Transgender: from Simone de Beauvoir to Lady Gagas penis

Sara R. Gallardo Mediated Identities: Gender, Ethnic and Class SS 2012 Universitt Potsdam

Contents
1. Introduction 2. Simone de Beauvoir and the phallocentric model 3. The new pornography: postpornography 4. Madonna, Lady Gaga and other examples of transgender representation 5. Conclusions 6. Bibliography

Introduction
Postfeminism proposes an overcoming of the concept of gender and sexuality that the dichotomy of feminist theories had not yet taken into account. In the field of postmodernism, the concept of pan-sexuality and transgender is a revolutionary way to destroy the difference between "man" and "woman" and also "difference feminism" which sought to equalize women to men within a model and ideology yet only masculine. These transgender ideas also leave behind the concept of "opposites", the concept of "dominated" and "subordinate" that the media need to perpetuate the established system. Media in a broad sense (advertising, film, television, social networks) use the concept of sex (not biological sex, but sexual act) as an object of consumption, so that the idea of sexuality is at all times in the public sphere. However, the concept of sexuality has changed radically in recent years. This essay aims to give an overview on this issue and analyze specific cases of commercialization of transgender concept through examples in music, fashion and art. Also, there will be reference to pornography as redoubt (residue) of the mass culture, which, however, is of crucial importance in the subject that will be treated. In this sense, the Playboy empire played a major role not only as a paradigm, but as the executor of a new sexuality, of a new way of mediating sexuality and to transform capitalism.

Simone de Beauvoir and the phallocentric model

"One is not born but rather becomes a woman". This sentence by Simone de Beauvoir condenses a part of her feminist philosophy, in which the French thinker means that being a woman is a cultural construction, a social production, an imposed reality, where there are very few roles and all of them in relation to men and projected onto a phallocentric social cast. As Stuart Hall said, and intellectuals like Judith Butler corroborate: identity is a problematic concept that should not be thought of as a historical fact but as a "production, which is never complete, but always in process" and that it is not constituted before, but while it is been represented. "Every entity is identical to itself," says the philosophical principle that the new sexual theories dare to question. Because, at what point are we identical to ourselves? Are we identical to what might have been if society had us not formed in a concrete idea and excluding gender and sexuality idea? Sexuality can be defined as the physical and psychological conditions and the behaviors through which individuals seek sexual pleasure. According to the World Health Organization, sexuality is a "central aspect of being human which includes sex, gender identities and gender roles, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy, reproduction and sexual orientation." It is also directly influenced by all the economic, political, religious, social, ethical, etc., factors of a society. Sexuality encompasses the "sex, gender identities and gender roles." What is sex, then? What determinates gender? Is sex the results offered by Google upon introducing the term? Is sex two genders, masculine and feminine? Does gender determinate sex? Is gender just a grammatical division?

Gender as a cultural construction

According to the American philosopher Judith Butler, mother of Queer theory, gender is undoubtedly a sociological or cultural concept, which seeks to impose an phallocentric heterosexual ideology, to divide people into male or female. This division has its origin in the assignment of certain roles and the "normalization" of heterosexuality. Thus, when a man does not do ones expectations placed on him as a man is said to be "effeminate". Or "male" attitudes are recognized in women that do not respond to their role of "woman" which society and politics

have assigned to them. What is revolutionary in Butlers philosophy is that she says that the idea of "sex" as a natural matter has taken shape within that binary notion of gender. She does not say that sex is not natural, she does not deny the materiality or biology of the body, but the sex is yet being defined within a given political (phallocentric heterosexual) system and it is organized in opposition of two ideas. Gender difference is, theoretically, inevitable, because there is a sex difference a priori. But she contradicts it saying that "sex as something natural" depends on socio-historical settings and gender norms are also subjectivity producers. That "women" collective who struggled for their release was actually a political construction. In the words of the Spanish philosopher Marisol Salanova, postpornography and performance expert, the work of Bulter "caused them to cast doubt on the category of" woman "or" women" and forced the feminist perspective to rethink their assumptions, and understand that "women" rather than a collective subject taken for granted, was a political signifier." The "women" are not going to fight for emancipation because they struggle from exclusive and preconceived ideas of gender. It is specifically this dichotomy (male / female, rich / poor, white / black) what media needs to perpetuate the established system: they need oppressor / subordinate dialectics to legitimize the system. Woman, Beauvoir had already said, is "the Other", she is the peripheral subject that allows to define the concept of man. That is her sole function: to complement the man and his concept. (As Stuart Hall says, every identity has a margin and is initially not defined, but is built exactly from what is missing in it). This process is seen in many other opposite concepts like "heterosexual" and "homosexual". The concept "homosexual" is relatively recent and serves to normalize heterosexual practice and to segregate and pathologize what does not follow these practices: everything peripheral is "homosexual." What follows from these texts which I refer to is a criticism of "equality feminism" which advocates "equality" of women, "putting them on the same level" to men, but continuing in a heterosexual cast dominated by them. That is, within this center is to be man, women (periphery) should enter his circle (center) to be equal. Gender does not arise as construction, it is assumed. It was inevitable, therefore, that to these new revolutionary theories had been assigned new names: post-feminism, queer theory, transgender studies and so on. According to Beatriz Preciado, "what is queer is opposed to equal policies derived from a biological notion of

"woman" or "sexual difference". It opposes Republican universalist policies that allow the "recognition" and impose the "integration" of the "differences" within the Republic. There is no sexual difference, but a multitude of differences, a cross-cutting sense of power relations, a variety of possibilities (powers) of life. These differences are not "representable", given that they are "monstrous" and they call into question, because of that, not only political representation schemes but also the systems of production of scientific knowledge of "normal" people. In this sense, the politics of queer crowds are so opposed to traditional political institutions that present themselves as sovereign and universally representative, as heterocentral sex-political epistemologies that still dominate the production of science. " If thanks to postfeminism, the dichotomy between man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual is diffused or non-existent, the era of new media is achieving that the difference between private and public life is smaller and smaller. Until now, and Playboy is the more paradigmatic example, in the representation of sexuality in pornography and in advertising, music videos or any other type of media representation the dominant idea was that of men. Even in a lesbian scene, the potential audience is always a man: the object that is being viewed is indeterminate (a heterosexual couple, a gay couple, a group of women, a woman and an animal, a woman and a dildo, etc.), but the look that is requested is the masculine one. Pornography had been allowed during the two World Wars as "strategic support to the troops," but at the end of these, had been banned again, because it represented a threat to the reconstruction of the heterosexual family in times of peace. After the Second World War Playboy managed to put folding photographs of naked women in the public sphere: the obscenity did not lie in the photos, but breaking into the public sphere with something that was previously considered to be private. Although it seems contradictory, the owner of the Playboy empire, Hugh Hefner, desfeminized domestic space and masculinized it: hence that he visually associated naked women with a domestic interior. Heterosexual eroticism ensured psychologically their readers that Playboy magazine was not a female or homosexual one. What Hefner did was to enter into a house all the values that were considered masculine: market, policy and information. The pleasure was and still is a side effect.

"Here the apartment was not a mere interior set, but an actual performative gender machine, capable of carrying out the transformation of the antiquated man in a playboy," says Preciado, a new masculinity that endures the twentieth century heterosexual crisis. The valid model after the Second World War was a heterosexual model that should rebuild the ruins of the war through its main traditional stronghold: the family. Escaping from the concept of man that is of use only for public life and that returns at night to his house organized by a female partner, Hefner conceived the male model eternally single, detached from those traditional values, which looked for his place in time when feminism was paying off. Playboy magazine was the forerunner of a new capitalism: multimedia capitalism. Here, the pharmacopornographic component is essential: it goes from a traditional capitalism to an economy of body control and production of subjectivity through synthetic consum materials, the marketing of endocrine substances for separating heterosexuality and reproduction, and finally, the transformation of pornography in mass culture." Hefner removed the borders between fiction pornography and reality and between private life (leisure) and public life (business): mansions, private jets and sexual/domestic gadgets are a reflection of that. Now then, although Playboy proposes a new pornographic model in postmodern society, the ideals in which they are based remain heterosexual. However, one of the success of Playboy in terms of marketing has been the inclusion of (young) women as potential consumers of products derived from the magazine. Playboy changed the heterosexual model, both man and woman (the woman went from being a housewife or the next door neighbour to be a bunny), and the pornography industry and media is still anchored in the already outdated but successful model.

The new pornography: the postpornography

On the other hand, just as postgender philosophy breaks with the traditional gender dichotomy, there already is what is called the postporn, which, defined by the Spanish group "Girls who like porn", is pornographic representation of "alternative" sexualities that are included in a different industry model. As the postporn movement arose exactly being part of postfeminist or queer activism, its ideal is largely political. The body is the first political space and before fighting against pornography through censorship, the key element is the representation of diverse sexualities.

Yet in the late nineteenth century, artists such as Claude Cahun played with the representation of the own body and with the self-portrait. Transvestism and representation of subjectivity through photography is a way to take over the body and using it, as we said, in a political manner. Subsequently we must stand out Sarah Lucas or Valie Export and Marina Abramowi too. Sarah Lucas (London, 1962) works primarily with the found object, for example fruits with clear sexual connotations. "In many of his works, she shows the male gaze scrutinizing the women who want or the women as object of desire and, in this process, she exaggerates so much male chauvinism that it is unmasked in her eyes. The artist seems to enjoy clearly the game between the gaze and the looked striking object," wrote Raimar Stange in the section dedicated to this artist in the book Women Artists of the XX and XXI centuries. More interesant is Valie Export, an Austrian artist, whose works include video installations, body performance, expanded cinema, photography, etcetera. In her 1968 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic), Valie Export entered an art cinema in Munich, wearing crotchless pants and brandishing a machine gun, she walked around the audience with her exposed genitalia at face level. The associated photographs were taken in 1969 in Vienna, by photographer Peter Hassmann. In 2005 Marina Abramowi, among many other works about the female body and the boundaries of gender, repeated the experiment by Valie Export in New York. These and some others of their artistic actions are included within the performance, the art understood as execution or compliance, where it is played with subjectivity (body) and with the public, which is such an important part of the experiment as the artist. One of the pioneers of postpornography was the actress Annie Sprinkle, who placed as subjects of pornographic representation the traditional passive "objects" of such representation: women, porn actors and actresses, whores, fags and dykes, perverse... Thus, she questions the aesthetic, political, narrative... codes of the visibility of their bodies and sexual practices, in short, of their sexuality. One of the premise of this postporn movement is actually this rethinking of pornographic aesthetics; the siliconate blonde bombshell as an object of desire against the active tomboy

subject. What these sex activists propose is that sex is beautiful in all its facets. Attitudes socially accepted as masculine on a biologically female adolescent often lead to insults that emphasize, above all, the supposed "ugliness" of her conduct, the unsightly point of being a transgender. As the collective XXBoys says: "Being sexy is the empowerment of the reappropriation of your body, how to understand and express your gender, is a mental state, being sexy is a decision." While the porn industry continues its economic course and postpornographic expressions remain being "residual", "peripheral", in the commercial field of music or fashion post-feminist or postgender theory is the order of the day and it is actually, in my view, one of the ways that one can open up and expand in a market with increasingly atomized and diverse individuals.

Madonna, Lady Gaga and other examples of transgender representation

Madonna's case is widely discussed in cultural studies as a marketing product in the service of post-capitalist consumerism, which, however, brings together all the "deviant" sexual and ideological ideas. According to Douglas Kellner, a theorist of the Frankfurt School, the performances of the Queen of Pop integrate "symbolic aspects that refer to different subcultural groups, including African Americans, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, feminists and other subjects that represent minority or subordinate positions, but "while it asks for the subversion and transgression is a promotional product to market forces." Since the sixties has emerged in the global culture a number of performers and models that emphasize their androgyny and play with it in their professional life. In the world of music, the clearest examples are David Bowie and Boy George. Today, Antony Hegarty, from Antony and the Johnsons, who says that he feels himself in a middle ground between being male and being female, and the controversial Lady Gaga are two very different faces of this trend to the representation of sexuality. However, we can say that Lady Gaga's case is special, because of the fact of cross-dressing is part of her performance, her marketing strategy, similar to Madonna. Within this purpose we can include the rumor of her possible hermaphroditism. In other cases, such as Tracy Chapman, the fact of being "ambiguous" is given by nature (she does not autorepresent to manufacture a product). The music video by Lady Gaga Born this way (one of her greatest hits) it is very interesting,

because she plays all the time with the concept of woman and man in the images and in the lyrics she said that "There's nothin wrong with lovin who you are / She said, "'cause he made you perfect, babe" (sic). In two or three different moments, Lady Gaga appeared with black clothes, sitting in a chair, holding a machine gun, in a very closed imitation of Valie Export's performance. It can be read as a tribute, because Lady Gaga does not hide her admiration to the austrian artist: she has admitted it in some interviews. In the fashion world one of the pioneers was Kate Moss, who with his sweet boy face and his flat chest revolutionized the catwalk world in the late 80's. Grace Jones, a decade before, not only questioned both racial and sexual stereotypes. Her case is another example of how the ambiguity is not only the travesty of a woman who accentuates her male features or a man who does the same with his feminine traits (woman and man still as traditional concepts), but what her image suggests a man with feminine features, which also uses makeup, when their biological sex is actually female. A woman who looks like a man who looks like a woman. Current examples of fashion world are the most representative, because it is one field that has been slow to start to blur the traditional distinction of gender through clothing, although it can be said that already in the 20's, from Flapper movement, followed by actresses like Louise Brooks and Marlene Dietrich, one could see a fledgling start, which did not explode until years after the Second World War. Today, the Spanish Bimba Bos, muse of designer David Delfin and the top model James Varley, as man-woman, are two special cases. Bimba has always been characterized by extreme masculinity, which continues to enhance his/her appeal. In the Goya awards show 2010 (two thousand ten) appeared dressed as David Bowie, which, again, is groundbreaking: a girl that blends masculine in a man who enhances his femininity. But the supermodel that has aroused most admiration and polemic in this regard has been the Bosnian Andrej Pejic, who is considered the perfect androgynous because his/her Venusian beauty is both feminine and masculine. He was discovered by Jean-Paul Gaultier in 2011 (two thousand eleven) and since then he worked on catwalks around the world as a model of both sexes. FHM magazine placed him among the 100 (one hundred) most beautiful women in the world over the aforementioned Lady Gaga. Not so innovative that fact, as the idea of the media are letting in since a couple of decades on

the "normal" label new sexual values (the transgender) through these examples of mass culture, giving not only sexual legitimate freedom but also attractivity. This will surely be an upward trend in the coming years, helped, in turn, for a digital world that lowers the boundaries between public and private life and that atomizes potential public to make it to little fragmented individuals with sexualities, ideologies and own mentalities.

Conclusions
Just as the media represent and are influenced by the tastes and values of society, society is influenced by the presence and the mass distribution of information. Although the traditional division man / woman is deeply rooted in many communities and multisexual representations remain isolated or exceptional, both in the postporn as in art, the public increasingly accepted it as "transgender" not as something strange or residual, but as part of the multiple sexuality in a diverse society. Of course the media use the label "weird" or "diverted" to define these idols (singers, topmodels...) or they empathize the trait that makes them different. That is because they need dichotomies to keep their system. However, unlike other groups: the explosive and sexy girls, homosexuals, etc., the media also grant sexual attraction to the individuals listed there, but they are not included in a particular group. That is, they have some freedom within the media to be presented as specific individuals, with a non-defined gender. Nobody questions what kind of sexuality (sexual relations) they prefer. Here the strict division homosexual / heterosexual is meaningless, perhaps the label "LGBT" (Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) may be more appropriate, but this acronym attempts to define in four letters the diversity of human sexuality, that not coincides with the "heterosexual" concept. In other words, the society is not used to show the nontraditional sexual tendency, but the media are changing this proclivity, maybe not always intended to show the diversity, just to get audience. However, what they do has some consequences, that we will see in the next years.

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