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Merleau-Ponty, Trans Philosophy, and the Ambiguous Body

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Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s seminal book, Phenomenology of Perception, stands as a positive resource for articulating both trans experiences and trans identities within both a wrong-body model and a multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy. I begin my paper by highlighting the complex relation between Talia Bettcher’s proposed multiple worlds of sense model and the wrong-body model. As the dismissal of either model appears undesirable, I suggest that we attempt to combine the two models. To do this, I turn to Georgia Warnke’s contextual understanding of identity as I ultimately juxtapose her work with Merleau-Ponty in order to give a positive account of trans identities that will function as a bridge between Merleau-Ponty and Bettcher. I then turn to discuss the basic ideas within Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception that are used to ground Rubin’s wrong-body model. As I contend that Merleau-Ponty has more to offer what Rubin attributes to him, I then turn to key passages concerning Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the sexual schema and the intrinsic ambiguity of the body. By incorporating both concepts into a discussion of trans philosophy, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a non-essentialist account of sexuality that both phenomenologically legitimates and grounds the wide spectrum of trans experiences and trans identities as well as Warnke’s contextual identity through, what I call, our ambiguous-being-in-the-world. Such an account, I conclude, makes possible a combined wrong-body model and multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy.

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Notes

  1. For a more complete account of reality enforcement, see “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion” by Talia Bettcher (2007).

  2. Bettcher acknowledges phenomenology as a meaningful methodological approach for engaging in trans philosophy (Bettcher 2019: 655).

  3. Nataša Jokić-Begić et al. indicate issues of pathologizing trans identities as they point out how in countries wherein one’s being transsexual is understood as a psychiatric disorder, as opposed to a form of gender variation, “transsexual persons are confronted with an additional set of challenges due to lack of regulation, lack of professional expertise in the area of trans health, and difficult pathways for accessing and arranging treatment” (Jokić-Begić et al. 2014: 8).

  4. Here Bettcher cites María Lugones’s Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions pp. 21.

  5. All names quoted within Monsour and Rawlins are pseudonyms selected by each person within their study (Monsour and Rawlins 2014: 17).

  6. Rubin reports that of the twenty-two men he represents within his work, several have chosen to use their real names (Rubin 2003: 5). In order to respect the wishes of those who do want to remain pseudonymous, it is not clear when exactly Rubin quotes an interviewee by their real name or a pseudonym.

  7. Although Warnke’s contextual account of identity gives a strong Derridean feel, we will see in the next section that her account can be easily captured by Merleau-Ponty.

  8. Bettcher offers an almost equally compelling account of identity through her account of “existential self-identity” (see Bettcher 2009). However, my reason for adopting Warnke’s account over Bettcher’s is grounded in Warnke’s emphasis on the contextuality of identity, which I believe is more readily adaptable to a multiple worlds of sense account, whereas Bettcher’s account is more engaged in articulating an account of identity that properly recognizes a person’s first-person authority over their gender.

  9. All translations of Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception are my own. As such, all references therein are to the original French.

  10. For a discussion on the differences and similarities between Husserl’s account of the body and Merleau-Ponty’s, see Taylor Carman (1999).

  11. Merleau-Ponty’s relation with Gestalt theory, wherein the subject is always already intertwined within the world, taken as a whole, and in such a way that the dividing line between subject-object-world categories begins to be dismantled, is evident throughout his carrier as a philosopher. This can be seen as early as The Structure of Behavior (1942), continued in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and found re-envisioned in his concept of flesh in The Visible and the Invisible (1946). For accounts of Merleau-Ponty’s relation with Gestalt theory and the ways in which it informs the development of his thought, see Sheredos (2017), Gerçek (2020) and Barbaras (2006).

  12. Although Merleau-Ponty’s methodological approach for uncovering the structures of the phenomenal body is explicitly attributed to Husserl (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 13), it is, in my opinion, more in tune with Heidegger’s approach than Husserl’s. For Heidegger, we uncover the various ways in which an object can be (qua ready-to-hand and present-at-hand) and its embeddedness within an environment by tending to what we can learn when tools break, are wrong for the current task, or turn up missing. Likewise, we can uncover the underlying care structure of Da-sein through its breakdown within the world in the event of Angst (see Heidegger 1992: §23 and §30; Heidegger 1962: Ch. III and Ch. V of Division I). In a similar fashion, Merleau-Ponty looks at the various ways in which the body experiences a breakdown in order to illuminate various structures of the unified healthy body.

  13. I think it is important to fully recognize that Merleau-Ponty expressly notes that he is intentionally using various pathologies to perform his existential analytic. Commentators widely recognize Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of these individuals as suffering from various pathological conditions (Cañas 2019: 221 n.28; Carman 1999: 220; Dreyfus and Todes 1962: 561; Foultier 2013: 770; Sheredos 2017: 196; Wieseler 2018: 89). Rubin, however, appears to imply that it is not so much Merleau-Ponty who pathologizes these experiences, but the contemporary physiologists and psychologists (Rubin 1998: 269). This point is also important for Foultier who argues that Butler’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty hinges on her misreading Schneider as a pathological example ( Foultier 2013: 773).

  14. Here Warnke cites Jan Morris’s memoir Conundrum pp. 3, Raymond Thompson from Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality pp. 77, and Jennifer Boylan from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders pp. 21.

  15. The inclusion of erogenous zones is of particular interest insofar as I believe it allows Merleau-Ponty to make sense of particular trans experiences that necessitate imagined body parts, as Butler suggests (Butler 1999: 90). If one’s erogenous zone is not determined by a given part of the body but is manifest by our sexual schema, then it does not immediately appear to be unthinkable that our particular sexual schema will manifest erogenous zones that do not map on to our body in perfect one-to-one relations with particular organs. Clearly, Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the phenomenal body and the corporeal body help justify and account for the possibility of such experiences. That is, it does not seem implausible on Merleau-Ponty’s account for one’s sexual schema to take shape in a manner that brings one to have sexual pleasures that require imagined appendages. Indeed, in the same way the cane can become incorporated within the phenomenal body for someone who is visually impaired (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 178), so too could various objects, both imaginative and real, be incorporated within the sexual schema.

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    Seth Daves

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Daves, S. Merleau-Ponty, Trans Philosophy, and the Ambiguous Body. Hum Stud 44, 529–557 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09590-7

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