Transmisogyny and the Abjection of Girlcock

Abstract

This thesis seeks to construct a theoretical framework around transmisogyny, the intersectional violence and marginalization faced by trans women, trans fem(me)s, and non-binary people assigned male at birth. I explore the ways in which disgust, fear,and anxiety around trans women's bodies, centered around the potential existence of a trans woman's cock (which I call girlcock, and which can be corporeal, or imaginary, as in the case of trans women who have had genital surgery, or who otherwise do not have a penis) casts them as abject - dirty, placeless, and beyond the horizon of discourse. I explore this placelessness in classic feminist and lesbian literature written around sexual difference, which has too often prioritized bodily (and more specifically genital) morphology over the full embodied experiences of gender and sexuality. Next I explore how recent examples of media deploy transmisogyny through the material and metaphorical abjection of trans women on the screen, and through discourses created around the media. Finally, I turn to a documentary pornographic film the portrays a BDSM Dominant/submissive relationship as an example of media that sublimes a trans woman's body and sexuality. Importantly, and in opposition to the first two examples, this documentary creates a place for the trans sub(ject) to exist in both the foreground and the background, and blurs the lines between sexual object, and sexual subject. This thesis seeks to not only examing and challenge the structures of transmisogyny, but to push back against them, and ultimately, sublime trans women's bodies and sexualities through the words of the thesis itself.