Parts of Myself

This essay considers Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself through an inquiry into the multiplicity of trans subjectivities. Beginning with the story of the author’s encounter with Butler’s text as a newly transitioning graduate student, it asks whether misreadings, both of theory and of bodies, are key to the construction of trans knowledges. From there, the essay reads (or perhaps misreads) Giving an Account alongside Susan Stryker’s foundational essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” arguing that both Butler and Stryker offer ways to inhabit fractured, split, and unknowable selves.