Trans-analysing Frankenstein

‘These are my words to Victor Frankenstein, above the village of Chamounix. Like the monster, I could speak of my earliest memories, and how I became aware of my

difference from everyone around me. I can describe how I acquired a monstrous identity by taking on the label “transsexual” to name parts of myself that I could not otherwise explain. I, too, have discovered the journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bodies of creatures like me since the 1930s. I know in intimate detail the history of this recent medical intervention into the enactment of transgendered subjectivity; science seeks to contain and colonize the radical threat posed by a particular transgender strategy of resistance to the coerciveness of gender: physical alteration of the genitals.’

Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’, GLQ (1994) p. 244.