ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the song, 'The Cripple and the Starfish' by Antony and the Johnsons. It describes that Antony is probably 'trans or at least gender-queer', and that the song seems to point toward 'a yearning for transformation'. Trans' is meant to disturb purification practices; the well defined is confounded at multiple material and semiotic levels. Psychical and corporeal experiences are blended. For example, gender and the embodiment of gender are contingencies that may hold for a moment then fall away into another set of relationships. Re-generation is something that both transsexuals and starfish do. Transsexuals and starfish do other kinds of prefixial relationships between inside or outside, subject or object, or predator or prey, but in re- they share a phenomenological experience of re-shaping and re-working bodily boundaries. Transsexuals and starfish challenge disembodied metaphors, and propose ways in which we are metonymically stitched to carnal substrates.
