Palinode: The Heteronormative Re/production of Transsexual

Authors

Jodi Kaufman, Georgia State UniversityFollow

Abstract

This project began at the intersection of several conversations: Recently Jay Prosser (2005) wrote a palinode of his analysis of Del Lagrace's photograph of the genitals of a female -to-male transsexual. Recanting his original reading of the photograph as a referent directly linked to "male," Prosser re-read the photograph, suggesting "the referent [is] unsuturable with the signifier," in other words concluding that transsexuality...is...irreconcilable...within gender representation" (p. 176). This idea of a palinode caught my attention. How could I re-read my data to realize what was lost in the original, to find that which exceeded the bounds of signification so I might further glimpse the real (Prosser, 2005)? Concurrently, I was reading Pink's (2004) call to use hypertext as a means to critically reflect on the way arguments are constructed, and MacDougall's (2006) discussion on how the mode of representation influences meaning. Swimming with these thoughts, I began to use writing in and through Storyspace, a self-publishing hypertext program, as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) to write this palinode.

Keywords

Narrative Inquiry, Transsexual, Hypertext, Poststructural Methods, and Data Analysis

Publication Date

6-1-2008

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2008.1591

Recommended APA Citation

Kaufman, J. (2008). Palinode: The Heteronormative Re/production of Transsexual. The Qualitative Report, 13(2), 151-151. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2008.1591