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Title: Radical Gender Abolition Anti-manifesto
Author: AMR Schwarzenbach
Language: en
Topics: gender abolition, gender nihilism, feminism, gender theory
Notes: Response to: The Gender Nihilist Manifesto by Alyson Eschalante

AMR Schwarzenbach

Radical Gender Abolition Anti-manifesto

This is a call to action against politically impotent attempts at

characterizing, deconstructing and abolishing gender. This is a radical

feminist response to the blatant mischaracterization of our position,

the smear campaigns to paint us as reactionary and dated. This is a

vindication of women’s anger at the systemic marginalization of our

voices. We are the class of people that foremost faces and knows the

violence of gender.

The Gender Nihilist manifesto recognizes correctly that there can be no

positive architecture of gender politics; to legitimize gender or to

create a thousand genders does nothing but produce new avenues for power

to permeate. It does not, as intended, create a platform for

emancipation or liberation. The Gender Nihilist Manifesto also correctly

upholds a politics of weaponised, radical negativity; we may never know

what comes after but we do know that we want gender gone. So what is our

contention? I will attempt to lay out how our position and even our

claim to feminism has been repeatedly vilified.

To set aside some grounds for misinterpretations, I will not argue that

sex is pre-discursive, but I will argue that tendency of queer politics

to moralize all discursively produced categories (such as biological

sex), needs to be challenged.

Butlerian assertion that subversive gender performance can reconfigure

the power structures of gender in the object world hardly makes sense.

To keep posing and reposing the question “What is a woman?” until the

signifier ‘woman’ is completely resignified, or until it loses all its

content and is watered down to ‘anyone who identifies as such’, does

nothing to change the disciplinary or corporeal damnation that our

bodies continually endure by gender produced by male supremacist

discourse. Furthermore, the deliberate resignification of ‘woman’ is a

hermeneutical, epistemic injustice being dealt upon billions of people

whose vocabularies suddenly lose their intended significations. It has

become obvious to radical feminists that this cannot be the path to

gender abolition.

Besides, non-conventional (or non-dominant) gender performances aren’t

potent enough to base a political project on, for they aren’t acts of

resistance and may indeed consolidate with the gender power structure.

These non-dominant performances of gender, through resignification, may

just as easily displace gender norms (to become new norms). Drag, for

example, may have started off as a mode for male gender non-conformity,

but has increasingly become a kind of mockery of the cage of femininity

that patriarchy places female bodies in. Point being that subversive

gender performance is at best a site of ambivalence-of possible

resistance to or further consolidation of power. One cannot wager their

entire politics on ambivalence. Thus, radical feminist rejects any

politics that centres its project on performance (in the Butlerian

triple sense meaning to “act”, “embody” and “cite some signification”).

Radical feminism knows that the words man and woman have connotations of

gender (performance and norms) and attached heterosexuality. For

example, historically, woman has meant- Sex: female, gender: feminine,

sexuality: heterosexual. What do we intend to do with this? We want to

rescue the signification of sex in relation to the signifiers man or

woman, while shedding the significations of gender and sexuality, not

because we necessarily believe in a pre-discursive sex, but because we

see the utility in the category of (medically defined) sex when it is

divorced from its gendered implications.

The Gender Nihilist Manifesto says “Sex…is given an authority through

medicine…we decry this violence”. This is the moralizing that I brought

up initially. It is not violent to describe anatomical differences and

recognition of these differences does not outcry a hierarchy. Radical

feminists use sex as a descriptor to signify corporeal reality, but do

not support the violent prescriptive application of the category of sex

to bodies who do not fit these descriptions (we vehemently oppose the

genital mutilation and loss of bodily integrity of those born intersex).

Descriptions don’t always transform into prescriptive imposition;

discursively produced categories of sex and sexuality aren’t inherently

oppressive and can be transformed into neutral descriptions of material

reality. Further, it is imperative to recognize anatomical differences

within medicine so that a differential treatment can be afforded

according to one’s needs to procure equitable quality of life for

everyone. When medicine has discounted sex, women have suffered and died

(for example we do not currently know the effect of most drugs on the

female body). Sometimes, as in this case, the abolition of all

boundaries linguistically and medically, constitutes a violent injustice

for historically marginalized groups, in this case, women.

The radical feminist, now popularly derided as ‘TERF’, is said to be

reactionary. To what qualification has such a heavy and offensive title

been awarded? Gender critical theory is but the belief that gender is a

tool of oppression to subordinate women, and that gender has no

ontological existence. The Gender Nihilist manifesto also comes to the

latter conclusion. Our political project seeks to abolish the power

structures of patriarchy and male supremacy that have produced the

category of gender. Following this train of thought, we conclude that

gender is a power structure and cannot be transcended by individuals

identifying in-and-out of it or by inventing new gender categories. We

do not contend the existence of transgender people, we contend the

possibility of such a trans identity in the framework of

gender-as-coercion, and we contend the political potency of

trans-identification. Since one cannot ontologically be a man or a

woman, one can only be a man or a woman (and intersex) in accordance

with their anatomical referent. There is nothing coercive or oppressive

about affording signifiers to anatomy and anatomical differences.

Radical feminists condemn the systemic attempt to erase the categories

of sex and sexualities because with this linguistic erasure goes the

possibility to account for our experiences within these categories.

After all, there is nothing beyond language. We believe that the erasure

of these categories is exponentially more oppressive than the existence

of these categories. We believe these categories are being resignified

not through discourse but deliberately through political power.

Significations organically evolve throughout history but a deliberate

reconfiguration of these significations often sets a dangerous political

precedent of unintended consequences.

Further, our experiences as homosexuals have been lost in the queer

discourse. It has been implied, and perhaps even stated explicitly, that

same-sex attraction is exclusionary. Okay. We concede, our experiences

and affections are exclusionary. Does this exclusion then imply a

marginalization and oppression of those we exclude? No. The personal is

political. The attempt of queer politics to breakdown the personal

sexual boundaries, is thus political. At this stage in political

discourse, it has become important to state that We are homosexuals. We

are bisexuals. We are not queer. We reject the nebulous, and by extent,

reactionary politics associated with ‘queer’. Our sexualities are not up

for scrutiny even if though they may be discursively produced. We will

not “re-examine” our orientations for your failing attempts at gender

abolition. We know that the road to gender abolition lies in the radical

reconfiguration and subsequent destruction of the gender caste

structure. One cannot transcend caste individually. One can only abolish

the caste structure collectively.

We are women, not because our gender identity is woman, but because we

belong to the historic caste of those whose reproductive abilities and

anatomy have been appropriated. We reject gender, its associated

identities, norms, socializations and its disciplining of our bodies and

colonization of our minds.

We are homosexuals, not because we identify as gay, but because we have

a sexual affiliation to members of the same sex as us. We reject the

stereotypes and norms, including the new norms of queer politics, that

attempt to relegate us into a life that is opposed to our desires.

Overall, as radical feminists, as women, and as homosexuals, we reject

the constant signification and resignification of our vocabulary, and

subsequently, our boundaries done without our consultation. We know who

we are, and our political projects of liberation, whatever that may look

like, will not be dismantled by those who attempt to decentre us from

our own movements. We are not “cis” or “queer”. We are women, and we are

homosexual. We will resist any and all attempts to take our definitions

and boundaries away from us.

QUEER POLITICS HAS CONSOLIDATED WITH THE CAPITALIST STATE MACHINE. THUS,

WE REJECT IT.