#trans monstrosity

[the-apparatus]

i just to hear from ur dabi trans allegory please

Okay, I'm going to assume very minimal knowledge of trans theory just so I can give a very thorough explanation. First, I would recommend reading My Words To Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix by Susan Stryker. I don't know if she was the first person to make the comparison between The Creature from Frankenstein and trans bodies, but she definitely does a very good job at explaining it. Key points are essentially that since the trans body is built from medical science, the experience of being trans can be compared to the experience of The Creature. The Creature is shunned from society because its body is a creation of technology, and this isolation and violence against it brings such a rage within them that they enact violence against the initial factor which abandoned it (Victor Frankenstein). Stryker says that living in a trans body (regardless of weather or not they have undergone any modification of their vessel, because the transgendered body is considered monstrous either way) fuels such a raw rage within an individual that can be turned against the oppressive and violent society.

Now how does Dabi come into this (spoilers ahead ig)?

Lets examine his backstory, although I find it less important than just the way his body is presented. In his childhood, he was pushed to fulfill a societal expectation of his body (quirks being a biological phenomenon and the social pressure that came with having a very powerful quirk) and his social upbringing (being the son of the #2 hero). He then becomes fixated on this idea, pushing himself further and further to fulfill this societal expectation on him until it breaks him. His body is destroyed by the very part of him that fueled the pressure: his quirk. His body is stitched back together, creating a miracle of medical technology. Dabi's body is stitched together in the same way The Creature is stitched together, in the same way that the transsexual body is stitched together and manufactured.

Dabi's backstory lends itself to a transfeminine reading of it: the factors of societal pressure to live up to one's father in hero work (masculinity) is one that makes sense within a transfeminine allegory. However, I think Dabi's body itself is what creates the trans allegory. The process of Dabi's body being built out of the burned chunks of his former self is the same as a trans person who builds themself and creates someone who is monstrous, but necessary for survival. Like the trans person, Dabi turns his rage toward the factors that pushed him to the breaking point, he enacts violence against Endeavor and Hero Society, in the same way that a trans person will feel rage towards the way they were raised and against the society that renders their body monstrous. This is why I don't say that Dabi is trans in the way I think Bakuguo is trans -- I think Dabi is an incarnate of the trans experience (or at least a section of it).

[oleandervenzon]

excerpts from ON TRANSNESS AND MONSTROSITY, an essay by oleander venzon

tw: transphobia

alt. text:

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.

[sam-keeper]

A Host of Gentle Terrors by Sam Keeper

You remember wandering in a fractured land...

A Host of Gentle Terrors was in many ways for me an externalization through monstrosity of gender dysphoria

[the-apparatus]

I wake from my tumblr.com hibernation to talk about something that has plagued my mind for the past 3 or so weeks (ever since I watched the fly (1986) on a first date):

Okay, so y'know Frankenstine; or, the modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly? Okay, so The Creature is commonly used as a trans allegory -- trans bodies are viewed the same as The Creature, they're viewed as other and monstrous, even to the extent that trans people have "mutilated" bodies. Now take the fly: a contemporary (mis)interpretation of the same idea behind the modern Prometheus. The fly is directly villinizing the monstrosity, it shows someone's descent into madness from having a body viewed differently (brundlefly). This body is MORE monstrous than The Creature because it is explicitly nonhuman, where The Creature is testing the boundary of what is considered human.

In the film, we see Brundle slowly become less and less "human". It's explicitly body horror, his hair and teeth fall out, he starts to peel his fingernails off -- gross stuff. But this body horror isn't just gross and weird, it's specifically made worse because it's a transformation, Brundle is becoming something else, something "inhuman". The main question this raises, is what is a human? The brundlefly is still party human, it has human DNA, yet it is considered completely nonhuman, even by Brundle himself. This brings in a secondary aspect, which is that Brundle is ingrained so deep in forms of anthropocentric queerphobia that his transformation drives him "crazy". Unlike Frankenstein, it's not a story about someone being shunned by society and that radicalizing someone to violence -- it's about someone who is shunning and isolating themselves so hard that they would kill the ones they love (girlfriend and unborn baby) in order to return to something "more human than I have ever been". The drive isn't just to go to a baseline normal, the goal is to create the MOST human thing that has ever existed, and have Brundles consciousness controlling it. So that's what we get from the movie. The movie isn't overtly critical of any of these, however -- the point is the analysis of what's available to the viewer. And the themes that are left, is that people are driven to violence because of the cultural norm of "normal" vs "other" bodies, and anthropocentric conceptions of what is human and stratifying value based off humanity

What further complicates it, is that what Brundle practices in response to his transformation is rage (it is a hurt and desperate rage, but rage nonetheless) it is antithetical to Susan Stryker's conception of rage as a practice to realize one's body -- Brundle lashes out to try and reduce his body to one of hyperreal person-hood -- more human than human itself.

[narratively-complex-refuse-heap]

The meme where theres a guy standing in the corner at a party except it’s me at a campsite in rural Montana with my family and a bunch of random middle aged men drinking beer and I’m standing off in a field thinking none of these people know that I am the reason that my therapist knows who Susan Stryker is and feeling a level of self-satisfaction that I have only ever seen in the smug grin of SpongeBob SquarePants

[the-apparatus]

I've been kayaking in the Alaska Backcountry for the past few days, and upon my return, I am struck by just how wrong my body is. I haven't shaved my face in about a week, and I've been on estrogen for about a year and a half. I truly embody a space between sexes -- I have the face of a teenage man, a half grown face of hair. I have burgeoning breasts that are small, but distinctly noticeable and feminized. These traits lock my body in the penumbra of the transsexual (the person who exists outside of the binary conception of sexes). I am both the man and the woman. My body is necessarily perceived as both feminine and masculine -- not actually existing in the space in between, but in both spaces at once. Among these wealthy eco-tourists on the tour boat that picked me up, I cannot claim womanhood. A true woman would not have such facial hair. A true man would not have breasts like that. My body as it is perceived is that of the transsexual monster, the one who seeks to adopt feminized traits to hide its masculinity, and in doing so it forgoes itt's ability to establish either. My body as it is, is that of the state that reflects my psyche. A vessel un-beholden to the boxes that others place it into. This is not so much a penumbra of the sexes as it is a third sex, the transsex. But we transcend that as well, as we as transsexuals and transgenders are want to do. The practice of transcending this third sex is of denying the ability to be placed into it, to defy the boundaries between the sexes so thoroughly that they cease to exist -- to redefine what it means to inhabit a body so thoroughly as to destroy the current conceptions of it.

[the-apparatus]

In light of recent events regarding trans women on this website, I want to talk about why I think internet spaces are so important on principle.

The Transgender experience living within everyday social conceptions of being is daily body horror. Every day is a reminder that you are "wrong", that you are outside the norm. However, this is largely tied to physical form.

On the internet, communication is severed from the physical. Talking to someone online, or just posting and reblogging is a form of communication that is not dependant on recognition of the physical form, which is why its so important trans people have access to online spaces like this one -- this is a lifeline we use to disconnect from the physical while maintaining communication pathways.