Writing trans genre: An inquiry into transsexual and transgender rhetorics, affects and politics

This dissertation extends and critiques recent genealogies of transgender and transsexuality through consideration of the figural economy of transgender representation in early psychoanalytic theory, cultural feminist theory and science fiction, and contemporary queer and trans political and cultural discourses. In so doing, this dissertation grapples with an archive of trans representation that is rife with repudiation, pathologization and phantasy; further it inquires how the unconscious inheritance of such an archive might rhetorically, politically and affectively contour contemporary trans representation, including self-representation.;This dissertation employs a psychoanalytic lens which attends to how sexual minority subjects contend with internal and external forms of interference, dynamics of love and hate, identification and dis-identification and the affects of shame, envy, contempt which accompany experiences of social exclusion and erasure. It thus attempts to read the ways in which psychic life impinges trans and queer speech and representation in literary, cultural and political spheres, and to understand these effects in light of a longer history of fantasy about transgender subjects by non-trans subjects (clinicians, feminists, academics, etc.) In short, it attempts to think together the asymmetries of social power and the ambivalences of desire and identification at play in contemporary transsexual, transgender and queer subject formations.