Read Online Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism by Laurie Penny - Free Book Online
Authors: Laurie Penny
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towards: an end to the damaging and demeaning tyranny of gender stereotypes and a coherent resistance to bodily marginalisation.
What part of female experience do trans women not know? How to bleed between the legs? How to adopt a posture of subservience in order to be accepted as one’s felt gender? How to ape commercial sexuality and spend money on the trappings of femininity as sanctioned by the overculture? How to perform, and how to long for the freedom to be oneself without having to perform? Trans women know all of these things, many of them better than cis women, because they have had to fight at every turn even for the constrained right to consumer femininity. All women have to fight for gender capital: trans women merely start out in debit.
The one thing that most trans women largely do not experience is reproductive tyranny, the obscenity of living in a culture that tries to stamp itself all over one’s womb and clamp itself around one’s ovaries and shame XX-genotype women for owning bodies that can create new life. I have stood on too many protest lines beside transsexual women, screaming together for the right to legal abortion on demand after forty years of fighting, to imagine for one second that this is a part of women’s oppression that trans women do not understand. The struggle for medical and legal recognition of trans women’s needs and the struggle for medical and legal recognition of a woman’s right to choose are part of the same dialectic of wresting back state control over women’s bodies.
Trans women and transvestites are despised by gender fascists because they do something unforgivable: they take the rules of the game and they make them explicit. They show that femininity is a mode of being that can and must be purchased. They take the sexual sell and they make it manifest, with the courage and ingenuity that often comes from feeling oneself an outsider from the first. And for this reason, almost as a form of patriarchal revenge, violence is enacted upon the bodies of trans women with frequency and force experienced by no other group of women apart from those who work in the sex trade.
Transsexual women and women who sell sex own bodies which are explicitly – rather than implicitly – part of the brutal capitalist exchange of gender signs. It is seen as somehow apt that these women should apologise for themselves. It is seen as somehow understandable that violence should be done to them on a scale unimaginable even for cis women. Across the world, prostitutes and transsexual women are murdered at horrifying rates. In a recent report for the police district of Columbia, it was estimated that 10-20% of all violent hate crime was targeted at trans women, despite the relatively small size of the trans community in the area. 15 Trans women are murdered so frequently that since 1998, a dedicated day of remembrance has been held every year on November the 20th to draw international attention to the problem of violence against trans people.
Writer and trans activist Julia Serano memorably called attention to trans women as the “whipping girls” of Western culture. 16 The bodies of transsexual women are marginalised and punished precisely because they expose the mechanisms by which the modern carapace of gender capital is maintained, threatening its hold over women’s bodies.
4
Dirty Work
The most elementary demand is not the right to work or receive equal pay for work, but the right to equal work itself
Juliet Mitchell
Marginalised bodies do marginalised work. Bodies that are arrogated and controlled can be persuaded to do work that is underpaid and overlooked. Slavemaking is a social science, and nowhere is that science more expertly demonstrated than in the continued ability of contemporary industrial culture to persuade women perform the vast majority of vital domestic and caring labour without expecting reward or payment.
After a century of
What part of female experience do trans women not know? How to bleed between the legs? How to adopt a posture of subservience in order to be accepted as one’s felt gender? How to ape commercial sexuality and spend money on the trappings of femininity as sanctioned by the overculture? How to perform, and how to long for the freedom to be oneself without having to perform? Trans women know all of these things, many of them better than cis women, because they have had to fight at every turn even for the constrained right to consumer femininity. All women have to fight for gender capital: trans women merely start out in debit.
The one thing that most trans women largely do not experience is reproductive tyranny, the obscenity of living in a culture that tries to stamp itself all over one’s womb and clamp itself around one’s ovaries and shame XX-genotype women for owning bodies that can create new life. I have stood on too many protest lines beside transsexual women, screaming together for the right to legal abortion on demand after forty years of fighting, to imagine for one second that this is a part of women’s oppression that trans women do not understand. The struggle for medical and legal recognition of trans women’s needs and the struggle for medical and legal recognition of a woman’s right to choose are part of the same dialectic of wresting back state control over women’s bodies.
Trans women and transvestites are despised by gender fascists because they do something unforgivable: they take the rules of the game and they make them explicit. They show that femininity is a mode of being that can and must be purchased. They take the sexual sell and they make it manifest, with the courage and ingenuity that often comes from feeling oneself an outsider from the first. And for this reason, almost as a form of patriarchal revenge, violence is enacted upon the bodies of trans women with frequency and force experienced by no other group of women apart from those who work in the sex trade.
Transsexual women and women who sell sex own bodies which are explicitly – rather than implicitly – part of the brutal capitalist exchange of gender signs. It is seen as somehow apt that these women should apologise for themselves. It is seen as somehow understandable that violence should be done to them on a scale unimaginable even for cis women. Across the world, prostitutes and transsexual women are murdered at horrifying rates. In a recent report for the police district of Columbia, it was estimated that 10-20% of all violent hate crime was targeted at trans women, despite the relatively small size of the trans community in the area. 15 Trans women are murdered so frequently that since 1998, a dedicated day of remembrance has been held every year on November the 20th to draw international attention to the problem of violence against trans people.
Writer and trans activist Julia Serano memorably called attention to trans women as the “whipping girls” of Western culture. 16 The bodies of transsexual women are marginalised and punished precisely because they expose the mechanisms by which the modern carapace of gender capital is maintained, threatening its hold over women’s bodies.
4
Dirty Work
The most elementary demand is not the right to work or receive equal pay for work, but the right to equal work itself
Juliet Mitchell
Marginalised bodies do marginalised work. Bodies that are arrogated and controlled can be persuaded to do work that is underpaid and overlooked. Slavemaking is a social science, and nowhere is that science more expertly demonstrated than in the continued ability of contemporary industrial culture to persuade women perform the vast majority of vital domestic and caring labour without expecting reward or payment.
After a century of
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