GENDER TROUBLE 125

Gender Trouble
or naturalized as gender-specific. In other words, some parts of the
body become conceivable foci of pleasure precisely because they correspond to a normative ideal of a gender-specific body. Pleasures are in
some sense determined by the melancholic structure of gender whereby some organs are deadened to pleasure, and others brought to life.
Which pleasures shall live and which shall die is often a matter of which
serve the legitimating practices of identity formation that take place
within the matrix of gender norms.42
Transsexuals often claim a radical discontinuity between sexual
pleasures and bodily parts.Very often what is wanted in terms of pleasure requires an imaginary participation in body parts, either appendages or orifices, that one might not actually possess, or, similarly,
pleasure may require imagining an exaggerated or diminished set of
parts.The imaginary status of desire, of course, is not restricted to the
transsexual identity; the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body
not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object. The strategy
of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself.
Indeed, in order to desire at all it may be necessary to believe in an
altered bodily ego43 which, within the gendered rules of the imaginary,
might fit the requirements of a body capable of desire. This imaginary
condition of desire always exceeds the physical body through or on
which it works.
Always already a cultural sign, the body sets limits to the imaginary meanings that it occasions, but is never free of an imaginary construction. The fantasized body can never be understood in relation to
the body as real; it can only be understood in relation to another culturally instituted fantasy, one which claims the place of the “literal” and
the “real.” The limits to the “real” are produced within the naturalized
heterosexualization of bodies in which physical facts serve as causes
and desires reflect the inexorable effects of that physicality.
The conflation of desire with the real—that is, the belief that it is
parts of the body, the “literal” penis, the “literal” vagina, which cause
pleasure and desire—is precisely the kind of literalizing fantasy char90