BECOMING AND BE/LONGING: KATE BORNSTEIN'S GENDER OUTLAW AND MY GENDER WORKBOOK.(Critical Essay)

The oppression of love, sex, and desire are built into the very nature of the kind of communities in which we huddle.... We do all this stuff I think, because we're so afraid of not belonging, so afraid of being alone.

My Gender Workbook 93

I. SUBJECT(IFICAT)ION, BE/LONGING, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

It is perhaps only fitting that one of the key tenets of autobiography criticism at the dawn of the new millennium--that we become subjects through the workings of a constituting social order within which, however, we can still exercise agency and self-determination--should echo the teachings of the ancients. A Midrashic commentary of the seventh century has it that "a man is called by three names: one given him by his father and mother, one that others call him, and one that he calls himself." [1] Here are two contemporary autobiographical articulations of this logic of self-naming. "I am neither man nor woman," affirms Michael Hernandez in a short self-portrait included in Leslie Feinberg's TransLiberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, "I just am" (76). And in her Foreword to the collection Boys Like Her: Transfictions, Kate Bornstein reflects on the pain she would have been spared if, as a youngster, she could have simply told the world: "'I'm a girl, but I'm a boy, I am"' (11). The texts by Hernandez and Bornstei n foreground issues of vital interest to contemporary autobiography studies: the "existential necessity" of having a sense of self--of affirming "I am"--and the function of self-narration as a medium of/for such self-creation (Eakin 46); the range of culturally and historically specific "vocabularies of the self" through which subjects are constituted (Bjorklund 7); and the possibility that a subject so constructed (here, through a binary gender discourse) may defy and re-define the terms of its naming. These, then, are the broader questions that motivate the present essay. If, as social psychologist George Herbert Mead was already arguing at the turn of the twentieth century, "the human self arises through its ability to take the attitude of the group to which he belongs--because he can talk to himself in terms of the community to which he belongs" (Movements 375; emphasis added), what happens to the self and to self-narration (talking to oneself) when the terms of the community and the group are no longer a pplicable or acceptable to the self, and belonging is jeopardized? What can non-hegemonic subjects like Hernandez and Bornstein teach us about the interrelationship of subjectivity, belonging, and autobiography?

The contemporary theoretical scene, in which philosophical, sociological, psychological, and textual perspectives have been brought together, provides a fertile ground for such explorations. Drawing out the psychic implications of Foucault's and Aithusser's theorizations of the subject as paradoxically constituted by and in subjection, Judith Butler has argued that "no subject emerges without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent" (7). Since it is the internalization of social norms that produces the subject's "interiority" in the first place, the subject depends on these interpellations to bring it into being and confer upon it a recognizable and enduring social existence. Such attachment, therefore, is both enabling--it is necessary if the subject is "to persist in and as itself" in a psychic and social sense"--and a mark of subjection--to be, the subject has to submit to "a world of others that is fundamentally not one s own" (Butler 8, 28).

In this essay I would like to suggest that be/longing--the longing to belong so that one may be--is a primary manifestation of the subject's conflicted, passionate attachment to the very grids of affiliation that work in the service of its subject(ificat)ion. Be/longing is the "longing for social existence" of a subject constituted by social categories that signify its "subordination and existence at once" (Butler 20). Not all subjects, however, are equally subjected by the regimes of power that regulate the conditions of their existence. "How do you begin to be/long when everything around you conspires to keep you alien?" asks Marlene Nourbese Philip as she reviews the long history of territorial, social, and psychic dispossession experienced by Africans in the Caribbean and the Americas (22), reminding us that the subject's founding struggle is always already inflected by the particular socio-historical conditions that shape its lived experience. We "live in time and politics," Carolyn Steedman reaffirms-- speaking from the perspective of the classed subject--so that the psychodrama of selfhood will be differently experienced and interpreted by subjects "according to the social circumstances" they find themselves in (111.)

A sexed and gendered subject's fraught becoming and be/longing are at the center of American performance artist Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (hereafter GO) and My Gender Workbook (hereafter GW). [2] Introducing herself as a post-operative male-to-female "transsexual lesbian whose female lover is becoming a man" (GO 3), Bornstein challenges the terms of her subjection, rendering questionable--indeed untenable--the hegemonic grids of sex, gender, and sexuality of a society some have described as founded on "the apartheid of sex" (Rothblatt) and the "tyranny of passing." [3] But having such a fluid sexual/gender identity becomes problematic, Bornstein acknowledges, because the social order can only render it as absence (no self) and otherness (no community): "the need for a recognizable identity, and the need to belong to a group of people with a similar identity ... are driving forces in our culture, and nowhere is this more evident than in the areas of gender and sexuality " (GO 4-5). Bornstein seeks to counter the risks of psychic and social disintegration by renaming herself and redefining her community. Allying herself with those who are "'transgressively gendered'...who break the rules, codes, and shackles of gender" (GO 135), she insists on the right to self-fashioning: "That's how I see myself: I live pretty much without a gender, which paradoxically means I can do many genders" (GW 14). Bornstein's narratives, then, engage us in questions central to the contemporary interrogation of subjectivity, agency, and self-narration. They invite us to reflect on the ways in which a subject, risking its continued psychic and social existence, may oppose and transform "the social terms by which it is spawned," thereby (possibly) clearing the way for "a more open, even more ethical, kind of being, one of or for the future" (Butler 29, 130). And they call upon us to develop a critical paradigm committed to examining the relations between lived experience and representation, so that we may not reduce the embodied experience of such a subject "to the figural dimensions and functions of discourse" (Namaste 194). [4]

In form and content, Gender Outlaw is shaped by the objectives that drive Bornstein's autobiographical project: to critique the dominant bi-polar gender system; to explore a different, transgendered, mode of being, in which one will not have to be "one or the other" (GO 8); and to envision a social space in which a transgendered person could not only become but also belong. Like the identity it seeks to represent, Gender Outlaw is a "cut-and-paste thing" (GO 3), a generically hybrid, multivoiced, and dialogic collage that includes personal narrative, theoretical discourse, campy humor, activist polemics, transcripts of interviews and speeches, photographs, the script of Bornstein's play "Hidden: A Gender," and numerous quotations culled from a wide range of sources. I read My Gender Workbook, subtitled "how to become a real man, a real woman, the real you, or something else entirely," as a sequel and companion volume to Gender Outlaw. It is, again, a hybrid work that includes "words from over 300 people" (GW Acknowledgments), comic-style illustrations, and the text of "Post Hard: An Online Play in One Act." (More on Bornstein's enthusiasm for cyberspace later.) As its title promises, however, the bulk of My Gender Workbook consists of an impressive array of exercises and activities that Bornstein has designed for her readers to do, so that together--with her, with each other--we could "go on a little journey ... through previously unexplored and underexplored areas of gender, identity, sexuality, and power" (2). Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook thus seek not only to trace the emergence of an oppositional subject, but also to enable and facilitate--by evoking the words of others and by direct appeal to the reader--the emergence of an oppositional collectivity and a different manner of belonging.

In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser comments on what distinguishes Gender Outlaw--"Our first 'postmodern' transsexual (thus posttransexual) autobiography"--from conventional transsexual autobiographies. Bornstein "doesn't so much narrativize her transsexual life as (a performance artist) she performs it, acting out--without integrating into a singular stable gendered identity--its parts" (174). What I am particularly interested in reflecting on here are the ways in which Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook, while flaunting and advocating gender fluidity, are also …