Independent Scholar and Filmmaker

Susan Stryker, Ph. D. is an internationally recognized independent scholar and filmmaker whose historical research and theoretical writings have helped shape the field of transgender studies. In addition to numerous academic articles and works of popular nonfiction, Dr. Stryker was contributing editor of the transgender studies special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (1998), and co-editor, with Stephen Whittle, of The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006). With colleague Victor Silverman she wrote, directed, and produced the public television Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (USA 2005), which examines the militant origins of the contemporary transgender movement in the 1960s.

The technologically modified human form has not only a future, but also a past. We understand transsexual surgery and self-demand amputation as two quite different practices that reveal, in complementary ways, the complex state regulatory regimes that historically have governed antinormative surgical body modifications, and which thus help us chart the trajectory of emerging developments in the field of somatomorphic enhancement technologies. We demonstrate how a discourse of bodily integrity has been deployed both for and against transsexual surgery and self-demand amputation at various historical moments and in differing social contexts. Drawing on Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty in Leviathan as well as Foucault’s critique of centralized state authority, we argue that “integrity” is not predicated on notions of natural, biologic, organic unity, but rather on the availability of the body for integration as a source of biopower into the State’s projects. We thus arrive at a radically antihumanist understanding of the political struggles that structure the occupation of one’s own embodied space, and which ultimately determine whether the body is available as a resource for subjective needs as well as state functions.