Monstrous Bodies: geographies of gendered bodies, sexless selves, and future lives

Keywords: queer geographies, trans geography, feminist geographies, political geography, social theory
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

After marriage equality many conservative organizations turned to trans rights as a focal point of activism in state legislatures, courts, and school boards. As Bettcher (2007) argues, trans bodies are always already obscene, inviting probing questions about what lurks underneath clothing. Building an anti-trans strategy, conservative organizations have developed a dense network of activists who provide testimony in hearings and trials, produce online content, and host regular events for political organizers. This paper examines the political campaign against trans lives through the legislation, testimony, and public campaign for measures limiting access to gender affirming care and prohibiting participation in sports. These texts produce images of monstrous trans bodies presented as the end result of the erosion of gender and sexual norms. Relying on claims about “common sense” rooted in sexual reproduction, these campaigns utilize the imagery of disfiguration and mutilation to reaffirm a vision of a healthy body politic built on the norm of the heteronormative, self-sufficient, and racially pure nuclear family. Attempts s to ground trans lives in the truth of medical science, while providing a counter-narrative to specific anti-trans campaigns does not adequately address the political claims to ontological certainty rooted in the “biological certainty” of sexual difference and heterosexual reproduction drawn upon by right-wing projects to mobilize fear of trans monstrosity for a wider political project. Looking directly at monstrous bodies—whether trans, queer, sexualized, racialized or otherwise considered grotesque—we can see other ways of resisting the medicalized, individualizing, and commodification of precarious bodies (Sharpe 2009, Malatino 2022).