💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › lena-kafka-destroy-gender.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:06:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Destroy Gender
Author: Lena Kafka
Date: April 6, 2016
Language: en
Topics: gender abolition, gender nihilism, gender roles, Insurrectionary
Source: Retrieved on 2020-08-14 from https://fillerpgh.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/destroy-gender/

Lena Kafka

Destroy Gender

Gender as Governance

Gender is a hierarchy, one of the apparatuses of governance, that

differentiates and categorizes bodies/people. Bodies are categorized

into genders based on one’s appearance, behavior,

economic/social/cultural position, and others. The categories are

stacked in a hierarchy, where men and men’s labor are more valued than

women and women’s labor (domestic work, youth/elderly care,

psychological/social work, food service, retail, all jobs based on

emotional labor, etc).

Gender uses its categories to play a part in governing the social sphere

to maintain social reproduction. It creates a gendered division of

labor, between masculine and feminine, “man’s work” and “women’s work”.

Women’s work is valued and paid less, and for much domestic work not at

all. The valuing women’s labor less than men’s attempts to make working

class women reliant upon men economically. The forced reliance on

heterosexual relationships is as old as civilization and class society.

Women are coerced, structurally and interpersonally, into relationships

with men for the sake of survival, and the reproduction of civilization.

As “Against the Couple-Form” puts it, “rather than an essentialist

concept, the category of woman stems a gendered mode of exploitation and

relegates certain types of labor to a private, unwaged sphere.” The

sphere of reproductive labor.

Economic exploitation is not the only way gender governs us. On a social

level, gender sets standards and norms for our bodies and behaviors.

Bodies get put into categories based on secondary sex characteristics,

voice, behaviors, dress/aesthetic/ethnicity, etc. These expectations

vary based upon social/cultural situation and position. Gender regulates

bodies into certain norms to be interpreted into certain categories

(man/woman, etc). These norms are regulated by stricter interpretation

for women, and with harsher punishment for transgression. Gender is what

tells women that we are not enough or too much anything and everything.

Gender regulates our movements (“it’s not safe at night”) and our

capabilities (“that’s not what women do”, “women shouldn’t do this or

that”). Gender creates our anxieties/desires to be “manly” and

“womanly”, to meet the capitalist ideal of easily identifiable,

categorizable, and predictable bodies and actions. Gender governs the

social sphere.

Governance and gender define all aspects to the hierarchy of

civilization. Governance is the regulation, normalization, and

(re)production of bodies/people and territory. It does so through

prisons, police, surveillance, borders, gender, work, evictions, school,

racism, debt, xenophobia, etc, creating a class of those who benefit and

a class of those who suffer.

Done be to is what?

Everyone in the milieu knows to make total destroy, abolish whatever, to

smash this or that. Gender is but another apparatus to be smashed,

burned, and scattered. To destroy an apparatus, we must destroy its

roots. But first, the soil that covers and protects the roots. The

police, racists, misogynists—patriarchs of all varieties—this is the

soil we must dig up.

Easier said than done. Confronting police requires militancy

(vigilance + awareness + tactical knowledge), but militancy demands the

kind of commitment and preparation many aren’t ready for. In most

‘progressive milieus’, going on the offensive is seen as hasty,

ill-advised, or at worst, as reactionary. Revolutionaries know that

those who wait for the state’s offensive to hit them, who wait for some

tragedy to use as leverage and justification for reform, are the real

reactionaries. Revolutionaries need to push beyond half-measures, beyond

reform, concession and rollback, and push for breaking from the normalcy

of daily life. We must push for insurrection against all governance.

The Coming Insurrection states, “The goal of any insurrection is to

become irreversible.” To be irreversible means the roots are dug up and

patriarchy, and all forms of hierarchy, are dismantled. In more real

terms, it means that we have communities and spaces that aren’t just

safe, but dangerous to those who oppose our desires and our spaces. Not

just a reading group safe space, but reclaimed territories capable of

providing for the needs of the working class/women/the excluded (free

from gender/gendered violence). These spaces can’t simply be given to us

by a higher power. Through occupations of the borderlands and sites of

production, or less formal territories of resistance, such as friends

who have each other’s backs, we will make or take the commons back.

No Tucking, No Masters

Our insurrection against gender cannot stop with just gender

self-identification, or with a new list of terms for everyone to learn

to respect. Insurrection must push beyond these limits to a free-play of

actions, behaviors, sexuality, etc. Where doing or enjoying one action

or another does not categorize you into a limiting role.

To be free from governance entails being free from gender. Being free

from gender entails being free from categorization, normalization, and

exploitation of governance.

Lena Kafka