‘Hear My Taleʼ: Transgender Rage and the Reality of Gender Trouble, with Professor Heather Love

This presentation, taken from Professor Heather Loveʼs forthcoming book, *To Be Real: The Uses of the Personal in Queer Criticism*, examines Susan Strykerʼs use of the personal voice and her relation to the field of queer studies in her 1994 essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” In the essay, Stryker occupies instead a queer position —unassimilable, antagonistic— in relation to the human community. But if her relation to humanity at large is proudly defiant, her position vis-a-vis queer community is more vexed. Like other queers, Stryker embraces her difference, raging against the normal and the natural. Yet even as she stakes out a queer position, Stryker suggests the limits of “queer” to account for her situation. While her transsexual embodiment puts her at permanent odds with nature, Stryker adds that it is in nature that she must nonetheless exist. Although she fully embraces the queer critique of essentialism, she stipulates that to be wholly against nature is to cede the ground of existence. Centering her body and her emotions, Stryker demands that the anti-foundationalist field of queer theory recognize her in the fullness of her being. Hear my tale, she commands: commiserate me, and dare to know what gender trouble truly is.

Co-sponsored by the Centre for Study Of Sexual Dissidence and SPEAR (Sussex Performance Events and Research)