The Sexual Schema: Transposition and Transgender in Phenomenology of Perception

In Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes but a single reference to what might be called mixed-gender embodiment: “A patient feels a second person implanted in his body. He is a man in half his body, a woman in the other half” (88). This remark would not seem to promise much for thinking about nonnormative gender configurations. We are introduced to this person of indeterminate gender as a “patient,” already marked by some indistinct but defining sign of emotional or mental distress. That patient is doubly confined within a binary system of gender. Even though this patient is, phenomenologically speaking, both a man and a woman, this gender configuration is not thought as some new third term that might exceed the binary of man and woman but is conceived by Merleau-Ponty as a man, intact and entire, somehow fused with an also properly gendered woman, with the body divided down the middle neatly between them.1 Despite this, I want to argue that, even given the dearth of attention to nonnormative genders in this text, the phenomenological approach to the body that Merleau-Ponty offers in Phenomenology of Perception can be uniquely useful for understanding trans embodiment.2.