Showing posts with label hot tranny miss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hot tranny miss. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
TRYING HARD TO BECOME WHATEVER THEY ARE: Over the weekend I watched "Transgeneration," a Sundance Channel/LOGO documentary series following four transgendered college students (well, one is a grad student) over the course of a year. I'd been putting this off a) because I have an aversion to this exact kind of self-voyeurizing, reality-TV documentary (it's related to my disapproval of biographies) and b) I thought it might be depressing. But in the event, the kids were so captivating that it was really easy to sit down and watch the whole thing all the way through. Here are a few scattered notes.
First, the cast of characters: a Filipina-American from a poorer background, a Smith College student from Oklahoma, an engineering-major geek from a well-off family, and an Armenian Cypriot graduate student. Plus lots of their friends and relations. I really liked both the diversity of backgrounds and the decision to include a lot of scenes with friends. You really get a sense that these students are creating communities of other transgendered people. There are a lot of contrasts and parallels here, watching which friendships break down and which gain strength over the course of the year. This isn't a documentary about just four people; it's also about the people on whom they rely, and who rely on them.
Second, holy cats these people are desperately undergraduate! (Well, the grad student is more grown-up, but he spends a lot of time with undergrads.) They're variously self-absorbed, melodramatic, hyperpolitical, and judgmental. They're alternately dizzy and diligent, they're fumbling through first romances (you definitely get a sense of the ways in which being transgendered meant they didn't have standard high-school experiences), they're convinced they can change the world.
All of these ridiculously undergraduate characteristics do play out through their gender identities and transitions, but aren't reducible to those identities--sort of like, I was 19 when I converted to Catholicism, and I think I lived out my conversion in a fairly self-absorbed and melodramatic way, but that doesn't mean Catholicism promotes self-absorption and melodrama. Just that if you're 19 at Yale, you may well live out your conversion in ways which reflect other aspects of the 19-year-old Yalien mindset.
Third, yeah, Americans are way too comfortable on camera. TJ, the Armenian Cypriot, seemed the least likely to film himself--am I misremembering that?--and in his segments back home there were moments when someone would bar the camera from pursuing, or wave the camera away so that real intimacy could be created. Raci, the Filipina-American, also had one relative who took her aside for an off-camera conversation. But the white, non-immigrant folks seemed ridiculously at ease being filmed and, again, frequently filmed themselves as well. I suppose as a Christian I can't be too hardcore about the idea that privacy, being unwatched, is something to preserve and honor--I mean, God is always watching even when you take a smoke break!--but I just can't imagine treating the camera with the nonchalance that these kids (and to a lesser extent their parents) do.
And finally, one thing I really wish the documentary had spent more--or really any--time on is the possibility of outside pressure toward transition. There were at least two people, a friend and a doctor, who seemed to me to be pushing students to resolve their ambiguities and hesitations into clear, final narratives of transsexuality. And I wonder if parents don't also apply some of this pressure. There are ways in which "I was always already a man, and I'm taking all the possible medical steps RIGHT NOW to express that manhood physically" is easier to understand than "I'm really not sure what's best for me right now, and I'm not totally sure where I'll be in a year, and maybe I need to spend some more time in-between even though it's astonishingly uncomfortable and I know I don't want to stay here forever." It's totally impossible to tell how much outside pressure really mattered, because the highly edited nature of the documentary means we're not seeing this year the way the students saw it. But I do wish the question had been addressed.
That said, I definitely recommend this series if you're at all interested in the subject. It's available on Netflix to order or to watch instantly on your computer. ...The deleted scenes on the DVD didn't add much, IMO.
First, the cast of characters: a Filipina-American from a poorer background, a Smith College student from Oklahoma, an engineering-major geek from a well-off family, and an Armenian Cypriot graduate student. Plus lots of their friends and relations. I really liked both the diversity of backgrounds and the decision to include a lot of scenes with friends. You really get a sense that these students are creating communities of other transgendered people. There are a lot of contrasts and parallels here, watching which friendships break down and which gain strength over the course of the year. This isn't a documentary about just four people; it's also about the people on whom they rely, and who rely on them.
Second, holy cats these people are desperately undergraduate! (Well, the grad student is more grown-up, but he spends a lot of time with undergrads.) They're variously self-absorbed, melodramatic, hyperpolitical, and judgmental. They're alternately dizzy and diligent, they're fumbling through first romances (you definitely get a sense of the ways in which being transgendered meant they didn't have standard high-school experiences), they're convinced they can change the world.
All of these ridiculously undergraduate characteristics do play out through their gender identities and transitions, but aren't reducible to those identities--sort of like, I was 19 when I converted to Catholicism, and I think I lived out my conversion in a fairly self-absorbed and melodramatic way, but that doesn't mean Catholicism promotes self-absorption and melodrama. Just that if you're 19 at Yale, you may well live out your conversion in ways which reflect other aspects of the 19-year-old Yalien mindset.
Third, yeah, Americans are way too comfortable on camera. TJ, the Armenian Cypriot, seemed the least likely to film himself--am I misremembering that?--and in his segments back home there were moments when someone would bar the camera from pursuing, or wave the camera away so that real intimacy could be created. Raci, the Filipina-American, also had one relative who took her aside for an off-camera conversation. But the white, non-immigrant folks seemed ridiculously at ease being filmed and, again, frequently filmed themselves as well. I suppose as a Christian I can't be too hardcore about the idea that privacy, being unwatched, is something to preserve and honor--I mean, God is always watching even when you take a smoke break!--but I just can't imagine treating the camera with the nonchalance that these kids (and to a lesser extent their parents) do.
And finally, one thing I really wish the documentary had spent more--or really any--time on is the possibility of outside pressure toward transition. There were at least two people, a friend and a doctor, who seemed to me to be pushing students to resolve their ambiguities and hesitations into clear, final narratives of transsexuality. And I wonder if parents don't also apply some of this pressure. There are ways in which "I was always already a man, and I'm taking all the possible medical steps RIGHT NOW to express that manhood physically" is easier to understand than "I'm really not sure what's best for me right now, and I'm not totally sure where I'll be in a year, and maybe I need to spend some more time in-between even though it's astonishingly uncomfortable and I know I don't want to stay here forever." It's totally impossible to tell how much outside pressure really mattered, because the highly edited nature of the documentary means we're not seeing this year the way the students saw it. But I do wish the question had been addressed.
That said, I definitely recommend this series if you're at all interested in the subject. It's available on Netflix to order or to watch instantly on your computer. ...The deleted scenes on the DVD didn't add much, IMO.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
What makes possible the psychic translation of the surgical incursions into the body into a poetics of healing is a kind of transsexual somatic memory. Surgery is made sense of as a literal and figurative re-membering, a restorative drive that is indeed common to accounts of reconstructive surgeries among nontranssexual subjects and perhaps inherent in the very notion of reconstructive surgery.
--Second Skins. This longing for and nostalgic memory of a home (a home in one's own flesh) which has never been experienced reminds me very strongly of Augustine's discussion of our memories of Adam's happiness. (Which... I only vaguely remember, at this point, your joke here. Am I making this up? It's certainly related to the Augustine-stuff I discuss here; the basic idea, as I understand it, is that we share not only in the legacy of Adam's sin but also the memory of his happiness, and it's this remembered happiness which allows us to long for goodness and to recognize it [when we do recognize it!] in this life.)
--Second Skins. This longing for and nostalgic memory of a home (a home in one's own flesh) which has never been experienced reminds me very strongly of Augustine's discussion of our memories of Adam's happiness. (Which... I only vaguely remember, at this point, your joke here. Am I making this up? It's certainly related to the Augustine-stuff I discuss here; the basic idea, as I understand it, is that we share not only in the legacy of Adam's sin but also the memory of his happiness, and it's this remembered happiness which allows us to long for goodness and to recognize it [when we do recognize it!] in this life.)
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Thursday, January 07, 2010
And in one oral transsexual account an anonymous male-to-female expresses her alienation from her male body in terms of being encased, surrounded by a false skin: "I used to look at my body and think it was a bit like a diver's suit, it didn't feel like me inside."
--Jay Prosser, Second Skins. Prosser doesn't draw out what to me might be the most striking aspect of this metaphor: the diver swims in an implacably hostile environment, the coldest depths of the ocean. This metaphor expresses the basic move of Catholic theology in which, when Eve and Adam fell, the whole world changed with us, became suddenly hostile and predatory and wrong.
--Jay Prosser, Second Skins. Prosser doesn't draw out what to me might be the most striking aspect of this metaphor: the diver swims in an implacably hostile environment, the coldest depths of the ocean. This metaphor expresses the basic move of Catholic theology in which, when Eve and Adam fell, the whole world changed with us, became suddenly hostile and predatory and wrong.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY: So a chain of events led me to read a lot of reviews of Andrew Sullivan's various books. Here are some comments on the reviews. For reference, I think Virtually Normal is his weakest and Love Undetectable is brilliant; LU's third section, about friendship, I think is genuinely life-changing and beautiful, whereas its middle section, about psych theories of homosexuality, is really weak. Apparently this places me at odds with pretty much everyone who got paid to review these books.
So... Margaret O'Brien Steinfels reviews Virtually Normal in Commonweal. On the one hand, it's adorable to see a time when Commonweal could challenge gay-lib without three thousand disclaimers. On the other hand, "homosexual or lesbian" is slightly hilarious.
On the more serious tentacle, I really like how Steinfels draws out the contradiction here: It's really hard to argue for gay marriage if you have the good taste to find homosexuality interesting. One of the more depressing features of the pro-gay-marriage arguments is their tendency to act as if any differences between men and women, or between straight and gay relationships, are banal and beneath notice. This seems like an excellent way to make yourself stupider.
And on a fourth tentacle, I'm fascinated by how little work Steinfels had to do to feel as though she'd successfully refuted Sullivan's arguments. I think her argument is anorexic; and yet at the time, of course, this sort of dismissal was thought "progressive." Sullivan can measure his success by the degree to which Steinfels's arguments on marriage now seem wafer-thin.
[EDITED--that was unclear to the point of appearing self-contradictory. What I mean is that Steinfels's earlier "arguments against" gay marriage are naively dismissive, and really privileged--she isn't even trying to look at the world through Sullivan's eyes, and she isn't even considering that that's something she should do. She is normative and thus gets to judge him, and that's obvious to her. But the later paragraph in which she uses his own words against him, and asks why what he wants should be called marriage at all, strikes me as persuasive and even a possible way to open up new options for gay couples. Without the insistence on banal sameness, maybe we can come up with new models for love--some of which will be Catholic, some of which will be really-not-Catholic, but all of which will be more sublime and honest than the usual love-is-love-is-love oatmeal.]
And, especially: Steinfels's review makes me wonder what aspect of Sullivan's famous "We Are All Sodomites Now" essay isn't "liberationist." He more or less made his name as an anti-liberationist gay man; yet his essay shows all the most striking characteristics of what he described as liberationism, e.g.: a focus on acts vs. identities; a dissolution of boundaries between heteros and homos; the deployment of homosexuality to undermine heterosexual self-understandings; the absolute moral equivalence of intercourse and sodomy.
I mean, Sullivan's essay is wrong on its face, and it only takes one night at a crisis pregnancy center to figure that out; but I'm not super interested in that right now, more interested in whether the "gay conservative" position always collapses into liberationism if you push.
(To which the obvious response is, "Yeah, Sullivan's probably a closet liberationist. But Jonathan Rauch is actually a gay conservative, so you should take up your fight with him." That's fair, but no fun; Sullivan is the Kate Bornstein to Rauch's Julia Serano. The fact that I learn more from Rauch and Serano is probably related to the fact that Sullivan and Bornstein are much more open to the aesthetic and religious dimension of life.)
Norah Vincent reviews Love Undetectable for the National Review. First, I like Vincent, and I'm glad to see this extremist getting her praise from NR! But more substantively, this is not a good review, largely because it isn't even attempting empathy. I mean... AIDS memoirs are not inherently worthless, so I don't get why Vincent thinks she can dismiss Sullivan's book by making the obvious point that it's basically an AIDS memoir.
I also think she's deploying faceless AIDS-stricken Africans against Sullivan--she's weaponizing racism in a way I find really distasteful. Her review has nothing to do with AIDS in Africa except insofar as it's a stick with which to beat Sullivan. I can't respect that.
Gilbert Meilander reviews Love Undetectable for Commonweal. Once again, someone thinks the section about dumb psych theories is the best part! I don't even know what to make of that.
On the other hand, Meilander's critiques of Sullivan's essay on friendship are very well taken.
That's just lovely, and hardcore and challenging. I think Sullivan's essay is an amazing beginning for an investigation of friendship. Meilander's review--like all the works Sullivan actually cites, and recommends--takes it further.
So... Margaret O'Brien Steinfels reviews Virtually Normal in Commonweal. On the one hand, it's adorable to see a time when Commonweal could challenge gay-lib without three thousand disclaimers. On the other hand, "homosexual or lesbian" is slightly hilarious.
On the more serious tentacle, I really like how Steinfels draws out the contradiction here: It's really hard to argue for gay marriage if you have the good taste to find homosexuality interesting. One of the more depressing features of the pro-gay-marriage arguments is their tendency to act as if any differences between men and women, or between straight and gay relationships, are banal and beneath notice. This seems like an excellent way to make yourself stupider.
And on a fourth tentacle, I'm fascinated by how little work Steinfels had to do to feel as though she'd successfully refuted Sullivan's arguments. I think her argument is anorexic; and yet at the time, of course, this sort of dismissal was thought "progressive." Sullivan can measure his success by the degree to which Steinfels's arguments on marriage now seem wafer-thin.
[EDITED--that was unclear to the point of appearing self-contradictory. What I mean is that Steinfels's earlier "arguments against" gay marriage are naively dismissive, and really privileged--she isn't even trying to look at the world through Sullivan's eyes, and she isn't even considering that that's something she should do. She is normative and thus gets to judge him, and that's obvious to her. But the later paragraph in which she uses his own words against him, and asks why what he wants should be called marriage at all, strikes me as persuasive and even a possible way to open up new options for gay couples. Without the insistence on banal sameness, maybe we can come up with new models for love--some of which will be Catholic, some of which will be really-not-Catholic, but all of which will be more sublime and honest than the usual love-is-love-is-love oatmeal.]
And, especially: Steinfels's review makes me wonder what aspect of Sullivan's famous "We Are All Sodomites Now" essay isn't "liberationist." He more or less made his name as an anti-liberationist gay man; yet his essay shows all the most striking characteristics of what he described as liberationism, e.g.: a focus on acts vs. identities; a dissolution of boundaries between heteros and homos; the deployment of homosexuality to undermine heterosexual self-understandings; the absolute moral equivalence of intercourse and sodomy.
I mean, Sullivan's essay is wrong on its face, and it only takes one night at a crisis pregnancy center to figure that out; but I'm not super interested in that right now, more interested in whether the "gay conservative" position always collapses into liberationism if you push.
(To which the obvious response is, "Yeah, Sullivan's probably a closet liberationist. But Jonathan Rauch is actually a gay conservative, so you should take up your fight with him." That's fair, but no fun; Sullivan is the Kate Bornstein to Rauch's Julia Serano. The fact that I learn more from Rauch and Serano is probably related to the fact that Sullivan and Bornstein are much more open to the aesthetic and religious dimension of life.)
Norah Vincent reviews Love Undetectable for the National Review. First, I like Vincent, and I'm glad to see this extremist getting her praise from NR! But more substantively, this is not a good review, largely because it isn't even attempting empathy. I mean... AIDS memoirs are not inherently worthless, so I don't get why Vincent thinks she can dismiss Sullivan's book by making the obvious point that it's basically an AIDS memoir.
I also think she's deploying faceless AIDS-stricken Africans against Sullivan--she's weaponizing racism in a way I find really distasteful. Her review has nothing to do with AIDS in Africa except insofar as it's a stick with which to beat Sullivan. I can't respect that.
Gilbert Meilander reviews Love Undetectable for Commonweal. Once again, someone thinks the section about dumb psych theories is the best part! I don't even know what to make of that.
On the other hand, Meilander's critiques of Sullivan's essay on friendship are very well taken.
Moreover, the classical notion of the friend as "another self" may, in fact, cut against Sullivan's claim that one must first love one-self in order to be capable of friendship. We need the friend as "another self" so that we may come to know who we really are. Hence, an attempt first to know or love oneself, to suppose that I must first be a person capable of friendship, may be self-defeating. Something must first be risked in friendship if we are ever really to become "selves" capable of sustaining deep personal bonds.
That's just lovely, and hardcore and challenging. I think Sullivan's essay is an amazing beginning for an investigation of friendship. Meilander's review--like all the works Sullivan actually cites, and recommends--takes it further.
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