The first sentence you get from Wikipedia’s article “Body image” is the following:
“Body image is a person’s thoughts, feelings and perception of the aesthetics or sexual attractiveness of their own body.”
The body image is personal; it is imagined to possess the individual. The thoughts, feelings and perceptions of the value of their body are demons operating within the person. A productive machine circulating in its own ways, inside the shell that constitutes personhood. This image should not be understood as something personal however: it is rather the image of the body that is the assemblage of this machinery. This assemblage is the image of mankind. The body image is merely a settler; it operates in order to capture the subject, to territorialize it and make it its own. “Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies” (Deleuze & Guattari. 1987, 167). We need an exorcism from this image. We are tired of its intensities and the humiliation it inscribes on our bodies.
The transbody is not merely a trans person’s body; it is all those bodies that transgress the image of the body. Be it the amputated, the blind, “crippled” bodies that so many of us have. Be it the non-white bodies that are being disclosed outside of the image. The image of the body operates through the face as Deleuze and Guattari show us: it is through the assemblage that bodies are determined as “passable” or not (1987, 178). The transbody should not be viewed as something external to this process; it is the waste of the image production itself; its own fallout. It is produced in the binary operations of the assemblage of the image of the body. If we want to be done with the judgment of God, then we must find a line of flight, to truly get rid of the territorialization, its investments and horrors the image of the body lays upon us. To broaden it, to make us fit into it, will surely make us nothing but a shell, devoid of the joy and beauty that lies in the Beyond. Pride? Pride for what if the very heart of our disfigurement and queerness is being occupied by the binary workings of the image and its representations.
The image of a girl, or a boy. It alienates us, as much as the image of a white person. Within the Imaginary, the body is fractured, split in organs and the whole has been lost to the image. Such are the unfortunate events of the oidipalized child. The cock, the pussy, they are there, looking back as monstrosities. Stuck like parasites: the cock as a leech never to let go, the pussy as a deranged scab of a mortal wound. Not only are they alien invaders colonizing the body, that is, organs without bodies; they are the threshold, the very initiators of subjectification; they are faces and therefore more than part-objects, more than fractures and bodiless organs. “Are you the one with a leech feeding on your shame, or the kind with the deep wound that never really could heal?”. Such is the workings of the gender binary: it invades like parasites, it inscribes our very punishment on our bodies like Kafka’s machine. In one sense we all have that judgment upon us; we are all part of our own penal colony. This is where the Imaginary meets the Symbolic; where they both begin. The image of the body is not a mere image. It is the productive force that makes an imagined whole of our body, through the symbolic judgment of the big Other. It is beyond both the symbolic order and the Imaginary. The transbodies are those bodies that the image of the body made abominations out of; the fractures still present. Frankenstein’s monster inhabits this very same function within the assemblage: he is the image of the transbody. “Something went terribly wrong here”. I don’t think I’m the first trans person to have thought that thought when observing the image of my very own body. And it isn’t just trans people that are being violated by this abstract machine: the anorectic plugging their holes in order to escape the violence, the heroine addict smoothing out the gaps of the multiplicities of the body. Frankenstein’s monster is not hated because he is an abomination, but because he reflects the abominations within us all. Lacan teaches us that it is the Real we are fleeing from, while the Real in actuality is what is being desired; an escape route from the violence of the organism, and a novel way of desiring-production. As I stated: it is only within the Imaginary that the body is fractured.
Gender dysphoria – or should it be called sex dysphoria? – in this sense should not be understood as immanent to the Imaginary. It is not that the image of the mirror does not correspond to the image of the Self, the ego as it is being depicted. Rather, this image is a stratification of the assemblage of the image of the body: it is the abstract machine actualising forms of expression within the assemblage itself, getting it rid of the destructive powers of transgender desire. Gender is stratified through the transgressiveness of gender dysphoria. Then, what is this phenomenon that is being pacified by all means? It is the body without organs. Deleuze and Guattari writes in Anti-Oidipus:
“Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the body without organs. Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it. “The body is the body/it is all by itself/and has no need of organs/the body is never an organism/ organisms are the enemies of the body.” Merely so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture. In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as “primary repression” means precisely that: it is not a “countercathexis,” but rather this repulsion of desiring-machines by the body without organs” (1983, 8)
Gender dysphoria is the rejection of the image of the body, or more exactly, the repulsion of the gendered judgment. It is not the cock itself that is being rejected by the trans woman, it is the cock as an image; as a representation or a face. This image, in effect, constitutes what the body may become. There is therefore a vivid relationship between the strata of the social body and the biological body at play. On the one hand, the image of the girl becomes not only impossible by the operations of the image of the body, but also forbidden. There is a two-fold restriction on desire here: the deep voice is being actualized by the organs on the biological strata themselves, yet being gendered by the image of the body. The cock isn’t just a representation of the image of a boy; it is a representation of a biological testosterone producing factory, trapping desire for the present and the future to come within a matrix of socially coded images of sex and gender. Lacan’s Real is traumatizing because it is a direct route towards pure affect and therefore disclose the multiplicity of horror the machines produce through their workings. It shows the productive jouissance of the body that is being hidden behind images and representation.
And then there is the face. Forming its own body as it circulates and captures everything around it. Deleuze and Guattari write:
“The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye” (1987, 168).
Or, as they point out, the face begins on the white screen, and within the black hole. That is to say that both of them are the preconditions of the face. The face is dependent on its own abstract machine (not to be confused with the abstract machine of the image of the body). This face-machine, as Deleuze and Guattari argues, has the potential to make faces out of other body parts (1987, 170). Gender dysphoria is a result of this facialization of the body when the codes of the image of the body are passing through the abstract machine of the face. “Nice breasts”, said to a man can be a statement of humiliation; an attack of one’s manliness, but only when breasts have become two faces. It is humiliating because it points out an imagined or symbolic deviation from the image of the man-body. The very same sentence: “Nice breasts” can also represent this tyranny of the facialized body, as it is for women in general (“It’s just a chest you creep!”). But, what does it say to the transgendered body? To a transman this statement is neither or both of the above, but more importantly it opens up a pathway for gender dysphoria to bleed out. A desire that seeks its connections beyond the limits of the face, the image and of the biological strata of the organs themselves. “Cut them off, I am tired of their faces. They are parasites festing on my body. Intensities that trap my desire”. Even when the fractured body and its organs without bodies are gotten rid of; we still are trapped with faciality. Where can we find a way out? Where are our lines of flight in which this desire can find its connections without letting the intensities to continue circulating in a closed off body? If we are fractured bodies within the Imaginary, always in a struggle to patch ourselves up to the image of the body, and if we are a body of faces without the image of the body, then what is there left to do? The transgendered body is in a point of no return. It must find new weapons to cut through the face, to dismantle it. Why the face? Because the image of the body requires the production of the face in order to actualise its body images.
