My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage
Susan Striker
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies·Read paper
Abstract
Susan Stryker’s evocative retelling of the story of Frankenstein’s monster specifically responded to Sandy Stone’s call for “post-transsexual” theorizing rooted in the embodied experience of transgender people, and was the first published academic work to link this project explicitly to queer critical theory.
Like other early voices in the field, Stryker helped situate transgender studies in larger intellectual currents. She draws—explicitly or implicitly—on Kristeva’s notion of the abject and Althusser’s notion of interpolation, as well as on Butler’s notion of gender performativity.
Stryker’s title derives from the scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which the monster first speaks back to its maker, revealing itself as something other, and something more, than its creator intended. She turns this literary meeting into a metaphor for the critical encounter between a radicalized transgender subjectivity and the normativizing intent of medical science. In doing so, she claims her own transsexual body as a monstrously powerful place, situated outside the natural order, from
which to speak and write and act.
In her essay, Stryker both claims and rechannels the rage that many transgender people feel over being made outcasts; she transforms a particular experience of suffering into a basis for self- affirmation, intellectual inquiry, moral agency, and political action. Her text helped clear the way for other transgender theorists to dare to speak in their own voices, as experts on their own situations, and to accept their affective experience—including their rage and anger—as part of that expertise.
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