人、妖殊途，肉身如是：從巴赫汀的怪誕身體觀及其「跨性別」意涵看人妖曾秋煌的「她（他）者性」再現

Reviving Mikhail Bakhtin’s Concept of the Grotesque Body and its Implications of“Transgender”: News Representation of“Otherness”of Renyao (The Prodigy of the Human) TSENG Chiu Huang as a Case

本研究旨在推敲Bakhtin怪誕身體觀及其「跨性別」意涵。透過批判性和脈絡化地閱讀Bakhtin狂歡節研究中的相關書寫，本研究首先歸納出其中蘊藏著揭示肉身主體的異質性、肯認性╱別官能的接合性、展演性╱別實踐的公共性等意涵。這與從「跨性者」（transsexual）到「垮性別」（transgenderist）一詞的語藝地景變貌有相當程度的呼應，更構築了本質論與建構論互為配搭的可能性。
再以人妖曾秋煌的「她（他）者性」（otherness）再現為例，本研究發現此一「垮性別者」藉由將其生理性（而不只是性別）展演為一種社會裝扮，回溯性地體現破碎、瑣細、獵奇怪誕化的肉身修辭（和媒體報導）如何對女性和男性本質帶來諷刺。曾秋煌所示現的性／別旅居游牧者（sex/gender migratingand nomadic identity）的非法性，直指眾客體、諸類目的「之間」亦總是情境化的動態彈性、性／別光譜和論述建構。正是在此，我們方能理解為何曾秋煌僅僅只是存在，就足以讓人感到不安。因其怪誕身體於1950年代的臺灣，本身就是一項空前的政治宣示。

The epistemological debate between essentialism and constructivism is a key issue that continues to ferment and occupies a leading position in contemporary transgender studies that emerged in the 1990s. Based on the theory of Judith Butler’s gender performance, constructivists argue that the parodic performance of drag queens can expose gender as an arbitrary and contingent artifact. Sex and the body do not exist a priori, but are cultural and legalized effects of gender. Based on this, some constructivists claim that transgender people who want to resolve their bodily dislocation through sex reassignment surgery could consolidate the sex/gender dimorphism.
Essentialists such as Jay Prosser, who is a transsexual man, have different viewpoints. He believes that having hormonal treatment or a sex change in order to achieve social belonging is not a regression or loss of political consciousness, nor is it a return to a simplified or reified view of biological essentialism, but rather it reveals the struggle of transgender to survive. Therefore, even though the transgender community has recently formed an important alliance with queer theory and resorted to gender-oriented reformation, completely replacing and deconstructing“sex”obviously do not concern those who have experienced traumatic experiences in the past or currently. The epistemological debate in contemporary transgender studies seems to have become an unsolvable theoretical and practical problem.
In this essay, we believe that the attempt of constructivists to construct transgender as a special category to highlight the discontinuity between identity and body is not irrelevant or completely decoupled from“sex”. The inner self-experience, feelings, and desires of transgender people in their transition as described by essentialists further highlight the unruly nature of the material aspect of the body and its deliteralizing and discursive subversion. Reviving a theoretical genealogy of contemporary transgender studies is the primary problematization of this study.
In chapter 5“The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources”of the book Rabelais and his World, Mikhail Bakhtin takes“Gargantua and Pantagruel”as the examples and proposes a perspective of the grotesque body that resorts to exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness in folk festivals. Bakhtin views the grotesque body as a kind of social practice and political action that attempt to symbolize freedom, to break through constraints, to reshape the boundaries between elegance and secularity, and to regenerate social values. The terms“a double body”and“androgyny”are not only the key to unlocking cultural innovation, but are also very similar to terms of contemporary transgender studies. Although these words are originally used to display grotesque images in the literature, they are indeed deployed to describe the body in transition and the ontological and material transformation herein. Therefore, even though there is currently no discussion on the impact and inspiration of Bakhtin’s grotesque body on transgender studies, this essay still argues that Bakhtin’s perspective of sexed body and materiality in the construction of sex/gender could help get rid of the either-or choice between essentialism and constructionism.
This essay elaborates upon Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body and its implications of“transgender”. By critically and contextually reading the relevant writings from Bakhtin’s research on carnival, this essay first notes that the heterogeneity of somatic bodies, the articulation of sex/gender organs, and the publicity of sex/gender performance might signify the specific connotations of“transgender”. This echoes the transition of rhetorical landscape from“transsexual”to“transgenderist”to some extent and also constructs the possible fusion of essentialism and constructivism.
The term“transgenderist”is mentioned by Virginia Prince, an opinion leader of the western transgender community, in 1978. She is a biological male and has insisted that gender as a social costume and sex cannot be changed by operation. Prince also argues that a hermaphrodite, who is biologically male like herself, but wears women’s clothing and lives under a full-time female role takes on a more mature, socially adaptable status and is capable of enjoying sexual desire. Before transitioning, Prince thus deliberately has maintained a life of dressing as a woman, but without the intention of“passing”, so that others might see that she is not a“real”woman. She said that her purpose in doing this is to deconstruct the gender binary.
This essay provides an example from a local case of a“transgenderist”and presents news representation of“otherness”for renyao TSENG Chiu Huang. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, TSENG, as a biological male, was 37 years old when the public first learned about him/her. In the first wave of press reports in 1951, the public was captivated by TSENG’s renyao (and his/her self-proclaimed intersexuality), primarily because of the ease with which s/he switched between male and female genders as s/he committed crimes. According to news reports, s/he committed a series of crimes, including both“obscene”and“fraud”. The police did not know whether to assign him/her to a cell with male or female inmates, due to his/her legendary status as being“neither-man-nor-woman”. TSENG him/herself also deliberately maintained the ambiguity of sexual identity. S/he was questioned several times by police and judges, and there was almost no consistent answer as to whether s/he was a man or a woman. This resulted in much more curious attention from the media and the public, which made him/her a spectacle during the 1950s in Taiwan.
Inspired by Curbelo’s (2021) perspective of“otherness”, this essay views TSENG as a sexual dissident person and portrays his/her struggling for subjectivity within the context of news representation from the following four dimensions: (1) economic instability; (2) social exclusion; (3) sex work; and (4) violence and repression. Based on research findings, this essay argues that the indescribably grotesque body of TSENG not only exposed the mainstream sex/gender dichotomy and its governance or control over sexually dissident people, but more importantly the“otherness”of TSENG paradoxically reflected the unintentional implosion of the reified sex/gender matrix and its failure to integrate or domesticate all heterogeneity of the grotesque body.
In a series of reports in the 1950s, we see that TSENG was first highly sexualized and visualized, but at the same time s/he was also an invisible and abject sexual dissident, especially on the themes of“anecdotes of fraud and theft”and“doubts about the status of renyao/prodigy”in terms of his/her economic instability and social exclusion. Even though s/he passively suffered social inscriptions of media representation and social convention, TSENG was still able to wait for the opportunity to return to the re-deployment of the specific experience, narrative, and situation of the“grotesque body”. As a result, TSENG’s repeated prostitution and hooking up with many other guys gradually exposed that the legacy media and even the previous society were unable to withstand this strange story. Subsequent control and restraint were almost ineffective due to the dilemma of determining whether TSENG should be put in a male or female prison.
TSENG’s“otherness”here is in fact not a passive and objective“othering”, but counter-offensive sex/gender tactics. It reciprocally exposes the“narrowness”of the grotesque perspective at that time and its attempts to trivialize the grotesque body of TSENG, but it was doomed to fail. Therefore, the institutional management of sex/gender has also become useless.
As a“transgenderist”, TSENG’s“otherness”not only considers gender as a dressing, but that biological sex can also be deployed as a kind of social costume that retrospectively embodies a parody of fragmented, trivialized, distorted corporeal rhetoric (and news reports) that brings irony to femaleness and maleness. Here, the so-called“relativity of boundaries between objects and between categories”is still somewhat static and stable. What is more groundbreaking is the“in-betweenness”by which a sex/gender migrating and nomadic identity of TSENG embodied is always-already a contextualized and dynamic sex/gender spectrum and discursive formation. The“otherness”of TSENG should be an appropriate embodiment to exemplify the specific category of“transgenderist”, which is the intermediate ground between man and woman and also a supra-binary gender experience before the use of the term“transgender”.
This essay concludes that the mere presence of TSENG, as a sex/gender outlaw in the eyes of mainstream society, is exactly enough to make people feel uneasy. Hir grotesque body (in Bakhtin’s sense) was an unprecedentedly political statement in the 1950s in Taiwan.