ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on a contentious strand of theorising and activism that claims transgenderism is, at least potentially, a transgressive force that destabilises and challenges the gender binary, male/female, as the paradigm of ‘sex difference’. To the extent that transgender discourses rely on the transgressive assumptions of gender as ‘performativity’, this focus serves to highlight a concern raised in Chapter 2, where I questioned whether Judith Butler’s concept of gender as ‘performance’, or ‘performativity’, does in fact hold the subversive import she contends, or whether it is rather more complicit with the structural imperatives of simulation. This chapter extends that discussion. Judith Butler (1990) was writing her important work on conceptualising gender as ‘performance’, or ‘performativity’, at the same moment Baudrillard was writing the Transparency of Evil (TE), in which he critically situates the hegemonic ‘performance principle’ as paradigmatic of hyperreality. Both works were published in the same year (1990). In the Transparency of Evil Baudrillard also develops his analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of ‘trans’, within which he includes a discussion of ‘transsexuality’. I will first develop some background to feminist and transgender theorising on the critical portent of transsexuality, or transgenderism, for feminist theory and politics. Then I will discuss how Baudrillard’s work, with particular focus on Part One of the Transparency of Evil, and The Ecstasy of Communication (EC), forces a reconsideration of the assumptions underpinning this argument.
