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ABSTRACT
This essay examines how two trans public figures, Lou Sullivan and Jennifer Finney Boylan, try to realize the need for transgender legibility through messianic rhetoric. Messianism is a site of contention in queer theory, between advocates for either antirelational queer theory or queer utopianism. This essay sees messianic rhetoric as a strategy found in the public speech and writing of Sullivan and Boylan, each of whom instrumentalize it to achieve legibility. Such rhetoric works to the political end of broader transgender acceptance. However, it also relies upon a flattening of trans life into a monolith. Messianic rhetoric legitimates a singular narrative of “how to be trans” through excluding other possibilities. Public speech that rejects this universalizing messianic impulse is possible. The zine “Fucking Trans Women” represents such a possibility, focusing attention on experience and pleasure over narrative linearity, thus providing one path forward for trans public speech.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Siobhan Kelly is a doctoral candidate in Religion, Gender, and Culture at Harvard University. Their work draws from queer theory, transgender studies, and critical theory to study religious rhetoric in identity construction and embodiment. Siobhan received a B.A. in Religion from Tufts University and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School.
Notes
* This paper was previously presented at the Boston University conference Sex on the Margin, and at Harvard Divinity School’s Stendahl Symposium. Many thanks to the attentive audiences and their precise questions, and to Mark Jordan and Amy Hollywood for their guidance.
1 Hale, “Consuming the Living,” 320.
2 For more discussions of messianic rhetoric, see Selvidge, “The New World Order”; Beare, “It Gets Better … ”; and Charteris-Black, Politicians and Rhetoric.
3 The most obvious example that illustrates this characteristic of messianism is the narrative of Jesus Christ in the Christian tradition.
4 Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 313.
5 Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 60.
6 Ibid., 52.
7 Ibid., 53.
8 Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Politics,” 56.
9 Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 10.
10 Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 25.
11 Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 10.
12 Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 312.
13 See: Colossians 1:15, Jesus as “the firstborn of all creation.”
14 Caputo, “The Messianic,” 273.
15 Ibid., 273.
16 Ibid., 272.
17 Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 22–3.
18 Ibid., 23.
19 Both Derrida’s and Benjamin’s work on messianic structures and messianism are debated, and any entrance into that conversation must be taken with great care. For the purpose of this article, I am specifically looking at what happens after “the event” that, for Derrida, is supposed to remain ever in the future, occurs.
20 Glazova and North, “Introduction,” 5.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 For a greater explanation of these two approaches, see the introduction of Cruising Utopia.
24 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
25 Ibid., 18.
26 Muñoz’s argument lies in the work of another Frankfurt School thinker, Ernst Bloch, whose work he characterizes as “unorthodox and messianic Marxism,” and thus similar to my reading of Benjamin as also focused upon messianic thought. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 86.
27 Edelman, No Future, 3.
28 Block, “I’m Nothin. I’m Nowhere,” 255.
29 Bateman, “The Beast to Come,” 83.
30 Ibid.
31 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy,” 257–8.
32 Love, Feeling Backward, 147.
33 Ibid., 148.
34 Ibid., 27.
35 Blair, “Against Populism”; and Penn and Stein, “Back to the Center.”
36 Watts, “Peril of Gender Trap.”
37 Boylan, “You’re Blaming Transgender People?”
38 Sullivan, Changing the Standards.
39 Sullivan, “A Transvestite Answers”; and Sullivan, AIDS and Sex.
40 Sullivan, AIDS and Sex.
41 Sullivan, DSM 1990.
42 Sullivan, Battling Gender Specialists.
43 Sullivan, DSM 1990.
44 Ibid.
45 Hale, “Consuming the Living,” 320.
46 Power, Meeting Lou Sullivan; and Sullivan, “Information,” 49.
47 Boylan, She’s Not There, 19.
48 Ibid., 180.
49 Ibid., 174.
50 Ibid., 9.
51 Ibid., 183.
52 Ibid., 186.
53 Russo, “Afterword: Imagining Jenny,” 286.
54 Boylan, She’s Not There, 171. See also, John 8:58: “Jesus answered, ‘before Abraham was born, I am.’”
55 Hero, “Toward a Queer Theology,” 150–1.
56 While Boylan and others speak of “finishing” or “completing” their gender transition so that transition becomes past tense, not all trans people ascribe to this narrative. Some see it as an ever-evolving process, with no end. Boylan, She’s Not There, 245.
57 Ibid., 162.
58 Ibid., 244.
59 Ibid., 249.
60 Sullivan, “Transvestite Answers a Feminist,” 164.
61 Sullivan, AIDS and Sex.
62 Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back,” 229.
63 Ibid., 232.
64 Bowles, “A Death Robbed.”
65 Miller, “D.C. Settles Bias Suit”; and U.S. News and World Report, “Dr. Joseph Bastien.”
66 Boylan, “The Big Dress Theory.”
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Diebel, “U.S. Marine Found Guilty”; Fraley, “Gwen Araujo Murder”; and Schwirtz, “Embarking on New Life.”
70 Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 22.
71 Bellwether, “Fucking Trans Women,” 18.
72 Ibid., 7.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 159.
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