Norms of Embodiment and Transgender Recognition: The “Wrong Body” Problem, the Taboo on Translocation, and the Case of Henry James

Abstract

This article begins with critics’ hostility toward Gilbert Osmond, the notorious villain of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881). It identifies this tradition as a response to Osmond's identity as a trans woman and to the mode of embodiment that Osmond demonstrates as one possible solution to the problem of the “wrong body.” The article's first half sketches the status of the wrong body in trans studies, where the concept is disfavored as reproducing a repressive ideology, in contrast to its characterization in Lacanian psychoanalysis as psychotic. The article demonstrates, nonetheless, in the principles of Lacanian theory the postulation of a class of subjects whose psychic sexuation as men or women does not match up with the symbolic sexual identity of their physical persons: subjects who cannot, therefore, assume their physical persons as their bodies (the article terms such embodiment “co-located”). It then develops a Lacanian analysis of the solution modeled by Osmond to the wrong body problem: “translocated embodiment,” in which a subject assumes as their body a sexed form other than their physical person. The second half of the article explores the operation of translocated embodiment in the Anglo-American leisure-class community of The Portrait of a Lady. The aestheticism of Gilbert Osmond, Ralph Touchett, and Edward Rosier is read as a historically specific instance of translocated embodiment. Social disfavor of their overt translocation drives James's three connoisseurs, as transgender subjects, to attempt covert translocation via heterosexual courtship and matrimony, aiming to secure advantageous representation in the form of cisgender women.