Queer theory, for all its glory, has long failed the transsexual. Jay Prosser's Second Skins (1991), initiates this critique in direct response to Judith Butler, whose early contributions to the field theorized the cross-dresser as a quintessential \"troubler\" of gender. Problematizing this appropriation of trans performance for the purpose of transgressive politics, Prosser argues that transsexuality calls for a different theoretical framework altogether. Simply, the transsexual does not \"defy\" so much as \"reinscript\" the body. Despite the transsexual's inclusion under the umbrella of queer identity, Prosser asserts, the transsexual subject directly antagonizes the values of queer performativity, which, he argues, casts \"all literalizing as hegemonic ('bad') and all deliteralizing as subversive ('good').\" In this project I extend Prosser's warning about the contradictions between queer theory and transsexuality to point to a broader crisis in identity politics—one in which identity, as constituted by the messy paradoxes of desire, is often found to be incompatible with politics. By this, I mean that the transsexual not only exposes the limits of queer theory, but also forces us to grapple with an essential provocation—why wouldn't a queer politics be able to accommodate desire in its entirety? What else is a queer politics for, if not the pursuit of desire in all of is forms? Responding to the recent provocations of Andrea Long Chu, this paper seeks to imagine a politics of gender that embraces its own irredeemability. Rooted in the theoretical foundations of Lee Edelman's No Future, Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism, and Gayatri Spivak's \"Can the Subaltern Speak?\" I challenge the instance utopianism of the progressive trans movement in order to call for a new grammar of optimism that can withstand the inevitability of disappointment.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Transsexual","Desire","Queer"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 23759