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On the subway platform I put on my Transexual Men- ace T-shirt, so that all four of us were displaying the Menace logo: "Tran- sexual" in modern type with "Menace" in Rocky Horror blood-dripping letters. Not surprisingly, we were drawing some attention from early- morning commuters. Even as we talked about the upcoming demonstra- tion, I began to feel some rising anxiety, the source of which I couldn't quite name.

I had met Max once before, at Southern Comfort, a gender confer- ence in Atlanta. He is to be married to her partner in the not-too-distant future; at one time, he identified as a les- bian. I think of Max as "man," partly because of her name and partly because he is butch. When she was only two months old, two undescended gonads were removed from 1Max's body. What had in earlier medical records been referred to as a "rudimentary phallus" was now instead renamed an "enlarged clitoris," and Max was assigned surgically to be a girl.

I met Morgan, a Ph. When Morgan was an infant, hir father was told that hir large clitoris would have to be sized down. ISNA members reject these common justifications for IGM as unfounded, argu- ing that the physical and psychological pain that result from such surgery, and the concomitant fear and secrecy, are far more likely to cause prob- lems in later life.

The course of action ISNA recommends is to defer medically unnecessary surgery until the child can make informed deci- sions about any surgery, while providing counseling and an open, caring environment to allow the child to understand his or her body, ask ques- tions, and to consider the choices he or she may have.

While I gender Morgan as "woman," this is not an identity I have heard hir use. We changed from one subway line to another, still talking about the pros and cons of the upcoming demo: should we refer to female genital mutilation or intersex genital mutilation?

As we talked, the group of men who had been watching us somewhat suspiciously didn't change with us, but they hung around looking at us until we got on the next train. I breathed a sigh of relief. I have known Riki for just over a year now, and as one of the most vocal, tireless, and brilliant members of the transgender community, hir ideas have informed this paper as much as anything I have read. We have had many conversations about sex, genitals, and the productive nature of power.

But this would the status of my require a disruption of the "rigorous normative discourse on genitals" Riki's words , a discourse that makes "common sense" of what happens body, and what both in hir workshops as well as in the operating rooms where IGM is per- formed.

Max drew on Riki's fanciful and variable construction of identity my plans for it in his most recent e-mail to me, signing off as "just your average butch lesbian intersexed white guy with a clitoral recession and a vaginoplasty might be who wants her dick back. It was not just a fear of potential violence, or that my sexu- ality or gender identity was under query by passersby who did a double take when they saw my T-shirt.

Rather, I was fearful that they were mak- ing assumptions about my genitals. When I wear this T-shirt it is not simply my gender and sexual pref- erences that are suddenly in question, but more precisely, the appearance of my genitals, the status of my body, and what my plans for it might be.

My genitals are, so to speak, up for grabs, and my body is suddenly in doubt. The discomfort I feel comes from the same source that has pro- duced IGM as an unproblematized medical practice: the fear of what the 1 percent might mean if it couldn't be clearly recognized in either the gents' or the ladies' rooms.

The issue that is at stake for me here is the dilemma posed by a fem- inist anthropology that respects differences while it makes assumptions about the meanings of bodies. Even if you do know what someone's gen- itals look like, what does that mean? While we accept the understanding, via Foucault, that heterosexual and homosexual "persons" are social constructions,6 we nonetheless still assume that there is a kind of genital certainty to each individual.

I'm not making a postmodern plea here for the fluidity of categories, identities, or even bodies. Indeed, the people I have mentioned above have drawn on an available field of identities and practices that are unique to this historical moment, and their identities or in Riki's case, the freedom not to have to take on an identity are hard won and the result of long personal and painful struggles. I am saying, however, that trans and intersex bodies raise questions for me as an anthropologist about how people physically reconstruct bodies, or are reconstructed, and how people make sense of their bodies.

But further, it also raises questions as to how we, as anthro- pologists and producers of cultural knowledge, make sense of them. If feminist anthropology has come to respect differences along lines of race, class, and culture, can we also respect differences in bodies that defy what are still, really, the biological basis of many of our categories?

It surely complicates our categories and our understandings of gender and sexuality to have gay men who call parts of their bodies clitorises; or les- bians who speak of their penises; or a person who occasionally refers to hir vagina as hir penis. What does it mean to talk of the cultural construction of bodies?

If we consider that there are people who are not just altering their bodies but constructing identities around bodies that are culturally not understand- able in terms of existing categories, new questions of difference and power are put into play.

And when I talk of power I don't only mean agency, in the sense that people are producing new definitions of their own bodies, but I also mean the policing of these bodies by cultural apparatuses. Such policing can be conducted by institutions as varied as the legal system and the medical establishment, by individuals such as hotel clerks who guard access to restrooms, and by groups of potentially violent people in the subway. But such policing can also be performed by academics like myself who are trying to make cultural sense out of such identities and practices.

In other words, a focus on trans and intersex genitals doesn't let me off the hook. This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.

Reprints and Permissions. Broad, K. By Riki Ann Wilchins. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 3, — Download citation.

Issue Date : July Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. A short summary of this paper.

Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. She is doing research on the social construction of population-environment connections and women's rights in non-governmental organizations, particularly on how the discourse has influenced and shaped debate on public policy issues.

There are numerous questions today about what constitutes gender identity. Is it socially constructed? Is it biologically determined? Who can make the rules and enforce them? It is a book for anyone committed to changing that system. Basically, Wilchins utilizes this book as a vehicle to use language and knowledge to subvert certain established ideas about bodies, gender and desire.