TY  - JOUR
A1  - Xiang, Zairong
T1  - Transdualism
BT  - toward a materio-discursive embodiment
JF  - TSQ-Transgender studies quarterly
N2  - The author introduces the concept of transdualism to critique dualism without relying on a dualistic model of critique, the modus operandi necessary for a critique against sexual dualism and hetero/cisnormativity. Transdualism offers an opportunity to dwell within that operation by staying below (not beyond) the “dualism,” that is, below the logic of either/or. The essay will explore the notion of “transdualism” through the hexagram Tai of the Yi Jing, which is often used in medical contexts to illustrate the body-of-orifices of Huangdi Neijing or the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor. The author reads this body-of-orifices, which is primarily represented by its nine major bodily tunnels, with yinyang philosophy as gender/sex indeterminant and shows that the Inner Canon's yinyang body-of-orifices points to something more transgressive, which could unsettle from within the naturalism of gender and sexual dualism and the nature/culture as well as other dualistic divides that have informed contemporary critical rethinking of embodiment. By unpacking the hexagram Tai alongside Inner Canon's body-of-orifices. as well as contemporary feminist, queer, and transgender theorizations of the body and sexuality, this essay aims at rethinking the materio-discursive complexity of the body-of-orifices, which has been either dualistically separated into antagonisms between man and woman, sex and gender, body and discourse, yin and yang; or one-sidedly reduced to a function of “social construction,” knowable only through language—or problematically lumped together in a gender-is-fluid postmodern “both-and,” which supposedly overcomes the metaphysico-theological “either/or.”
KW  - yinyang
KW  - dualism
KW  - embodiment
KW  - either/or
KW  - Yi Jing (I Ching)
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-6900795
SN  - 2328-9252
SN  - 2328-9260
VL  - 5
IS  - 3
SP  - 425
EP  - 442
PB  - Duke Univ. Press
CY  - Durham
ER  -