Queer Postphenomenology

The gender binary, intersubjectivity, and control

Disclaimer: I'm speaking directly from my lived experience as a (mostly) closeted transfeminine person. What I'm saying will likely not apply to everyone and can at times have a negative or pessimistic outlook/description of queerness. With that in mind, please read at your own discretion. CW: internalized transphobia, depersonalization

"my hands aren't my hands, and my voice isn't my voice. I can't say anything real, can't hold or touch anything real. I don't have a body... how can I exist?" (Daisy's Apocalypse Journal, 5/27/23)

The above quote is an excerpt from my diary on a night that I lived out repeatedly over the past year. On dysphoria ridden evenings I would write every disparaging thought about my closeted queer existence while staring at my hands and feeling invariably separated from the shared human experience. There were years of my life where I didn't look in the mirror, and I would write about struggling to feel the connection between my mind and my body. Later in this journal entry I proposed that deep conversation with close friends is a way to truly feel alive, but that being trans had stopped me from ever having a meaningful connection with even the people closest to me (with maybe a couple exceptions). There had to be something else to life, and I had only ever scratched the surface of feeling alive during fleeting moments of intimate connection with a handful of people when pent-up queerness bubbled up into emotion too visceral to hold back. I knew my life was lacking, but I had no framework to better understand just how and why, or what could be done to reconcile the disparity between my mind and the world around me.

Enter phenomenology. I was first introduced to the mode of thinking in a class I took on the politics of the body during my first year of college. Our professor assigned us the book Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives by Lisa Guenther, which (among other things) looks at the lives of prisoners who have endured extended periods of solitary confinement through a phenomenological lens. Guenther argues that solitary confinement threatens prisoners' basic sense of identity by depriving them of their necessary bonds with other people; what Guenther calls their "constitutive relationality".

I read this text a few days after I wrote my initial journal entry, and for the first time in a long while felt like I had the tools to understand myself. Now, I'll be the first to admit that the concepts and ideas that I've latched onto aren't the main focus of traditional phenomenologists' research, but seeing as this field relates to reality being a subjective experience that changes based on time, space, and subjectivity, I think I'm in the clear to appropriate some terminology. The addition of the prefix "post" is a commentary on this divergence from both classical and contemporary phenomenology, and also because postphenomenology tends to better align with the way that I posit technology interacts with one's relationship with the world around them. And ultimately I don't particularly care for being perfectly accurate when it comes to the specific language with which I define my personhood, queerness, and lived experience. At the end of the day, I'm just trying to understand my own experience within one possible framework that I've resonated with.

In My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix Susan Stryker posits that being gendered is the first act of violence that defines subjectivity, stating that "having a gender identity is a tribal tattoo that makes one's personhood cognizable" (Stryker, 1994). I would like to build on this using Guenther's observations on the degradation of prisoner's intersubjectivity when forced outside of the social realm. The gender binary performs violence through the use of biotechnology and socio-cultural dogma that weaponizes the constitutive relationality of gender deviant people against themselves until they are rendered powerless.

I was not abused as a child. I lived without an overly strict worldview bearing down on me. I talked openly with my parents when I decided I no longer ascribed to the faith system that I was brought up into, and received no ill will or pushback from them. Why, then, can't I seem to open the doors of this damned closet and stop neglecting myself? I've said that every conversation I'm in feels like it can only go so far; that my intersubjectivity is hinged only partially. Gilles Deleuze's essay Postscript on the Societies of Control shows how ideas become so ingrained in institutions that no one questions them because they are beyond question. The gender binary is an example of something that can become so attached to medicine, social life, politics, that it ceases to be under consideration. It has infiltrated the minds of trans people. My brain has a gun aimed directly at itself. Every word out of my mouth, every movement I make is to send a message of compliance. The world never had to outwardly abuse me, all it had to do was exist in accordance with the gender binary and I abused myself. In remaining closeted, I am depriving myself of my own relationality, and my experience of "being-in-the-world" becomes torture.

system:
gender binds us to subjectivity; i am forced beyond that reach; i am forced beyond intersubjectivity; i am forced beyond humanity

I don't intend to posit that I exist in a state of social death comparable to that of prisoners experiencing solitary confinement. I just wish to muse about the aspects of my existence that painfully bewilder me. As much as I feel the way out is through a method of radical negativity, I struggle to reconcile that with my desire for recognition within the framework of gender, a goal which I know is antiquated and selfish. In a year I hope to not be as stuck, and when I die I hope to be long rid of this hurt.