Theory-Bombing

I've begun reading Transgender China, edited by Howard Chiang, published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan, but I'm not sure I'll finish it.  What I have read, however, crystallized conclusions I've been moving toward for some time now after reading academic queer theory and its relatives.

Editor Chiang begins the introduction to the book with a brisk summary of Euro-American scholarship on gender, beginning with "Magnus Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten (1910)" (page 3), and proceeding to various twenty-first century landmarks.  "These newer studies," he opines, "demonstrate a remarkable measure of analytical sophistication and maturity, whether in terms of critical ethnography, synthetic history, clinically based psychoanalytic theory, materially grounded phenomenology, or social scientific empiricism" (4).

As I read those words, it occurred to me I would never use "analytical sophistication" to describe the works I've read among those he lists.  I've complained before about scholars who do good research in the field, whether ethnographic observation or oral history in the metropole, or in the archives, but do not understand the theoretical frameworks they invoke, so that their analysis never makes contact with, let alone accounts for, their data.  This makes reading their work extremely frustrating for me, as the authors keep intruding on fascinating accounts of their subjects' lives with undigested and often irrelevant theory.  It's an academic version of what's called "photo-bombing," where someone intentionally or accidentally ruins a photograph by walking into the field of view or making rabbit ears from behind the subject.  In theory-bombing, scholars randomly drop chunks of theory into their texts: a reference to Foucault's paragraph about the Modern Homosexual, say, where it contributes nothing to the discussion.  It ruins the picture but they can't resist.

In Chiang's case, one problem is the inflation of the term transgender.  He acknowledges that as

transgender studies came to be consolidated and widely recognized as an independent area of academic inquiry ... debates ensued among activists, popular authors, academics and other writers regarding what transgender means (and the more general question of who fits into what categories has deeper historical ramifications in gay activism, feminism, and the civil rights movement).  But with an expansive (even ambiguous), institutionalized, and collective notion of transgender, the actors shared a commitment to advancing the political and epistemological interest of gender variant people [5].

It would be interesting, if probably not fruitful, to borrow Foucault's approach to the medicalization of sexuality and apply it to Chiang's account.  What seems to be going on here is something very similar to the nineteenth-century turf wars between doctors, the church, and the (more or less) secular law over who would get to define, surveil, and police women, erotic outlaws, the mad, Jews, "natives," and other troublesome groups.  The proliferation of academic fields of study exhibits similar conflict over authority (including the authority to name) and, not least, budget appropriations.  That's why I say such analysis wouldn't be fruitful, in terms of publication, tenure, and promotion: as Rita Felski noted mischievously in The Limits of Critique (Chicago, 2015), the critical tools one applies to one's subject matter must never be turned on one's own institution, department, or self.

I've noticed that numerous scholars, including trans ones, have inflated "transgender" so that it applies to almost every human being.  In The Lives of Transgender People (Columbia, 2011), for example, Ginny Beemyn and Susan Rankin wrote:

To be inclusive of all gender-nonconforming people, we defined “transgender” broadly as “anyone who transgresses or blurs traditional gender categories” [22].

In Transgender China, Pai Kee Eleanor Cheung wrote:

However, as the influence of the transgender movement is becoming stronger in Hong Kong, more people have begun to use the term ‘transgender’ as ‘an umbrella term including many categories of people who are gender variant,’ ranging from cross-dressers to intersexed people to transsexuals [263].

The most obvious objection to this inflationary use of "transgender" is that almost everybody "transgresses or blurs traditional gender categories" in some respect, so almost everybody could be classified as transgender by these criteria.  When I've had the opportunity to point this out, I've been told that "transgender" doesn't really mean that, and that it only refers to a specific, limited population.  Yet the scholars (many of them trans) to whom many trans and trans-supportive people point for intellectual and academic legitimacy disagree.  I suspect that most of the trans advocates I encounter have not read any of the literature, or at best ignored the more inclusive definition these scholars posit; besides, having given their definition, these scholars then mostly ignore it, focusing on the kind of people the term was coined to denote in the first place.  Cheung, for instance, goes on to say, "I adopt this latter definition of transgender throughout this chapter, but the emphasis of my analysis will be on those who were about to, or had already undergone, SRS [sex-reassignment surgery] at the time of the interview" (ibid.).

Another problem is that "transgender" originally referred not to gender expression but to subjectivity:

What it means to be transgender is that your innate gender identity does not match the gender you were assigned at birth. This might be the case even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess. You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another.

Yet in "transgender studies," the term is applied to people who lived in the distant past, about whose subjectivity we know nothing.  Or scholars simply ignore the issue and refer to any behaviors or expressions that "that look 'transgendered' to contemporary Eurocentric observers," as trans historian Susan Stryker puts it in her contribution to Transgender China (292).  Cross-dressing for Carnival, for example, will be adduced as transgender behavior without any evidence about the celebrants' motives or subjectivities -- they must be transgender, I suppose, or they wouldn't do it.  This sort of thing can hardly be lauded for its "analytical sophistication."  It tells me something about the observers' subjectivity, but nothing about the subjectivity of the people they're writing about.

Chiang admits that there could be objections to slathering the very Western concept "transgender" over non-Western cultural phenomena and (to use the trendy word) bodies.  He quotes the trans scholar Susan Stryker, who suggested that "the conflation of many kinds of gender variance into the single shorthand term 'transgender,' particularly when this collapse into a single genre of personhood crosses the boundaries that divide the West from the rest of the world, holds both peril and promise" (7).  Myself, I'm not into these East-West binaries, and I think Stryker should have left out "promise."  What she said could as easily be said (and probably was) about the previous candidate for World Assimilation, "queer."  There too a potentially useful concept was stretched and inflated by people who hadn't thought with any care about it, even though it was their profession to do so, and who violated the principles they invoked in its favor.  For example, it was supposedly an improvement over the supposedly culture-bound "gay" despite the dispersion of "gay" around the world among people who'd adopted it rather than had it imposed on them. "Queer" was imposed on cultures and periods where it wasn't used, and to describe people who would have rejected it as a label for themselves -- who indeed had local labels of their own for themselves. What's going on here, I think, is not analysis but the very Western practice of branding.

Chiang also quotes the scholar David Valentine: "The capacity to stand in for an unspecified group of people is, indeed, one of the seductive things about 'transgender' in trying to describe a wide range of people, both historical and contemporary, Western and non-Western" (6).  "Seductive" is double-edged, and I wonder if Valentine was being as celebratory in context as Chiang wants him to seem.  But you could substitute "queer," or even "gay," for "transgender" in this sentence and get a vague feeling of nostalgia for the terminological nostrums of yesteryear.  I'd love to know how "transgender" is different from "gay" or "queer" in this respect, but that question doesn't seem to be on anyone's agenda.

Having paid lip service to these questions, Chiang breezily ignores them.  Later he writes of "trying to imagine China in a transgender frame," and I wonder how he can justify imposing a culturally imperialist Western category on the helpless people of the Middle Kingdom.  How does this differ from subjugating China as "the sick man of Asia," defenseless before foreign cultural and political domination?  His own contribution to Transgender China is a long piece on Chinese eunuchs, who were seen by Western observers and Chinese advocates of modernity as symptoms of China as "a castrated civilization."  The piece does include a Chinese eunuch's account of his own castration as a child by his father, which doesn't seem to have been the result of the boy's gender identity; rather, it imposed one on him.

I can imagine that throwing around an unspecific term could conceivably be justified by the results of the discussion; but not only don't these discussions shed any light on their subjects, the initial caveats are simply forgotten once they've been uttered.  I have the impression that they are like crossing oneself or kissing one's scapular before beginning a fateful project, to ward off misfortune.

I've also discussed and praised scholars who avoid these pitfalls, who really make sense of their subjects; but these people are outliers in their fields.  I'm glad they exist, though, so that I know it's possible to do meaningful work without making the mistakes I'm criticizing here.  But Sturgeon's Law evidently applies to critical theory as much as it does to science fiction.

Survivor's Guilt; or Nature Thinks She's So Smart

(Grammar obsessive digression: I can't quite make up my mind whether the apostrophe in the title should be before the final s or after it -- singular or plural?)

But anyway, here's another meme that's going around, like the flu but slightly less virulent:

"Faith is the reorganization of observations so that they fit neatly into a particular belief system." Well, no, that's science: the fitting of observations into a particular belief system, aka theory. This is on my mind today because I'm reading Walter Alvarez' T. Rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton, 1997).  (Also, a more technical point: observations have no meaning except as they are framed within a theory or other organizing framework. Facts don't speak for themselves. This isn't exactly rocket science, though a lot of scientists talk as though they didn't know it.)

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom is Alvarez' account of how he and many other scientists filled out a speculation with facts that, they concluded, validated and confirmed the speculation.  The speculation, which has become fairly well-known by now, was that the mass extinction which killed off the dinosaurs and many other species of animals and plants 65 million years ago, was caused by a large object, probably an asteroid, hitting the earth.  The mass extinction, formerly known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction (also KT, as Alvarez refers to it throughout the book) has been renamed The Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event by Politically Correct zealots at the International Commission on Stratigraphy.  (The same kind of people who decided Pluto isn't a planet.)  There have been numerous mass extinctions, but KT is one of the best-known because of the public fascination with dinosaurs, but no one knew why they happened.

It's a fascinating story, and undermines the faith-science dichotomy in the meme above.  At the beginning Alvarez didn't have any evidence for believing that KT was caused by something big hitting the earth, he had a hunch.  Then he had to think of what could constitute evidence, then he had to look for it.  Occasionally he found what looked like disconfirming evidence, but he didn't lose faith: he kept digging and thinking until he found new facts or a way to think about the facts he had.  In the end he came up with a lot of evidence that confirmed his hunch, and I'm not denying that it's good evidence or that the KT extinction happened, or happened that way.  What I'm saying is that it shows that a simple science/faith dichotomy doesn't work.

The general acceptance of Alvarez' theory struck a blow against the uniformitarianism that had dominated geology for a couple of centuries, which again had been a matter of faith: scientists simply asserted that no catastrophes had any important effects on the earth.  The doggedness with which they clung to this belief is interesting.  There was nothing either illogical, let alone supernatural, about the idea of an asteroid or comet striking the earth, but it was resisted fiercely for a long time.  Not only that, but some scientists continued to reject Alvarez' theory long after most of their colleagues accepted it, arguing that his evidence didn't prove what he thought it did.  That's a reminder that rejecting a scientific theory is not in itself anti-science, which many scientists forget in times of controversy.

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom also quietly rejects the heroic fantasy of the solitary scientist battering away at Nature's privacy until she surrenders her secrets: from the beginning Alvarez worked with other scientists, and a worldwide network of colleagues contributed data and suggestions to help.

Scientists have to have faith in their theories, or they would abandon them at the first disconfirming evidence, and science would fail.  They also have faith in science itself, since science has as many embarrassing failures in its history as it has successes.  It's an old joke among historians and philosophers of science.  The scientific method is like a besieging army: if it fails to capture one city, it moves on to another that looks more vulnerable, in hopes of better success. Where faith comes in is the belief that eventually, every problem will be conquered.  Declaring that science will never be able to solve its unsolved problems is analogous to declaring that gods definitely don't exist.  It's notoriously hard to prove a negative, but asserting the positive requires faith.

There's one thing about Alvarez' presentation that bothers me, though: his personification of Nature.  This might be partly the all-too-common scientists' assumption that you have to dumb down a popular account to snow the rubes.  Mary Midgley wrote that when she "complained of this sort of thing to scientists, I have sometimes met a surprising defence, namely, that these remarks appear in the opening or closing chapters of books, and that everybody knows that what is found there is not to be taken literally; it is just flannel for the buying public" (Evolution as a Religion, Methuen, 1985, 67).  Whatever the reason, Alvarez writes of Nature as a conscious agent, even an adversary, throughout his book.  Some examples (there are many more):

As we struggled to understand what had happened, it almost seemed as if Nature had cleverly constructed a maze of alibis, misleading clues, and false trails [82].

As scientists, we are engaged in a conversation with Nature. We ask questions – like “Where is the crater?” – by making observations or performing experiments. And Nature answers, with the results of the observation or the experiment [85].

… to understand the real meaning of Nature’s answers, or how many ways there are to make mistakes and get fooled [86].

This last one reminded me of the immortal beginning of Robert Treese's 1973 paper on homosexuality and the Bible: "What is God trying to tell us about homosexuality?"  You'd think science was engaged in a game of charades.

But we had all been fooled!… How did Nature fool us? Only years later, after the Yucatán crater was finally found, did we come to understand how we had been misled? [94]

Nature misled us by mixing sedimentary rocks rich in calcium and magnesium together with the underlying continental crust, which was rich in silicon [95].

At last, it seemed, Nature’s trick had been figured out … It was satisfying to have finally understood Nature’s ploy, but the satisfaction was premature. Nature was about to have another laugh at our expense [105].

And so on, and on.  I remember a passage in Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (1948) to the effect that the physical scientist has an advantage over the social scientist in that Nature doesn't cheat.  That's because Nature is not a person: Nature is an abstraction, though it has long been personified as an alternative to God, a way of avoiding theological reference in books while still anthropomorphizing the inanimate, impersonal world.  It seems to be very difficult to avoid personifying the impersonal, even for scientists, but that's supposed to be a major part of what science is supposed to be about.  But how flattering to cast oneself as one who outsmarted crafty, dissimulating Nature.  It's like beating Death at a game of chess, almost as good as stealing fire from the gods.