The Promise of the Trans* Body: Twisted Liminalities of Gender in Transparent

Writing the Body, Writing the Flesh

Within the history of French feminist thought, Cixous’s work straddles the line between earlier feminist projects focused on voice, reflexivity, lived experience, and emotion, and the post-structuralist strands of the field (Alphonso, 2000). She does so by focusing on the body as a site of language construction or performance. The body—the lived experience contains symbolic and performative syntax that confronts both the patriarchal rational subject of the Enlightenment and the reflexivity of the phenomenology—typified in notion of voice in earlier feminist thought (Alphonso, 2000). The body is a site of ongoing performative construction that is both situational and political. It belies psychological totalizing narratives perpetuated by Freud and Lacan, and instead fosters a sense of women sans patriarchal impositions (Alphonso, 2000). Cixous’s work has received very little attention from feminist scholars in qualitative inquiry. We believe, however, that her ideas complement Stone’s critiques of feminist studies, specifically as it relates to the patriarchal gaze and the need for women to write themselves or to tell their stories in their own ways.

Cixous’s writing on language made flesh seeks to contest feminist approaches that employ more of a sociocultural approach. The problem with this approach, Cixous argues, is the over-reliance on the construction of gender and the under-theoretical understanding of the relationship between the exchange of signs between the body and texts. Sociocultural approaches assume that the body is imprinted on, rather than the body having a say, possessing a language or knowledge on its own, or as a participant in the construction process. The body as text writes along with social and linguistic signs. The body and the flesh play important roles in the scripting and inscription of the body and verbal performances. Rather than living in the abstract of language, Cixous reminds us that the body and flesh produce meaning; they play with signs and generate language on their own. As Pamela Banting (1992) explains,

Cixous’s recourse to the body is not a return to a natural, speechless or prelinguistic body but rather to a signifying body continually networking with its own flesh and the surfaces and particularities of the world. She claims that women’s self-censorship, their silently holding their tongues, has either killed them or led them to be more familiar with their tongues and their mouths than anyone else. (p. 229)

Thus, the relationship between the body and flesh represents an in-between “networking” with the “particularities of the world.” The liminality of women’s bodies and the self-censorship of their tongues place them in familiar places with the compositions of the body. Women present themselves as text as flesh, and it is within dynamic relationships, their movement throughout the world, and in various places, that the body speaks, that the head of the Medusa laughs, and translation occurs. As Pamela Banting contends,

In translation, of course, the transfer of meaning is never totally efficient. Signification escapes, meaning leaches away, and extraneous meaning seeps in during the transfer between source language/source text and target language/target text. While such leakages signal the so-called “failure” of traditional inter-lingual translation, they also function as fissures in constituted meaning, faults and crevices in which previously repressed heterogeneity and difference may appear. (p. 230)

Language per se as interlingual translation in this revelatory moment collapses; it is only in the embodiment of herself as woman does the body as text reveals itself. Meaning in this instance “leeches away” and only becomes embodied as a transfer from the “source” and the “target.” It is within those crevices that gender and sexuality acquire their liminal spaces.

Cixous argues that privileging the body presents a revolutionary agonism of multiplicity against the dominant rhetoric of the masculine hierarchy and sanctioning of the body. “The Laugh of the Medusa” (Cixous et al., 1976) demonstrates how feminine language of the body provides space for liminality, for change, for possibilities rather than prohibition and categorization. The metaphor of the Medusa typifies the multiple ways in which the feminine enters language through the various desires and multiplicitous expressions uninhibited by linguistic, historical, sexual, or epistemological constructs.

Cixous implores women to “write” themselves. She means for women to literally write as well as use one’s body to compose or fashion oneself without the all-seeing phallus or without the excoriation of the Freudian lack. Women is, for Cixous, a world of searching for knowledge, a “systematic experimentation,” and, perhaps most importantly, “a passionate and precise interrogation of her heterogeneity” (p. 876). This exploration of the heterogeneity continues without patriarchal hands.

In Cixous’s (2000) essay, “Castration or Decapitation,” she wonders about what it means for theory to think about women absent the male gaze. She argues that woman is always related in comparison with the man/male. Such binaries order the gendered world according to hierarchical coupling that always places the woman in a subordinate position. She explains,

In fact, every theory of culture, every theory of society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems—everything, that is, that’s spoken, everything that’s organized as discourse, art, religion, the family, language, everything that seizes us, everything that acts on us—it is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition, an opposition that can only be sustained by means of a difference posed by cultural discourse as “natural,” the difference between activity and passivity. It always works this way, and the opposition is founded in the couple. A couple posed in opposition, in tension, in conflict . . . a couple engaged in a kind of war in which death is always at work. (p. 279)

According to Cixous, women stand in opposition to man in a continual battle of difference. The man/woman couple begins as a symbolic organization based on conflict, as a “kind of war,” or as a death match between oppositions. At issue for Cixous is not simply the body, although it is important for her, but language. From birth, Cixous argues, language premeditates conflict and opposition. Women, she explains, begin in opposition through the prescribed language allowed or permitted for them to use. Furthermore, she posits that women “are already caught up in masculine interrogation” (p. 279). Language itself persists and disseminates as difference, and standing in opposition to the masculine and being interrogated by it, women become “constituted in a movement in which one of the terms of the couple is destroyed in favor of the other” (p. 279). Thus, for Cixous, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan which position women in terms of castration complex (Freud) and masculinity in terms of the phallus as the ultimate transcendental signifier (Lacan) present women in the untenable position as the unruly, mysterious seducer in need of order, structure, and a master. The women is always already in debt to the man and relies on him for direction through submission. As Cixous states,

So in the end women, in man’s desire, stands in the place of not knowing, the place of mystery. In this sense she is no good, but at the same time she is good because it’s this mystery that leads man to keep overcoming, dominating, subduing, putting his manhood to the test, against the mystery he has to keep forcing back. (p. 283)

Women’s mysterious ways drive the man to try to control her. He is both intrigued and frightened of her powers, which leads to his concern from castration. He both is mesmerized by her mysterious disposition and tries to manage and control it. The woman, Cixous protests, apparently both demands order and relies on the man to control her. But, Cixous wonders, could this framing of the relationship between this contentious couple be otherwise? Is there a way to look at the women without the castration complex of the man, or without the domineering gaze of the transcendental phallus? Of course, language plays its part in answering these questions.

To begin, Cixous claims that women need to give up the death match so necessary for the masculine economy. The zero-sum game of the masculine economy has to be resisted and replaced with an affirmation of “their (women) difference . . . to the point of strangeness” (p. 285). Moreover, women can begin to produce knowledge without the hovering glances of the ancestral “fathers” (p. 285). As Cixous explains,

We have to get rid of and also explain what all knowledge brings with it as its burden of power: to show that all thinking until now has been ruled by this dividend of power: show that all thinking until now has been ruled by this dividend, this surplus value of power that comes back to him who knows. (p. 285)

Furthermore, women can begin to speak of her pleasures and to “de-phallocentralize the body” (p. 285). She shifts the focus from the phallus to a libidinal economy that appears “shifting, diffused, taking on all the others to oneself” (p. 285). A feminine libidinal economy is diffuse, endless, unending, and indeed mysterious. “The feminine text,” Cixous explains, “starts on all sides at once, starts twenty times, thirty times, over” (p. 287). Writing the text from a feminine libidinal perspective asks, “What does this writing give?” It is a text that remains generative, from one body to the next, from one desire to the next. It defamiliarizes common structures and hierarchies, such as family, and persists outside structures of patriarchal power. A feminine text takes the “metaphorical form of wandering, excess, risk of the unreckonable” (pp. 287-288). It is unpredictable and ineffable and therefore can be “very disturbing” (p. 288). The feminine text is visceral and tactile, it touches the body, it is an “outpouring” (p. 288). As Cixous explains,

So, the movement, the movement of the text, doesn’t trace a straight line. I see it as an outpouring, which can appear in primitive or elementary texts as a fantasy of blood, of menstrual flow, etc., but which I prefer to see as vomiting, as “throwing up,” “disgorging.” And I’d link this with a basic structure of property relations defined by mourning. (p. 288)

Mourning in this instance refers to the masculine’s need to confront loss as a continual process due to his concern for accumulation and fear of castration, or lack. The feminine, according to Cixous, accepts loss as a part of life. Furthermore, Cixous writes, “She does not hold onto loss, she loses without holding onto loss” (p. 288). The feminine releases, detaches, and accepts loss as a part of giving, while the masculine tries to make sense of and tries to incorporate loss, to “recover the investment made in the lost object” (p. 288), which is why the masculine remains in a continual state of mourning.

Living without a sense of mourning, without having to continually incorporate loss or live with the threat of loss, provides women with the necessary modus to write. To write is to construct, to position oneself, but, more importantly, for Cixous is to “flow,” to search, and to experiment. The practice of women writing is “extraordinary rich and inventive” and is “prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden” (Cixous et al., 1976, p. 876). The practice of women writing belies canonical, historical forms but thrives in multiplicities and is less about capturing and corralling language and cementing symbolic systems, and more about the overflow of words, art, and beauty. The text and the body work synergistically to write women and produce womanly texts. Women writing is rupturing old, patriarchal systems with inscriptions of new syntax. It is a writing that is of/and with the body. The body itself becomes the site of a fresh aesthetic. As Cixous states,

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word “silence,” the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word “impossible” and writes it as “the end.” (p. 886)

In the next section of this article, we want to put Cixous feminist ideas about the body and text to work in relation to the trans*. We utilize Cixous’s notion of wanderings to think about the ways in which the body becomes flesh in Maura. We organize this section based on Cixous arguments against two main male-oriented theories of gender, primarily the works of Freud and Lacan. Thus, the sections below are organized as wanderings away from patriarchy and wanderings away from the castration complex. We conclude with comments about liminality of trans* with Cixous feminist theory.

Wanderings Away From Patriarchy

When Mort Pfefferman invited his three adult children to dinner, he wanted to disclose to them a lifelong secret. As the children arrive, he meets them at the door and affectionally adores them. He garners a smile and the gleam in his eye reflects the impending freedom he knows he will feel after telling them the secret that has hovered like a cloud over his life. This secret will also help explain so much of the children’s past and how Mort and Shelley (his ex-wife and the children’s mother) raised them. As they sit down to dinner, the children engage in a flurry of speculation about Mort’s secret and there is a great deal of discussion about a possible cancer diagnosis. Mort attempts to begin his secret by stating, “Listen, I have, I, I need to talk to you about something. There’s a big change going on, and oh, God, I love you kids. I love you kids.” Mort begins to cry as he continues, “I love you kids. I love you kids. I love you kids.”

At this point, Ally interrupts him and exclaims, “It’s cancer!” Sarah and Josh follow in fast secession, practically talking on top of one another “Oh, my God,” “Daddy, are you dying? Just tell us if you’re dying,” “You were right,” “I knew it was cancer,” “Daddy, are you dying? I don’t think he has cancer,” “Just tell us if you’re dying,” “Dad, just tell us if you have cancer,” “Dad, you look good,” “He looks good.”

While the children’s over-talking escalates, the viewer sees Mort become more and more frustrated as his children do not allow him to get a word in edgewise. Finally, in a moment of frustration and anger, Mort slams his fist on the table and yells in a deep and enraged voice, “God! Stop it. God, I don’t have cancer. Do you kids want me to have cancer?”

This assertive moment, Mort slamming his fist on the table aimed to silence his children, to bring order to chaos, to add stability to the unsettling scene, represents the last patriarchal moment in the show. It is Mort’s strong forceful attempt to insert brutal reality into erratic speculation. Then, after a pause, and in a despondent, low voice, he declares, “I’m selling the house. I’m done with the house.” Mort’s claim that he is going to sell the family home is a lie or only partially true. What he really wanted to tell them was that he is transgender and is going to take steps to live his life in an authentic way—as a woman which she has wanted her whole life. She is going to write her body in a new way. What is important here is that Mort, sitting at the head of the table, reflects a commentary on patriarchy as a lie, or as only half-truth. It is a lie in its inevitability, in its authority, and in its certainty. All patriarchs harbor the fear of the lie and remain insecure about the potential lack of something. In a brilliant deconstructive moment, the lie that Mort hides from his children is the understanding that his patriarchy is driven by the feminine, which strives to create community, plurality, and experimentation. It is the desire to shed the façade of the patriarch and exhibit the authentic woman and the outpouring of the feminine in her that drives Maura throughout the show.

But in this scene, Mort on some levels realizes that verbalizing his desire to transition is inadequate. Putting language to desire proves to be insufficient because transitioning is also an embodied experience. Verbal declaration places the experience in the abstract, rather than in the body. The text must merge with the flesh. Mort has to link language, text, and flesh. What this means is language itself coordinates with the body as a text that emerges through the intricacies of the flesh. Liminality operates in between these three blurred spaces. Mort’s transition between male and female represents the liminality of gender. This point does not mean that being transgender is a liminal space. We do not know and cannot make such a claim, but gender itself, at least in the show Transparent, exposes the patriarchy as a lie despite its bombastic assertion, and explores liminality as a productive force of language and the body as flesh.

Maura understood this place. For all of her life, she spoke the language of the father with the self-censored “mother’s tongue.” As Cixous implores women to “write yourself. Your body must be heard” (p. 250), and it is within this space, this desire to be heard that Maura emerges as a trans* woman. The rest of the show consists of her attempts to live within the liminality of translation as she makes text flesh. No more is this point more evident than in the beginning of the second episode. Prior to disclosing her gender identity to her children, Maura returns home from attending her trans-support-group and walks in on Sarah, her oldest daughter, kissing her former college lover, Tammy. In a state of confusion, Maura sits Sarah on the bed and says, “Since I was five, I felt that something was not quite right, and I couldn’t tell anybody about it, my family. It was a different time, I had to keep all of those feelings to myself.” After protesting to say her speech, Sarah interrupts Maura and asks, “Are you saying that you’re going to start dressing up like a lady all the time?” to which Maura replies, “No, honey, all my life, my whole life I’ve been dressing up like a man. This is me.” It is the space of liminalities that fosters and nurtures continual becomingness to gender, sexuality, and being transgender.

The translation of Maura’s speech illustrates how her body becomes over-determined with meaning. It is only through transitioning to a woman that she gets to write her body in such a way that aligns with herself. Bodily production places in relief the certainty and absolutism within the patriarchal construction and gender. Maura’s translation of herself from logos to haptic generates the “faults and crevices in which previously repressed heterogeneity and difference may appear” (Banting, 1992, p. 230). It is against the contours of phallocentrism that Maura’s flesh reverses the dominances of text as transcendental, as representation, and as organized by the demands of the phallus. Her body, her flesh becomes the texts that crack open the limits of the potential of gender and sexuality; when the flesh becomes a text, when the sensuality of the body generates a collection of inter-textuality, gender and sexuality cease being binary or absolute. We see the changing aspects of gender and sexuality, where the liminality of body and flesh of Cixous’s theory take place in the rest of the show.

Wanderings Away From Castration Complex

In Transparent, the women in the show exhibit multiple ways gender and sexuality can be performed. In fact, they change not along a linear progression but based on desire or for potentially several different reasons. Sarah, the oldest daughter, leaves her husband and “perfect” life for her former college lover, Tammy. Ally, the middle child, is gender-fluid, and Josh, the only boy, realizes at some point that he was raised by all women or, in Cixousian terms, raised in the feminine.

In Episode 6 of Season 1, Len, the man from whom Sarah recently separated, arrives at Maura’s house to find Maura, Tammy, Tammy’s daughter, and Sarah all having Shabbat dinner. Len arrives to pick up his children, but as the conversation starts, Len becomes upset that the children were introduced to Maura before he and Sarah had a chance to discuss it. He says,

Uh, I’m about to get into a car with two small children, and I would like to know, uh, what do they know about this? I just want to get the terminology straight. Are we talking about grandpa Mort? Grandma Mort? What is it exactly? Because we had said that we wouldn’t do this, uh, until we had talked to the kids.

Sarah responds, “Well, Tammy and I did talk to the kids.”

Len who is becoming noticeably upset says, “Oh, Tammy and you talked to the kids? You and Tammy? I’m sure that confused them even more.”

To this, Tammy responds, “Believe me, we did not talk about anything beyond their own understanding, okay?”

As Len nears the peak of his frustration, he declares, “Beyond their understanding? Tammy, I don’t understand this.”

At this point, Sarah remarks that Len is using an unpleasant tone of voice. In exasperation and frustration, Len exclaims, “It’s my tone? That’s what it is? This is all great. But it’s my tone? It’s the register of my vocal cords. That’s what’s confusing to everyone. ’Cause I can change my tone.” He continues in a falsetto. “I can talk like this. Talk like a lady. Okay, would you ladies be more comfortable if you all lived on an all-female planet? Maybe you could sail off in a uterus-shaped spaceship.” He snatches the carving knife from table. “Maybe I can cut my dick off. I could be a girl too.”

Tammy stands and tells Len to put the knife down. Maura stands at her seat at the head of the table, slams her hand on the table, and shouts, “This is my family.” Then, more quietly, she apologizes,

Leonard, I am so sorry. This is my fault. I should have called you. Honey, I should have taken you out to lunch, and we should have talked. But I didn’t do that. And I’m sorry about the Mort and the Maura and the he and the she.

Finally, Maura implores Len to recognize Maura’s humanness, while also pointing out to Len that the social changes being enacted require Len to change how he is interacting with those around him. “I’m just a person, and you’re just a person, and here we are. And, baby, you need to get in this whirlpool or you need to get out of it.”

The feminine, the liminality, the flesh to text is akin to a whirlpool. It is the circular motion of the whirlpool that signifies the transition from the hetero-patriarchal world of the dominant, all-knowing father, to the collective engagement of the women, by the women, and for the women. The world of Transparent defies the “hierarchical” ordering among genders. It is difference in a new and different way not grounded of the male/female warring couple, but in the self-fashioning, the bodily composing, the writing and rewriting of one’s gender. Gender in this instance gets a chance to move around, to experiment, to invent, and to be in-the-making. What is at stake for Cixous is also what is at stake for Maura. The mystery of the translation process, the wandering around and the self-creation, or self-writing that continues throughout the show reveals the importance of the liminal spaces she embodies. It is not a liminality as in stages or as in rituals, but one where the transfer of meaning remains purposefully inefficient and ambiguous—and remains in the body, as flesh in an ever-constant self-fashioning endeavor. It seems that Maura seeks to shed herself of the patriarchal gaze and assume new “leakages” and “fissures” of the body. She tries, in short, to compose or write herself within those leakages and fissures. It is her attempt to exceed the “interlingual” failures that provide the drama of the show and exemplify the liminal spaces of gender not just for Maura, although that certainly is the case, but also for everyone in her family. Len, for his part, represents the hetero-patriarchal gaze but gets in line and becomes a supporting member of the family. The show invites its audience to wonder about and consider a world that does not take the phallus as the transcendental signifier. Cixous questions what women would be like without Freud’s castration complex as lack and without the phallocentric world of Lacan. Transparent teaches the viewer that liminalities of gender operate as a continual flow, or to stay another way, like a whirlpool. Liminalities of gender remains an in-between space where the is no inherent domination of one sex over another, but one where the patriarchal masculine economy is forgotten, and the feminine economy takes hold. It is a space where loss and release continue life and bodily experimentation and invention generate possibilities.

Conclusion

As scholars in the field of gender and sexuality in education are quick to point to the fluidity of gender expression and sexuality, Cixous and Maura show us what it means onto-epistemologically to be in the liminal fluidity. The body is not simply an unknowable space where desires and pleasures change on a whim but is an important text that endures both writing and reading difference, and gender and sexuality, then, rely on (il)legibility. Language moves in multiplicity and as an arbitrary collection of difference that defies hierarchical order. Instead, it operates as a wandering through/with the body to write itself. Wandering as a method of translation produces leakages of meaning and interlingual expression.

Writing the text and writing the body cultivate possibilities for change—for non-linear expressions. Maura’s story shows the viewer that the liminality of gender involves a commitment to getting into the whirlpool—twisting, turning, shifting, expressing, revising, multiple, mysterious leaky texts that continually get recreated. Likewise, she reminds viewers of gender’s experimental force. It is a collection of deeply layered texts as gifts that coincide with loss and life and without the pain and suffering of continual mourning. Thus, Maura’s story acts as a liminal performance, which restores the importance of personal narratives of gender non-conforming individuals and offers a sense of writing one’s own body as a text. Trans* as liminality functions, then, as more of a promise and less as a threat.