12
Gayle Salamon wrestles with this question in her phenomenology of transgender bodies,
Assuming a Body. In the introduction, she writes, “the production of normative gender itself relies on a
disjunction between the ‘felt sense’ of the body and the body’s corporeal contours and that this
disjunction need not be viewed as a pathological structure.” 38 Normative gender, as she uses the term,
refers to a sense of gender derivative of sexual difference, since she
views the conflation of gender with sexuality and sexual expression
as a problem. 39 Drawing from the insights of Merleau-Ponty,
Salamon criticizes philosophical reliance on materiality when
defining the body in favor of a Butlerian approach to the body as
desire (and in this way it transcends sexual difference): desire, when
housed in my body becomes my body; likewise, my body becomes
desire. 40 This concept is called transposition. She further describes it
as a process of yearning by which the body loses its solidity and,
41
paradoxically, the desire owns me. She approaches a unique variant on the concept of body as
relationality, reminiscent of Butler’s writings.
Body as desire is never merely body as desire. The desire always inclines the body, therefore the
person, towards another object or person. The desiring person becomes spread out as he or she lives
the desire that he or she is; for example, Salamon writes, “my arm, if I reach out, is experienced
phenomenologically less in its function as my arm and more in its function as towards you.” 42 This depth
of relationality contextualizes the concept of “felt sense” by which the body means simultaneously mind
and the material it acts through, because, as the cliché phrase rightly points out ‘you can’t have one
without the other.’ The physical body with its sexual difference between sexes is real, yet a sexual
difference emphasizing compatible parts via genitalia – a teleological understanding of gender –
misunderstands the significance of the body as a whole.
The popular understanding of gender does not appeal to a teleological principle, largely because
it rejects a biological-reductionist account of natural law. The teleological principle appears to reduce
bodily significance to biology, generating a conflict between body and mind for many transgender
people. In the trans-friendly, revised account of natural law, the meaning of ‘natural’ expands to include
all sorts of bodily conditions and sexual behaviors, allowing for a justified “felt” sense of the body
unencumbered by weighty materialism (real sexual difference between genitalia). Within this “felt”
experience, the mental image of oneself takes priority over bodily importance. Gayle Salamon
articulates this position well when she writes, “I can only have access to my body through the mental
image that I have of my body, an image that is extremely fluid and possesses only a tenuous cohesion to
38
Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), 2.
39
Ibid. 45.
40
Ibid, 52.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid, 54.