Body Genres
the unique positionality of queer and trans writers in articulating the erotic
I first encountered feminist film theorist Linda Williams’ work nearly twenty years ago, as an undergraduate film studies major, in reading her foundational 1991 essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” The essay begins by recognizing a common issue in the rhetoric behind the critique of certain films, namely that the presence of sex, violence, and emotion therein is often dismissed as excessive and possessing no logic beyond the imperative to excite. The films in question lean generically towards the lowbrow, ranging from horror to pornography to melodrama, and it’s true that compared to more classical cinematic genres, these films are certainly sensationalist. But Williams has a brilliant insight, here—she argues that for these “body genres,” excess is precisely the point.
While I will not be sketching out the remainder of Williams’ argument in this post, I want to rest for a moment here. I’m interested in this opening strand of William’s argument because the way she articulates how critics have written about these “excessive” genres bears a striking similarity to how right-wingers and reactionaries all across the anglophone sphere have talked about queer and trans people.
You’ve probably heard these sentiments, even if you don’t think that you have. They underly every complaint of “well, I don’t mind what people do in the privacy of their own homes, but do they have to be so in-your-face about it all the time?” The fact is, just existing as a queer and/or trans person can be, and often is, flagged as obscene, pornographic, and illicit—just look at the boom of legislation targeting trans and gender non-conforming people (particularly trans women) moving through state legislatures across the so-called U.S. today, not to mention the federal directives ensuring that trans people will be misgendered on any federal documentation, such as passports.
An approach some queer and trans people and organizations have taken is one that counters this rhetoric through direct opposition—we’re not obscene, we’re just trying to live our lives. While I sympathize with this critique in its aims against dehumanization, I’m simultaneously somewhat wary of any approach that functions by carving out an Other to which we can contrast ourselves. If we’re not obscene, then something—or someone—else must be, and implicitly that something or someone is then denigrated in our place. I don’t think that the path to queer and trans liberation should be paved by excising the pornographic, no matter how we define it. I think that might actually play right into their hands.
What I think needs to happen is a careful examination of queer and trans cultural attitudes to normativity. This is hardly a new charge; queer/trans self-proclaimed perverts and deviants have existed and have been fighting the good fight against assimilation into dominant straight and cis culture for a long time. Because—and this gets us back to Linda Williams’ intervention—what if the excess is actually the point?
The concept of the erotic can be very useful for us here. I love how Lucie Fielding uses it in the new second edition version of her book Trans Sex: Nurturing Trans Erotic Embodiment and Gender-Pleasure, where she invokes it “with the intention of speaking of playfulness, sensuality, kink, relationships, embodiments, and intimacies that include the sexual but are not limited to sex, the sexual, or sexual energies.” She continues: “The erotic is a creative, a generative force, and also an unruly, un-settling, ‘destabilizing,’ and deliciously ungovernable one.”
While of course engagement with the erotic is hardly limited to queer and trans people, many of us, at least to some degree, are rooted in some kind of relationship to erotic embodiment because we’ve had to orient to it just by virtue of being excluded from normative constructs of what actually constitutes bodies, gender, and sexuality to begin with. Until relatively recently, the standard heterosexual timeline running from dating to marriage wasn’t even available to queer people, and many still desire today to live their lives moving towards an entirely different horizon of love.
All of this is to say, queer and trans people often orient to the erotic—in the broad sense Fielding describes it, which she grounds in the three beautifully unlikely bedfellows of psychoanalysis, Audre Lorde, and recent writings on asexuality—in a manner that takes a different shape from societal expectations. Because of this, queer and trans writers are in some ways uniquely positioned to address the erotic in our work.
As a queer and trans developmental editor, I support the writing and revision process by reading both fiction and nonfiction through a lens of sensory specificity. I work particularly with writers who want to ground their narratives in embodiment and the erotic—in the broadest sense of the term, across orientation and expression—and my approach supports queer and trans authors to feel seen with regard to their own lived experience and, for fiction writers, the imagined, yet no less vibrant, lives of their characters.
If you’re a queer and/or trans1 writer working on something right now, big or small, and you feel like you might benefit from editorial support or coaching, stay tuned for ways you can work with me in the upcoming weeks.
or ally who’d like to learn more about portraying embodiment and eroticism in your work from someone with a queer/trans perspective!