Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment

Perverse Modernities

by Aren Z. Aizura

The first famous transgender person in the United States, Christine Jorgensen, traveled to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery in 1952. Jorgensen became famous during the ascent of postwar dreams about the possibilities for technology to transform humanity and the world. In Mobile Subjects Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives within global health and tourism economies from 1952 to the present. Drawing on an archive of trans memoirs and documentaries as well as ethnographic fieldwork with trans people obtaining gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura maps the uneven use of medical protocols to show how national and regional health care systems and labor economies contribute to and limit transnational mobility. Aizura positions transgender travel as a form of biomedical tourism, examining how understandings of race, gender, and aesthetics shape global cosmetic surgery cultures and how economic and racially stratified marketing and care work create the ideal transgender subject as an implicitly white, global citizen. In so doing, he shows how understandings of travel and mobility depend on the historical architectures of colonialism and contemporary patterns of global consumption and labor.

Genres: Transgender, LGBT, Gender, Nonfiction, Queer, Theory

296 pages, Hardcover

First published November 23, 2018

Reviews

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please forgive me if this review appears to be saying nothing. There is no way of making Mobile Subjects into one project - one thesis, one type of writing, one situation, - that at all satisfies me. I want to write a quick review without reopening the book, so that I don't write 10 paragraphs and go insane over Wittig and Deleuze like I did in my Gender Trouble review. Here's that attempt...

One of the things at the heart of Mobile Subjects' explorations of (trans)nationality, (trans)narrative, bodies, and technologies is Aizura holding GRS in minor societal relevance, morality, and even specificity. {I say minor in a Deleuzian sense, where the "major" requires acts of closure but the minor constantly emerges without planning.} Basically, this book "about" gender reassignment is remarkably skeptical that there should be books written about gender reassignment(!), and certainly this book does not believe that directing ones attention to gender reassignment is some kind of best way of enlightening oneself. Maybe critical academia skews in this direction, though, of making ambivalent and mobile treatments to beat back the precedence of frozen treatments; I have an engineering degree.

Aizura frequently brings up how few transgender people get GRS. {Aizura uses "transgender" in an appropriately near-deconstructed sense. GRS basically stands for Gender Reassignment Surgery, though I read it in very many different ways while reading this book.} State control, borders, the price of travel and the debt-leveraging of subjects (even those from the global north!) are obvious forms of friction that complicate people's ability to get GRS. Surgeons themselves and transgender people are the less-obvious but always-present places where friction can emerge to complicate the process of GRS happening. Aizura stresses how because of/despite/through those forms of friction, transgender people find *other* ways of reconstituting their bodies, that escape the closure of state thought and even the vision of affirmative thought.

Aizura, I hope he won't get mad at me if he reads this, philosophically sits with materialists, both new materialists and old. An example of a new materialist influence on this book: the one mention of Deleuze and Guattari comes at the very end of the 1st chapter and comes in the form of Aizura's critique of a writer's privileging the Deleuzo-Guattarian "cut" as a process whereby bodies are made more resilient (the cut literally increases the surface area of the skin as membrane and opens new flows, tissues, gases, materials to one-another) and become themselves along a line of flight. This is a beautiful, affirmative, actual, rich conception of the way bodies act. I think Aizura brings this concept up because Aizura basically dislikes how GRS is taken as THE one, despotic signifier of the cut. Such a coding is extremely dangerous, because it threatens to make GRS a totalizing act of change (no, GRS does not separate your two lives, it does not cut your lifeline into two any more than a blink of the eye does), or threatens to give GRS some mode of change that it totalizes (no, GRS has no essential claim to gender unless a subject freezes themselves in that mode of transcendent thinking), and finally because - as Aizura wants to indicate by drawing out a field of somatechnology - "the cut" is something extremely general. Our feet are cut as we walk, our lungs cut flows and are cut in breathing, our bodies and all bodies cut and reconstitute themselves in the swirling speed of its material. In the gym we tear our muscles, lose weight to "cut," fabric cuts and drapes in always new shapes around my body, I constantly cut a shape in the air and through it I feel most myself. These are not metaphors, they are gestures at worst, they are statements that attempt to cut the field of discourse. There is a little bit of GRS present in thought, in speaking, in opening your eyes and lifting your head, in giving love and holding desires: everything more-or-less intense, receiving intensities from flows, becoming what it is. Abstract the cut out of the despotic signifier. Every machine is a “cutting plane of deterritorialization.”

Althroughout chapter 1, Aizura is showing us the GRS-assisted event-of-transition as seen by office workers, when a transgender coworker goes on a transition vacation. There are many actors in this little theatre who altogether come to a specific, untroubled, binary, frozen understanding of transgender life. The transgender coworker becomes absent and returns under a new name and new pronouns; the other coworkers must expect an evental change in the transgender person and understand under which pronouns the transgender person should now be identified. This theatre is a total misunderstanding. The transgender coworker goes through an actual process which involves cutting, becoming, but also a consumption-consummation made possible by capital; the other coworkers ideally observe (and must Respect) a change from one identity to a second one identity. All actors in this theatre must make themselves ignorant to the actual flow of gender indeterminacy that their language bounces off of, they must simply find the right norms to guide their understanding of self-identical actors, and - as long as these behaviors are performed to the satisfaction of HR, - capital will continue to protect their broken, beige, air-conditioned discourse.

I think Aizura sits with new materialists in that he wants people to come to understand the actual gender indeterminacy that flows around them and how capital can crush this indeterminacy into norms. In the case of the office, for example, HR satisfactorily reduces subjects to a flow of labor when they can crush processes of transition (above, under the sign of vacation), and hide signs of bodily (re)constitution (genitals, yes, but fashions and tattoos must spring to mind as well).

I think Aizura sits with old materialists - Marxists, if you like? Intersectional Marxists? I'm not sure, I have an engineering degree, - in that he wants people to understand that there are valid readings of (evental, GRS-assisted, transnational) transgender life that understand GRS as a small consumptive act, grounded in the brutal extraction of labor from a globally distributed underclass. Aizura finds himself in this dynamic in key ways, including a certain remark that he experienced GRS as a consumer. But, again, Aizura does not in the least want to implicate the whole field of transgender life in this phenomenon. It's much bigger than that, and it will continue to constitute itself, perform itself, become itself in a way form is just chasing after.

With that in mind, this is certainly a good book, in that it exceeds itself a great deal.

[Etienne RP · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Biased Perspective on Sex Change

Imagine you want to go through a “sex change” or a gender reassignment. People identify you as a man, but you want to be identified as a woman, or vice versa. You may also plan to undergo medical treatment and take hormones or get surgery. What should you and your colleagues do at the workplace to manage this transition? According to the British government that published a guide for employers regarding gender reassignment, transsexual people should take a few days or weeks off at the point of change and return in their new name and gender role. Time off between roles is assumed to give the trans person as well as coworkers time to adjust to the new gender identity. It is usually announced that the trans person will go on a trip, which may be real or figurative; and this journey-out-and-return-home forms the transition narrative that will shape people’s expectations and reactions to the change in gender identity. What happens during this trip needs not be detailed. The journey abroad opens a space of gender indeterminacy that makes transsexuality intelligible within a gender binary. This transition narrative was pioneered by Christine Jorgensen who, in 1953, went to Denmark to get surgery and returned to the United States as a celebrity. As the (undoubtedly sexist) quip had it, Jorgensen “went abroad and came back a broad.”

Neoliberalism and white privilege

This line of conduct is presented as good practice to ease transition at the workplace. But Aren Aizura is not happy with this recommendation. For him, the journey narrative is tainted by neoliberalism, white privilege, colonial exploitation, and gender prejudice. As he puts it, “the particular advice to take a transition vacation places us firmly in a corporatized framework of neoliberal racialized citizenship.” This is, in a way, stating the obvious: remember that the advice comes from a guide for employers, and from the analysis of workplace policy documents. The labelling of corporate practices as “neoliberal” is a well-established convention in the social sciences and in critical discourse on globalization. More surprising is the author’s call to “remain alert to the racial and colonial overtones of ‘elsewhere’ in this fantasy of an ideal gender transition.” Denmark was never a colony, and neither was Thailand, where many gender reassignment operations now take place. Nor are the recommendations of the Women and Equality Unit of the British government tainted by a white bias or by structural racism. Contrary to what Aizura states, they do not assume the whiteness of the trans or gender nonconforming subject: this racial assignation only takes place in the author’s imagination. As for the gender bias implicit in these guidelines, it results from Aizura’s claim that gender is not necessarily binary: presenting transition as the passage from man to woman or woman to man “contains the threat of gender indeterminacy and the possibility that gender may be performative and socially constructed.” Again, nothing in the above-mentioned guidelines appears to me as contradicting these claims.

Christine Jorgensen’s journey was considered as inspirational for generations of trans people or gender nonconforming persons in the United States. As the author of Transgender Warriors put it, “Christine Jorgensen’s struggle beamed a message to me that I wasn’t alone. She proved that even a period of right-wing reaction could not coerce each individual into conformity.” Her story also contributed to posit Europe as a place where gender reassignment technologies were more widely accessible and accepted. It was a typically American success story, emphasizing individual autonomy, self-transformation, and upward social mobility. In this respect, it was fully congruent with the “capitalist liberal individualism” that Aizura so vehemently denounces. But this doesn’t turn it into a story of white privilege or settler colonialism. The deconstruction of the rags-to-riches transition narrative not only annihilates the hopes and aspirations invested by earlier generations of trans people; it leaves non-trans persons with no reference point or narrative to interpret the gender identity change that some of their colleagues or relatives may go through. The fact that Christine Jorgensen was white and middle class seems to me fully irrelevant to the power of her narrative. Aizura does envisage the case that a gender nonconforming person of color may wish to benefit from the same corporate procedure described in the British guidelines; but he immediately dismisses such person as “the token brown person or cultural diversity representative” put forward by corporate communication planners. For me, dismissing racial inclusion and diversity policies as an expression of tokenism is a deeply problematic gesture.

French cabaret

I wasn’t familiar with the story of Christine Jorgensen. However, my French upbringing made me recognize the names of Amanda Lear, Capucine, and Bambi, whom the author claims underwent vaginoplasty surgery at the Clinique du Parc in Casablanca in the 1960s. This is a blatant fabrication, based on gossip and rumors that circulated at the time but that a rigorous scholar ought not to reproduce. The life story of Amanda Lear is shrouded in mystery, as her birthdate and birthplace have never been confirmed. But throughout her singing and acting career she strongly denied the transgender rumors that circulated about her, stating at one point that it was a “crazy idea from some journalist” or attributing them to Salvador Dali’s sharp wit. Capucine, a French actress and model, was never a transgender or a cabaret performer as alleged by Aizura: he confuses her with the transgender club singer Coccinelle, who did travel to Casablanca to undergo a vaginoplasty by the renowned surgeon Georges Burou in 1956. She said later, “Dr. Burou rectified the mistake nature had made and I became a real woman, on the inside as well as the outside. After the operation, the doctor just said, ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle’, and I knew it had been a success.” As for “Bambi”, she is better known in France by her name Marie-Pierre Pruvot and soon left the cabaret stage to become a literature teacher and an author of bestsellers. When she was awarded the Order or Merit by the French Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot (herself a celebrity among trans and LGBT people), she dedicated this distinction to “all those (celles et ceux) whose fight for a normal life endures.”

These stories are distorted and silenced by Aizura, who only examines English-language accounts of gender transition. He considers these narratives as normative, without acknowledging the fact that his own account is deeply influenced by norms and conventions developed in North American (and Australian) academia. Accusations of white privilege, cultural appropriation, and heterosexual normativity are part of the “culture wars” that are waged on Western (mostly American) campuses. They should not be treated lightly: these charges carry weight and can lead to the shunning or dismissal of professors and students who are accused of cultural misdemeanor. It is not therefore without consequences that Aizura targets Jan Morris, Deirdre McCloskey, and Jennifer Boylan, three public intellectuals who have authored transition narratives, with potential repercussions for their reputation and career. The first (who passed away in 2020) is accused of “blatant colonial paternalism” because she describes her trip to Casablanca along an “unabashedly orientalist perspective.” Deirdre McCloskey is inappropriately described as a “Chicago School economist.” Although she taught at the University of Chicago for twelve years, she didn’t identify with the neoclassical orientation of her colleagues from the department of economics. On the contrary, she focused her work on the “rhetorics of economics” and took a decidedly heterodox approach to the discipline. But Aizura isn’t interested in McCloskey’s scholarly contribution: as with Jennifer Boylan, he accuses her of “institutional recuperation” and “cultural appropriation” because she dares to compare her experience of crossing gender barriers with the plight of immigrants entering the United States. When McCloskey writes: “You cannot imagine the relief in adopting my correct gender. Imagine if you felt French but has been raised in Minnesota,” Aizura is prompt to denounce her Eurocentric perspective (but doesn’t notice the small bruise done to Minnesota’s pride.)

Pinkwashing

Moving to the examination of a set of documentary movies documenting the trajectories of gay and transgender migrant workers in First World locations, Aizura formulates a new set of accusations: these films are voyeuristic, manipulative, culturally insensitive, and “metronormative” (they exhibit an urban bias.) Commenting on Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning, he questions the logic wherein “a middle-class white lesbian film-maker could produce a document about poor and marginalized queer and trans people of color with questionable benefit to the participants.” Regarding Tomer Heymann’s Paper Dolls, a 2006 documentary that follows the lives of transgender migrant workers from the Philippines who work as healthcare providers for elderly Orthodox Jewish men and perform as drag queens during their spare time, Aizura reproduces the charge of homonationalism and pinkwashing made against Israel’s gay-friendly policy by Jasbir Puar in The Right to Maim. Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva’s documentary Les travestis pleurent aussi, located in the Clichy suburb near Paris, offers a “deliberately bleak picture of the precarious existence of queer immigrants in Europe.” Indeed, Aizura takes issue with the “race, classed, and spatial politics of representation” made by documentary cinema that renders the bodies of migrant workers visible to white, mostly non-trans audiences at LGBT festivals or in “transgender 101 courses.” As he comments, “Queer film festivals are far from politically neutral spaces, however, and embody transnational politics,” again taking issue with Israel’s sponsorship of the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival.

Mobile Subjects is also an ethnography of transgender reassignment practices done through “extensive fieldwork in Thailand and Australia between 2006 and 2009.” Here again, the author reproduces the charges of white privilege, Orientalism, and racial exclusiveness that taint the testimonies and observations he was able to collect. He viciously settles scores with the medical doctor who denied him proper treatment by reproducing a scathing obituary that circulated on social media at the time of her death: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” (his “Dr. K.” will be easily recognizable, as the Monash Health Gender Clinic in Melbourne was the only institution to deliver gender reassignment prescription certificates in Australia.) He contrasts the “gatekeeper model” of obtaining gender reassignment surgery or GRS with the more open and entrepreneurial framework that characterizes Thailand. Cheaper services, better techniques, and ease of travel make the Thai model more attractive for the transnational consumer. But Thailand is not without its own prejudices against its kathoey population, and its medical services are not accessible to impecunious patients. Besides, there are legitimate concerns about a consumerist approach that treats bodily modification as a commodity. But Aizura’s main concern is about race: in the eyes of the Americans, Britons, and Australians he encountered in the high-end clinics that offered services to non-Thai foreigners or farangs, Thailand was synonymous with exoticism, feminine beauty, and the fulfillment of desire. The Thai women—and a few kathoeys—who catered to their needs were perceived as the responsive and subservient Asian female subjects that echoed their orientalist fantasies. Their self-transformation into “full womanhood” was therefore predicated upon a racial hierarchy that posits Asia as the feminine and the West as the masculine part of a heteronormative dyad.

Misconstructing Asia

As is clear by now, my concern with this book goes beyond sloppy scholarship, lack of fact checking, “naming names” for opprobrium, and slavish following of “woke” intellectual fashions. The obsession with whiteness and its alleged privilege seems to me more than delusional: it betrays a basic ignorance of current trends shaping South-East Asia, where Americanism or Eurocentrism increasingly appear as a thing of the past. There is not a word on China’s presence in the region, although the international clientele for gender-affirming treatments in Thailand increasingly comes from mainland China and other countries in the region, while online platforms for prescription hormones mostly cater to a regional market. Thailand is becoming a global destination for gender change, regardless of race or ethnicity, and references to colonialism are fully irrelevant in a country that never fell under Western colonial domination. I don’t want my critique to be misconstrued as the expression of gender prejudice or transphobia: again, the objurgation of transgender persons through the deconstruction of their valid testimonies is on the author’s side, not mine. Of course, Aren Aizura is entitled to his politics, which he sums up as “decriminalization of sex work; loosening immigration restrictions and national border controls; and making welfare, health care, and social safety nets available to all people regardless of immigration status” (I wish him luck, regarding the American context in which he operates.) He is also free to pursue scholarship in line with “trans and queer of color critiques,” “transnational feminist studies,” and “critical race studies.” I am not familiar with these lines of inquiry, and I picked up Mobile Subjects to get a better sense of what they might mean. My experiment was inconclusive, to say the least.

[Sarah Fogel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know I promised I'd post the whole review that I wrote, but honestly, it ended up being kind of rushed and something I'm not as proud of as I was hoping it'd be, so I won't. What I will say is that despite some reservations, this book is overall pretty useful! Would give it 3.5 stars if GoodReads allowed me to.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

In “Mobile Subjects,” Aren Z. Aizura examines transsexual surgeries sought abroad, mostly by Westerners, sometimes Middle Eastern people. The purpose of studying “surgical tourism” is to interrogate how having such options—economic power granting such mobility—highlights power disparities between East and West. Or rather, “Global North and Global South,” since this seems to be the real axis and line of demarcation between the haves and have-nots (though this is changing, somewhat.)
It could be an interesting subject, and the book shows intermittent signs of life, but it is burdened (maybe sunk entirely) by an obscurantist prose style. I will never understand why postmodern (post-postmodern?) academia equates unreadability with scholarliness. Most of the discourse tends to use Michel Foucault’s theories as a model (especially the biopolitics), but whatever you thought of Foucault’s conclusions, the guy was accessible. So why these dense thickets of syntax salted with words like “imbricate” and plagued by tortured series of relative clause piled on relative clause? After a while, just reading became a dread chore, a kind of endurance test. Frankly, I got enough of this stuff in graduate school, but once I commit to a book, I have a hard time giving up and thus saw my way through to the end.
The other problem is that Aizura doesn’t let his subjects speak for themselves anywhere near enough. The people in question—men, women, intersex—are all held at a remove, both the tourists and those being subjected to the “Occidental Gaze.” There’s some irony here: Aizura tries to turn a gimlet eye on people from “exotic” locations, treated as mere impedimenta by moneyed tourists. And yet, again and again he overlooks his subjects, burying them as well as the reader under an impenetrable mound of jargon and theorizing about surplus labor. As usual, the dialectic leaves no room for the breathing and real people and their circumstances. Maybe a Marxian critique will help lift these people up, but maybe humanize the language, too, you know?
A disappointment.

[daniel dillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compelling blend of film/textual studies and ethnographic accounts of how these models compel queer and trans people to be mobile in order to embody racially and colonially inflected ideals of gender and sexuality. Would recommend to those in gender AND mobilities studies, as there is a lot here to appreciate and build upon.

[Mills College Library]

306.76 A3119 2018