Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_3656
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
viii, 270 p. : ill.
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = vita)
Includes vita
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by T. Benjamin Singer
Abstract (type = abstract)
This dissertation offers a corrective to limited interpretations of the category transgender across literary and medical discourses, as well as visual culture and new media. Most often, the term transgender is used as a stable category of personhood, or, alternately, as an umbrella term that encompasses all sex and gender variance. Such
usage results in reductive models in medical and educational contexts, as well as closed narrative structures in literary and popular cultural depictions of trans-subjectivity and embodiment. By contrast, I understand “transgender” as a proliferative matrix that
produces representations of rapidly shifting embodiments and identities that exceed sex/gender categorization. I theorize the effect of proliferation as the “transgender sublime” to account for encounters with representational excess—whether in public
health settings or popular culture—that can overwhelm perception and unsettle familiar ways of knowing. Insofar as it demands an interpretive practice based on “shimmering” mobility, this phenomenon harbors a transformative potential: a politics of transgender sublimity promotes categorical excess as a means to enable new modes of subjectivity. In the first chapter, I critique a widespread educational model called the
“transgender umbrella.” I identify the manner by which it represents, in visual form, the taxonomic excess that conditions transgender sublimity. The second chapter is an ethnographic study of a trans-specific harm reduction program that negotiates binarygendered
HIV-prevention strategies in public health worlds. I argue that by recoding binary-gendered institutional practices, such programs re-contour social imaginaries
through mobilization of categorical and representational excess. Chapter Three analyzes trans man Thomas Beatie’s online autobiographical account of his pregnancy that is accompanied by a photograph of his pregnant body. I argue that visualizing “the pregnant
man” occasions an incitement to discourse about how the sight of a pregnant man renders viewers speechless: speechlessness being symptomatic of a representational limit that signals the transgender sublime. The final chapter critiques the “wrong body” trope found in psychological and medical literature, as well as in transsexual autobiographies that follow the Bildungsroman structure. I compare this with My Right Self, an online photonarrative project that uses the excesses of transgender sublimity to imagine and represent alternate wor(l)ds.
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.