(Be)Coming Undone: Toward a Critical Trans Phenomenology of Sexuality

In this paper, I use Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray to offer a critical phenomenology of the experience of orgasm in relation to trans sexuality. I do so to demonstrate how prevailing understandings of sexuality foreclose sexual possibilities for both trans and cis people. Trans sexual experiences are illustrative, not for being exceptional, but simply because the levels of norms embedded within our sexual experiences become apparent when certain assumptions (e.g., about genital configuration) are put under pressure. I begin by considering the role of sexuality in perception in conjunction with Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the sexual schema. From there, I turn to a consideration of orgasm and offer a brief phenomenology of trans feminine orgasmic experience. In particular, I attend to how orgasmic experience shifts through processes of transition in ways that undercut the language of loss that conditions cisnormative understandings of trans sexuality. Finally, I offer a reading of Irigaray's notion of sexual difference that aims to break down conceptions of gender and sexuality by attending to the moments of hesitation in her work as a site from which critical phenomenological work on sexuality might begin. I put this into conversation with the notion of sexuality as an “ecology of sensations” developed by Amit Rai to offer a possible direction for reconceptualizing sexuality.