Embarrassing Subjects, Undisplayable Objects

Diego Semerene is Assistant Professor of Queer and Transgender Media at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the Queer Analysis Research Group of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Not unlike the subject matter of this article, finding a proper pronoun to refer to the author is impossible. Yet the conventions of a biographical account accompanying such a text demand that a pronoun eventually be used in order to avoid the endless repetition of the author’s name throughout the text. This makes for an embarrassing situation for the author, which also mirrors, or incarnates, the thesis of the text itself. If the author uses “he,” readers may quickly accept that premise –or sentence, or symptom – perhaps not without questioning the author’s authority or lived experience to speak on trans-ness. Or so the author fears. If the author uses “she,” readers may question such a self-entitlement on the grounds that they wouldn’t recognize sufficient visual signs in the author’s photographic portrait, or the author’s first name, to substantiate the claim. If the author uses “they,” or some neologism of a pronoun, this may pass as a good compromise, sparing the author from sharing the embarrassment so akin to the objects at the center of the article. But the neutrality of such terms would be a lie for the author does not, at the level of self-identification, reject these binaries. The author is a product of these binaries, of their hyperbolic Latin American demands in specific, and has come to, in the most psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoy them – despite everything. Which is also embarrassing, politically. The author will thus replace the utilization of a pronoun with this problematization in order to mark the impossibility of the situation, and of language writ large, and in the hopes that the speaking subject might neuter some of the embarrassment derived from embarrassing situations and embarrassing objects by writing them out. Or by displaying them.