ABSTRACT
This investigation applies Foucault’s theory of biopower for the purpose of interrogating the psychomedical powers that shape, act upon, discipline, and regulate gender-variant bodies, centering the contemporary transsexual experience. A medicalized understanding of transsexual/transgender (trans) people is given primacy in this project, despite launching a critical debate on the stability of this term. By historicizing the processes through which gender variance became medicalized, it is observed that anatomopolitical and biopolitical matrices of hegemonic powers insist on disciplining and regulating non-normative bodies for the purpose of maintaining a naturalized sex/gender/sexuality system. Bodies that transgress this system threaten species propagation, and are therefore systematically coaxed into a dualistic system of male/female to maintain social order. Within this theoretical project the following questions are explored: (1) what were the major historical processes and medical discourses that produced trans subjects?; (2) how do mechanisms of biopower circulate trans intelligibility?; and (3) in what ways do trans people resist psychomedical discourses while simultaneously transitioning from one sex to another? To unravel these questions, biopower is discussed to outline the many complex power relations that dovetail with the production of medical knowledge about trans people.
