Norms of Embodiment and Transgender Recognition:The 'Wrong Body' Problem, the Taboo on Translocation, and the Case of Henry James

I begin with critics’ hostility towards Gilbert Osmond, notorious villain of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). I identify this tradition as a response to Osmond’s identity as a trans woman, and to the mode of embodiment that Osmond demonstrates as one possible solution to the problem of the “wrong body.” In the article’s first half, I sketch the status of the “wrong body” in trans studies, where the concept is disfavoured as reproducing a repressive ideology. I contrast its characterization in Lacanian psychoanalysis as psychotic. I demonstrate, nonetheless, in the principles of Lacanian theory the postulation of a class of subjects whose psychical sexuation as men or women does not match up with the symbolic sexual identity of their physical persons and who cannot, therefore, assume their physical persons as their bodies (I term this “co-located embodiment”). I develop a Lacanian analysis of the solution modelled by Osmond to the “wrong body” problem: “translocated embodiment,” in which a subject assumes as their body a sexed form other than their physical person. In the second half, I explore the operation of translocated embodiment in the Anglo- American leisure-class community of The Portrait of a Lady. I read the aestheticism of Gilbert Osmond, Ralph Touchett and Edward Rosier as a historically specific instance of translocation, and show that its social disfavour drives James’s three connoisseurs to attempts at heterosexual courtship and matrimony whose purpose is to secure an advantageous representation of these transgender subjects in the form of cisgender women.