Your identity - but you are identical to what?

With Garber’s figure of the transvestite a space of imaginative possibility is opened up that begins to dispel the more militant, appropriative forms of identity that have become second nature. God may be dead but fantasies of self-sufficiency (or invulnerability) are not. Instead of God now, the third sex who knew the difference, or the heterosexual couple who have everything between them, a complete set of genitals, we can have the transvestite who, by crossing over, can unsettle us by provoking what Freud calls ‘the laughter of unease’.

The transvestites’ power to unsettle is proof, if we needed it, of how precarious our categories are, and how uncertain we are as the makers of categories.

Phalloplasty, the ‘building’ of a penis for a woman, was first done as an operation in 1936. The resistance to this operation, Garber suggests, convincingly, was ‘a sneaking feeling that it should not be so easy to “construct” a man – which is to say, a male body’. The problems of phalloplasty make, as it were, disarming reading: it can fall off and it does not get hard. So the trans-sexual, as Garber puts it, ‘gets the name but not the game’. ‘In sex reassignment surgery,’ she concludes, ‘there remains an implicit privileging of the phallus, a sense that a “real one” can’t be made, but only born.’ From Garber’s point of view, there are good political reasons why we are not very good at making penises: because we don’t want to, because if you can make it it’s not so real (and ‘real’ here means that which one is obliged to submit to). Those who believe in trans-sexual surgery and those who are appalled by it both believe they have privileged access to some deeper truth. Playing God in this context

Garber remarks in her droll way that it is ‘nonetheless curious that the means chosen to neutralise the threat of femininity and homosexuality should involve using a version of the poison as its own remedy’. It is indeed curious, although Garber doesn’t quite spell it out, that I am confirmed in  I really am is what Inot being a woman if I can pretend, or enjoy others pretending to be one; that what am unable to imitate. My true identity becomes something which, by definition, I cannot perform. The performance anxiety of becoming one sex or another depends upon such unpromising distinctions. There must be a reason, Garber intimates without making a meal of it, why men so often need to believe that being a man and being ridiculous are incompatible. But ideas are incompatible in a way that performances are not; the logic of language is not the same as the logic of gesture or tones and movements of voice.

Performers, therefore, are inevitably the stars of Vested Interests because they make a living from their parts. Among the most engaging chapters in the book are those on Shakespeare, boy actors on the Elizabethan stage and Michael Jackson, all of whom confront us, in Garber’s view, with the radical undecidability that underlies our outrage for disorder. Michael Jackson ‘in performance erases and detraumatises not only the boundaries between male and female, youth and age but also that between black and white’: he ‘internalises cultural category crises, and in internalising them ... makes possible a new fantasy of transcendence.’ This would seem like the smart fan straining to legitimate her pleasure were it not for the fact that it fits so well with some of the things Jackson says about himself: although he doesn’t, of course, put it quite like this.

And what happens when technology catches up with cultural fantasy. But the making of bodies is always going to be associated with the unmaking of bodies and there are real terrors here.

Describing the two sexes as opposite or complementary, rather than useful to each other for certain things but not for others, promotes the misleading idea that we are all in search of completion. Bewitched by the notion of being complete, we become obsessed by notions of sameness and difference, by thoughts of what to include and what to reject in order to keep ourselves whole. But maintaining this icon of ourselves confronts us with a paradoxical question: if we have an identity what areugh we need to know where we are by never being anywhere else. And one fundamental means of orientation, of self-recognition, is the difference between the sexes, despite the fact that in practice they keep leaking into each other. Once you stop pointing to body parts and start talking, the apparent differences between men and women begin to dissipate. So if we aren’t different from the opposite sex, what are we?

Gerber implies all with a light but well-researched touch, that our most intense erotic attachments are to our categories. That we hold ourselves together by keeping things apart.   

 
There is, as Garber shows, an erotics of uncertainty; so the fear of relinquishing the idea of difference may be the fear of the death of desire. There is no shortage of superstition about what keeps us going, but Garber’s account of ‘the real political energy to be obtained from reversing – rather than disseminating – gender signs’ gives us a new way of thinking about the political connections between difference and desire. What she calls ‘the anxiety of artifice’ – the performance art of sexual difference – becomes the anxiety of culture. Even when we are undressed there are vested interests at work.

How does on take all  this if we turn to Fashion as an a la mode exemplar, the aim might be to  swerve as the herd swerves, but swerve at the front of the herd

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety by Marjorie Garber
Routledge, 443 pp, £25.00, May 1992, ISB