My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

by Susan Stryker

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Transgender, LGBT, Feminism, Essays, Theory

18 pages, ebook

First published June 1, 1994

About the author

Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is an associate professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, and is the director of the university's Institute for LGBT Studies. She has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Simon Fraser University. She is an openly lesbian trans woman who has produced a significant body of work about transgenderism and queer culture.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Alex Abrahams · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape that in which it was not born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist."

SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP SHOVELING DIRT INTO MY MOUTH EATING THE PAPER SOBBING YELLING RUNNING AROUND DOING CARTWHEELS BAWLING MY EYES OUT

[Abbie O'Hara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best things I’ve read in my entire life. Brought me to tears!! Theory doing that is insane.

[Jasmin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity; having a gender is the tribal tattoo that makes one's personhood cognizable. I stood for a moment between the pains of two violations, the mark of gender and the unlivability of its absence. Could I say which one was worse? Or could I only say which one I felt could best be survived?

[vam pire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genuinely the best essay i have ever read. I will be ruminating upon this for a very long time.

"To encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of the natural order. Confronting the implications of this constructedness can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My transsexual body literalizes this abstract violence."

[leonore]

writing an essay on this rn i wish someone couldve told me that i could log my acaemic readings on here... maybe i wouldnt look so illiterate

[Calliope Lagunas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this felt like a piece of my soul had been surgically removed and transcribed as a truly eloquent and awesome manifesto. Susan Stryker's (fantastic name btw) essay should be required reading for all of my transgender kindred.

[Kesaria (Kesso) Abuladze · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...in the lived moment of being thrown back from a state of abjection in the aftermath of my lover’s daughter’s birth, I immediately began telling myself a story to explain my experience. I started theorizing, using all the conceptual tools my education had put at my disposal. Other true stories of those events could undoubtedly be told, but upon my return I knew for a fact what lit the fuse to my rage in the hospital delivery room. It was the non-consensuality of the baby’s gendering. You see, I told myself, wiping snot off my face with a shirt sleeve, bodies are rendered meaningful only through some culturally and historically specific mode of grasping their physicality that transforms the flesh into a useful artifact. Gendering is the initial step in this transformation, inseparable from the process of forming an identity by means of which we’re fitted to a system of exchange in a heterosexual economy. Authority seizes upon specific material qualities of the flesh, particularly the genitals, as outward indication of future reproductive potential, constructs this flesh as a sign, and reads it to enculturate the body. Gender attribution is compulsory; it codes and deploys our bodies in ways that materially affect us, yet we choose neither our marks nor the meanings they carry. This was the act accomplished between the beginning and the end of that short sentence in the delivery room: “It’s a girl.” This was the act that recalled all the anguish of my own struggles with gender. But this was also the act that enjoined my complicity in the non-consensual gendering of another. A gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity; having a gender is the tribal tattoo that makes one’s personhood cognizable. I stood for a moment between the pains of two violations, the mark of gender and the unlivability of its absence. Could I say which one was worse? Or could I only say which one I felt could best be survived?"

[freya · Rating 5 out of 5]

i really like the way she chose to document this. the description of the space and how she inhabits it. her clothes and the words they say. i think i'm sometimes wary of people who are so direct with their symbols. i don't like pins bc they feel like explanation. but i understand why people want that. especially at the time it was written and i'm glad for the way she described it.

It is good to hear about her new family and how beautiful and misunderstood it is. how painful it is to be a part of. i'm glad i get to hear this one part of her life. the things we think about to get ourselves sick. i read g the part about the baby, her partner's baby. they said it's really such an event. "it's a girl". that's the first time you gender the child's body. "it's a girl she's so beautiful." if your lucky that's the last time you're an it. that statement is so powerful it forever changes how you're refereed to. what you are. what you get to be.

i want to be angry. i think about it a lot. about being incomprehensible to the people who inhabit rooms with me. the sense of ownership people who are supposed to care about me instead feel over my body. i want to be angry about it.

this is really beautifully written. i think we all feel the objectness. it's so obvious even in the way some people are talking under this. "individual". gross. i like the word transsexual. mostly because of the reaction it elicits. it describes pretty neatly i think, the disgust people project onto you. whether the body is yours yet or not.

[Kassian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful piece that combines embodiment, queer theory, and owning ones rage. I absolutetly recommend this piece with the warning that it can be very dysphoria triggering and some of the language (transsexual) is largely considered archaic today.

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

• Textual adaptation of performance piece—perform self-consciously a queer gender. I wanted the formal structure of the work to express a transgender aesthetic by replicating our abrupt, often jarring transitions between genders
• Performance entailed genderfuck drag
• The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.
• I am not the first to link Frankenstein’s monster anti the transsexual body . Mary Daly makes the connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon,” in which she characterizes transsexuals as the agents of a “necrophilic invasion’’ of femalespace (69-72).
o echoes Victor’s feelings towards the monster
• Frankenstein’s monster as his own dark, romantic double, the alien Other he constructs and upon which he projects all he cannot accept in himself (“my own vampire”
• Lesbian and gay representations of transsexuality keeps this attribution of monstrosity palpable
• When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I find no more reason to mourn my opposition to them-or to the order they claim to represent than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity to the human race. I do not fall from the grace of their company-I roar gleefully away from it like a Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell.
• I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself.
• words like ‘c re at u re, ” ‘ ‘ mo n s t e r , ” a nci ‘ ‘ u n n a t u r a I” need to be reclaimed by the transgendered.
• Ecotheology: The affront you humans take at being called a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called “it,” being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being
• Brooks’ definition of Monster: whatever else a monster might be, it “may also be that which eludes gender definition”
• He understands Frankenstein to unfold textually through a narrative strategy generated by tension between a visually oriented epistemology, on the one hand, and another approach to knowing the truth of bodies that privileges verbal linguisticality , on the other. Knowing by seeing and knowing by speaking/ hearing are gendered, respectively, as masculine and feminine
• The monster problematizes gender partly through its failure as a viable subject in the visual field; though referred to as “he,” it thus offers a feminine, and potentially feminist, resistance to definition by a phallicized scopophilia. The monster accomplishes this resistance by mastering language in order to claim a position as a speaking subject and enact verbally the very subjectivity denied it in the specular realm.
• Transsexual monstrosity, however, along with its affect, transgender rage, can never claim quite so secure a means of resistance because of the inability of language to represent the transgendered subject’s movement over time between stably gendered positions in a linguistic structure. Our situation effectively reverses the one encountered by Frankenstein’s monster. Unlike the monster, we often successfully cite the culture’s visual norms of gendered embodiment. This citation becomes a subversive resistance when, through a provisional use of language, we verbally declare the unnaturalness of our claim to the subject positions we nevertheless occupy
• JOURNAL ENTRY of their child’s birth
• The shape of my flesh was a barrier that estranged me from my desire. Like a body without a mouth
• POEM
• THEORY
• A formal disjunction seems particulary appropriate at this moment because the affect I seek to examine critically, what I’ve termed “transgender rage,” emerges from the interstices of discursive practices and at the collapse of generic categories.
• Within this dynamic field the subject must constantly police the boundary constructed by its own founding in order to maintain the fictions of “inside” and “outside” against a regime of signification/materialization whose intrinsic instability produces the rupture of subjective boundaries as one of its regular features.
• The affect of rage as I seek to define it is located at the margin of subjectivity and the limit of signification.
• It originates in recognition of the fact that the “outsideness’ of a materiality that perpetually violates the foreclosure of subjective space within a symbolic order is also necessarily “inside” the subject as grounds for the materialization of its body and the formation of its bodily ego.
• This primary rage becomes specifically transgender rage when the inability to foreclose the subject occurs through a failure to satisfy norms of gendered embodiment.
• Transgender rage is the subjective experience of being compelled to transgress what Judith Butler has referred to as the highly gendered regulatory schemata that determine the viability of bodies, of being compelled to enter a “domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation” that in its unlivability encompasses and constitutes the realm of legitimate subjectivity
• However, by mobilizing gendered identities and rendering them provisional, open to strategic development and occupation, this rage enables the establishment of subjects in new modes, regulated by different codes of intelligibility. Transgender rage furnishes a means for disidentification with compulsorily assigned subject positions. It makes the transition from one gendered subject position to another possible by using the impossibility of complete subjective foreclosure to organize an outside force as an inside drive, and vice versa.
• Rage during daughter’s birth is from non-consensuality of baby’s gendering. Authority seizes upon specific material qualities of the flesh, particularly the genitals, as outward indication of future reproductive potential, constructs this flesh as a sign, and reads it to enculturate the body
• How can finding one’s self prostrate and powerless in the presence of the Law of the Father not produce an unutterable rage‘!
• I defy that Law in my refusal to abide by its original decree of my gender. Though I cannot escape its power, I can move through its medium. Perhaps if I move furiously enough, I can deform it in my passing to leave a trace of my rage.
• To encounter the transsexual body , to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of the natural order.
• Confronting the implications of this constructedness can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My transsexual body literalizes this abstract violence.
• By speaking as a monster in my personal voice, by using the dark, watery images of Romanticism and lapsing occasionally into its brooding cadences arid grandiose postures, I employ the same literary techniques Mary Shelley used to elicit sympathy for her scientist’s creation. Like that creature, I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life worth living.

[Josie Rushin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non-fiction essay. Another recommendation from TikTok. As the title suggests, it focuses on the experience of a transgender individual. I particularly enjoyed the constant changing of style from poetry to storytelling to monologue, as it kept me, the reader, alert and unsure what to expect next. As I previously studied Frankenstein at A-Level, I was curious to see the relationship the author establishes between Frankenstein’s monster and the view some of society have towards trans people. It was certainly a challenging read, in terms of the content being upsetting, but the language itself made it accessible and easy to understand. I haven’t read much in terms of trans literature before, aside from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, where the trans person isn’t the focus of the narrative, but the relationship with the protagonist/author, and this text felt like a good start, due to its length and its style.

[Mileee♪]

"Gender attribution is compulsory; it codes and deploys our bodies in ways that materially affect us, yet we choose neither our marks nor the meanings they carry.” My Words to Victor Frankestein, Susan Stryker.
El género es realmente una idea tan abstracta que, al menos para mí, es complicada de comprender, y aún así define tanto para el ser humano.
Es realmente atractivo escuchar/leer experiencias de personas que desafían y cuestionan estás etiquetas. Me encanta como Stryker describe su experiencia: el renacimiento y la re-construcción de si misma luego de su transición, y la comparación que realiza con el monstruo de la novela Frankestein, de Mary Shelley. Tanto el monstruo como ella tienen la oportunidad (o más bien como única opción) crearse a si mismos, construir su propia identidad a través de sus experiencias, y explicarse mediante sus propias definiciones y conceptos. Siento que es un viaje muy significativo que la gente cis género no se atreve a emprender y nunca llega a experimentar porque siempre nos han señalado lo que debemos ser.
En fin, este ensayo fue muy interesante de leer!

[Seth · Rating 1 out of 5]

The following work is a textual adaptation of a performance piece...

I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panelists’ table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the right side lacings, and Queer Nation-style stickers reading SEX CHANGE, DYKE, and FUCK YOUR TRANSPHOBIA plastered on the back.

The affront you humans take at being called a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called “it,” being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood.

"Stop oppressing me!" I scream, as I proudly display the violently removed hide of a member of a class that I am oppressing, and then come very close to calling myself out on it with zero self-awareness.

After that, the rest of the essay would have to be pretty fucking amazing for me to award it even two stars, and it was not.

[Karolina Bojdoł · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In the body I was born with, I had been invisible as the person I considered myself to be; I had been invisible as a queer while the form of my body made my desires look straight. Now, as a dyke I am invisible among women; as a transsexual, I am invisible among dykes. As the partner of a new mother, I am often invisible as a transsexual, a woman, and a lesbian. I’ve lost track of the friends and acquaintances these past nine months who’ve asked me if I was the father. It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t get what I’m doing with my body. The high price of whatever visible, intelligible, self-representation I have achieved makes the continuing experience of invisibility maddeningly difficult to bear.”

[m. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie."

um trabalho lindo sobre transgeneridade lésbica e como a autora relaciona sua vivência com Frankenstein. achei lindo como ela escreve sobre o próprio corpo e a própria existência principalmente, como o mero fato de ela possuir um corpo causa tanto desconforto nos outros. eu não sou uma mulher trans, mas entendo essa sensação de alteridade não importa onde você vá, como uma mulher lésbica. eu também amei como ela se compara com a criatura, mas não em um sentido autodepreciativo, como a sociedade quer. em vez disso, ela transforma essa realidade em identidade. é bem bonito não pedir por compreensão e apenas ser.

[Molly Cooper Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

“You are as constructed as me.”

“I’m so tired of this ceaseless movement. I do war with nature. I am alienated from Being.”

“I cannot be, and yet—an excruciating impossibility—I am.”

“Bodies are rendered meaningful only through some culturally and historically specific mode of grasping their physicality that transforms the flesh into a useful artifact. Gendering is the initial step in this transformation, inseparable from the process of forming an identity by means of which we’re fitted to a system of exchange in a heterosexual economy.”

“Phallogocentric language…is the scalpel that defines our flesh.”

[Aster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent essay pondering about monstrosity, queerness and what connects the two. I have a big fascination with horror stories, and this is a big reason why. After all, what we fear tell us much about ourselves and our culture, and the Other, the Transgressive, is often feared and, thus, turned into a monster. I don't feel like I understood everything, mostly because I'd need to study more, but this had a lot of great insights. Also, it's fitting that I read this in the waiting room for my doctor appointment to start HRT :)

[ori (: · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a beautifully written essay. The writing style, if you could even call it that, was definitely all over the place. I didn't find this to be upsetting, though. I thought that the inconsistency of the essay created beautiful imagery and felt like a metaphor for exactly what Susan Stryker was describing themself and other transsexual individuals as. I also felt as though the writing style conveyed the whole idea of transgenderism and transgender rage that the author was describing - a lack of order and traditional customs.

[Ngan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is making me so emotional and changed at 3am in the morning. Ive had the blessing of my life to meet and talk and facilitate an event with susan stryker and she was just the most lovely humble and considerate person you could ever meet. I didn’t read all of this book, only this chapter of it on performing transgendered rage, and i cant stop highlighting every line. Her words flow like water, with emotions and intellectual ideas that stir waves inside you. Im going to reread this piece so many times.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

kinda can't find the words — just deeply awed & respectful. this piece is powerful in the way that you become intensely aware of your heart beating. "monologue" particularly took me out. wish i had seen stryker's performance. horror is queer; transness is the ultimate queerness. learned a piece more of my queer history in the time period understanding of "transsexual" (which today we define as just the outdated term) v.s. "transgender."

[Sarah Fogel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just read this for probably the fourth time, and I get more out of it every single time. This shit reads like it could have been published today, but no, 1994! I will admit that I dug into this today as a thesis detour, but I'm realizing that this piece actually charts a really useful course for how to write both against an anti-trans politics from the right and the normalizing impulses of the libs -- we ARE at war against Nature! We ARE monstrous! Behold!

[Owin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely incredible piece of work that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for years. Invaluable as a scholarly resource for Queer Theory and Gothic Studies, powerful as a personal essay on the trans experience, and timeless in its use of language and prose. I am genuinely either speechless trying to describe it briefly, or way too verbose in trying to pick at all it does and seeks to do in a full essay. I recommend it to almost anyone that will listen to me yap about it.

[Nathan Ethridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

While some of the language, terminology, and concepts are dated (this was ~30ish years ago from when I'm writing this), the core ideas at the center of this essay are what's important. While I don't consider myself to be binary, this still deeply resonated with me, even if part of it is played up for effect, as Stryker states in the essay. It finds an interesting place I didn't know existed somewhere between performance piece and critical theory.

[AJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I might as well quit all academic pursuits now cause I could NEVER come close to writing an essay this good. Wow. I truly have no words.

“May you discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it nourish your rage. May your rage inform your actions, and your actions transform you as you struggle to transform your world.”

Like are you fvcking joking?????????

[ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this essay and will likely come back to it later... there's a lot to say but I found this particular passage (and the poem after it) really striking: "I break the plane of the water's surface over and over and over again. This water annihilates me. I cannot be, and yet - an excruciating impossibility - I am. I will do anything not to be here".

[Saffron · Rating 4 out of 5]

my dissertation supervisor recommended this to me as secondary research for my work, and so I'm very glad I was able to experience it. raises themes I've been considering for years when writing about frankenstein, and should probably be a staple for queer readings of horror

[sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

ummmmm this is empowering af???? i cried like 3 times

[Séamus Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, galvanizing. Made me cry at my kitchen table

[cacio e petal · Rating 4 out of 5]

iconic, based as fuck.

[Ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck