archives . . . is for Derrida always a mal d’archive, always a function of the disorder in the relations between the arche and the archive, a failure to remember the distance between the original and the trace’ (Caputo, 1997: 264). Despite a pledge for inclusivity, the archive willingly – maybe also necessarily – remains an imbalanced tool that tends to strengthen dominant histories and suppress all emerging traces of difference that may pose a threat to those recognized majoritarian trajectories.
As Prosser writes, the journey home for trans individuals commences in the ‘clinician’s office’ (Prosser, 1998: 101) and requires the adherence to a specific medical narrative (later cemented by a specific legal narrative such as, for example, gender recognition legislations) made of ‘suffering and confusion; the epiphany of self-discovery; corporeal and social transformation/conversion; and finally the arrival “home” – the reassignment’ (p. 101). The dominant role played by medicine in the make-up and understanding of sexuality and non-normative sexual practices is well known (Weeks, 1977) and is not a prerogative of transsexuality. In the 1960s, Harry Benjamin pioneered surgical techniques for gender reconstruction from which there emerged a distinction between gender and sex and ‘dysfunctional socialisation’ was identified as the cause for transsexuality (Hines, 2010: 2). Here, my interest is not so much in sexology and medical techniques that have made transsexuality possible; rather, I reflect on the dominant role played by medical discourse in the mapping of ideally-sexed bodies and the fixation with correcting anything that falls short of that description. In the constitution of this ideal image, patterns of embodiment that refuse to commence their journey from the clinician’s office – that are not committed to the archive, or that do not wish to go home – are not contemplated.
If we wish to follow a Foucaultian perspective that frames irregular sexualities as a kind of perverse desire, we can see how ‘gender dysphoria’ – a term that replaced ‘transsexuality’ in the 1970s – really marked the shift to a novel understanding of trans identity no longer as only a matter of the physical body – a body that needed to be fixed – but also a matter of psychology – a mind that needed to be realigned. In this compulsion for ‘gendered harmony’ (Hines, 2010: 3), medical discourse in the 19th century pathologized deviant bodies (once ‘troubled individuals’) in order to correct and categorize them (offer a solution) through social and political forms of knowledge. Far from natural, these forms of naming and labelling sexed bodies were based on the arbitrary interpretation of opposites – for example, sex/gender, nature/nurture, natural/constructed – thus leading to intelligible dichotomies which, de facto, established sexuality as a somatic fact, a construction of culture, a thing. This is corroborated by Sandy Stone’s account of the 1968 Stanford project where, under the direction of plastic surgeon Donald Laub and psychiatrist Norman Fisk, the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Programme led research dedicated to the understanding of human sexuality. In The Empire Strikes Back: A Post Transsexual Manifesto, Stone explains that key to the project was compiling an archive of transsexualism: Let me pause to provide a very brief capsule of their results: A transsexual is a person who identifies his or her gender identity with that of the ‘opposite’ gender. Sex and gender are quite separate issues, but transsexuals commonly blur the distinction by confusing the performative character of gender with the physical ‘fact’ of sex, referring to their perceptions of their situation as being in the ‘wrong body’. (Stone, 1991: 281)
As university-based programmes produced new findings and knowledge to back up medical legitimation, it was important to set up a gatekeeping system that could lay out the key criteria for eligibility to regulate the field and protect its professionals. As Stone recalls, this system created a contentious relationship between the service providers and people who demanded hormones and surgery to create the sense of self they needed.
Stanford is presented to me as a place where one goes if one is very small, very willowy, very blonde, likes to wear high heels and heavy makeup. ‘You must blend in the population. We hope you get married.' (I did, but I didn’t expect to.) I think, ‘Hot diggity dog! I am about as far from this as anyone can possibly be. [. . .] I sit down. Don [surgeon Donald Laub] says, ‘Why aren’t you dressed like a woman?’ I look down. I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I say, ‘I am dressed like a woman.’ Don says, ‘No, you’re not.’ I say, ‘Have you looked out the window recently?’
When Donald Laub asked if she was 100 percent sure: I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ I felt 99 percent sure. I think anybody who’s 100 percent sure of anything is probably crazy. I mean, we all have doubts. I said, ‘I’m an adult. I can take responsibility for my actions. This is informed consent. If I made a mistake, it’s my fault, not yours. Let’s go.’ Don said, ‘I’m sorry. You’re not eligible.’ So I went home.
Stone is then called in for a second meeting and ends up undergoing surgery.
One of the things I did try to do [before surgery] was duplicate [writer] Jan Morris’s experience of going to the mirror and giving her old self a wink for luck because it was the last time they would ever meet. [. . .] So a week or two later [after the surgery], I went to the mirror and it was still me, and I felt like I’d done something terribly wrong. But it’s been me ever since. (Stone, 2000)
The distortion in the mirror recalled by Stone captures the ongoing negotiation in the process of rearranging oneself, when ‘everything is still there, but out of place’ (Betsky, 1997: 21). It is in this no-time no-space virtuality, with structures all around collapsed and new absences to become acquainted with, that she sees herself as a possibility; ‘starting from that gaze which to some extent is brought to bear on me, from the depths of that virtual space which is on the other side of the mirror, I turn back on myself, beginning to turn my eyes on myself and reconstitute myself where I am in reality’ (Foucault, 1997: 352).
In the emotional economy of the mirror which reveals absence before it confirms presence, similarly to what we have seen in the archive, nostalgia plays an important role in this process of rearrangement of memory. Here, perhaps in accentuated forms, our desire is split between pain and yearning for the origin, for what is no longer present. The body, our material possession, is an archive of marks, shapes, boundaries and traces that inevitably participate in a process of rethinking oneself. Indeed, these signs we carry are symbols of personal memory (absences) that configure the type of knowledge we have about ourselves. Not surprisingly, the etymology of the term nostalgia comes from the Greek word algos, which means pain, grief, and the word nostos, which means ‘return home’ and suggests the yearning for an unattainable past (Blunt, 2005: 14–15), or the denied access to a home that did not welcome us. Home, then, can become an impossibility that fuels novel acts of mobilization and propels a type of nostalgic activism apt to remodel the shape of the home-to-come.
Anywhere but Home
While greater visibility of trans subjectivities in contemporary politics, media and culture has opened up the possibility for less uniform narrations, the rhetoric of the ‘wrong body’ persists and trans individuals continue for the most part, at least in mainstream narrations, to be portrayed as examples of body-mind disagreement that surgery, the endpoint of these stories, will at some point reharmonize and make the subject ‘right’. From here follows the ‘trapped in the wrong body’ (where the body is a metaphor for one’s house, one’s place of residence) image that we often see associated to stories of transition, largely used as a tool through which it is easier to justify the process of pathologization of the body and the standardization of identity that runs in these forms of narration. On the legislative front, this binarized understanding is supported by a legal framework of gender recognition where, often, to be recognized, trans individuals must meet a level of gender stability and authenticity (see, for example, Nirta, 2021; Sharpe, 2007a, 2007b, 2009) that non trans individuals are not expected to engage in. This is pursued in various ways, for example, through the imposition of a specific timeline for transition, or the demand for a declaration of adherence to the new gender until death, as is the case in the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004. This brief account extracted from Laura Jane Grace’s autobiography, Tranny (2016), is emblematic: Then it finally clicked for me. The therapist just wanted to see me in a wig, mascara, and high heels. He needed to see what he thought a woman should look like and his idea of femininity. So at our next meeting I did just that. I played his game, showing up wearing an a-line dress from the Gap and high heels. He immediately wrote me my letter, and referred me to an endocrinologist. Simple as that. (Grace, 2016, cited in Nash, 2021: 250)
Claudine Griggs’ recollections highlight a similar realization. Organized into daily entries that reflect the rituals of her post-op convalescence in hospital, the journal is an archive of her agony through medical routines, assessments, and post-op complications she writes down diligently to satisfy her compulsion to remember what her body is experiencing, and mitigate her tendency to forget and move on from pain too quickly. Griggs’ account, similarly to Stone’s earlier, is irregular insofar as it does not fulfil ‘happy woman at the end of the story’ (Halberstam in the foreword of Griggs, 2004: vii). Returning home is not the primary pursuit here: this departure from a happy ‘home-coming’ end is, according to Halberstam, a disruption from the return ‘home’ to the body, typical of trans autobiographies (p. vii). Griggs’ focus, as she recalls the journey that took her from Los Angeles to Mt. San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad, Colorado, is directed to achieving a sense of wholeness. Whether or not this will coincide with going home appears to be a secondary concern; even if it did take her to a home, she feels that it would not be the home she has been fantasizing about, and so her primary pursuit is rather to make her own home. Her declared ‘attempt to escape from transsexualism’ (Griggs, 2004: 136), typical of so many trans autobiographies, is soon turned upside down as she ‘in some ways [. . .] feel[s] trapped in a female body in the same sense [she] once felt trapped in a male body’ (p. 210). Griggs, who does not regret undergoing gender reassignment but welcomes the relief of having a feminine body, quickly becomes disillusioned as she realizes that surgery does not cure her ‘maleness’ (p. 151) and finds herself ‘transsexual again’ (p. 129). While surgery can intervene on the physical body, Griggs finds that the subject remains trans, which she considers to be a type of ‘regression’ (p. 129). The sense of wholeness she was hoping to achieve never quite materializes in the way she expects. She appears to have found a sense of ownership over her physical body, but soon realizes that it is not sufficient to feeling whole. Her journey home is interrupted by a constant entrenchment of past and new struggles that fracture her present mode of being. Griggs’ story, similar to Sandy Stone’s, does not match the happy ending we expect to have in dominant transition narratives – a happy ending that seeks eradication of a sense of wrongness and the instalment of a newly-found essence that ‘makes things right’.
Perhaps an even more enticing narrative of ‘home refusal’ is that of Jess in Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993). From a young age, Jess understands that she is not the ‘ladylike’ girl her parents expect and that she feels more comfortable when she can inhabit – with pronouns and clothes – a masculine universe. She undergoes years of trauma, harassment and turmoil that mirror the growing confusion with her identity and sense of loneliness and loss. Her journey of self-discovery quickly becomes destructive: she ends up in prison, where she is regularly beaten up and, on one occasion, raped. Jess decides to try hormonal therapy and soon finds that a more successful passing keeps her safer. This may be the beginning of an easier life for Jess, who finally comes to terms with her identity. However, as she realizes that her sense of loss and loneliness are not mitigated by a more recognizable body-image, she decides to stop body-altering treatments and resumes her ‘he-she’ identity. Fear for her physical safety is replaced by the terror that comes from realizing that passing as a man does not soothe her inner turmoil: ‘I still lived in fear, only now it was the constant terror of discovery’ (Feinberg, 1993: 173), and ‘I feel like a ghost [. . .] Like I’ve been buried alive. As far as the world’s concerned, I was born the day I began to pass. I have no past, no loved ones, no memories, no me. No one really sees me or speaks to me or touches me’ (p. 213).
Jess is not able to establish a relation of coherence, as the spectres of discontinuity and incoherence, themselves thinkable only in relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and produced by the very laws that seek to establish causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the ‘expression’ or ‘effect’ of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice. (Butler, 1990: 23)
Jess decides to return to her previous ambiguous self: as much as I loved my beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it. What I saw reflected in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn’t recognize the he-she. My face no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath the surface. (Feinberg, 1993: 443–4)
The more she passes and becomes visible, the less she recognizes herself – she is disappearing. In taking this decision, Jess evades categorizations and rejects the master narrative of ‘home-coming’ that frames conventional transsexual life stories. She is left with no home.
Before, strangers had raged at me for being a woman who crossed a forbidden boundary. Now they really didn’t know what my sex was, and that was unimaginable, terrifying to them. Woman or man – the bedrock crumbled beneath their feet as I passed by. How the hell should I know what it is? I had forgotten how hard this was to endure. But I knew I was emerging into the next phase of my life. Fear and excitement gnawed at me. (Feinberg, 1993: 244)
Refusing to go home does not mean that Jess chooses misplacement and chaos. Rather, hers is the refusal of what Halberstam calls ‘the dialectic of home and border’ (Halberstam, 1998: 170), where home stands for solidity and borders represent lack of sense of belonging and unresolved identity (Halberstam, 1998); and why would anyone on the margins refuse the privileged centre, namely, the stability of a home? Jess’s refusal is a ‘non-ending’ narrative which dares re-imagine trans becoming as a journey of radical openness (hooks, 1989). In the context of politics of location, bell hooks notes: I had to leave that space I called home to move beyond boundaries. [. . .] At times home is nowhere. At times one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer that place which enables and promotes varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers and difference. One confronts and accepts dispersal, fragmentation as part of the construction of a new world order that reveals more fully where we are, who we can become, an order that does not demand forgetting. (hooks, 1989: 19)
The experiences of displacement and oppression explored in this article signal an ‘archival crisis’ (Singh, 2018: 30): the body, after all, is much too unpredictable, too unstable, too porous (Tuana, 2008), too leaky (Shildrick, 1996), too volatile (Grosz, 1994) to fulfil the rigidity of the archive. Such rigidity, which – as mentioned in the previous section – is constantly renewed by the symbols of personal memory we carry, has the potential, however, to threaten the archive, for it invites individual and often unpredictable processes of disruption. The body stretches and extends beyond its own boundaries, beyond its own memory, making it difficult – impossible at times – to store and perform information in ways that are congruent to the outside. The power dynamic, here undermined, cast by the archive (as previously explained), not only makes the home inaccessible but turns against the body and triggers a process of separation and emotional and symbolic violence which contributes to the unmaking of the home, now a space of marginalization and disorientation. Ultimately, what these narratives show is that there is a fundamental difference between going home and making home. While the former involves submitting to pre-existing authority and entering a dialectical negotiation where adaptation and obedience are key ingredients to being welcomed into that space, the latter is an intimate process that reflects our being. It resembles a scary, uncertain and often unsafe practice of exploration, guided only by one’s direction through places that are defined by one’s imagination. It is a movement that trans-forms. It forms and informs affirmative relations through the act of reimagining itself.
But not all is lost. Although the archive is projected to the compulsive preservation and re-elaboration of the past through which it hopes to define the contours of the present, Derrida insists that it – the archive – is, and remains, a thing of the future: ‘As much and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future’ (Derrida, 1995: 34–5). Derrida’s understanding of the Freudian death drive posits death and life as part of an inevitable cycle of self-regeneration-through-self-destruction: the urgency of life can only emerge as a self-affirming force from violence and destruction. The archive not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mneme or to anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. (Derrida, 1995: 14)
The death drive is ultimately a desire for the new which erupts through the destruction of the archive: ‘to burn the archive and to incite amnesia . . . aiming to ruin the archive as accumulation and capitalisation of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’ (Derrida, 1995: 12). The archive is, after all, a vulnerable dispositive: memories can be suppressed, documents can be lost, the past can be forgotten. This violence weakens the archive and makes it vulnerable, but it is also what ignites the compulsion for archiving. This impassioned process of abandonment and acquisition – never objective, never linear, never casual – orientates us to the future. We will never get home, and this homesickness, which is a type of disavowal, will push us to pursue the impossibility of the archive.
