Trans-lating the Monster: Transgender Affect and Frankenstein

The monster is a ubiquitous figure in transgender rhetorics. Mary Shelley’s nameless creature, who has circulated under the name of his scientistcreator ‘Frankenstein’ since the 1830s, is often the specific trope used to cast transgender people as “monstrous, crazy, or less than human” (Rubin 12). Shelley’s nameless creature has been used to denounce transgender people as “synthetic products” of a “medical empire” (Raymond 12, 165) and as products of a “Frankenstein phenomenon” of “ghoulish gynaecologists” (Daly 69, 70). References to Frankenstein also frequently appear in transgender narratives and trans-affirmative scholarship (Barad, Cromwell, Noble), from titles like Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” to Rebecca Duke’s “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ Intelligible” and from memoir (Bono, Breedlove, Link & Raz, McBee) to poetry (Cannon, Ladin). For artist Anthony Clair Wagner, struggling with ‘monster,’ “this derogatory word,” is about nothing less than the question: “How can we own the transgender imaginary?” (341). The particularly prominent, affectively intense place of Frankenstein in the transgender imaginary is the starting point for this essay. While transphobic uses of Frankenstein’s monster as a trope generally draw on ideas of monstrous bodies and physical monstrosity, transgender metaphors of the monster use his rage-fueled agency to carve out a transgender speaking position in the face of the silencing gestures of transphobia. Trans studies scholar Harlan Weaver, for example, notes: “Stryker’s essay has made an indelible mark in transgender theories in the ways it takes up the monster’s rage as a means to elucidate a new form of doing and understanding trans bodies” (133). Rage is not the only means of understanding trans affect through Frankenstein, however. As a figure laden with negative affect, the monster offers transgender readers a way of addressing feelings of shame, gender dysphoria, and alienation from heteronormative gender and sexuality. Stryker uses the monster as a figure of bodily