‘젠더’와 트랜스섹슈얼리즘: 성전환에 대한 인류학적 연구, 인류학에 대한 성전환적 연구 (Gender and Transsexualism: Anthropology of Changing Sex, Changing Sex of Anthropology)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 서울대학교 비교문화연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 비교문화연구 / 19권 / 1호 / 5 ~ 39페이지
· 저자명 : 이강원

초록

What I want to do in the present work is to show how can transsexualism and anthropology inform and strengthen one another.
When social/cultural anthropologists and cultural feminists add the term ‘gender’ to some phenomenon, such as motherhood, kinship,division of labor and identity they designate a bundle of ties that may mobilized to account for relationship among human actors.
Problem rises, however, when the ‘bundle of ties’ begins to mean a type of material, especially in the case of a sex change or transsexuals. I address this question in the form of a review of transgenderism and transsexualsim in the study of anthropology.
Instead of taking sex as a characteristic of individuals, transsexualism as a way of life mobilize it as something performed locally in ways that vary from one situation to another. For transsexuals, there is no such a thing as a ‘level’ that may divide sex into two parts,biological/cultural or sex/gender. They cross the borders of the disciplines among genomics, endocrinology, anatomy, plastic surgery, psychiatry, psychology, law, and politics, connecting not only to humans but also to different materials. From this point of view, I suggest that biological and cultural factors are coordinated on the same plate in making different arrangements, which transsexuals mobilize to perform their sex-gender identities. Tracing this performance offers anthropologists an interesting theoretical and methodological opportunity and a chance to turn away form the traditional dichotomy between biology and culture. For transsexuals,reading and writing an ethnography of their own construction of sexes opens up new political spaces and strategies to cross both the borders of female-male and of natural-cultural.

영어초록

What I want to do in the present work is to show how can transsexualism and anthropology inform and strengthen one another.
When social/cultural anthropologists and cultural feminists add the term ‘gender’ to some phenomenon, such as motherhood, kinship,division of labor and identity they designate a bundle of ties that may mobilized to account for relationship among human actors.
Problem rises, however, when the ‘bundle of ties’ begins to mean a type of material, especially in the case of a sex change or transsexuals. I address this question in the form of a review of transgenderism and transsexualsim in the study of anthropology.
Instead of taking sex as a characteristic of individuals, transsexualism as a way of life mobilize it as something performed locally in ways that vary from one situation to another. For transsexuals, there is no such a thing as a ‘level’ that may divide sex into two parts,biological/cultural or sex/gender. They cross the borders of the disciplines among genomics, endocrinology, anatomy, plastic surgery, psychiatry, psychology, law, and politics, connecting not only to humans but also to different materials. From this point of view, I suggest that biological and cultural factors are coordinated on the same plate in making different arrangements, which transsexuals mobilize to perform their sex-gender identities. Tracing this performance offers anthropologists an interesting theoretical and methodological opportunity and a chance to turn away form the traditional dichotomy between biology and culture. For transsexuals,reading and writing an ethnography of their own construction of sexes opens up new political spaces and strategies to cross both the borders of female-male and of natural-cultural.

참고자료

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