ABSTRACT
The emerging field of masculinity studies in Canada, as evidenced by the series of intriguing papers presented at the ‘Making it Like a Man: Masculinities in Canadian Arts and Cultures’ conference, is a fascinating site of complexity, interdisciplinarity and queerness. 1 Topics covered at the conference ranged from narratives of nation through the trope of the lumberjack and canoeist, to masculinity in Canadian hockey culture, to depictions of the ‘geek’ in film; each of the papers sought to challenge heteronormative and hegemonic ideas about masculinity and many accomplished this goal. But what intrigued me, as a female-to-male transsexual man sitting in the audience, was the one singular, essentialist thread that ran through each session I attended: that is, of course, that ‘man’ as a cultural description, even while it was being deconstructed as a heteronormative gender, was assumed to be secured or guaranteed by the supposedly self-evident body (read: the penis). This chapter seeks to deconstruct that assumption and offer instead one intersecting site of masculinity in Canadian cultural production where that assumption is directly challenged: that site is, of course, female and transsexual masculinities. 2 This is part of two larger projects which are investigating the existence of a paradigm shift in thinking sex 80as the ground of gender difference (Noble 2006). Where the essentialist belief in unique and biologically distinct sexes, evidenced by sexed genitals, has been used to organise gender systems, many theorists, including Anne Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler, are suggesting that how we define the ground of gender, that is, how we define and categorise sex itself, may well be within the realm of the social, cultural, discursive and hence, political (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Butler 1993). Such reconceptualisations of sex then force us to ask different kinds of questions about the mechanisms we use to secure gender.
