Identity Struggle and (Trans)Gender Trouble: Deconstruction of Hegemonic Matrix of Serbian Masculinity through Media

Representations of Transgender Identity

Isidora JarićFaculty of Philosophy, University of

Belgrade

Experience and Transgender identity

• As Joan Scot said, recognizing a testimony often depends on whether there is a potential narration into which it fits (Scot, 2006). In that sense, the question that imposes itself is which potential narration the experiences of transgender persons living in Serbia today can “fit” into and if such a narration is even articulated – theoretically and practically.

Media• Media uses different strategies of cultural fusion and combination of

different cultural artifacts and meanings in shaping their messages in order to reach the desirable target group. In this multidimensional process media are playing and calculated with the deepest levels of our identities.

• In that sense these messages“ doesn’t always mirror how people are

acting but how they are dreaming… they absorbs and fuses a variety of symbolic practices and discourses, it appropriates and distills from an unbounded range of cultural references…. this is not simple manipulation, but … ‘participation’, with the audience participating in its own manipulation.” (Jhally, 2003:251)

• The commercial texts always participate in the illusion. (Bordo, 1993:299)

Gender regime• Each individual society represents a complicated system of differing social structures

and social relationships which are found in differing relations of overlap, conflict and interdependence. One of these social structures is that of gender, which is also termed the gender regime. The gender regime defines the social position and obligations of an individual based on her/his belonging to particular gender group and the content of gender role. It (gender regime) represents “relatively structural relations between men and women, masculinity and femininity in assigned institutional encirclement, on a level of discourse and on the level of practice. This structuration is externalized in different gender roles, different gender identities and different gender representations (including different gender performance)“ (Blagojevic 2002:17). The gender regime is a fundamental part of the structure of each society infusing all its aspects and influencing the organization of social life.

• “We cannot understand the place of gender in social process by drawing a line around a set of ‘gender institutions’. Gender relations are present in all types of institutions….The state of play in gender relations in a given institutions is its ‘gender regime’.” (Connell 1987:120).

Gender order

• The relations between different gender regimes make gender order. In some cases this relation is additional or complementary. But the gender regimes of interacting institutions are rarely so harmonious. (Connell 1987: 134-135) Gender order is a fundamental part of the structure of every society, which permeates all aspects influencing the organization of social life in every part of the social mosaic, no matter how small. Therefore, studying the discourses and practices of some gender regimes offers an insight into a broad spectrum of structural social processes (like in the case of a pattern of recruitment of married women for part-time jobs, which has developed particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, in the economic context of the recession. This case represents a practical accommodation between the institutions involved, as mentioned by Connell).

• For example, the conflict between the emotional relationships of the family and the demands of a state at war.

Hegemonic masculinity• Hegemonic masculinity represents a specific configuration of different gender

performances and practices that are recognized as the most widely socially accepted response to concrete (economic, political and social) circumstances within a certain society at a specific moment in history.

• Connell defines hegemonic masculinity «...as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.» (Connell, 1995:77)

• Every gender construct is ‘an internally complex structure, where a number of different logics are superimposed’ (Connell, 1995:73). Any of these gender constructs is in the same time positioned in a number of different social structures, which may be following different historical trajectories.

• Because gender constructs intersects, and interacts, with other social structures it is important to incorporate that knowledge into their analysis.

• “To understand gender … we must constantly go beyond gender. … We cannot understand class, race or global inequality without constantly moving towards gender.” (Connell, 1995:76)

• Hegemonic masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position within a given gender order/gender regime/pattern of gender relations, whose content is changeable in relation to specific societal/cultural framework and to the time in which it is formulated. This hegemonic position is constantly endangered. According to Connell’s research, different types of hegemonic masculinities are differentiated between themselves, in relation to the discourse which determines them, and in relation with these discourses they constitute themselves. In other words, different social contexts support the creation and promotion of different types of hegemonic masculinities. Depending on actual/current social context certain pattern of values and from it derivated gender roles will impose itself as hegemonic one.

• We can conditionally divided these influences into:(a) local(b) regional(c) global

Hegemonic masculinity in the Serbian context

• Strong military and warfare tradition (Colovic)• Violent discourse (Banovic)• Xenophobia • Strong identification with referent

national/ethnic/family group with patriarchal organization of power relations

• Reverse dichotomy (Papic, 1997)

The structure of gender regime and the position of transgender identity

• complementary relation between male and female gender roles. • “Masculinity and femininity are inherently relational concepts, which have meaning in relation to

each other, as a social demarcation and cultural opposition. This holds regardless of the changing content of the demarcation in different societies and periods of history.” (Connell, 1995:44)

• “those who reject the hegemonic pattern have to fight or negotiate their way out …” (Connell, 1995:37)

• “Gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives. Human society depends on a

predictable division of labour, a designated allocation of scarce goods, assigned responsibility for children and

others who cannot care for themselves, common values and their systematic transmission to new members,

legitimate leadership, music, art, stories, games, and other symbolic productions.” (Lorber, 1994:15)

• Gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute—rather than express—the illusion of the stable gender identity. (Butler, 1991)

• Every subversive action like construction of transgender identity through performance produce gender trouble, for people to trouble the categories of gender that are set in advance.

Media representation of transgender

• The media use different strategies of cultural fusion and combination of different cultural artifacts and meanings in shaping their messages in order to reach the desirable target group. In this multidimensional process the media toy with/exploit the deepest levels of human identities.

• • “Advertising doesn’t always mirror how people are acting but how they are

dreaming… Advertising absorbs and fuses a variety of symbolic practices and discourses, it appropriates and distils from an unbounded range of cultural references…. Advertising is not simple manipulation, but … ‘partipulation’, with the audience participating in its own manipulation.” (Jhally, 2003:251)

• • The commercial texts participate in the illusion people come together and

explore what the culture continually presents to them as their individual choices … as instead culturally situated and culturally shared.» (Bordo, 1993:299-300)

• “Predrag Azdejković, president of the Gay Lesbian Info Center, believes that most people find it easier to accept transsexual than homosexual persons because they believe that the sex change achieves “heterosexualization” and those persons become “real” men or “real” women. “Transsexuality is treated as a disorder to be treated operatively, and people have an easier time hearing a sexual deviation can be ‘treated’, because it annoys them to no end that homosexuals won’t get treated and become like ‘normal people’”.

Politika, 10.06.2015, p. A7“Trapped in the wrong body”Author: KATARINA ĐORĐEVIĆ

Major Helena

• “When forty-year-old major in the Serbian Army, going as Major Helena in public, decided to change his sex, his wife wanted to – kill him in his sleep. That is, at least, what he said in his confession to a magazine, adding that his oldest son had a comment going something like “Whoa, pop, you’re a she-male” … the Army requested his, or, rather, her resignation, stating that this transsexual is a threat to the reputation of the army.”

Politika, 10.06.2015, p. A7“Trapped in the wrong body”Author: KATARINA ĐORĐEVIĆ•

Dajana (Dejan/Dolf) Pospiš

• “Because of the condemnation of society I ran to the extreme. I have long suppressed it in myself, but then I realized I do not have to live differently. Everyone who knew me said that I was a good person and that I should be myself and not put on masks - says Diana with melancholy. She began to struggle with depression she felt because she lived someone else's life.It was all gone when I began hormone therapyI was an unarticulated person, I was always angry and frustrated. Sometimes I could not even talk about how hard it was. I felt like I was imprisoned in a cage and as much as I wanted that, I could not find a way out. All blockage and depression disappeared when I accepted myself - says Diana currently lives in Novi Sad and occasionally, if there is money, receives hormonal therapy. ...She had a difficult childhood ...Relatives of Pospis first found out he was changing his sex from journalists. As they say, Dejan had a very difficult childhood and spent a period of life in the Children's Village Novi Sad and shelter for older juveniles. His late father divorced his mother. As far as I remember, he himself changed the name. His name was Walter, but he preferred to be called Adolf. He was killed in a car accident. The truck hit a bicycle who was driving. His mother remarried several times and now lives in Novi Sad, and Dejan and his own sister for a time lived in the Children's Village. They moved to Veternik with their uncle, but were displaying aggressive behavior - the story of a distant relative, who says he has lost contact with them, but that he always felt sorry for the children because they have not had a normal childhood. As they say, if the sex change makes him feel better, he would not find fault, but it is important not to return to the old roots when he was much more violent.”

Blic, 25.07.2015 page: 13I ran into fascism to hide women in Author: ZORICA LAZAREVIĆ

Caitlyn/Cait (Bruce) Jenner

• “Call me Caitlyn, said Bruce Jenner (65), the latest American transsexual icon… from the cover page of ‘Vanity Fair’… had over a million followers on Twitter as Caitlyn in only a few hours… in public, the Kardashians seemed united. Opening his soul to the American TV network ABC Bruce said his children supported him in the intent to change his sex, and all three ex wives were unanimous in the assessment that he was a ‘person with a big heart and soul’, whether it was in the body of a woman or a man.”

Politika, 10.06.2015, p. A7“Trapped in the wrong body”Author: KATARINA ĐORĐEVIĆ

Conclusion

• Within media discourse of Serbian press transgender identity is constructed as the unwanted aberration of hegemonic masculinity. The function of this discursive artificially produced threat is the consolidation and articulation of hegemonic masculinity that is under the pressure produced by the traditionally unfriendly processes of modernization, europeization and globalization.