Sissy the Archive: Ambivalent Intimacies between "Sissy" and "Trans" in Trans* Archives and Contemporary Fiction.

In this article, I examine the ambivalent relation between sissies and trans women in historical and contemporary trans cultural production. Sissification porn depicts a forced-feminization fetish in which a man is "nonconsensually" transformed into a girlish bimbo. His masculinity and selfhood are "negated" through fantasies of masochistic feminized embodiment. Trans-exclusionary feminists claim that sissy porn induces gender dysphoria in its viewers and converts unsuspecting cis men into trans women through sissification. Rather than simply repudiating any relation between the trans woman and the sissy, I insist on tarrying with the negativity of sissification and the bad affects saturating this relation as the figure of the sissy haunts trans archives. Recent fiction and criticism by Imogen Binnie, Torrey Peters, Alison Rumfitt, and Andrea Long Chu reveal an ambivalent intimacy between the trans woman and the sissy. In sitting with this ambivalence, I critique a desexualized (trans)gender identity without dissolving the negativity of the sissy into a countercultural, queer pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]