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Title: Gender Nihilism Author: Automatic Writing Date: February 12, 2015 Language: en Topics: gender, gender abolition, gender abolitionism, gender nihilism, queer, queer nihilism, queer theory, trans, transfeminism Source: https://automaticwriting1.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/gender-nihilism/
"NOTHING can/will define me! Free to be EVERYTHING!!!"
– Miley Cyrus
I wish to speak of something without knowing quite what it is. A
disposition; a sensibility; a micropolitical strategy; a navigational
heuristic; a performative absence; a forgetting, perhaps; a queer site
of refusal and resistance; a creative potential; an experiment, a mode
of living within, despite and against the regime of gender, which I'm
going to call “gender nihilism”.
Gender nihilism designates a kind of radical agnosticism at the level of
(gender) identity; a refusal of the injunction to know what one is, to
objectify oneself as knowledge, and to make oneself known; a persistent
“no comment” to the police who surround and suffuse us, and marshall
against us a vast array of tactics – promises, threats, insults, lies,
seductions, manipulations, forms of violence – to extract a confession.
It names a possibility latent within any particular gender position:
that of disidentification, of non-identification.
Silence too is performative.[1] If gender is in some sense the effect of
the repetition of gendered expressions, what is the effect of the
repetition of a silence when the question of one's gender is posed? It
is not an escape. Norms continue to inscribe gendered meanings on the
body, to produce modes of embodiment, and to act upon expression. One
remains both a relay for and a product of gender as a form of power.[2]
It is more like a strike or an act of sabotage, a refusal to function as
a site of production for a particular kind of knowledge and an effort to
disrupt one's normal functioning as a force of production.
There is nothing natural about having a gender. The shift from
sovereignty – whose mode of action is necropolitical and whose
instrument is law – to discipline – in which the fashioning and control
of life (rather than consignment to death) becomes the primary concern
of power, and the norm its instrument – as the dominant form of power
required the expansion of modes of inquiry and knowledge production.
Simply: that which is to be disciplined must be rendered intelligible to
disciplinary powers; the norm must be defined and delimited and deviance
understood in order to be corrected and eliminated. Gender, sex,
sexuality are conceptual instruments of this form of power. The belief
that one must have a gender, that is, that one must know oneself in
gendered terms and be capable of transmitting that knowledge, that
gender self-knowledge is a necessary condition for a livable life, and
that the absence of such knowledge is a form of crisis, is a historical
phenomenon and an effect of power. Gender nihilism is the lived
refutation of that belief, the demonstration that life can be lived
without such knowledge, and that such a life can flourish.
If the disciplinary society aimed at the elimination of troublesome
difference through institutional power, the new capitalism, the society
of control, produces a fresh twist on the politics of intelligibility.
Control is interested not in the elimination of difference but in its
assimilation, the recuperation and reincorporation of renegades into the
market, the state, the family and so on by adding additional axioms
which conditionally and selectively allow access to the norm.
Homosexuality no longer requires a cure, rather the marriage norm is
expanded to include gays who conform to certain norms of acceptable
difference, while the rest are further abjected. Disciplinary power is
tactile and direct, control is remote and abstract. It effects
biopolitical control through the modulation of differential access to
markets, food, shelter, recognition, rights, protections.
If the assertion of abjected identities, and the hybridisation and
invention of new identities directly confronted disciplinary power, such
gestures are increasingly incorporated by new forms of control. The
assertion of identity becomes the means by which a population delimits
itself and renders itself intelligible to power and begins a trajectory
of assimilation which assigns it a place within marketing strategies,
state institutions, culture and social life.[3] It thereby structures
oppositional politics according to a logic of recognition, drawing
renegade flows back toward the state and the reproduction of the
present.
Gender nihilism is disinterested in recognition. Recognition is always
“recognition as...” and therefore remains always conditional: “I
recognise you as...” is always conditional on a prior identification,
always implies a “because you are...”, and always retains the
possibility that recognition will be withdrawn if you become something
else. The power of recognition is also simultaneously the power of
misrecognition and non-recognition, and the goal of recognition, whether
demanded or asked for, exposes one permanently to these forms of
violence. However forcefully we assert “I am...”, we remain vulnerable
to “You are not...”, “You are instead...”[4]
Gender nihilism has no positive content. In itself it does not prescribe
or recommend any particular way of being in the world. It makes no
claims about what it is. If identification is drawing a circle in the
sand saying “here are the things I am, there are the things I am not”,
gender nihilism simply lets the circle be washed away by the waves. The
gender nihilist is therefore indifferent to the names they are called
and the genders they signify. * Gender nihilism opens the entire space
of gendered possibility as a terrain for exploration, but does not
replace fidelity to an identity with fidelity to an ethics of
exploration. One can stay where one is just as surely as one can set off
at a sprint. In this sense it is less a nomadism than a homelessness.[5]
It opens up gender as a space of play, or of combat, without mandating
either. It's mode of address is “you can...” – “you should...” and “you
must...” only emerge when other components are bolted on. It is futural
in the sense that it refuses the conception of historicity that grounds
identity (“I am what I always have been”) which is always in any case a
founding myth, a constantly reworked fiction that establishes continuity
with the past. Gender nihilism is at ease with rupture. It allows us to
treat our histories as a resource, an archive of past styles, ways of
living, memories, experiences, beliefs to be reworked and refashioned in
any way desired, but is not innately a postmodernist, or futurist, or
accelerationist disposition towards novelty or innovation.
Gender nihilism is political but it is not a politics. It is queer by
definition, but proposes no ideal queerness, nor any queer horizon
towards which to direct itself. It is a negation that doesn't presuppose
some future dialectical turn. Clearly it is in various ways a marginal
and precarious position and thus its structural position pushes towards
certain forms of alliance, and indeed may in itself open unique
political possibilites. In this sense gender nihilism may be a valuable
conceptual component in a political assemblage, but one ambivalent to
the particular political projects it connects with.[6]
since it prescribes indifference as an ideal way of living queerness -
prescisely the kind of prescriptivism this text seeks to escape. I have
struck it out because, while I feel it can safely be removed from the
text without loss of coherence, I don't believe in simply deleting
problematic/contentious mistakes so it appears as if I never said them.
[1] One stock example of performativity is the “I do” of a wedding
ceremony. Consider how the same ceremony also incorporates a
performative silence to sanction the legality of the marriage: the
moment after “speak now or forever hold your peace”.
[2] A question arises here: if we assert that gender cannot be escaped,
are we not legislating against the identities of those who claim for
themselves a position outside of the gender binary, or outside of gender
as such - those who call themselves agender, non-binary, or third
gender, for example? This, I think, is a problem that arises in all
forms of gender identification, which I call the problem of 'lived
ontology'. That is: any particular assertion of gender identity involves
claims about what kind of genders can exist and which cannot, whose
implications extend beyond the self to the whole social body. For
example, a trans person's insistence that their anatomy does not dictate
their gender troubles the gender of a cis person who understands their
gender as grounded in biological fact, while in turn forms of lived
gender fluidity trouble some trans people's understanding of their lived
gender as grounded in fixed interior truth. The various forms of gender
identity in the world are mutually incoherent, and in some cases
mutually canceling. This should not be seen as a problem, rather we
should seek to understand the ways that a variety of mutually
incompatible forms of gender dissidence each open up their own spaces of
freedom and effect their own disruptions of the gender regime. I intend
to return to this topic in a more systematic way in the future, but
provisionally we can say that all genders are in some sense impossible,
and that the extension of recognition despite or even because of that
impossibility is one of the ways in which we can collaborate and support
one-another to performatively open up possibilities that are barred by
gender norms.
[3] Of course, this process is not inevitable. Identity categories can
be queered and re-queered to resist assimilation. And identity-based
movements can exceed containment and threaten power. My aim here is not
to proscribe identification, but to question its necessity and sketch an
alternative.
[4] This condition is perhaps never fully escapable. As social beings we
are always minimally vulnerable. We never fully control how we are
affected by the names we are called. In this sense perhaps gender
nihilism designates a horizon rather than an actuality. In any case, it
is certainly not a delusion of invulnerability.
[5] My point is not that a nomad ethics is not desirable (I think it is,
and there is clearly an affinity or compatibility between the two),
simply that this question is external to the proposition of gender
nihilism.
[6] Indeed I write this in part because I am convinced of the political
value of nihilism both as a point to pass through and as a position to
act from, but that's another essay.