http://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back.pdf
Sandy Stone notes that the above link is the most recent, current revision of this work --
THE
"EMPIRE" STRIKES BACK: A POSTTRANSSEXUAL MANIFESTO
Sandy
Stone
Department
of Radio, Television and Film, the University of Texas at Austin
Copyright
(c)
1993 by Sandy Stone.
Publication
history: Version 1.0 written late 1987.
First
presented at "Other Voices,
Other
Worlds: Questioning Gender and Ethnicity," Santa Cruz, CA, 1988.
First
published in Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein, eds.: "Body
Guards: The Cultural Politics
of
Gender Ambiguity" (New York: Routledge 1991).
Second
version, revised and updated, published in "Camera Obscura",
Spring 1994.
Electronic
version published on the ACTLab ftp site, January 1994. Fourth
version, revised and updated, forthcoming.
Excerpt --
[8]
Such results might have been considered marginal, hedged about as
they were with markers of questionable method or excessively limited
samples. Yet they came to represent transsexuals in
medicolegal/psychological literature, disclaimers and all, almost to
the present day. During the same period, feminist theoreticians were
developing their own analyses. The issue quickly became, and remains,
volatile and divisive. Let me quote an example.
“Rape
. . . is a masculinist violation of bodily integrity. All
transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the female form to an
artifact, appropriating this body for themselves...Rape, although it
is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception.”
This
quote is from Janice Raymond's 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The
Making Of The She-Male, which occasioned the title of this paper. I
read Raymond to be claiming that transsexuals are constructs of an
evil phallocratic empire and were designed to invade women's spaces
and appropriate women's power. Though Empire represented a specific
moment in feminist analysis and prefigured the appropriation of
liberal political language by a radical right, here in 1991, on the
twelfth anniversary of its publication, it is still the definitive
statement on transsexualism by a genetic female academic.
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