excerpts from ON TRANSNESS AND MONSTROSITY, an essay by oleander venzon
How does one define a monster? Foucault’s definition describes it not as an outsider to the normative, but as the limit of the normative which causes it to be labeled as monstrous. In Luciano Nuzzo’s essay, “Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster,” he writes that “[the monster] is the space of emergence itself, i.e. the location where sheer potentiality becomes the possible of and in the event. All monstrosity is therefore deeply, and inevitably, political” (Nuzzo 2013:55). It is the existence of a tangible limit to the normative, as defined and regulated by the powers that be, that serves as a potential subversion of said normative. To be monstrous is to be ungovernable. And to name something as monstrous is to pathologize it, to ‘other’ it, to name it something to be fixed or killed. In this way, monstrosity functions as a framework for transsexuality — a rejection and subversion of the western colonialist gender binary — to operate within.
...so I’m reduced to a revolutionary body. A monstrosity. It subverts, transforms, thrashes, trembles, bleeds. Perhaps there is beauty to be found in monstrosity, in transcendence. But I feel most monstrous when I’m aching to survive.
Trans bodies, trans monstrosities, people reduced to bodies reduced to things. Guattari would define us as ‘revolutionary bodies’: producing our own liberation. Our defiances, failures, (call it what you will) to uphold the powers that be, he argues, serves as a means to “…create a new social reality in which the maximum of ecstasy is combined with the maximum of consciousness… [to] make us STRONG against a system of domination that continues to strengthen its power” (Guattari 1973:213–214). He argues that our existence as monstrosities, as a threat so powerful that the State systematically oppresses and subjugates us, is the first step in a revolution against the capitalist system itself. Still, I often find it difficult to believe that our mere existences as monstrosities, a product of the system itself, can’t inherently be revolutionary when so many of us live and die by a system of structural oppression. What beauty is to be found in mere survival? What’s liberating about your body being made into a battleground for the sake of society as a whole? How many need to be murdered to convince society to change? At what point do the suicide rates make a difference?
Yet, in a society where the western colonialist gender binary has created us, as we are, through violence and oppression, our existences have to be revolutionary. Our survival necessitates it. A revolutionary body is one of inherent pain and grief and, while our survival necessitates acknowledging this as well, there’s beauty too in the healing: in reclaiming our monstrosity and acknowledging more than just the blood. We are in a constant state of trauma, grief, pain, and rebirth. In our battleground bodies, our flagrant monstrosities, our power has to come from the reclamation of an existence denied of us. How else does one define a monster? The term originates from the Latin term, monstrum: “a divine messenger of catastrophe”. In Ocean Vuong’s poem “A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read,” he writes, “To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once” (Vuong 2017). In holding our own rejected conditional humanity, our aching broken frames of reference, our disembodied joy, our living and loving and building community beyond survival, we exist. We are “…self made, reborn, resurrected of our own accord. clawing at our own self-inflicted expiation, holy monstrosities: all deformity — no repentance” (Venzon 2018). We draw concentric circles around ourselves, exist in endless states of becoming.
snowghoul
titsay
jbbartram-illu
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
