Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, while widely recognized and celebrated as a groundbreaking portrayal of a transgendered protagonist at the time of its publication, has rarely been seriously considered as a novel. Regularly assumed to be a thinly disguised autobiography and generally considered too "sentimental" to rank as a serious literary accomplishment, Feinberg's text is considered politically and pedagogically effective, but not literarily or culturally significant. Such assessments, however, take for granted both the genre of "sentimental" fiction and its status as "unliterary," and, in so doing, obscure the way that Feinberg both draws upon and revises traditions of women's literature - particularly the captivity narrative - to produce and alter the genre's particular sentimental effects. Understanding the way that Feinberg has constructed this deeply affective narrative is significant not only for our understanding of hir[1] transgender protagonist, but for our approach to "multicultural" literatures more broadly. I would like to argue that Feinberg's revision of the captivity narrative is a pioneering and significant example of narrative that manages to represent a "minority" body without allowing that body to become rhetorical, symbolic, or displaced. In presenting readers with the opportunity for ethical contact, in Levinas's sense of the word, Feinberg eschews the focus on ethical content that has characterized, and limited, early approaches to multicultural curriculums and pedagogies, including the study of "minority" sexualities.

The Captive Body

American studies scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Lauren Berlant have noted the way that, in U.S. literature, the at-risk female body has traditionally functioned as a means to both articulate and undermine nationalistic discourses of racial, sexual, and gendered belonging.[2] This is particularly true of early captivity narratives, such as the puritan "bestsellers" produced by Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Dustin, which, as Michelle Burnham points out, confronted readers "with a series of new and radical possibilities" (38) for imagining female subjects. Although these narratives were always presented as religious testimony, they could not be easily contained as examples of (as Rowlandson titles her narrative) The Sovereignity and Goodness of God. In order to survive the violent raid on her village and the death of several of her children, Rowlandson must sacrifice ideal standards of feminine behavior and barter relentlessly (perhaps even sexually) with her captors. Hannah Dustin's popular account of a similar situation, in which she escapes by killing and scalping her kidnappers, exemplifies this point. According to Christopher Castiglia, the genre of the captivity narrative has thus afforded white women a "symbolic economy" with which to express dissatisfaction with gender roles, to re-imagine those roles and the narratives that normalize them, and to transform boundaries of genre (4). Departing from the standard reading of puritan captivity narratives as "predictable and artless . . .expressions of voluntary social conformity" (23-24), Castiglia shows that stories of captivity have allowed white women to document agency and write about culturally unnamable forms of imprisonment, such as heteronormativity.

Michelle Burnham agrees that captivity narratives, and the sentimental novels that grew from them, "function as escape literature because their heroines so often indulge in transgressive behavior or enact forms of resistant agency, not in spite of their captivity but precisely as a result of it" (3). However, she goes on to argue that "like novelistic discourse, nationalist discourse relies on the profoundly affective experience of sympathy" (43), and the sentimental response that captivity narratives evoke is one of the deepest and most structuring of any narrative in U.S. nationhood. Burnham describes this sentimental response as dependent on an ambivalent struggle between identification with home cultures and with the Other. As she explains: "the captive professes an identity whose fixity is belied by the unstable and mobile processes of identification that supports that identity" and "what is sentimental about the imagined communities novels create is that they are not based on likeness" (47). In other words, it is the close contact with Otherness, and indeed the very slippery boundary between the Other (captor) and the supposed same (captive, reader) that creates the affective experience of novel reading (and eventually, of nation-imagining). The heroine of the captivity narrative holds an ambivalent liminal position between two or more cultures that undermines her identification with the "home" culture and, simultaneously, reinforces that identification. In short, we identify with the heroine's rebellious boundary crossing but also read her stubbornly back into the "home" culture where she belongs.

Stone Butch Blues clearly and immediately announces its connection to this tradition. At the opening of the novel, Jess is torn between two worlds. In language that, as Siobhan B. Somerville has pointed out, accesses the "enduring trope of the captivity narrative" (171), Jess describes the ambivalent sense of displacement that attends her moving between two apartments, that of the "Indian" family who nurture her and that of her own parents, who do not. She writes, "And so I grew in two worlds, immersed in the music of two languages. One world was Wheaties and Milton Berle. The other was fry bread and sage. One was cold, but it was mine; the other was warm, but it wasn't" (14). Although Jess's mother was relieved to be excused from mothering duties for the child she really didn't want, eventually her father insisted that she be reared at home:

Sentiments of captivity continue throughout and profoundly shape Stone Butch Blues. As Castiglia explains, virtually all captives narrate a profound ambivalence (straightforwardly or embedded in the textual form) about their eventual return "home" (in most cases, to white culture; in Jess's case, to the world of binary gender categories). Because white patriarchy may not offer women more "freedom" than nonwhite cultures can, Castiglia explains that "Rescue leaves women not in a state of antesocial liberty but in the moment of articulation arising between two forms of confinement" (129). Jess's inability to find a "home" - literally, as she flees or is forced from one living situation to another, or existentially, as she moves between the categories of man and woman, butch lesbian and transsexual - is typical, then, of the captivity narrative genre.

However, because nationalistic discourse usually recuperates its transgressive subjects, using the titillating representation of contact with Others to ultimately reiterate definitions of identity and alterity and create imagined communities of sameness, Feinberg must revise the traditional symbolic economies of the captivity narrative in order to break literary ground for hir transgender subject. Whereas Castiglia identifies a kind of female bonding that can occur through the creation of "textual interventions" (116) received by a community of female readers, Stone Butch Blues assumes no such community readership, and aims for a reader-response that is far more radical than the subtle counter-cultural expressions that Castiglia describes as embedded in the captivity narrative genre. Furthermore, Jess's struggle between competing worlds of gender identity and sexual expression are not meant to eventually strengthen her identification with one at the expense of the others. Unlike most captivity narratives, in this novel we are meant to identify with and come to value the liminal space of "in-between" - transgender.

To facilitate this reader response, Feinberg seeks to describe a different sort of self/ other relationship and a different sort of captivity. Although oppressive social forces significantly contribute to Jess's suffering and inability to find a home, the novel focuses most intensely on Jess's captivity in her own body. For example, a great portion of the novel is devoted to exploring the way that Jess's flesh has become "stone" and her search for a lover who can "melt [her] stone" (9), thus freeing her to fully live out her desires in a flesh undivided. [3] This focus on Jess's embodied captivity is a significant departure from other captivity narratives and sentimental novels, which oftentimes highlight the heroine's body but defer the meaning of that body by making it symbolic, rhetorical, or displaced.[4] As a result, Burnham argues, "'America' as a political, cultural and national category has in large part been articulated through the bodies, especially the reproducing bodies, of women" (171). The cultural tradition of reading the female body symbolically could easily translate into the objectification or displacement of the transgender body; Feinberg's narrative is designed to make sure that such cooptation does not happen.

The Transgender Body

Jay Prosser and Judith Halberstam have laid out the stakes of this project in their debate over the most fair and appropriate representations of transsexual and trangender bodies, particularly within the context of queer theory. Prosser and other transsexual theorists have objected to the contemporary use of the transgendered body as symbolic for postmodern, queer theories of performative identities. For Prosser, queer theory seems to circulate the understanding that "transgender=queer=subversive" (32), leaving transsexual subjects in the position of un-subversive, "naturalizing" (32) or recuperated. He reads queer theory's reliance on a theoretical notion of transgender as indicative of its "incapacity to sustain the body as a literal category" (27). In other words, queer theorists take refuge in the discursive/ theoretical representation of transgender as a way to avoid the difficult ontological questions associated with transsexuality, such as: what does it mean to be, or how do we describe the feeling of, being differently gendered?

Prosser has identified Judith Halberstam's controversial 1994 article, "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity" as emblematic of queer theory's tendency to elevate the theory of transgender over the specificity of transsexual. However, in Female Masculinity, Halberstam effectively defends her work on the cultural figure she calls the "transgender butch," as well as her theoretical position that it is limiting, probably naïve, and possibly even dangerous to emphasize too much the notion that one who is differently gendered can find a "home" in a "right body" through transsexual transition. She argues: "the idea that only transsexuals experience the pain of a 'wrong body' shows an incredible myopia about the trials and tribulations of many varieties of perverse embodiment" (162). While Halberstam does to a certain extent recant her early formulation in "F2M" that "There are no transsexuals. We are all transsexuals" (153), she feels that too much emphasis on the experience of gender transition might obscure the specificity and complexity of the multiple and varied experiences of being sexed and gendered.

Feinberg's novel has been a touchstone in the debate between Prosser and Halberstam precisely because it so effectively mediates between their two positions. In some ways, the novel emphasizes Halberstam's charge that "specificity is all" (173), as Jess disagrees with other members of her communities about how best to balance personal desire, body image, and survival in a hostile world. More to the point, Jess's body itself changes and shifts throughout the course of the novel, at times feeling like "home" and at others like a prison; at times feeling "right" and at other times feeling very "wrong." At the same time, the novel's priority is emphatically not to express the postmodern fragmentation that accompanies these shifts in identity. Rather, the narrative is designed to articulate what it feels like to move in and out of embodied captivity, what it feels like to be trapped in your own skin. As Feinberg has repeatedly stated, s/he chose

Throughout this novel, Jess is an embodied subject on a horizon of being with the visible world, including other body/ subjects. Even when Jess is "trapped" in her own body, she takes refuge in the phenomenological deferral between body and self that is not a division, but is a reversible/ reciprocal relationship. As I will show, Jess's deferral or disassociation during episodes of torture allows her to preserve her "self" for a future on the horizon of being. Unlike the self/ other divide that Burnham describes wherein we are titillated by the heroine's contact with Others but ultimately relate to her as like ourselves, Feinberg's embodied captivity narrative introduces a reversible/ reciprocal self/ other relationship that applies to Jess's body/ self in the world of the narrative, and ultimately to our own relationship to the text.

This reversibility leads to a reader response that I call "ethical contact." [5] I base this concept on Emmanual Levinas's description of "ethics" as a primordial "facing" between two subjects. He explains:

I believe that Stone Butch Blues works to construct an ethical reader response that is not so much "primordial" as it is phenomenological. In order to read Jess's body without objectifying it, this ethical contact attempts to translate the affective power of the captivity narrative into something that can actually "touch" the reader. [6] This means that the reader should feel not only moved but implicated; should consider him or herself not only a witnessing consciousness, but a connected and vulnerable body as well.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of phenomenological relation can augment Levinas's description of ethical facing to describe this narrative "contact." [7] According to Merleau-Ponty, there is a fundamental reversability between touching and being touched, or seeing and being seen. To see is to correspondingly be seeable; to touch is to simultaneously be touchable. As Elizabeth Grosz summarizes, "the human body is a 'being of two leaves,' one of which is an object in a world of other objects, the other of which is a perceiver of these objects" (102). Rather than segregating mind and inside from body and outside, then, Merleau-Ponty conceives of being as the continuous reversability or folding over of flesh - the almost simultaneous insideness and outsideness of our corporeal experience is what characterizes our being in the world.[8]

In his famous illustrative passage, Merleau-Ponty writes:

Stone Butch Blues seeks to both describe and enact this chiasmic relationship. While Feinberg shows us the way that Jess uses the space of deferral between body, self and world to "preserve" herself during episodes of torture or "un-making," s/he also shows the way that the chiasm can mediate between two Others (usually faces) on a horizon of being to help "remake" both subjects. The kind of wordless exchange described here is open ended, generative, and implicitly ethical, and because of the ever present possibility of this chiasmic exchange, Feinberg shows, it is necessary to continue participating in the visible world. Finally, Feinberg outlines the role that literature can play as part of a body/ subject's horizon. Because literature is described as primarily phenomenological rather than primarily discursive, Feinberg models a distinctive type of exchange that is available between texts and readers. In order to share the chiasmic relation that Jess has modeled for us, we as readers must conceive of ourselves as existing on her horizon of being. The reversible/ reciprocal relationship made available to us accesses the affective dimension of the captivity narrative without its sentimental nationalism, and addresses what Kathleen Lundeen has described as "the ethical dilemma inherent in empathy - forever finding oneself either too close or not close enough to the object of self-identification" (91).

Embodied Captivity; or, the Terrorized Body

Descriptions of chiasmic self-relation mediate our reading and witnessing of Jess's horrific experiences of literal captivity - when she is tortured, that is, in police custody, for the crime of being a "he-she." Jess's embodied experience is similar to the prison narratives of Lena Constante and Jacobo Timerman that Laura Doyle analyzes in "Bodies Inside Out: A Phenomenology of the Terrorized Body in Prison." Doyle describes a "vexed, doubled condition" that characterizes both testimonies: "the body is a reserve as well as an inescapable site of torture - exactly both at once in its doubleness" (124). Constante " 'escapes' into 'her mind'" (125) and therefore escapes the painful world of solitary confinement in Romania; Timerman "disassociates from his surroundings and the body that inhabits them" (125). Yet, Doyle writes,

This is precisely the dynamic that Stone Butch Blues dramatizes. During her first experience of gang rape Jess reports, "I couldn't make it stop, I couldn't escape it, and so I pretended it wasn't happening. I looked at the sky, how cool and placid it was. I imagined it was the ocean and the clouds were white capped waves" (41). Jess goes so far "inside" that she actually starts giggling thinking about what she wasn't missing in heterosexual sex, if this is indeed it. Jeffry, the current rapist, "pulled his cock out of me and slapped my face, back and forth. 'It's not funny,' he shouted. 'It's not funny, you crazy bitch'" (41). Doyle writes that prison guards or torturers who choose to violently probe bodily cavities force "violent touchings from without on the ontology of constant benevolent touchings, interconnecting tissues, within. Such violence seeks not only to inflict pain but also to divide the person from her or his own possibilities, to seize the primal condition of possibility" (124). When Jess distances herself from the pain and humiliation of the rapists' violations of her body enough to laugh at a joke she is sharing with only herself, she is showing Jeffry that he has not penetrated her deeply enough to dominate the whole of her interiority.

When Jess falls into the hands of more experienced torturers, the violations are more extensive, but so is her body's resistance. Lt. Mulroney gives Jess this choice: "Eat me or eat my shit, bulldagger" (62). In either case her face becomes the repository for his bodily excretions; her mouth, which is normally a central conveyer of her humanity (because it allows her to project her voice) becomes his personal toilet. The Lt. transfers the abject of his own body - his defecation - onto or into Jess, but the plan seems to backfire after she vomits his shit all over him. Lt. Mulroney continues his assault on Jess's interiority by raping her vaginally and anally, while for Jess, "Staring at that jail light bulb rescued me from watching my own degradation: I just went away" (62). She continues :

Jess's ability to remove herself from the world through disassociation also effectively removes her from a horizon of being. This produces an embodied captivity that also threatens her life. After the first rape, Jess walks home slowly and reports: "I didn't feel like this was my life that I was living anymore" (41). After the encounter with Lt. Mulroney, Jess reports "[t]he world seemed distant" (67); and in a similar incident with the police "I wondered if I was close to death because I seemed to be drifting away from the world" (136). After each incident Jess comes back to herself more divided from herself, a state that becomes exacerbated when she is passing as a man. Even though this period is the only time in Jess's life when she can walk down the street with no threat of bodily harm, she is never more thoroughly imprisoned - and it is the very space of her body that she is trapped in. According to Merleau-Ponty:

In order to survive the various manifestations of imprisonment and torture that she encounters (and to survive the ever present possibilities that another attack may be coming), Jess exaggerates the deferral between herself as seer (her inside) and herself as seen (her outside). The result is a feeling of radical alienation, almost disembodiment - and of further captivity. Jess is unable to initiate or maintain relationships with other people when they so fundamentally misunderstand her own self-understanding; she spends years alone, drifting from job to job, alienated from all communities. What began as a way for Jess to "still be me and survive" (148), then, left her feeling "buried alive . . . I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside" (173). She registers her need to close the gap between her "inside" and "outside" when she says, "I feared I was disappearing and I'd cease to exist if someone didn't touch me" (185). Finally, when she feels she can no longer recognize "the more complicated me beneath my surface" (222) Jess decides to stop passing as a man, even though this decision will once again put her life at risk.

Facing Bodies

Jess's embodied captivity, even when she is at her most technically "free," illustrates the absolute necessity of existing on a horizon of being. And, in contrast to the un-making that can occur on that horizon in the hands of torturers, there are also always forces of re-making - human connection and ethical action - available. This is a lesson that Jess learns after her first experience of torture by the police. Unable to accept the comfort of her friends, Jess feels herself to be on an entire different plane of being from them. She can't eat - "I couldn't bring myself to bite into flesh" - or respond - "my face wouldn't move, even to smile." Her friend Betty finally says to her:

These ethical and chiasmic "facings" occur throughout the text and they describe a mode of human relations that is primarily phenomenological, rather than primarily discursive. Urging her union organizer to rescue her friend Jan from a routine arrest, Jess "didn't have time to explain. Duffy took my arm and looked into my face for the answer. I let him see the fear and shame in a way I'd never voluntarily let a man see before. Duffy nodded. He understood" (98). When it comes to expressing the "truth" of trauma, in Stone Butch Blues these face exchanges are the only way. Jess receives such a "narrative" from her new friend Ben while passing as a man.

There is another realm of chiasmic relation that the novel describes as integral to Jess's survival, though: reading. In her childhood captivity in a mental institution, Jess finds her only real "asylum" in the Norton anthology of poetry. She says:

Ruth also gives Jess the opportunity to occupy the in-between space of the chiasmus - to live not at the margins but in the ever shifting dynamic of "the moment." This is exemplified in the scene where Ruth paints Jess's ceiling as a likeness of the sky that seems to be approaching dawn and dusk simultaneously. Unnerved by the painting, Jess admits:

By the close of the novel, it is clear that Jess's survival - the resolution of her captivity - is dependent upon her tolerance of being in-between here and there. As vulnerable to unmaking as her embodied self is, she must consistently place herself on a visible horizon of being, in relation to other beings. It is also clear that as readers, we are able and ethically obliged to "catch" Jess as she makes the necessary leaps towards self-realization. Jess has modeled this chiasmic relation for us: unless we want to leave her "naked" or stripped in the way that she reluctantly left her friend Ben, we must complete the ethical relationship that the text initiates. Even if we cannot do anything to intervene in Jess's world, we can, as she does helplessly at several points, "stand there and witness" (270). At best, we can feel the texture of her life as we read it.

Our role as receivers, and our necessary placement on Jess's horizon of being, is integral to the text from the very first page when we begin with a letter that cannot be sent to a proper location. "Since I can't mail you this letter, I'll send it to a place where they keep women's memories safe. Maybe someday, passing through this big city, you will stop and read it. Maybe you won't" (12). Unlike the letters that accompanied traditional captivity narratives to authenticate the authorship and explain away any inconsistencies of loyalty to gender, family, and nation (in other words, to mediate between author and reader) this opening letter puts us in immediate relation with Jess as we substitute for her absent ex-lover Theresa, and demands some reciprocity of feeling. The letter also models how not to receive Jess in its immediate portrayal of a blind date who, Jess says, "is looking at me but she doesn't see me" (5). When Jess tries to explain that her transgendered identity does not stem from her own socially imposed self hatred, "I felt myself getting all flushed and my face twitched a little"; meanwhile, the woman "got her very interested expression on" (6) and their encounter abruptly ends. Unlike this woman, who meets Jess's honest face with previous assumptions and then a polite mask, we are moved to receive Jess with an honest, empathetic face, as Theresa would.

We catch the letter and it catches us, and we continue to fulfill our ethical relationship with Jess as she leaps into the different phases of her life, variously described as: "like driving towards the edge of a cliff and seeing what's coming but not being able to brake" (53); "like driving on a single-lane highway and seeing an eighteen wheeler heading right for you" (69); and "being chased by something to the edge of a cliff. I'm scared of what's coming behind me; I don't know what's ahead of me. And suddenly I decide I'd rather jump than wait for it to catch up with me" (144). By catching Jess - even if only in the chiasmic relationship that involves being together on the same horizon of being - we enable the birth of this now established subject, the transgendered person. Signifying our shared journey towards a greater freedom, the novel closes on an image of 'flying free': "I heard the beating of wings nearby. I opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the dawn" (301).

The Reader's Body: The Implications of Ethical Contact

Stone Butch Blues, as has been widely acknowledged, allowed a wide readership to, for the first time, "see through the eyes of" a transgendered protagonist ("Pink,"1). Because of its autobiographical and sentimental feel, however, the novel has not been seriously considered as a novel. [11] As Feinberg hirself has stated: "an elitist bias has been revealed to me by some who have conveyed their assumption that a blue collar person, who lacks extended formal education, could not possibly write about anything except their own life" (quoted in Prosser, 199). Feinberg has not received adequate credit for hir skill in producing the tremendous affective power of this novel.

I have argued that Stone Butch Blues cleverly hitches on to the well known (if often misrecognized) genre of the captivity narrative, but then re-makes the ready sentimental and affective response to that type of narrative into an empathetic, phenomenological, and ethical mode of relation. If we enter into a chiasmic exchange with Jess, we don't really "see through her eyes" so much as we see into her eyes and the horizon of her life, with the corresponding understanding that we are also seeable. This connection, like the moments of emotional electricity described in the novel, may be difficult to rationally defend, but easy to feel. In this way, the novel seeks to open to us, and to open us to, a shared horizon wherein our own difference from the protagonist does not confuse or obscure our caring for her. Enacting and defending an ethical dimension to both being and reading, Stone Butch Blues ultimately makes a sophisticated argument for the importance, relevance, and approachability of both embodiment and ethics in the formation and relation of subjects. [12]

Feinberg's revision is significant not only for the light that hir "embodied captive" can shed on the culturally contested subject position of "transgender," but as an example of a narrative technique of great relevance to other contemporary "minority" authors. The multicultural movement has too often deployed its new canonical literatures as select representatives of "the" minority experience, and as authoritative providers of ethical content (i.e., slavery was wrong, the genocide of Native Americans was wrong, the terrorist tactics used against LGBT subjects was, and is, wrong). Of course, the process of revising dominant nationalistic narratives and reclaiming these untold histories is extremely important, and literature is an effective means of circulating these narratives. However, ethical contact has the potential to go beyond producing a sense that something was or is wrong. Ethical contact is more immediate, it implicates readers in the wrong, and when it is phenomenological like Stone Butch Blues, it can undermine the mind/ body split that undergirds most prejudices and phobias. [13] In short, it can help us to revise our very definitions of subjectivity and personhood in the way that Eva Feder Kittay, an activist and scholar in the field of disability studies, has suggested:

In his reading of traditional captivity narratives, Castiglia argues that freedom is a myth; that there can be no "new speaking voice" for any subject; there is no "newness" to be found in America (11). Speaking discursively, he is right - there can be no escaping the carceral network of norms that, as Foucault and others have so convincingly described, has constructed us from our birth. If captivity is a result of discourse, though, then perhaps freedom can best be found in the un-discursive realms of affect and phenomenology. The electric, almost tangible existence of empathy and the possibility that we might face the world with our feelings - pursuing, as Levinas urged, the good rather than the right - is the escape that this text offers up to each and every one of its phenomenologically connected readers. As such, it is a radical re-description of "a world worth living in," (Feinberg 301) and a hopeful and practical guide for our inevitable journeys into narratives of trauma that we mourn and, in a limited way, share.