Jeanne Vaccaro and Joan Lubin will begin with “The Waiting Room: Workaday Diagnosis and the Incorporation of Sexology” which animates the concept-metaphor of the waiting room across sites of sexological self-reflection in its incipient institutional form to propose a model of trans study. In the context of a racially segregated postwar American culture reorganizing normative gender and moral sexual practice, the sexological project to limn the category “trans” became a site of interaction between multiple vectors of social experience and varieties of scientific classification. This talk considers four women differently subjected to sexological scrutiny on the basis of sex, and tracks how that sexual basis articulates with gender, race, and sexuality to map the floorplan of institutionalizing sexual knowledge. It concludes by speculating on the relationship between the history of sexological incorporation and the hesitant institutionality of trans study.
Rovel Sequeira will present “Translating Subaltern Sex: Sexology and the Grammars of Prison Sex in Colonial India” which examines the early-20th-century Indian prison as a colonial sexological laboratory, arguing that it grounded a spatial sexual science tied to confinement. Tracking a pivotal unstudied scandal in Indian prison history, it shows how the would-be prison sexologist John Mulvany’s experiments on subaltern Bengali sexual “deviants” developed in tandem with the architecture of the prisons he administered. While scholars have predominantly studied the circulation of sexology amongst imperial publics and the production of bourgeois gendered and sexual subjects through the translation and domestication of scientific vocabularies of sex, this talk theorizes how the state’s mistranslations of subaltern Indian sexual idioms allowed it to exercise both disciplinary and repressive forms of power in colonial conditions.
Cate Reilly will present “The Trans of the Translator” which offers a joint exploration of the practical and epistemological problems involved in translating a key nineteenth-century German autobiographical case history, “Uebergangsstufe zur Metamorphosis sexualis paranoica” (often given as “Stage of Transition to Metamorphosis Sexualis Paranoica”). Originally published by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1890, the case was subsequently included in his sexological textbook Psychopathia Sexualis (1892, 6th edition). Written by an anonymous Hungarian doctor, it has since been canonized within transgender studies as the earliest sexological trans account. Yet extant English-language translations date from the fin-de-siècle (1894,1906) or appear as reprints within other sexological texts referencing it. The change in medical terminology between 1892 and the present, combined with the frequently dated quality of the extant translations mean that contemporary readers working in English analyze a version of the text that may seem isomorphic with twenty-first century concepts, but has an at best tangential relation to them. The paper outlines my strategies in creating a new, annotated retranslation of the case history, and reflects on the broader question of how the “trans” operates across translation studies and transgender studies.
I will conclude with “Trans Studies and The Case of the Metamorphosing Physician” which discusses an anonymous autobiographical case history originally published in 1890 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing now regarded as the earliest sexological autobiography of a trans woman. I follow the case's evolution from a study of paranoia through its reception within contemporary trans studies as the paradigmatic trans case history. By naming the case’s historical trajectory as a process of translation, I consider an unspoken presentism haunting trans studies which takes for granted the viability of framing historical case histories as trans in today’s affirmative lexicons. Contextualizing the nineteenth-century diagnostic category of metamorphosis sexualis paranoica allows trans studies to reflect on its own understanding of trans from a new angle attuned to the recent genesis of a U.S.-based, ego-psychological trans subject. In doing so, it engenders the possibility of considering the trans subject as a subject of the unconscious.