What constitutes reality can never be fully realized by the embodied subject. Because we live our bodies our perspective is where we locate ourselves in the world. Perception is “the midway between mind and body that requires the functioning of both” (Lived Bodies). It is through our bodies that we develop a relationship to other objects, but since we are our bodies we are unable to fully access it or see it as an object. Instead, we rely on the perception of other subject-objects and mirrors, which reflect back the “real” image others see. However, we can never really know how others perceive us, and we can never really perceive our bodies because the body is an experience. Merleau-Ponty argues that the body does not simply take up space like an object does, but rather, the body inhabits space and “we transport it without instruments” (Lived Bodies). A person is the conjunction of mind and body, and I believe that people who have Anorexia Nervosa or Gender Identity Disorder experience a separation between mind and body so that they desire to alter their bodies to mimic the “true” person they believe rests in the mind. Both of these disorders hyper-objectify the body, as the body is thought to be a prison that prevents the “actual” person from being realized.
The root of Anorexia and GID is a feeling of being trapped in the wrong body. Both disorders seek an identity to become, but there is a question of where identity is located or if it even has a location. People with Anorexia or GID know who or what they want to become and that if they want this becoming to be perceived by others, they have to reflect it in their visible bodies; they believe that who they really are is invisible unless it can be seen by others, which, in reality, is true. It’s not enough to feel something, you have to be it, and for others to recognize what or who you are, your identity has to be perceptible. Merleau-Ponty calls this extroceptively perceived image the “specular image.” While everyone recognizes the “specular image” and internalizes it as a double of themselves, I would argue that someone with Anorexia or GID not only internalizes this image, but accepts it as reality. When she looks in the mirror she comes face-to-face with what is visible to others, and she desires to change the body because what others visually perceive is not a reflection of who she believes herself to be. For instance, although Judith Butler states that gender is a performance, if a man who believes himself to really be a woman exerts feminine behaviors even though he is visually perceived to be male because of his body, he is not then perceived to be a woman, but rather, a homosexual or even a freak.
In the movie Transamerica, the main character, Brie Osborne, is becoming woman or, rather, the idea of woman. The identity of Brie Osborne is hyperfeminized in both mind and body to the point where she is unmistakably female to anyone who does not know that Brie was once Stanley. Brie is almost entirely woman in body, except that she still possesses a phallus, and the movie begins with Brie trying to attain signatures from both her medical doctor and her therapist assuring that she does in fact have Gender Identity Disorder and needs to have the surgery that will complete her becoming. While Brie still has a phallus she is both Brie and Stanley. Brie attributes Stanley to the body, to the corporeal and material. Brie is her mind, or who she really is. She refers to Stanley in the third person because he is not her. Stanley is only what her body used to be, but when the surgery is complete she will be Brie Osborne in mind, body, and perception. I question, however, the use of surgery to cure a mental illness. It completes and fulfills the person’s desire, but is the desire even healthy? Is it healthy to want to become something other than who you are? But then again, who are you?
According to Phenomenology we are our bodies, and “the body is crucial for understanding subjectivity” (Salamon). Brie wants the surgery so she can escape Stanley and his life. When Brie finds out that Stanley fathered a son, her therapist is unable to give her permission to have the surgery unless she goes to help her son, who was in prison for illegal drug use and prostitution. Brie becomes defensive because her alleged son was a part of Stanley’s life, to which her therapist responds, “Stanley’s life is your life.” Merleau-Ponty claims that the body and sexual schema are temporal and inescapable. They extend into the past and future so that desire is always in a “futural mode,” and is shaped by the past. It seems that allowing Brie to have the surgery reifies the notion that there is a male brain and a female brain, and that by a person changing their body they are escaping their past.
Someone who has Anorexia Nervosa is never able to complete or fulfill her desire, either because she is forced to seek medical attention or because her desire is physically unattainable, as her body is just never “good” enough. A female Anorexic’s starvation and perfectionism are physical expressions of her hyperfeminization. The anorexic wants to make her body unmistakably thin because she knows she is always being looked at, always being perceived, and she is terrified of being perceived as fat.
The anorexic’s body is an object in that she feels that if her body is not thin enough, it will take up too much space. She does not consider herself an embodied subject, and so she thinks that she takes up space rather than inhabit it. But the Anorexic does not desire a gendered body; in fact she comes to fear what makes her body perceptively female. Although the female Anorexic does not consciously desire a gendered body, her starvation defeminizes her body and causes it to become more perceptively masculine. The Anorexic body loses so much necessary fat that a soft coating of hair grows to keep the body warm; the body loses its feminine shape and curves; the body ceases to menstruate and even ceases to produce estrogen; and the Anorexic body becomes absent of breasts, the female body part that universally signifies a woman’s body. It would seem that the female Anorexic desires to become male. The female Anorexic desires to become a body without organs. She desires to erase any signification on her body. She wants to hide, go undetected. The female Anorexic is afraid of being perceived.
Although Anorexia and Gender Identity Disorder are both desires to alter the body to reflect true selves, the desire is not the same. A person with GID does not want to hide from the world or desire to be unperceived, but rather desires to be perceived as something different. In Kim Hall’s essay Queer Breasted Experience, she writes that feminism should not focus on how our bodies are our selves, but to instead focus on how we can make our bodies our selves. Brie wanted to feel and be perceived as a woman, and so she was replacing the phallus – the body part that signifies the male body – with breasts and a vagina. The body the person with GID wishes to create is familiar. Before the sexual reassignment surgery is complete the body is ambiguous, but once it is complete the body is recognizable because it conforms to a perceptible sexual category. But the Anorexic woman’s behavior is actually destructive. The Anorexic body is unfamiliar, ambiguous, and is unrecognizable, unable to be categorized as either male or female. In her essay, Hall claims that Patriarchy harms women because it is able to “make one’s own body an unfamiliar and despised object” (Hall). The Anorexic woman despises her body because she recognizes the boundary between the sexes and that as a woman she is “the other,” forever subordinated to man. She comes to experience her body as some kind of dirty sweater she wants to shrug off. The split between the mind and body causes her to look at her body as though she is outside of it. The Anorexic is always living an out-of-body experience.
Anorexia Nervosa and Gender Identity Disorder are not biologically rooted within the individual. These are social disorders, in other words, it is society that is sick. It is the patriarchal society which claims sexual difference to be a fact about the body, and so asserts that some bodies are better than others. The male body is privileged in society, and so the phallus is marked as a powerful body part. The Anorexic female starves her body to assert that she is tired of having a weak body, but her solution is not to assume a male body. Starving her body erases the feminine, but it does not replace or supplant it with the masculine; the anorexic body does not acquire a phallus, and so it does not acquire privilege. It is rendered imperceptible, a body without organs. But why does Brie desire to relinquish the privileged body? In the movie she states how disgusted she is with her penis, so perhaps she finds the very notion of there being a privileged sex disgusting. She wishes to become the body that is always other. Brie believes she is being reborn like Christ. Christ assumed human flesh because he loved people so much that he wanted to suffer like them. Brie wants to become the other, and as a transsexual she is “a radically evolved human.” Brie has a kind of Mestiza consciousness because even though she becomes a woman, Stanley is always a part of her.
Anorexics and Transsexuals, or people with GID, do not simply have an embodied consciousness. They do not accept the body as fact or the signification society places on it. Instead, they resist patriarchal norms and become something else, but that is why it is disordered thinking. Although it is a societal problem that so much emphasis is placed on the body, that sexual difference is taken as fact and some bodies are considered privileged, the body cannot be altered because the body is fact. It is only the significance we place on bodies that can, and should, be altered. The body is not an object; it is part of a person’s subjectivity and is an experience.
Eat, Travel, Be Merry 