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mpottash's picture

Response to the Readings and to Alex's Questions

Submitted by mpottash on Wed, 10/01/2008 - 9:17pm.
In "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix",Susan Stryker writes that "...transsexuality more than any other transgender practice or identity represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of fixed genders upon which a politics of personal identity depends".I associate this statement with question #2. There is something fundamental in our society that dictates the fact that a person needs to be either male or female, and this fundamental rule makes people afraid of anything that does not fit into these two distinct categories. The fact that Stryker calls it a "foundational presupposition of fixed genders" suggest the idea that people believe that our society is based on the dichotomy of these two genders, and that if this dichotomy was broken, society would somehow fall apart. I am also interested in her notion of "a politics of personal identity". It seems that personal identity is in fact not personal, but political (this could also relate to feminism). Society dictates that a person's identity must fall in one of two categories. This ties in with Foucault's theory of administrative control. Perhaps trans people are pressured to assimilate to either male or female because if they are outside of these categories, they are beyond the administrative control that dictates the politics of identity.

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