Transgendering Pop Culture 1: You Make Me Want To Be A Man

The first in a series of posts in which I transgender pop culture, selectively making use of, perverting and re-reading popular culture for my own purposes. Popular culture is so profoundly cis-gendered it's barely worth mentioning, providing precious few direct points of identification for transgendered people. I have no intention of doing justice to texts, of reading them on their own terms or in the cis and het ways in which they are usually read. If this is disorienting to read from a perspective that centres trans* subjectivities, then good. Let us begin.

Here's Utada Hikaru's single "You Make Me Want To Be A Man" from her criminally ignored 2004 English-language album Exodus. A heterocentric reading of this song would have Utada trying to communicate across the vastness of the het binary gap to her male partner yadda yadda. She's fighting with her partner and figures being a bloke would make it easier for her to understand him.

However, in my far more interesting reading, I see it as being about a barely communicable FtM desire.

The chorus goes:

"I really want to tell you something

this is just the way I am

I really want to tell you something but I can't

you make me want to be a man

arguments that have no meaning

this is just the way I am"

Utada in the video is cyborg, trying to articulating hir trans desires through the dizzying blur of technology and pop culture images by which heterosexual genders are reproduced. Both song and video produce a powerful alienation effect from the sentimentalised versions of heterosexuality one usually finds in sparkly pop music. The subject produced is partial in the way that early transition subjects are, barely audible through the electronic noise. And yet, technological mediation is necessary, since the humanist dream of organic wholeness is not one that trans people can ever access in the same way that cis people do given our body modifications, even if it proves strategically useful for us to understand ourselves and be understood by others.

The "arguments that have no meaning" I see as being the usual cis arguments one finds when you decide to transition. But Utada is firm--"this is just the way I am" ze repeats, over and over, trying to make the subject of the song (and us) finally get it.

Incidentally, Utada is releasing two new albums this year - one a Japanese one in March, and the second one later in the year is her English language follow-up to Exodus. Woo.

Next week: MtFing The Veronicas.