Putting Winters & Ehrbar and McRuer in Dialogue with The Body Dialectic

Since we are moving into Disability Studies and Crip Theory this week, I thought it would be interesting to investigate an intersection between Disability Studies and Queer Studies, and the ways in which they relate to trans struggles. In Critical Theory II, I have been working extensively with Foucault and his chapters Power and Truth, The Birth of the Asylum, The Condemned Body, Docile Bodies, and The Means of Correct Training in relation to mental illness and confinement. Foucault’s ideas extend to the creation and justification of the social sciences, particularly psychology and psychiatry, through the establishment of mental illness. All of these theories came together and were put to a face when I attended Kris Grey’s MFA performance show The Body Dialectic Friday evening, appropriately presented in the Ridges Auditorium. The show was organized around three plaster casts Grey has made of their (I will use a gender-neutral pronoun, which is considered grammatically incorrect despite similar efforts from the GLBTQ and linguistic communities) own body after beginning to transition in 2009. The day after Grey starting taking Testosterone (T), the first cast was made. One year later, on the day before Grey’s top surgery, the next cast was taken – breasts clutched desperately. The third cast shows the drastic changes Grey’s body has undergone due to the T – weight loss, gain in muscle mass, and successful top surgery.

One of the most significant points of Grey’s show was the detriment the DSM-5 causes trans individuals who decide to begin hormone therapy and/or surgery since they must face “the choice between the stigma of mental illness and sexual deviance and losing access to hormonal and surgical procedures” (Winters and Ehrbar 131). These labels, as with any mental illness diagnosis that is recorded in order to receive “treatment,” loom over the individual’s head throughout their lifetime affecting their chances at health care (as Grey points out, the diagnosis can be argued to be a pre-existing condition), employment, and so on. Accepting the label of mentally ill in order to undergo surgery and hormone treatment can pose other harmful side effects. My friend Lucas, a FTM, has been ordered by the Canadian government to have a hysterectomy before they will change the F to M on his legal documents. Here is an example of what Foucault calls bio-power, the regulation and normalization of the corporeal body by the state apparatus.

Similar to resistance posed by the Deaf community, many trans individuals do not want to simply “pass over” to the “other side,” and for good reason: first, this reinforces a dual binary system, and second, the clean cross over works as assimilation, erasing the trans identity for a more normalized and acceptable one. There are countless trans folks who do not care to peg themselves down to one identity label. Grey, for example, still considers themself female despite also considering themself male, while enjoying masculine identity as well. Thus, identifying as gender queer provides Grey with a safe and overarching umbrella term to stand under. As McRuer points out, “yes, queer theory and disability studies have come together in incredibly generative ways over the past few years, but that academic fact should not lead us to discount the more widespread cultural fact that our normalizing moment (like all normalizing moments) depends on identifying and containing – on disciplining – disability. It also depends – paradoxically, give how much a version of queerness is supposedly on display – on containing, on disciplining, queerness” (588). Diagnoses and identity labels function to make the incoherent more intelligible, and that is a problem to be sure. For, as Winters and Ehrbar assert, “it is time for diagnostic reform, because difference is not disease; identity is not disorder” (137). (A quick reminder here that until 1973, homosexuality was also included in the DSM as a mental disorder.) How can we move beyond these harmful diagnoses and categories when the governing state apparatus, the sciences, and the social sciences rely on them to exert and maintain power over our own bodies?

The Body Dialectic makes me think of McRuer’s discussion about photographic rhetoric and the ways it can be “deployed in counterhegemonic fashion” (590). At the close of the performance, Grey recounts a rift at an airport security checkpoint; when the officer requests more ID (as the F on Grey’s passport did not match their outward appearance), Grey responds by removing their clothing, left standing naked: “is this enough ID for you?” How might The Body Dialectic and similar art achieve, or fail to achieve these counterhegemonic goals?

For more information, be sure to check out Winter’s uber-informative blog .

Works Cited

McRuer, Robert. “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy.” PMLA 120.2 (2005): 586-592. Print.

Winters, Kelley and Ehrbar. “Beyond Conundrum: Strategies for Diagnostic Harm Reduction.”

Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 14 (2010): 130-138. Print.