Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility ed. by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (original) (raw)

2019, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

View Crossmark data pleasure. Furthermore, as a threshold, the sexual considers how the chiasmic body is permeable (to others). Continuing the conversation between Butler and Bakhtin, Sabsay argues that between matter and signification there is a fissure of representation, which, although understood as a failure in communication and/or translation, allows meaning to be an aperture, to remain open to rearticulations. Incorporating the relationship of body to time and space, Sabsay uses the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope in narrative configuration to imagine the sexual as a space of home, proposing that we think of sexuality as a diasporic figure, embedded in experiences of migration. Opening up sexuality to erotics, Sabsay turns the sexual into a spatio-temporal field, one in which sexual politics, at the mercy of desire, comes undone. As Sabsay intervenes at the level of the performative, both in relation to the formation of sexual and political subjectivity as well as through an engagement with speech act theory, this book is an important contribution not only to feminist and queer studies, but also to performance studies. Her proposal for a radical relationality premised in part on a dialogical otherness, exposes the temporal matter through which bodies come to be: "the body itself as verb, life in process, becoming" (187). For Sabsay, the body is not, the body is happening, and therefore always doing, undoing, becoming undone: a radical performative relationality of sorts. Furthermore, the book's final pages offer an aperture particularly pertinent for thinking through questions of desire in relation to performance. Sabsay integrates, if somewhat transiently, the voice and its grain, per Roland Barthes, as part of an array of textures that, like desire itself, escape signification and fail in translation. Along with the voice, other sensorial experiences may be modes by which the body also signifies; acts; performsnot just as a mode of tactile communication, but rather as an act where desire, if only ephemerally, finding escape in that fissure of representation, makes itself known.