Subversive Sutures: A Counter-hegemonic Reading of Trans Monstrosity

This essay presents a new approach to read the concept of trans monstrosity proposed by Susan Stryker in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” in 1994. Her work, in an emergent context of transgender studies, establishes a literary dialogue with Frankenstein’s creature, thus offering a groundbreaking view from which to criticize transmedicalism and the reification of hegemonic gender identities. Still, the post-structuralist framework in which the text was written limits its political possibilities beyond the discursive denaturalization of the gendered body. Hence, in light of contemporary transgender Marxist thought, new conceptual tools are offered to bring to fruition the counter-hegemonic politics that lied in the monstrous seams and sutures originally theorized by Stryker.