젠더와 트랜스섹슈얼리즘: 성전환에 대한 인류학적 연구, 인류학에 대한 성전환적 연구

Abstract

유인원, 사이보그 그리고 여자를 포함하는 주변적 존재를 가부장적 서구과학의 재현 속으로부터 해방시키고자 했던 해러웨이(Dona Haraway)는 1985년 사이보그 선언문(Cyborg Manifesto)(Haraway 1991: 14-181)을 발표했다. 선언문에서 해러웨이는 여성 연구자들이 테크노포비아에 갇혀서 젠더(gender)와 짝을 이루고 있는 섹스(sex)를 연구대상으로부터 제외하는 것은 너무 많은 것을 잃는다는 점을 지적했다. 그리고 기술을 매개로 해서 재구성되고 있는 성, 몸, 모성, 자연을 여성들이 자신들이 처한 조건을 개선하기 위한 대안적 전략으로서 받아들이고 있다는 점에 주목할 것을 주문하고 있다.

What I want to do in the present work is to show how can transsexualism and anthropology inform and strengthen one another.

When social/cultural anthropologists and cultural feminists add the term gender to some phenomenon, such as motherhood, kinship,

division of labor and identity they designate a bundle of ties that may mobilized to account for relationship among human actors.

Problem rises, however, when the bundle of ties begins to mean a type of material, especially in the case of a sex change or

transsexuals. I address this question in the form of a review of transgenderism and transsexualsim in the study of anthropology.

Instead of taking sex as a characteristic of individuals, transsexualism as a way of life mobilize it as something performed locally in ways

that vary from one situation to another. For transsexuals, there is no such a thing as a level that may divide sex into two parts,

biological/cultural or sex/gender. They cross the borders of the disciplines among genomics, endocrinology, anatomy, plastic

surgery, psychiatry, psychology, law, and politics, connecting not only to humans but also to different materials. From this point of

view, I suggest that biological and cultural factors are coordinated on the same plate in making different arrangements, which

transsexuals mobilize to perform their sex-gender identities. Tracing this performance offers anthropologists an interesting theoretical and

methodological opportunity and a chance to turn away form the traditional dichotomy between biology and culture. For transsexuals,

reading and writing an ethnography of their own construction of sexes opens up new political spaces and strategies to cross both the

borders of female-male and of natural-cultural.