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The Body and Consumption

With the body, obvious differences can be seen among the trans communities found within these works. Specifically, temporary versus permanent modification. This debate is an aspect of conflicts on coming out or not.  On the side of temporality, products which affirmed feminity while still being temporary include many advertisements for ways to appear more feminine. With this, newsletters and conferences are filled with advertisements for breast forms and shapewear, to give one a ‘feminine’ chest or wide hips. (1)  Beyond the physical dimensions of the body, workshops on one’s voice, posture, walk, and way of speaking could be found across conferences. (2) A desire to appear cis-normative feminine was thus clear, but one can also see temporality in both the shapewear and the lessons on walk and voice. Curiously, the voice and walk lessons transcend the spectrum of trans women, the gender variant, and cross-dressing men, as these lessons were marketed to each group. Typically, either as a means of enhancing one’s femininity, or to improve the realism of cross-dressing.

            With the body, itself, temporality becomes even more paramount. Workshops on coming out at work or to one’s family or spouse join with the same topic on periodicals to be clearly important in the eyes of consumers. (3) Explaining one's trans self and trans body was an issue of clearly intense discourse, with the conference S.P.I.C.E focusing on reconciling cisgender spouses to cross dressing or trans partners.  (4)

Contrasting with the emphasis on temporality was the singular emphasis on SRS as a means of legitimating one as a ‘real woman.’ Getting, ‘the surgery,’ was an area of intense focus across the pages and rooms of the trans community, with the New Woman Conference centering on trans women that have had SRS. (5) Works like Fanfare speak to SRS as the difference between trans women, or in this case transsexuals and transgender people. While beyond the scope of this project, the debate over SRS continues within the trans community, with many experiencing gender dysphoria over their genitals but many not. However, of importance with here is a clear emphasis on SRS as the final step or end goal for the gender variant.

Bibliography

  1. Illusion. “The Ultimate Illusion.” En Femme, October, 1990, 6. Accessed April 17, 2017. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/nc580m70f.
  2. Be All You Want to Be Weekend. “Seminars and Workshops.” Be All You Want to Be Weekend. June, 1997, 2. Accessed April 11, 2017. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/bk128998h.
  3. Be All You Want to Be Weekend. “Joint Session: Male to Female, Female to Male.” Be All You Want to Be Weekend. June, 1993, 2. Accessed April 11, 2017. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/7s75dc44n.
  4. Spouses/Partners’ International Conference for Education. “A Wilderness Adventure.” Spouses/Partners’ International Conference for Education. 1999,1. Accessed April 28, 2017.  https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/3r074v01q.
  5. Denny, Dallas. “A Word From the Editor.” Rites of Passage. Winter, 1992, 3. Accessed May 5, 2017. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/h989r323x.
  6. Phaedra, Kelly. “Castration is it for you?” Fanfare, January, 1988, 7-8. Accessed online April 15, 2017. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/0z708w42x. 
The Body and Consumption