Themes of Radical Embodiment from the film Avatar
Abstract
When agency and lived experience compels an individual beyond identification as "male" or "female," or beyond socially and physiologically definable bounds as "human," wherein does one find one's self? Is it possible to conceive and inhabit an embodiment that specifically posits gender, in all its constructed and intrinsic manifestations, as yet another form of choice powered by an individual exercise of agency? Relationality, performatitivity and the lure of congruence are themes that collide one against another through the course of this paper. I endeavor to relate transgender narratives of transition and embodiment to a deeper lure, not of merely escaping from one side of the gender binary to the other but rather to an elusive sense of both existential and ontological completeness, glimpses of which present for many transgender individuals at the "conclusion" of gender transition.
Dallas 1983
I stepped though the hatchway of the isolation tank. Settling into the warm epsom salt saturated water, I took my place floating horizontally while my research partner finished connecting the EEG leads. The electro encephalograph would monitor and record my brain wave activity for the next several hours while I lay floating in the warm, silent and womb-like environment. It is 1983, and I am conducting ethnographic research while a graduate student at Southern Methodist University.
The research in which I was engaged explored the manner in which humans employed trance as a means to facilitate an altered state of consciousness. I hadn’t the time or the resources to travel abroad to do typical fieldwork, so I was conducting experiments on myself in sensory deprivation to simulate the lived experience of my research subjects, who were variously situated in Meknes, Morocco, Konya, Turkey and on the island of Bali, Indonesia. What each of these ethnographic groups shared in common - all of them entered altered states of consciousness by means a great deal more dramatic than what I thought I was about to experience.
With the last connections checked, she sealed the hatch and I settled into a carefully controlled environment of complete darkness and utter silence. The water’s chemistry and temperature was closely regulated to match my body temperature and phenyl group levels exactly so that soon my perception of the boundaries of where my body started and stopped became increasingly less defined. During the course of the next four hours, I was to lose all sense that my body was a tangible object containing my consciousness. Not sure what to expect, I let the experience quietly overtake me as I worked at becoming accustomed to this radically different place.
I soon realized that this was not an environment that our waking-state consciousness was typically prepared to “become accustomed” to except by giving in to it and letting the mind go where it wished to go. All the research that I had previously conducted on sensory deprivation and altered states of consciousness suggested that what I should expect is that, absent the continuous stream of external environmental stimuli, the mind takes over and creates its own internal travelogue, its own existential schema for reality. Over the course of several of these “tank trips” as I called them my mind did not disappoint. With respect to brain wave activity, typical waking state EEG levels range from 20-25 Hz. While in sensory deprivation levels slow down to 4-8 Hz. The EEG readings settle into the slow, rhythmic wave pattern known as the theta state. It was in this deeply relaxed yet alert state, and always over an unpredictable and indeterminate length of time; that my consciousness would expand to create its own tangible and utterly vivid reality.
Experiencing my consciousness disconnected from the constraints of the physical body brought with it a curious sort of immediacy. Likewise, it often included what could only be described as an out-of-body experience wherein I both observed from a distance and experienced from within my physical body being fragmented into countless and myriad bits of sentience. At a distance from my “body,” I observed those individual bits of consciousness streaming ever upward and downward toward infinity. At the time, I could not recall ever experiencing this kind of dream-awake state before and I wondered what part of my consciousness could have manufactured such a vision? Was it a repressed memory? Alternatively, was it something intrinsic, some kind of neurological fragment long dormant and awaiting the right interaction of stimuli to leap to the fore? The nature of these experiences never centered on bodily sensations per se, but rather on what my consciousness ‘created’ out of whole cloth. I was fully disembodied and I found that I was not missing my sense of physicality at all.
Inexplicably - I was also genderless.
This particular feature was uniquely unsettling as, up to that point, being hyper-aware of my gender was a feature of my lived experience. From a very early age I was cognizant of my intrinsic nature as female - as somehow inexplicably and irreducibly feminine. This of course proved to be quite inconvenient in that I was born male-bodied and socialized accordingly. Yet through the course of these experiments, my conception of the nexus between the body and the consciousness would be forever altered, as it grew increasingly tenuous. Through the repetition of these experiences of disembodiment, I came to see the human body as merely a vehicle for the consciousness and realized that this vehicle could be infinitely malleable without threatening or damaging the integrity of the consciousness which animated it. This realization would change my life forever and with it presage my eventual transformation.
James Cameron's protagonist Jake Sully saw the relationship between body and mind in even starker terms.
“ . . . The concept is for us to drive these remotely controlled bodies called avatars. They’re grown from human DNA mixed with DNA from the natives.
The idea is -- every driver is matched to his own avatar . . . so their nervous systems are in tune. Or something . . . “
Jake Sully was about to inhabit a new and alien body and thought he was to operate it as one does any other form of conveyance. We were both going to learn how flexible consciousness can be when it’s necessary to adapt to altered states.
“One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”
-Simone de Beauvoir
Yet Of Liminality
“Yet of liminality, even under threat of alienation, we will do almost anything to mitigate its effect, except betray the essential truths of the core identities that we experience as innate.”
According to the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, as a derivative noun, liminality finds its root from Latin limen meaning ‘threshold.’ It follows that to enter into the liminal state one must first pass over that threshold to the space between departing and arriving. The central question, touching upon the lived experience of the transgender individual, is . . . between what and arriving where?
As an anthropological concept, Arnold Van Gennep first explored liminality in his landmark work Les Rites de Passage first published in 1909. Van Gennep explored tribal coming of age rituals and noted a unique and consistent tripartite structure:
1. A social and physical separation from the clan or tribal unit.
2. The liminal period during which the initiate is stripped of status previously conferred by the clan or tribal unit.
3. A process of reassimilation back into the clan or tribal unit follows acknowledgement by tribal society of the earned wisdom or special insights gleaned by the initiate during the liminal period.
In the early 1960’s, theories of liminality were expanded upon by Victor Turner. Yet, while Turner drew heavily upon Van Gennep’s three-part structure, he focused his explorations most intently upon the middle stage of the rite of passage—the transitional or liminal stage. It is here that we depart from all thoughts of turning back. For indeed, we have changed too much - have seen too much, to ever safely return.
Renee Thomas ©2010 All Rights Reserved
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