Abstract
In her essay Dungeon Intimacies (2005) Susan Stryker offers autoethnography as a methodology for theorizing embodiment and politics. She invites us to see how corporeality situates more generalizable knowledges. Following Stryker, this essay explores male-to-female transsexual transitioning in an urban setting, San Francisco's Tenderloin, through bodily experience. These accounts might appear as drifts in personal recollection, but they are meant to suggest, however speculatively, and without aiming toward universalizing, the sensuous transaction between body and environment. Apprehending the interplay of sensation and place, I suggest, requires an attention to streets, buildings, and sidewalks, but also other non-humans. Guided by figural and literal spiders and the effects of hormone replacement therapy in the form of horse urine (Premarin), this essay proffers that transsexuality is relational in terms of social, economic, and political milieus as well as spatial, affective, and speciated registers.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 225-251 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Women and Performance |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2010 |
Keywords
- sensation
- space
- species
- transsexuality
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Gender Studies
- Visual Arts and Performing Arts