光幻之墟

Entitled "he" in a Slash Format:
Initiating A Trans-Boy Continuum on the Discursive Arena of Prerogative


Lucifer Hung



Far from being a simplistic, universal, and a-historical model
across time and locations, the concept and envisagement on the
issues of right circulate around a complex, meticulous, and
contemporary (or modernistic in terms of temporal structure)
network of constructions and territories. It has been within
the confines of a western liberal wing for quite a long while,
and sometimes misunderstood as a benevolent, single-minded
organization for the progressive, linear teleology of a
historical idealism. Almost on the contrary to these benign
and naive assumptions, the fundamental meaning of Right is a
locus without inherent essentiality or, a seemingly neutral
milieu for political contestation and power circulation,
allowing sometimes for a battle ground upon which certain
contemporary identifications build their own base. This locus,
both insubstantial and conclusive, according to theoretical
articulation, might be the equivalent of a primordial,
nameless, emptied-out space of universality which foregrounds
a multi-dimensional construction of networks in charge of power
exchange, hegemonic institutionalization, marginal lifestyle,
and revolutionary potential; its spider web situating a proto-
organic system within which a symbiosis between impersonal
Sign and institutes and personal patterns of feeling converge.
On this founding stronghold, the discourse of right is
conceived as a product of theoretical and political intercourse,
crisscrossing its way out along with several important, poignant
issues, such as a modern subjectivity, difference and Other,
boundary and transgression, humanity and in-humanness, and, one's
own identity or positionality in terms of racial, sexual, or
(trans)-gender identification.

With variant formations and characteristics, there is a multitude
of attitudes and teleological kit-packages to struggle over the
contested site of right, the process often brutally intensified
and recalcitrantly unyielding by the confrontation between or
among antagonistic representational forces. Sometimes the
hegemonic system is oppositional to the marginalized people and
their “human” rights, yet sometimes with contingence or
manipulative deliberation, this representative mainstream performs
in concert with those who need empowerment in a seemingly
politically correct manner. The idea, and its material formations
of the invented (and naturalized) human right is a cutting edge,
revealing fault lines and raw wounds and, at the same moment,
concealing these gaps by a policing system that operate as
handyman to exclusion, expulsion, and prohibition of discriminated
subject positions, voicing bureaucratic, sloppy propaganda
borrowed from liberal notions and twisting them into a speech
such as government or even majority’s “right”. This essay
is written to correspond to and form an alliance upon several
agonizing confrontations invoked by a legion of social movements
on civil rights, and analyse especially several occasions of one's
execution of rights performed by masculine trans-gendered persons
or trans-sexual men in a everyday-life background embedded within
a normative social reality.


(Rights Symposium, HK, 2006 Dec.)