Becoming Embodied: Towards a Corporeal Approach to Trans Subjectivity

Despite the importance of physical practices, like athletics, to the life projects of many trans people, such practices (and corporeality itself as an analytic) have been neglected in accounts of trans subject formation. Rather than approaching gender transition as a discursive claim to identity or an aesthetic project of recognition, my dissertation takes boxing as a case study to highlight the role of physical movement in the project of trans becoming. I argue that physical practice facilitates an experiential shift in an individual’s relationship to their body, and that such a shift is crucial to what we understand as “transition.” Via a mixed-methods approach incorporating ethnography and autoethnography, discourse analysis, and choreographic analysis, I analyze trans boxers’ accounts of their embodied experience via three different forms of self-narration: ethnographic interviews, public media and memoir, and artistic performance. This interdisciplinary work contributes to new knowledge in trans and gender studies, dance and performance studies, and critical phenomenology. Amidst intensifying assault and objectification, the project offers an important study of how trans people locate a sense of capacity as agential body-subjects, as well as how we articulate our subjective becomings to others, and the stakes of such narrations for trans public life.

Image credit: Artwork by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo).