The sign you must not touch: Lyric obscurity and trans confession
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The sign you must not touch: Lyric obscurity and trans confession
Colby Gordon Department of English, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, USA.
Abstract It would not be going too far to say that contemporary trans subjects are trapped in the confessional. In order to access the medical and legal tools of transition, trans people are required to enact a ritualistic repetition of ‘their journey’ that amounts to a secularized form of religious confession. This essay turns to Renaissance lyric for another mode of trans confession, one that frustrates the basic purposes of feeding transgender affect into what Foucault calls an ‘endless mill of speech.’ Focusing on John Donne’s purposefully obscure engagements with religion and transition in ‘The Funerall,’ this essay argues that metaphysical poetry offers a form of trans confession that does not terminate in the medicalized techniques of social control. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 195–203. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00172-x
You might say that trans people have a genre problem: we are trapped in memoir. Cisgender publics have a ravening appetite for trans ‘journeys,’ and with each trans tipping-point that comes and goes, another flurry of autobiographies hits the market. We are always novelties, somehow, but the story remains the same. You know its beats: furtive childhood crossdressing, operatic confrontations with family, the surgery. These plot points are ballasted with pure phenomenological description, emotive and belabored discussions of the body that linger over the hair’s texture, the knuckles’ thickness, and the jaw’s curve. Self-narrativizing in this vein is tawdry and unpleasant, but also mandatory. Its proper execution unlocks the legal and medical tools of
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 195–203
Gordan
transition. So it is that you find yourself endlessly performing your ‘story’ for a rotating cast of therapists, surgeons, pharmacists, judges, advocates, social workers, and the occasional DMV employee. Remember, it’s important to get the tone right – vulnerable, but not out of hand; suffering, but not delusional; considered, but not rehearsed. It helps to seem meek, even a little apologetic. Yes, it is embarrassing for us all that we are discussing my body during this family dinner, this campus visit. Maybe you wonder what it feels like to be transgender. I will tell you. It is not so much about inhabiting a particular kind of body as it is about living under the constant expectation that you will say to anyone who asks (and everyone asks eventually), ‘This is what I knew and when. This is how I feel about my hands.’ Foucault gave us a name for this ever-present incitement to speech, the need to make gender speak through ‘explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail’ (Foucault, 1978, 18): confession, which he describes as a protocol that
1 The iterability that structures this endless process of tr
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