“Your boy is a boiii”: capturing the consumption of trans joy in the form of synthetic testosterone

ABSTRACT

Synthetic testosterone, is an object born of heteronormative sexual anxiety, invented for use by cisgender men. Today, synthetic testosterone functions, as an element of gender-affirming healthcare for specific segments of the trans population. We approach testosterone, throughout this paper, as a technical object and as such a raw material of gender in South Africa. Providing a close reading of South African Medical Journal (SAMJ), we trace the emergence, production, and linguistic life of this technical object as a site of heteronormative anxiety and consider the absent-presence of trans masculinity and trans men in relation to this. Drawing on images created by three South African trans men on Instagram, we explore the technical object’s representations/absences as a material of gendered joy in South Africa. We suggest that the self-representation of the technical object by trans men on Instagram makes it a happy object, one whose consumption is deeply intertwined with joy.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender-affirming care
• South African transgender community
• Trans men on Instagram
• semiotics
• technical objects
• synthetic testosterone

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The experience of “gender euphoria” potentially produced by testosterone is by no means universal and the question of what happens when the vial does not fulfil its promise is an important avenue for further exploration. Due to the limitation of space it is not one that can be taken up in this paper.

2 At One Military Hospital, up to 1000, people underwent “sex reassignment surgery” between 1971 and 1989. There is also evidence to suggest that such surgeries were also taking place at hospitals in Pretoria and Durban (Klein 2014). According to Lock Swarr, the state Tertiary Hospital Groote Schuur, 150 “sex reassignment surgeries” between 1969 and 1984 (Lock Swarr 2012, 48–49).

3 For an analysis of this in the South African context see: Prinsloo, McLean, and Moletsane 2011. “The Internet and Sexual Identities: Exploring Transgender and Lesbian Use of the Internet in South Africa.” In Erotics: Sex, Rights and the Internet, edited by Jac sm Kee. Association for Progressive Communications.

4 Ligaga (2016) has discussed, with reference to representations of gender by women in Nigeria, how the curatorial nature of Instagram makes it a particularly effective cite of study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

B Camminga

B Camminga (they/them) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the African Centre for Migration & Society, Wits University, South Africa. Their work considers the interrelationship between the conceptual journeying of the term “transgender” from the Global North and the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from the African continent. In 2018 they were runner up in the Africa Spectrum: Young African Scholars Award, which honours outstanding research by up-and-coming African scholars. Their first monograph Transgender Refugees & The Imagined South Africa was published in 2019 (Palgrave). The book received honourable mention in the Ruth Benedict Prize for Queer Anthropology from the American Anthropology Association and the 2019 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies (with Aren Azuira). They are the co-convenor of the African LGBTQI+ Migration Research Network (ALMN). The network aims to advance scholarship on all facets of LGBTQI+ migration on, from and too the African continent by bringing together scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and service providers to spark critical conversations, promote knowledge exchange, support evidence-based policy responses, and initiate effective and ethical collaborations.

Noam Lubinsky

Noam Lubinsky (he/they) is a sociology student at the University of Witwatersrand under the ANdrew W. Mellon Foundation scholarship “Governing Intimacies”.