A Response to C. Jacob Hale Author(s): Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Text, No.

52/53, Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender (Autumn Winter, 1997), pp. 237-239 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466742 . Accessed: 09/07/2012 06:45
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Text.

http://www.jstor.org

A Response

to C. Jacob Hale

Because of its auto-ethnographic methodology, C. Jacob Hale's paper marks a fascinating beginning to the project of articulating subjectivities that purposefully move across the boundaries of gender. Hale is modest but precise in suggesting some of the ways in which his account exposes the inadequacy of available theoretical languages concerning gender. It is striking to me, for example, that the range of motives mentioned by Hale and Bergstedt for their explorations involve spiritual exercise and selfdevelopment, excitement and fun, the search for a responsive community, new forms of mastery and self-mastery, "love, help, nurturance, guidance," opportunities for pedagogical give-and-take, and, in particular, self-construction, self-legibility, and self-recognition. This list is remarkably different from what one might infer from reading other theoretical accounts of cross-gender embodiment. By those accounts, the critique and exposure of dominant ideologies, which are the sole yardsticks by which gender practices are nowadays thought to be measured, might also be supposed to be their main motivation. Hale's and Bergstedt's projects, however, are subjectively described as affective and relational (if one includes in that term the relation to self) far, far more than they are described as motivated by critical epistemological projects. According to a certain theoretical stance, moreover, the reliance of these two accounts on a notion of "self," and in particular on a project of self-recognition, should signal a damagingly static and conservative essentialism. Yet, though Bergstedt makes explicit use of a concept of "who I really am," neither Hale nor Bergstedt narrates his life according to the essentialist, psychiatrically enforced transsexual model that would insist, "I was always really a man, but I used to be trapped in a woman's body." Neither one, that is, would seem to be revisionistically interested-at least for reasons beyond the legal-in going back to that birth certificate and inscribing a fixed M in place of the now problematical F. At the same time, both accounts are equally distant from the fatuous postmodern suggestion that "there are a million-actually, infinite-different ways that I could as happily wear my body and selfhood, but I just accidentally happen to have landed on this one." No, the meanings of particular gendered embodiments for each of these subjects are obviously deeply and extensively ramified-deeply enough to motivate, for example, courageous, disSocial Text52/53, Vol. 15, Nos. 3 and 4, Fall/Winter1997. Copyright? 1997 by Duke UniversityPress.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

ruptive, logistically difficult, and politically embattled career- and healththreatening physical choices. If these identities are not fixed and immutable, then, neither are they random or endlessly proliferative. Similarly, these two subjects are obviously not in any sense passive in relation to their gender, nor do they represent some purified, degree-zero absolute of agency and voluntarity. Rather than using self as an essentialist or conservative concept, and rather than simply throwing it into free fall or free play, the itineraries sketched in this essay seem to articulate an altogether different, theoretically very important possibility: something like identification with what is, at any given moment, understood to be the growing edge of a self. That is to say, a project of self-recognition may arise from something very different than the desire to fix, to render self-evident or self-identical or unchanging, the boundaries of a personhood. There seems to be a kind of spiral shape to these trajectories of identity. Moments of daring surmise and cognitive rupture-moments, that is, in which new speculations arise about what now constitutes the growing edge of this self-may be followed by moments of experiential reflection, forward projection, trial and error, and reality testing of such surmise: is this, at this moment, the possible site of a consequential change that will prove in some way meaningful in terms of one's own history? If so, then it seems inevitable, and important, that big change at this site will also involve a certain retroactive trajectory of reinterpretationand consolidation in the new place. I wonder whether that's reflected in the affect- and meaning-intensive pedagogical back-and-forth that Hale describes, the opportunity to experience or to offer someone else the boyhood that-what?-maybe that one would have needed in order to properly become what one is becoming, except that one is in fact already properly becoming it, and out of a different history entirely. Perhaps what one provides oneself with, then, in such a revised adolescence, is the consolidated-enough site from which to desire to find a different place again. From each new site of provisional meaning-consolidation, at any rate, if it has been chosen with some luck and some self-knowledge, many new paths and itineraries evidently become visible-paths that seem radically contingent only in the sense that their existence could never have been guessed from the place from which one began. From the place from which they are now viewed, they appear as necessary-that is, as much a part of the landscape of the grounded and real-as anything could be. It is the path by which one arrived that may now look small, contingent, unlikely, and unwelcoming; that one might return seems so much less real than that one proceeds to the next fork in another path, proceeds with a full respect for the integrity and gravity as well as for the contingency of one's journey. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

One conclusion I would draw from the essay, perhaps, is this: even if selfhood or personhood is, in the present systems of thought, almost entirely inextricable from gender, that does not make the concept of the self or person intellectually dispensible. Self, in fact, like gender, can motivate and instantiate change as readily as stasis. Perhaps, indeed, it is a smug and sterile opposition between stasis and change, between passivity and agency, between hegemony and subversion, that such accounts of the journeys of subjectivity can most importantly challenge.

A Response to C. Jacob Hale

239