Abstract
It would not be going too far to say that contemporary trans subjects are trapped in the confessional. In order to access the medical and legal tools of transition, trans people are required to enact a ritualistic repetition of ‘their journey’ that amounts to a secularized form of religious confession. This essay turns to Renaissance lyric for another mode of trans confession, one that frustrates the basic purposes of feeding transgender affect into what Foucault calls an ‘endless mill of speech.’ Focusing on John Donne’s purposefully obscure engagements with religion and transition in ‘The Funerall,’ this essay argues that metaphysical poetry offers a form of trans confession that does not terminate in the medicalized techniques of social control.
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Notes
The iterability that structures this endless process of trans confession is aligned with Judith Butler’s framework for gender performativity, which amounts to ‘a regularized and constrained repetition of norms’ and a ‘ritual reiterated under and through constraint’ rather than a ‘singular “act” or event’ (1993, 95). My account, however, is less optimistic that the iterative ritual of disclosure will open up sites for destabilizing norms.
The question of who, precisely, is seen and in what ways has been the subject of much important work in trans studies, as in powerful studies by Beauchamp (2019) and Fischer (2019). For accounts of how capitalism and white supremacy structure trans visibility, see, among others, Spade (2015), Chen (2019), and Snorton (2018).
Aaron Kunin treats George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’ as such a list (2019, 24). For recent critical treatments of Donne’s poetry as confessional, see Conti (2014).
See for instance Stanley Fish (1990).
Elizabeth Harvey calls this Donne’s ‘Tootsie trick,’ a phrase that retains the poet and speaker’s essential maleness (1992, 32).
All citations of Donne's poetry are to Donne (1933).
Incidentally, such a reading replicates the logic at work in early diagnostic criteria for gender identity disorder, which struggled to separate the ‘true transsexuals’ from garden-variety homosexuals and sex freaks. On this history, see Meyerowitz (2002).
On the genderfluidity of angels, see Milton, who speculates in Paradise Lost that these ‘spirits when they please / Can either sex assume or both, so soft / And uncompounded is their essence pure’ (2005, 1.423–5).
On the genderfluidity of Christ, see Bynum (1982).
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Gordon, C. The sign you must not touch: Lyric obscurity and trans confession. Postmedieval 11, 195–203 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00172-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00172-x