X-Sender: jterry@postbox.acs.ohio-state.edu
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 1998 11:37:17 -0400
To: tabody@waag.org
From: Jennifer Terry 
Subject: Re: panel remarks

Jennifer Terry
Guggenheim Museum Soho
September 20, 1998

In conversations with panelists leading up to this forum I raised the
question of why an artistic and intellectual project such as this one -- a
project intended to interrogate the complex relations between technologies
(digital, surgical, etc.) and bodies -- would invoke Brandon Teena as a
central symbol?  And I asked Shu Lea and other panelists to consider the
question of who each or all or some of us want Brandon Teena to be as we
engage in discussions of rather abstract and far-flung subjects which, in
one way or another, are related to "the technosocial body."  I feel obliged
to try to engage if not answer these questions myself and will do so in a
rather circuitous way in my remarks today.

In the course of raising questions to my co-panelists, I noted that,
particularly in certain subcultural circles if not also in American popular
culture generally, Brandon Teena is what anthropologists call "a magical
sign."  The subcultural circles I'm thinking about are the most obvious,
and they include the sometimes conflictual, sometimes allied formations of
transgender politics, lesbian-feminist politics, and butch identity
politics.  By magical sign, I mean a symbol whose meaning is profoundly
rich, usually multi-valent and multi-dimensional, and thus neither fully
knowable nor predictable.  A magical sign is a powerful symbol to which
cultural agents (usually people) look with awe in hopes of making sense of
vastly complex and often internally dissonant and contradictory cultural
phenomena.  A magical sign is brimming with unforeseen possibilities and
thus is phenomenologically large and even sometimes takes the form of a
body, although often by prosthetic and artificial means (think, for
example, of the holographic Wizard of Oz).  The magical sign has an
ineffable quality, though it is not necessarily sacred or clandestine; it
cannot be reduced to rational elements nor does its attractiveness solicit
rationality.  Agents may be drawn to a magical sign, as they would be to an
oracle, to solve their problems, to help guide them toward resolving moral
quandaries, to predict their futures, and to offer some kind of meaning in
the midst of the incomprehensible.  (Here a helpful contemporary example
would be the gene, a magical sign that promises to tell us who we are, what
we should do, what we should expect and accept, and where we may be headed,
collectively or as individuals.)  A magical sign is, importantly, animate
rather than fixed or static or containable.  It is itself an agent that
attracts many agents.  Its trajectory is far from certain; it has no one
destiny, if it has any at all.  It moves in unpredictable directions; it
may fulfill one's deepest wishes or confirm one's worst fears.
	In my own experience in the various subcultural scenes I named above --
those populated by transgender people, lesbian-feminists, and butches --
there always seems to be some tension between the magical sign of "Brandon
Teena" and the historical agent to whom this sign in some way or other
makes reference.  In the interest of time, I hope you'll forgive me for
doing some reductive violence to the complexity of the various investments
in Brandon Teena of each of the subcultures at hand:  for transgender
people, Brandon is a heroic figure who had the desire and ability to
perform as a suave, if sometimes troubled, young man, and for this, he paid
the price of his life after a group of losers stalked, taunted, and, upon
forcibly stripping away the Brandon of his own creation, read Brandon's
genitals as a license to rape him.  Several days later these same thugs
murdered 21-year-old Brandon execution-style because they couldn't stand
what they perceived to be his affront to normative gender codes that
mandate that individuals with vaginas live as women and those with penises
live as men.  
	A slightly different interpretation of Brandon emanates from a
lesbian-feminist perspective.  Here, Teena Brandon (her original name) is a
figure raped and murdered not only for being a woman but also for being a
woman who dared to appropriate masculinity and who dared to love women.
Brandon, in this telling, loved women (i.e. was a lesbian) and who, as a
strategy to pursue this love in the context of menacing and pervasive
homophobia, passed as a man not only to openly perform a deeply rooted
identification with masculinity but also to be able to love women openly.
>From this perspective, Brandon was another of the millions of women raped
and killed by men, but in addition to signalling the quotidian violence
against women, Brandon's victimization especially revealed the additional
component of homophobic misogyny that motivates homophobic men to try to
destroy what they cannot have and what they cannot be:  that is, women
loving women.

From the perspective of butches, Brandon Teena is an heroic character who
artfully inverted her given name of Teena Brandon, and performed
masculinity impeccably to the avowed sexual satisfaction of his/her
girlfriends.  Brandon here is both role model for butches and martyr:  s/he
was raped and killed for assuming the role of man and for doing so with
great skill and style, certainly much better than her killers could ever
dream of doing.  
	Now as I've laid out these three Brandons I hope you can see the points of
affinity between the three communities/perspectives from which they arise
and through which they circulate as magical signs.  All three communities
are wrenched by the tragedy of Brandon's death and moved by the poignancy
of Brandon's life.  The interesting thing is that Brandon had no apparent
(and at least no sustained) membership in any of these communities.  And
Brandon, who sometimes went by the name of Teena or Charles Brandon or
simply Brandon, didn't exactly embrace the primary values of these
communities, having consciously resisted being interpolated by any one of
them.  Brandon is reported to have openly denounced lesbianism and to have
declined therapy for sex reassignment.  But it should be remembered that
Brandon was young -- 21 at the time of death -- and came from a family of
humble means in smalltown Nebraska.  Brandon showed few signs of settling
down into a single name or any particular identity.  Brandon was isolated,
alone, outside the reach of either the grasp or the openhand of any of the
three subcultures I've highlighted.  And yet, if we can believe the myriad
posthumously reported, subjective, and highly mediated accounts of people
who actually met and knew Brandon, the historical agent, Brandon was
engaged in complex practices of self-making, some involving contemplating
the possibilities of technologically transforming the body.  Though Brandon
apparently rejected sex reassignment therapy, s/he was drawn to other
bodily techniques which, in a broad sense of the term, can be called
technological -- gesture, stance, gait, speech, clothing -- to effect
masculinity in readily legible and even seductive ways.  But I want to
focus for a moment on what the possibility of bodily transformation of the
flesh may have promised not so much for Brandon as much as for those for
whom Brandon is now a magical sign.

Though it may seem a bit hackneyed and shopworn as a question:  why would
Brandon contemplate physical (i.e. surgical and possibly hormonal)
transformations as a way to contend with dangers, confusions, and limits
arising from the seemingly contradictory predicament of female embodiment
and masculine psychosexual identification?  Why change the body?  And, more
specifically, why change the putatively female body?  Lisa Cartwright has
suggested that the body is both an inscription device and an inscription
surface for creative articulations of identity.  But who is inclined
(either by hostile pressure or playful invitation) to make use of his or
her body this way?  In other words, why is the body the place where those
who experience profound gender and sexual dissonance -- myself included --
write (w-r-i-t-e) ourselves?  We could answer this question in many ways,
including to note that the medicalization of sex has been extremely
effective in leading people to imagine that doctors are the best suited to
make sure the body's genitals and secondary sex characteristics are
correctly aligned to the individual's gender identity.  Much has been
written about the virtual monopoly the medical profession gained over
matters concerning the naming and treatment of intersexuality,
hermaphroditism, sex inversion, and its slightly younger sibling,
homosexuality.  A sign of the success of this monopoly, among other things,
is that transsexuality is generally thought to be a medical condition
requiring the intervention and management of trained medical professionals
not only because it is assumed to be primarily a bodily condition, but
because along the way we trusted doctors enough to believe that their
knowledge, authority, and gadgets were free of bias and eminently effective
for allaying the suffering of afflicted individuals.  Add to that that in
order to change one's sex legally in the United States a physician must
attest that the individual is indeed a transsexual and has followed the
necessary protocols for becoming the "other sex."  The partnership between
law and medicine is pronounced here but both domains could be reformed if
they didn't so satisfy "normal" peoples' desires to marginalize deviant bodies.  

I've already said more than I want to about medicine being the key site of
authority for matters concerning sexuality and resolving sexual dissonance.
 Besides the medical monopoly and our common belief that science and
medicine are effective  avenues for resolving gender and sexual dissonance,
why else do we turn to the body to effect or mark transformations in
identity?  Why, when we think about the gravity and the expense and the
no-going-backness of surgery, and the fact that surgery effects a kind of
violence, is it perceived as a vital avenue for self-(re)making?  What kind
of violence is the putative violence of surgery countering?  A slightly
different set of questions arises when we consider how hormonal
transformations of the body are used in order to alter one's position in
the orders of bodily and gender legibility to which Susan Stryker, in her
pre-forum commentary, alluded.  According to what schema does surgery seem
more "fixing" than the fluidity of hormones?  Do hormone treatments effect
different, perhaps more fluid, hybridized, or intermediate changes in the
self and the body than surgery does?  To put it a different way, is the
scalpel inherently more violent by virtue of its ability to cut and sever
than the hypodermic needle by virtue of its ability to add a bit more of
this or that to the body's system?

Now I seem to have strayed from the magical sign of Brandon in the very
way that disturbed me from the beginning of my engagement with Shu Lea's
project.  Then as now I felt that Brandon was difficult to make out.  S/he
certainly wasn't imaged, except perhaps by suggestive effects.  Let me try
to get back to Brandon as a way of closing.  When I visited the web site
and embarked on the roadtrip, I began to realize that the traveler was not
me but Brandon; or rather, I (or anyone who visits the site) is invited to
travel as Brandon.  I may be mistaken but, as Shu Lea designed the site,
Brandon seems to be in the driver's seat and it is his/her point of view
that structures the roadtrip.  The implications of this are many,
especially since the stops along the road are sporadic, mystical,
alienating, even sad -- the stuff that a blinking, nearly-burned-out-neon-
illuminated Martini glass can trigger when you've been driving too late into 
a lonely night away from some painful episode. Maybe it is because I only 
visited the site in the wee hours of the night, sitting in a dark, silent apartment, 
alone with only the glow of the computer screen to offset the desolateness.  
It could be that I am just another person who can confirm what a joint study, 
undertaken by MIT, several big computer companies and the NSF, 
reported last week:  that surfing the web leads to depression.  But I think 
something else or in addition is going on here:  Brandon haunts many of us.  
For those of us who imagine ourselves to be queer activists, 
Brandon incites a coulda, woulda,  shoulda response.  The costs of isolation 
are huge.  Isolation on Brandon's part combined with hostility, phobia, 
and contempt on the part of those around Brandon, accounts for so much pain, 
so much suffering, so much violence.  Is there a surgical technique for 
lancing such abscesses in our culture?  When is surgery a defense against 
violence?  What kind of technological alterations to the body might protect 
the self with which it is affiliated?  What kind of difference would it make
to Brandon -- the one and the many -- to have recourse to the idea of a 
technosocial body?  Would it have broken Brandon's isolation to have known 
that many of us search hopefully for liberatory possibilities in the era of
technologically transformable bodies?  While at the same time many of 
us feel it's crucial to interrupt the triumphalist hype about self-esteem-
enhancing surgeries? What are we hoping for?  What are we attempting to 
interrupt?  Or to flee? And can transforming the body allay the violence of 
isolation and the pain of deeply felt social and sexual dissonance?