Third Space

1
Third Space

• Lecture 8
• Beyond the Binaries
• COM/AES 490 WOMEN 486
• Professor Ralina Joseph

2
Terms for Today

• The Third
• Transgender
• Borderlands

3
Trans-defined

• Transgender not conforming to normative gender
  roles assigned at birth
• About gender identity not sexual orientation
• The L Word clips

4
Vested Interests (1992)

• Figure of the transvestite at heart of Western
  culture. Examining the entire 20th c., Garber
  applies early 90s critical thought to the
  phenomenon of cross-dressing in fact and
  fiction, high culture and low. Arguing that
  gender culturally constructed (like Butler), she
  contends cross-dressing challenges binary
  categories of male and female as well as the
  concept of category itself (signals cultural,
  social or aesthetic dissonances)'
• Garber argues that critics have looked
  through,'' not at,'' the transvestite.
  Transvestite defined as space of desire,''
  space of possibility,'' a third.'' Garber
  analyzes variety of transvestite figures
  including Shakespearean heroines, Tootsie,
  Lawrence of Arabia, M. Butterfly, Madonna, and
  Laurence Olivier.

5
First part of article

• What does Garber say about baby colors?
• The connotations of the colors and not the
  perception of the gendershas changed (2)
• A binarism was reversed but not revised.
• Garber analyzes transvestism as influenced
  heavily by gay identity and gay style, but
  theorizes out from there mainstream
  preoccupation with transvestism in popular
  culture and the academy
• Tootsie clips

6
Garbers take on Tootsie (1982)

• Some feminist critics had a problem with this
  film because although the overt message is that
  women are better than men, the subtext is that
  women must be taught by men how to win their
  rights (6).
• This misses the mark Tootsie is not a feminist
  film. Nor is it a film about a woman, or a man
  pretending to be a woman. It is a film about a
  transvestite (6).
• Transvestism an enabling fantasy in Tootsie
  enables Dorsey to be more than he could be on his
  own personally and professionally (going beyond
  binaries w/ gender roles is enabling).
• Tootsie is a critique of gender itself as a
  category. And if it is slick, unthreatening,
  mainstream, etc., that may be because Tootsie,
  like Michael/Dorothy, successfully passes, and in
  passing, has both its secret pleasure and
  cultural effect (9)

7
The Third

• One of the most important aspects of
  cross-dressing is the way in which it offers a
  challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting
  into question the categories of female and
  male, whether they are considered essential or
  constructed, biological or cultural (10).
• the third questions binary thinking and
  introduces crisis a crisis which is
  symptomatized by both the overestimation and the
  underestimation of cross-dressing (11). This
  crisis is a failure of definitional distinction,
  a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits
  border crossing from one (apparently distinct)
  category to another black/white, Jew/Christian,
  noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave
  (16).

8
The Third

• The crisis is not always about what it appears.
  The third not a term but a mode of articulation,
  a way of describing a space of possibility.
  Three puts in question the idea of one of
  identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge (11).
  
• Transvestism is a space of possibility
  structuring and confounding culture the
  disruptive element that intervenes, not just a
  category crisis of male and female, but the
  crisis of category itself (17).

9
Borderlands/The Third Group Exercise

• How does Garber define the third?
• How does Anzaldua define borderlands?
• What are the differences and similarities?
• Come up with five examples in the media or
  real life of borderlands.
• Come up with five examples in the media or
  real life of the third.