The individual as a desiring subject is confronted by the violence of the inherent ambiguity and instability of their desire. Desire becomes the driving force for producing narratives of love which then becomes the conceptual tool for navigating the ever present violence of our longing. In this paper I have tried to show the corporeality of this violence- how it is manifested on the body.

Thinking through the trans desire or the desire to be trans elucidates how the (trans) body becomes the site of institutional violence- equipped nevertheless to resist it, resilient as we are as human beings. To capture the potency our desire grants to our bodies despite all and the enigma this struggle creates, I look to the story of Lily as presented in the acclaimed adaptation to film by Tom Hooper in The Danish Girl. My ideas heavily rely Lauren Berlant’s psychoanalytic theorization of desire in addition to Jasbir Puar’s work on trans bodies.

Our desire is an inseparable part of our identity. To desire is to be. It shapes who we are and how we interact with our environment.

The formalism of desire as Berlant (23) writes; its drive to be embodied and reiterated opens it up to anxiety and discipline. Questioning the way desire shapes the individual has consequences for intimacy, sexual practices, sexual identity, identification and attachment. More importantly, it enables us to conceptualize sexuality in the sphere of contemporary politics.

Desire is antithetical towards its object- a play of idealization and revulsion and this fundamental ambivalence and coherence is pronounced in the context of non- normative desires that are often negated, disavowed and sacrificed for the preservation of heterosexuality. Fragments of these unfulfilled wishes create the contents of the unconscious. This is perfectly signified through the symbol of the bog in Vijle in the movie-

“Sometimes I think you’re going to slip through the surface of the painting and vanish- into the bog” / “don’t worry, I won’t vanish- the bog’s in me, silly”. (Hooper)

Fruedian notion of subjectivity states that one's primary love affair is with one's ego, projected onto the world and returned as a difference (Berlant 99), thinking through these lines in the context of transgendering and the discourse around transability, would it be wrong to engage with these debates to try to make sense of the inherent violence of desire and how it is shaped by the world around us to understand the struggle of trans bodies or better as Jacqueline Rose puts it, recognize the possibility of trans in all of us?

Lily’s incorporation of the loss of her object of desire (Hans) as a child into the ego prevents her from fully experiencing the loss since the loved one in the absence- as signified by the bog- becomes merged with the self. This is marked in the scene where Einar confronts Gerda after his first psychiatric procedure for finding a cure- “You hurt Lily” (Hooper).

The ambiguity of presence and absence is further complicated in the initial stages after the rupture of the binarian or cleaved self, giving us an incomprehensible undifferentiated uncategorical subject- merged, fluid contours like the colors on Gerda’s canvas.

Usually ‘an extraneous sexual object’ allows the desiring subject to deny the ambivalence and pass as sexually normative. For example, Einar’s first break from his heterosexual identity figures in his insistence on making love to his wife wearing her nightdress. Although fetishistic in appearance, this desire reproduces the lines of normative behavior to an extent by finding a substitute for his longing to embrace Lily through an unstable object- the nightdress.

As long as normative narrative and institutional forms of sexual desire construct people’s identities the non normative is constantly resisted, seeking escape from the wilderness of the repressed unconscious through love.

The desire of love is to reach beyond the known world of law and language. The desire to overcome the violence of intimacy and submission to institutional propriety (Berlant 25,100). Love however is not invulnerable to the transient nature of narratives or history; it is beautifully shaped by the ideologies of modern heterosexuality.

It enables heterosexuality to be constructed as a relation of desire that expresses people’s true feelings masking the institutions that police it. Einar’s relationship with Gerda had for the longest time provided a channel to discharge the aggression of his desire within the frame of propriety. It was at last the submission to Gerda’s gaze that traces out Lily in him and brings her to life. The promise of love however fails violently to sustain the identities and material reality of the life context of the individuals shaped by it. What are we to do then when the ‘intimate other’ (Berlant 89) as Lauren calls it, remains opaque to the desiring subject despite all?

Romantic love thus might sometimes enable people to transgress the bounds of conventionally proper desires as Gerda’s resolve suggests- a way to reclaim her loss of desired object in Einar and restructuring it as a quest to help Lily ‘become complete’ giving her a synonymous sense of achieving the object of her own desire. 

Instability of desire if channeled the right way, holds the potential for social transformation for example unconventional desires destructively distort self and social relations which can be seen as resistance. Trans is one such desire and identity.

Love then can also be understood as the desire for an escape or emancipation from the self- as it was for Einar, expressed by his discomfort with the physicality of his body.

If, as Jacqueline Rose powerfully argues that sexual difference never achieves purity or stability, could we say that Einar’s desire to embody Lily has been influenced by the heteronormative discourses of sexuality? Is gender non conforming trans then the only truly radical way of being trans? Since gender identity always seems to produce anxiety and lapses into incoherence?

Then again, as Gee Semmalar argues, can the debate around legibility and governmentality overlook the consequences trans bodies of color as caste and class subjects face on abandoning the safety of the binary when they are dependent on the same institutions of control for access to basic citizen and human rights such as healthcare?(more on this later).

The desire for transparency in love is associated with an internal false security about identity. (Berlant 77). 

Berlant goes on to say that the I is what protects us from the overwhelming stimuli of the multiplicity, fragmentary and ambiguous nature of self, making us intelligible to structures of control and regulation.

This social construction allows us to renounce the excess of our desire- it is precisely this overwhelming need that is expressed through the movie- resonating with the transgendering movement as well as its more radical and controversial limb- transableism.

Self-help culture and the new transability discourse works from the assumption that hereterosexual intimacy is in a crisis, a threat to which is a threat to life itself. 99

Einar’s failure to reproduce as an intersex individual when juxtaposed with Lily’s desire to have babies provides us with a glimpse into normativising the trans desire by piecing and suturing the trans body to pass (Puar 36) that is, a cooption of the trans by institutions of control to generate a able bodied neoliberal citizen subject. 
The reproductive neoliberal body is described as the future of control societies. 

The biomolecular and organic state of the body thus becomes inhabited by control economies through a process of miniaturization using the pharmaco-pornographic soft technologies, (Puar 42) making the body the site of control and therefore violence. And also paradoxically the site of resistance as depicted in the movie and through the contemporary trans movement.

Now more than ever our bodies are fragmented into parts, regardless of our sexual or gender identity- more so in the case of trans bodies given their capacity for mutability. As Gee Semmalar points, all of us are in some sense surgically and pharmaceutically altered and manufactured. Biopolitical technologies and institutions of control need scrutiny and analysis on a deeper level today, the way for which is paved by the trans movement.

Consider that even a hundred years ago, the doctor who performs Lily’s reassignment surgery is enthusiastic to tap into the potential of the ‘futurity of the trans body’. His reassurance to Lily that she might one day be able to have her own children could be critiqued as stemming from the desire to integrate the trans normative body into the binary, fitting them back into familiar affirmative roles.

This bias is reflected in how in almost all cases of trans desire cis-heteropatriarchy is prescribed as a cure- the pursuit of pleasure sacrificed to the reproductive function.

The debate around legibility brings in the question of who is allowed to be trans- questions of positionality, caste and class are strong determining factors. The state and legal functions thus act as filters to endorse the ideal trans normative body that not only passes but pieces, giving us a critique of this kind of ‘rehabilitation’ model that centers around capability.

Regardless of what it means for individual lives and stories it is important to look at transability as a global phenomenon to avoid being blindsided by neoliberal romanticization and commodification of the trans desire. To understand how the ability of the body to be integrated -not bodily integrity which is often the source of popular outcry- the idea that the body is incomplete, unwhole and always ready to be rent and torn. (Puar 43) is necessary for generating valuable assets for the neoliberal state.

The engagement of a trans subject with the medical-industrial complex is usually not empowering or victorious, as the movie suggests. It could be anywhere between transformative and capacitating or debilitating (Puar 47-48). The body thus emerges as a site of struggle- socio-political, psychological and biological. The struggle over the choice or lack thereof or even the ambiguity of embodiment, of experience. Few are those who could experience this futurity while the rest are discarded as collateral damage on the road to a revolutionary future.

As Gee Salemmar points, the trans body is often subjected to voyeurism, to be pierced and prodded like ‘lab rats’.

It also highlights the new and more immune ways of violating the body through medical discourses which have now made way into the extremely commercialized self-care culture and manifested itself in the mainstream. June being the LGBTQ+ awareness month has shown how easily the move for normalization of the trans has in turn stratified, pathologized and regulated it.

Body modification becomes a redundant term because the body is constantly in modification- becomes a statistic, the body becomes the site where the state market scientific and geopolitical spaces coincide. (Puar 35) Assimilation of gender through nationalism in the current global context shows how certain bodies are privileged and seen fit to uphold the promise of citizenship. Puar theorizes this simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of trans bodies as viable neoliberal subjects through the medico-pharma matrix since it is the very institutions that produce marginality that are responsible for providing medical and technological care as well as legal intervention on behalf of the trans individual.

Popularization of psychoanalysis and therapy culture has forced us to adjust our desires and self-relations to fit the norm by muting/hiding the pervasiveness of ‘perversion’ in the collective consciousness which then appears in pathological ways in the numerous outbreaks which we appear to be shocked by as a society. Going back to Einar’s experience with the psychoanalysts, Gee Semmelar’s narration of the difficulty to express himself to the psychologists and Puar’s theorisation of the collapse between the DSM and the disability discourse in the context of how trans is understood by the American Psychiatric Journal and the medical industry largely not only shows us across time and societies how little progress has been made in generating a better understanding of trans or as I am trying to show through this paper- of desire.

Love and its intimate contexts come to bear the value of the individual- personally and politically. By linking consumption to emotional survival neoliberalism has provided a substratum to attach the violence of institutions on romance aesthetics’ (Berlant 101) as a way to survive desire thereby creating a smoke screen of moral codes to prevent us from seeing the instability of desire.

Institutions often de-isolate subjects who are suffering from desire (by categorization or popular culture) and name them as the source of their own suffering. Rethinking this through the transability debate, how does it challenge coercive structures? Is it not that perhaps the threatening instability of desire that holds the largest potential for resistance while at the same time being most vulnerable to violence?

I have tried to show how desire manifests in a consumer society which is translated through narratives of love amidst ever growing strategies of subject control. I have also tried to highlight how individual will and agency is retained amidst the neoliberal heterosexual matrix. The ambiguity of trans desire highlights once again the unbearable violence of our own desires as gendered beings cis or trans alike and the million ways in which we resist while navigating the everyday struggle of being human.

Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Brooklyn, New York, Punctum Books, 2012.

Centre for Law and Policy Research. TransForm National Conference - Transgender Rights & Law. 16 January 2016. YouTube, CLPR Trust

Hooper, Tom, director. The Danish Girl. Working Title Films, 2015.

Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim. London, Duke University Press, 2017.