Error Free

Abstract

“Error,” in twentieth-century medical and scientific discourse, is bound up with diagnosing and understanding trans identifications in terms of wrong embodiment, or a FAAB/MAAB (female-assigned-at-birth/male-assigned-at-birth) body perceived within dominant biomedical perspectives as a mistake or as at odds with one's gender and bodily identity. Accordingly, trans-as-error functions in tandem with rubrics of identificatory, mental, and bodily disorders that have historically included nonheterosexual identities and intersexed bodies. As T. Benjamin Singer discusses in his work on photography, the medical gaze, and the trans-health model, trans as pathology — hence as an error to be corrected — has injurious ethical effects that usher in misunderstandings about nonnormatively embodied identities (2006: 602). By the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a range of trans identifications continue to be recognized via such notions of error, yet gender theorists and creative practitioners persist in reconceptualizing error as a mode of inhabitation and incorporation — so that “error” ultimately describes the movement away from a normatively transcendent model of embodiment. In The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo writes of female bodies as constituted “in error” and provides ways to think about the exclusions set up by feminist politics through a critique of social conformity (1995: 10–12). While the category of female has been associated with the grotesque other, so too have trans bodies become emblems of mutation and freakiness; but trans artists have, in the contemporary era, embraced such characterizations as an oppositional approach to inhabitation and cultural production.

These embodied aesthetics of error are readily apparent in photographer Del LaGrace Volcano's Sublime Mutations (2000), his collection of photographs that integrates vulgarity, disposability, and bodily flaws as explorations of transmasculine allure and value (Volcano 2012: 5–6; Halberstam 2005: 114–15). Emphasizing transfeminine embodiment, Zackary Drucker's confrontational video and performance art approaches “error” as a framework of transgressive desire and antinormativity. Her film You will never, ever be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man, and you will only get more masculine with each passing year (2008) aggressively reroutes and displaces transphobic rhetoric designating transfemininities as bad copies of cis femininities by showing two transwomen whose insults at each other culminate in sex. Invoking the psychoanalytic assessment of female embodiment as lack, Drucker's performance piece The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See (2009) gets the “nothing to see” “wrong” by displaying nonclassifiably female genitals that visibly show through women's underwear while audience members pluck visibly “errant” hair from the artist's body. Such rethinking of trans embodiment is also presented in Marie Losier's documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which features Genesis P-Orridge, known mainly for the 1970s industrial noise-music project Throbbing Gristle's use of broken instruments and manipulation of nonmusical objects for sound. In their Orlan-inspired “Pandrogyne” project, P-Orridge and lover Lady Jaye undergo a series of surgeries remaking themselves as invariably “wrong” versions of each other. The association of “error” with “trans” therefore develops as a radically productive misalignment of the positive/negative binary required by contemporary queer politics of the body.

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