GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

"My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix," by Susan Stryker.

GLQ 1.3 (1994).

This short essay marks the third time I've commented in GLQ on its publication of my 1994 article, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix," a performative text that riffs on a scene in Mary Shelley's novel, in which the creature talks back to its maker, to stage a transsexual retort to the devaluation of trans lives through attributions of unnaturalness and artificiality. As such, it helps map a particular dimension of queer theory's development over the last twenty-five years.

While it's difficult to assess the importance of one's own work, I can certainly say I'm happy that my Frankenstein article still has a life of its own a quarter-century after I first let it loose in the world, and that it remains one of the most read works in GLQ's history (currently at number two, after Cathy Cohen's magnificent "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens"). I have a Google alert set for it and take great pleasure in seeing mentions of it pop up in my inbox from time to time, like postcards from the Travelocity gnome, that keep me apprised of how and where it moves and of the company it keeps. It's gained a cult following, supplying pull-quotes for innumerable Tumblr and Twitter accounts, and has contributed to wide-ranging scholarly conversations on embodiment, techno-cultural studies, gothic literature and science fiction, affect theory, posthumanism, animal studies, radical veganism, philosophy of the body, and the relationship between queer and trans studies, to name but a few of the contexts in which it has circulated.¹ [End Page 39]

Although I didn't conceptualize it this way at the time, my Frankenstein article offered an implicit critique of what, in today's lingo, could be called an unstated cisnormative bias in queer theory. As I was writing it, I was reading the pair of articles on the queer politics of gay shame by Judith Butler (1993) and Eve Sedgwick (1993) that opened the inaugural issue of GLQ and served as a point of departure for a new phase in queer studies' institutionalization; they supplied an unacknowledged background to my own thoughts on the affect of rage.

Shame, as I understood it to be articulated in early queer theory, was predicated on the prior consolidation of a gendered subject, and emanated from the subjective perception that one was a "bad" instantiation of something that one recognized and accepted oneself as being. But what if one balked at that gendering interpellation and was thus compelled to confront not bad feelings but the hegemonic materio-discursive practices that produce the meanings of our flesh to render us men or women in the first place? I was not ashamed that in the name of my own psychical life I needed to struggle against the dominant mode of gender's ontologization—I was enraged.

The first opportunity to reflect on "My Words to Victor Frankenstein" came in the tenth anniversary issue of GLQ (2004), to which I contributed an essay called "Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin," which made explicit what previously had been unstated in my earlier work. My own involvement in self-styled radical queer networks in the early 1990s had led me to assume that "queer" was a family to which I belonged as a trans person, and guest-editing "The Transgender Issue" of GLQ (1998) helped confirm me in that belief. But as the new millennium dawned, it felt increasingly necessary to flag the ways that cisnormative queer theory naturalized the binary gender categories of man and woman as the enabling condition of queer sexuality's intelligibility, and relegated questions about the production of the categories themselves to a marginal status, or treated those questions as altogether extraneous to queer theory. Trans studies, I suggested, like queer of color or queer crip critique, offered a different way to imagine how queerness could be constituted by attending to other registers of difference than sexuality.

By the time I revisited the article yet again, in 2015, for GLQ's special double issue "Queer Inhumanisms," the ground of queer theory had moved in directions that made my old article appear more prescient than marginal in its focus on a mode of embodiment excluded from the status of human and thereby deemed less worthy of life (Muñoz et al. 2015). Reflecting a broader shift in the humanities and social sciences, queer theory increasingly linked a biopolitical framework, which analyzed the segmentation of populations and the hierarchizing of [End Page 40] its groups, with assemblage theories that helped conceptualize connections across scales of existence from the subatomic to the cosmic, and an ontological perspective that emphasized the intrinsic fluidity and liveliness of materiality. In this emerging paradigm, questions about the interrelatedness of such categorizations of life as species, race, or sex, and of how those categories materialized in ways that created greater or less capacities for living, came to the foreground. As queer theory turned toward establishing transversal connections between many varieties of life enfleshed in ways that subordinated them to the white heteromasculine able-bodied figure atop Eurocentric modernity's humanist hierarchy of values—Man—it could now look differently on the figure of transsexual monstrosity already nestled within its folds, waiting to be apprehended anew.

Karen Barad's "TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings," published in the "Queer Inhumanisms" issue of GLQ, articulated the affinities between my old Frankenstein article and the so-called new materialisms far more cogently than I ever have while deftly calling needed attention to the fraught relationship I suggested between processes of transsexuation and racialization (Barad 2015). In the original 1994 article, I had written that my "rage colors me" (Stryker 1994: 244). I deliberately played on the polysemic shades of "color" to make space for holding a question that I did not then know how to properly frame, let alone answer, but which I would now pose as follows: to what extent might the affect that emanated from my own enmeshment as a white transgender person in what Alexander Weheliye (2014) has since termed "racializing biopolitical assemblages" share some kinship with affects emanating from others who have been differently racialized than I, differently subordinated in the hierarchies of life than I, yet with whom I could strive toward some commons that better sustains all of our differently enfleshed lives?

Katrina Roen was the first scholar to comment on that phrase about transgender rage and color in her 2001 article "Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalisation" and to note, accurately, of me, "That she is coloured by rage is explicit. How she is coloured by race is not" (256). The unstated whiteness norm of academic transgender theorizing is something with which I have been deeply complicit, even in my best efforts to do otherwise. One genealogy of transgender studies traces its root to Sandy Stone's "Posttranssexual Manifesto" (1992), modeled, in part, on Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (1991), and written during Stone's years as Haraway's student in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Haraway explicitly acknowledged that her figuration of the cyborg drew on queer of color feminisms, but Stone, crafting her own manifesto in the heady atmosphere [End Page 41] where Gloria Anzaldúa published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Chela Sandoval (2000) was writing the dissertation that became Methodology of the Oppressed, did not make the deeper lineage or broader context of her figuration of the post-transsexual similarly explicit as her mentor had done for the cyborg, and it's taken a generation of scholarship to recover the ancestors and kin of color invisibilized within the post-transsexual strand of thinking that I think of as my home.

In Barad's engagement with my Frankenstein article, which they approach from the vantage point of quantum field theory, they dwell on the theme I dwelt on, of Being being a becoming that emerges from a nothingness that nevertheless teems with lively potentials. I still think the greatest strength of my article is the way it affectively transforms the experience of being abjected from the human because of one's mode of embodiment into the joyously empowering experience of embodying a new modality of techno-cultural life, predicated on different premises than those that subtend Man. And yet I take to heart Barad's critique of the metaphorics I deployed in the representation of that insight, of being thrown into "darkness," and emerging from the "blackness" from which "Nature itself spills forth" (Stryker 1994: 251).

As Barad (2015: 417) notes, however much my language aims at voicing a condition of unrepresentability or interstitiality, however much it strives to communicate a sense of the void as "full and fecund, rich and productive, actively creative and alive"; it also recapitulates "the underlying metaphysics of colonialist claims such as terrae nullius—the alleged void that the white settler claims to encounter in 'discovering undeveloped lands,' that is, lands allegedly devoid of the marks of 'civilization'—a logic that associates the beginning of space and time, of place and history, with the arrival of the white man." In other words, I inadvertently perpetuate the racist trope of imagining blackness as the unmarked and unacknowledged condition on which the existence of whiteness depends. Marquis Bey, in a recent article "The Trans*-ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-ness," does a much better job than I at expressing my ill-formed intent when he says that blackness and transness "are differently inflected names for an anoriginal lawlessness" that manifests "in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity" (Bey 2017: 275).

I have no idea where "My Words to Victor Frankenstein" will go from here, or what it might have to do with queer theory in the future, or if it and queer theory will go anywhere else at all from here; all things come to an end at some point. But as we celebrate the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's novel, and come to an even greater appreciation of how that work has always posed a feminist and implicitly [End Page 42] queer, posthuman critique of Eurocentric biopolitical modernity, I'd be delighted for my own words to share in some degree the longevity of the words that inspired them, as they tag along for the ride with that famous literary monster, and hopefully find new ways to have something to say to whatever present moments yet may come.