Keynote Mons Bissenbakker

Monday, Dec 8th, 10:15-12:00

The princess who became a man. ROGD-myths and trans counter-myths.

Mons Bissenbakker (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. As the head of the Center for Gender, Sexuality & Difference, he researches and teaches trans and queer theory, as well as affect studies and discourse analysis. He is currently working on a project on transgender identities and gender transitions in Danish literary fiction and prose from the Middle Ages to 2030.

Researchprofile

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6516-2137

To live as trans is to inhabit a mythological existence, as transness often becomes the object of a wide array of contradictory yet potent cultural fantasies. Trans identities are simultaneously construed as ridiculous yet threatening, marginal yet powerful, artificial yet all too real. In the current political climate, however, confronting myth with truth can seem futile. As every literary scholar knows, there is no true escape from mythology. Instead, constructing counter-mythologies may be vital to imagining trans activism and care.

Taking my point of departure in the repeatedly debunked yet nonetheless politically and medically influential hypothesis of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), as proposed by Littman (2018), I identify this particular myth as resting on three powerful assumptions: trans as a newly fabricated ‘invention’; trans as a maladaptive coping mechanism; and good parenting as synonymous with protecting one’s child from transness. Looking to literature as a reservoir for creating trans counter-mythology I propose the Danish folktale The princess who became a man – collected by Danish folklorist Edvald Tang Christensen in 1880 – as a trans resource that offers alternative understandings an imagery of trans history, trans coping, and trans care.

I approach this folktale through a simultaneously “resonant” and “recognizing” trans reading strategy (Eastwood 2014) as well as on queer “reparative reading” (Sedgwick 2003), affect-theoretical approaches (Cvetkovich 2003; Ahmed 2007), and psychoanalytic object relations theory (Winnicott 1965). Examining the proposed ‘causes’ of transness as imagined by the ROGD hypothesis – specifically sexual violence and a presumed lack of emotional coping capacity – I explore what might be gained by staying with such imagery rather than dismissing it outright. May we use The princess who became a man as a resource for imagining transness as a reasonable reaction to cis-violence? In what ways could the tale offer alternative ideals for parenthood for trans children? And what might the tale teach us about trans healing and allyship?

(TW: graphic violence, including sexualised violence mentioned in the talk).