Vested Interests - Marjorie Garber

In the early 1990’s Marjorie Garber’s book appeared and raised the game on understanding trans. It was a bit academic but engagingly written and gave trans a status it hadn’t had in popular discussions – trans as a something in its own right rather than a variant on something else. It wasn’t about he/she or male/female, it was a challenge to categories, not just to binary alternatives or to various “third”s and threes but to the idea of category itself. “Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge.” Then she established what kind of three trans is, then she gets going with her tour of culture. The book’s subtitle is “Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety”. During the 90’s the weight of importance in trans fell on expression, or presentation. That was why “transvestism” could then, and did, serve to represent a whole spectrum of trans identification which now is covered by a range of designations – trans-sexual, fluid, genderqueer, non-binary. In a way for Marjorie Garber trans was a way of saying, of speaking ourselves, or appearing, and life was about making relations through all that saying. It’s no co-incidence that the book is full of “deconstructions” of cultural stuff, like books, films, pictures, stories, to find the trans inside or beyond. The writer is all over the cultural landscape and you will find classic trans films like “Tootsie” taken to bits in these pages, alongside St Joan and Red Riding Hood, Ken dolls and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, not all fictional but all shaped by cultural forces – and cultural forces are what Marjorie Garber is interested in. Art likes constructions so it’s almost automatically in love with trans. Dig in and find the love. “Vested Interests” is about “category crises” and we trans are important because we cause such crises. Our existence upsets easy assumptions about how people relate to each other which creates anxiety, and that anxiety is good. An anxious world is, in some ways, a less dangerous world. What came later was not just “-vestism”, representation and presentation (“I present as female”) but identification (“I identify as female”) where the “other” could be hidden but real, and then “queer” where the “third/three” was a provocation not a category. Maths experts would probably call it a “value”, something to do with levels of “genderedness” So many quotation marks to explain a book! But the throughline on all of this is words and images and what they mean. Best to show when what they mean is debateable. “Vested Interests” is a bit of a treasure trove of trans references – quite like this site – and, by early on debating the binary, opened up the way for “non-binary” and “queer” agendas. It’s a big fat 400 pages with pictures and you can browse it in idle moments for the pleasure of seeing trans from new angles, a kind of hide-and-seek or “I-Spy” for gender non-conformists, and, let’s face it, everybody who cares, really.