Provincializing Cisness (Emma Heaney, NYU)

This talk traces the itinerary of the bourgeois ideology of cisness from its late nineteenth-century origin through the transsexual century that follows. Doing so provincializes Foucault’s account of the mid-nineteenth-century incorporation of perversions into taxonomies and identities, the homosexual “species” chief among them. The broader historical realignment is the proliferation of the idea that bodies come in two mutually exclusive and compatible types and that sex (both the act and the identity) is the expression of that morphological, hormonal, and chromosomal reality. The spread of this bourgeois colonial ideology required disappearing social categories and collective lifeways into the psychiatric hospital, the prison cell, the biopolitical category of lumpen life, and, in some cases, the miasma of an abruptly produced and enforced cultural amnesia. This analysis contradicts the easily debunked assertion that “the gender binary is Western” with a history of cisness as a technology of bourgeois self-legitimization that colonizes both externally and internally, taking as its targets both the projected perversions of the non-West and the proletarian and racialized populations of the metropole. The talk’s provocation is the observation that following key moments of change to the social experience of sex precipitated by feminist and gay political struggle, cisness was reinvigorated as a way to contain the revolutionary potential of those movements.