Discourses available to Sullivan
the kinsey reports and the transsexual phenomenon
pp. 117-143
in: , Lou Sullivan diaries (1970-1980) and theories of sexual embodiment, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
While the Kinsey reports (1948 and 1953)—as they came to be known—neglected a distinction between transvestism and transsexuality, Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) made up for this omission. However, Benjamin focused his analyses on what he called "high intensity" transsexuals, in spite of his own descriptions of various types of trans experience. These texts normalized certain sexual embodiments while leaving others marginalized, if not impossible to conceive, and they were major influences on the context within which Sullivan was "coming out." Analyses and responses arising especially from trans studies, however, reveal limitations exercised upon trans people—even still today—especially by medical and psychiatric institutions. Given that those who are marginalized or impossible to conceive still manage to recognize their lack of representation in dominant discourses, though, the question then becomes how this is possible if embodiment is fully discursive, and further, how to negotiate between these different experiences of embodiment, from the materiality presumed by scientific approaches, to the model of discursivity and performativity employed in the humanities, to individual embodied experiences that include both rudimentary, sensory experience and concrete, lived situations.Excerpts from Sullivan's diaries accompany the theoretical discussion in a way that Sullivan himself might engage in the theory.