Gender Fluidity

One of my most representative essays is a personal commentary on the novel Frankissstein: A Love Story (2020) by Jeanette Winterson. This modern take on Frankenstein shows the struggles with gender of Ray Shelley, a British transgender doctor. Shelley queries the AI specialist Professor Victor Stein’s aim to upload the brain contents into a hard drive, leaving the human body in disuse. The novel intertwines the past of Frankenstein's author, Mary Shelley, and Ray Shelley’s present to answer one specific question: What is your substance, whereof are you made? As Shelley’s words in the original novel, discourse has changed over time. And the same happens to the body.

Ray Shelley erases the alleged fixity between the male and female bodies. They undergo surgery to change the upper part of their body, but they keep their female genital organs. They are challenging the discourse. Shelley is no longer biologically tied to one of the two categories and they also recognised themselves as gender fluid. This is a challenge, but Shelley is still constrained by the categories of identity.

When we see water drops, we see how they move and disappear fast. Why does the body need to be static? Why cannot we change our conception upon gender and accept its malleability? The representation of reality is as subjective as the concepts of sex and gender.

In Frankissstein: A Love Story the possibility to upload the brain contents into a hard drive opens a new way of imagining how our bodies could be in the future, if we would have them at all. The conceptions established upon the human body through dominant discourses could be finally challenged. We would not have to be attached to a specific biological gender that we have been assigned with. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses that gender and sex are socially constructed and that they are imposed through dominant discourses. We should take action and challenge these predetermined conditions. History has never been objective.