Gender is a historical process. It is not the same thing from century to century, decade to decade, or even moment to moment. At one point, archers used high heels to get an advantage on the battlefield, leggings were worn by royalty, pink used to be seen as a ‘guys’ color because it was calm and collected, they used to think it was manly to put rainbows on trucks, and makeup used to be for everyone, before in the 20th century the fashion industry made these things marketed to women.
Historical performances of gender are not the same throughout time and culture – in other words they are not essential to a person, they are something which can be undermined, and change throughout a person’s life. No person is essentially any gender, because gender is a performance. That does not mean that people do not express themselves as one gender or another, or cannot continue to do so, it means that gender is so variable that it cannot be boiled down to a binary. The reason that it’s so valuable for reactionaries to focus on issues such as binary gender, and create such an essentialist paradigm for gender, is because the ruling class want to use it as an scapegoat to advance the agenda of brainwashing people with transphobia, so that they can uphold an American exceptionalist facade. The goal is to cover over all the genocide, the patriarchy, and the white supremacy, which is the United Snakes of Amerika.
Every person is a multiplicity of gender expressions, and this is “micro transsexuality” that Deleuze and Guattari talk about in “Anti-Oedipus.” Gender expression and gender identity are also separated, and have no necessary relation to each other. That means that if you identify as a man, you could behave in mostly what your era deems feminine, and this has no relation to what a person could identify as. The identity and the expression are chosen, not innate, and they can be arbitrarily undermined by any variable expression, which occurs in thousands, if not millions, or more, at every second.
Gender as a historical process
What we think of as gender changes from moment to moment. As a historical process, gender is part of change, and flux, as opposed to a constant fixed thing in the past like Heidegger’s notion of being. Gender might be thought of as coterminous, happening with and at the same time as time itself. Gender and time can be thought of contrasted to queerness as a rupture with the continuum of time. Gender, through history, has been a process of capture into a submissive role in Europe, through the middle ages when women were vilified and seen as witches. Witches were actually women that had set up their own crafts and shops according to Butch Lee in “Military Strategy for Women and Children.’ Women, likewise, according to Abdullah Ocalan were subjugated by religious leaders and strong men in ancient Mesopotamia, which formed into a Christianity which made Eve the cause of the fall of man.
Gender, however, in the West was a less hierarchical process. There was a matriarchy at one point for the Pueblos in the Southwest in Mesa Verde according to “A Pueblo Social History” by John Ware, which shows that the Pueblo society was predominantly matrilocal, and matrilineal, meaning the women would own the fields and the house, and the men would take care of different tasks. In the Hopewell there was a decentralized society with weakly institutionalized roles according to Christopher Carr’s “Gathering Hopewell,” which had gender variation on the record in the Shaman at the late Woodland period. There were likewise, many accounts of gender variation which were called “berdaches,” from Spanish colonizers which Roscoe describes in his monograph “Changing Ones.” People are multiple genders as well in the Arctic, and the account “The Many Faces of Gender” show people sometimes even becoming another gender to escape a ghost. But all of these practices, threatened by culture and time; things such as television show traditional western roles, which enculturate people into specific genders. Such as the continual creation of films that involve a man and a woman in a relationship, without any alternatively gendered characters. If there is a queer character, they may be a punchline, or a stereotypically sassy character. Sometimes movies and TV, unless they are shows like “Hazbin Hotel,” or “Stephen Universe,” don’t feature any queer characters. Some would argue Spongebob is a queer character, due to his lack of attention to what is considered manly, but queerness is never really explored very deeply in the original seasons of Spongebob.
Even the notion of gender as tied up with biology is an outdated assumption. Biology is variable, and has people who have chromosomes that don’t match their gender assigned at birth, that may make someone have a body that does not match what typically is expected for certain bodies. This means people can be intersex, or they can have an assigned male or assigned female body that has parts that don’t match up to just xx or xy. This is aside from the fact that performances vary throughout the ages. In the 80s people like Prince, and Boy George were bending gender expression, and even in the 60s and 70s David Bowie was crossdressing and expressing himself in ways that were not usual for the assigned male at birth person at that time. There was also glam rock such as the New York Dolls, who work makeup and dresses as an expression of queer rebellion, when most of the genre was actually supposed to be coded as cisgendered and heterosexual. You could construct a whole wardrobe of basically what is considered a feminine outfit, constructed through clothing through history that is considered “for men.” So what does that mean?
It means that there is no reason to say that one item of clothing is “for” one group, and “not for” another. Gender expression is a fungible signifier, meaning it is an expression that can be changed through time.
Queerness as escape
If fixed, binary gender, is what Max Stirner would call a “fixed idea,” then queerness is a rupture with the temporal flow of gender, into a multiplicity of expressions. Queerness is not in time the same way that gender is, queerness is a temporal instant in which change occurs, and the word queer also has the implication of unusual. Something which is unusual strikes you as uncanny, something which is familiar, and yet unfamiliar. Why do homophobic, transphobic, conservative people, usually online, react so negatively when confronted with the notion of queerness, seeing it, thinking about it, thinking it may apply to them? It’s because gender requires upholding an image when it is a fixed idea that is obeyed dogmatically, a fixed idea that makes people behave in a negative manner when what Lacan calls “the imago,” (Ecrit) is threatened, meaning the image of yourself. The transphobic person actually needs the trans person to uphold their imago, in the sense that without the trans person the insecurity would have nothing to uphold itself by saying what it is not. Bigoted cisgender, meaning gender assigned at birth identity, is parasitic on trans people, in that it needs them as a scapegoat to uphold its own rigid gender roles, but it also is not a symbiosis, but a parasitic relationship, because the bigot seeks to eliminate the trans person, either in expression or in life.
Queerness is also a multiplicity of impulses beneath consciousness. It’s change itself, difference, multiplicity. Gender identity itself is part of an assemblage of social machines. Clothing companies, marketing techniques, family influence, friend circles, they all influence us, but we can choose to cut against the flow of time and make our own choices as to what we want our expression to be. There is no qualitative difference in abolishing essentialist notions of gender, while at the same time expressing yourself however you want. Abolishing gender essentialism is a matter of hierarchy, in a way, as even difference, and what Deleuze calls the rhizome can have hierarchy. There is hierarchy mixed in with everything we do, but there is also good and bad hierarchy. Gender essentialism is a micro fascism, meaning it is an intensity of restriction forcing people out of their own desiring machines. One’s own desiring machines are one’s own impulses, which are directed or repelled towards various social forces. Social machines interact with desiring machines as one and the same process of arrangement, otherwise known as assemblage. Micro fascism is an intensity of bad hierarchy, like queerphobia, Islamophobia, racism, etc. based on essentialist thinking. Desiring machines are the impulses, which themselves are infinitely multiple, and cut against against the flow of the fixed ideas of gender in time and consciousness. It is because of queerness that gender changes through time. Plato had what he calls the instant, which he calls a queer thing in the Parmenides.
Identity and expression disconnected
We’ve talked about how gender identity is a conscious phenomena, and queerness is a rupture with conscious identity, but further complicating the gender picture is the way that your identity can be one thing, but your expression could be an entirely different cultural expectation. David Hume had what is called the “is/ought” divide, but this is not because is and ought are separate. Facts and values can be looked at the same way as the identity and the expression. In the same way that facts and values are connected, gender and identity are connected. If you have a fact in one corner, it does not necessitate that there will be a corresponding value in another corner. For instance, if you’re a Catholic, that doesn’t mean that you won’t be a trans person. You could hold the facts of the Catholic Church, and still feel that you are trans, or even be trans and identify as a Republican. A great example of the disconnect between gender and identity is what is called a “femboy.” Femboys dress in feminine attire, deemed feminine by culture and the fashion industry. They can identify as a man, but their expression has nothing to do with their manliness sometimes. Everyone is a mixture of different expressions, so they may still have some expressions that are one expression or another.
But this is another thing that should be avoided even, the idea that we have “male or female enculturation.” This is an argument that Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF) use to try to say that if you were assigned male at birth you still act like a man because you have been taught to behave as a man. That assumes that all men are treated equal, or that all men identify with the label of man, and that this label of man would correspond with an identity and expression that is infinitely man, to the infinite exclusion of the woman. That is not true, just like facts and values, gender identity and gender expression are infinitely mixed. There’s an array of identities which we pass through through life, infinite of them which are related to all the past events that have happened before. All the different time periods and their genders have meaning that expresses itself in a warped, and reconfigured way in the assemblage of each generation’s machines.
The eternal return and gender abolition
Abolishing essentialist notions of gender is a societal wide task, and all the expressions that have ever happened recur through trends that take what happened in the past and make it new again. Time is cyclical, and while the heat death of the universe may still occur, in the representational, scientific sense of time, there is always an infinite recurrence of everything that has happened, happening again in the eternal return. Queerness is not inside or outside of our heads, it is in a singularity as Deleuze would say in Difference and Repetition. The singularity means that all things are happening in a virtual field of identities and arrays of past expression re-occurring through the instant, which is the moment of change in which everything happens.
Gender is part of a colonial capture into an expression where infinitely variable expressions are attempted to segmented lines into a conveyor belt. Queerness is not necessarily a good, or bad thing, it is outside of conscious expressions and responsible for them all. Throughout time, the ways that people have expressed their gender has seen different levels of acceptance. The goal is not to be detached from all time, and try to exist in a fortress of a-temporality. We all have consciousness, unless we are in a coma or dead, that is inescapable. We will always have hierarchical thoughts mixed in with our rhizomatic, and variable lines of flight which evade capture into dominant structures of gender hegemony. But there is always the threat that if we are not careful about avoiding restructuring a new gender, instead of micro transsexuality, the full array of the expressions of the impulses, then we risk reinstituting forms of control over people’s gender again.
Sources:
“Baedan: A Journal of Queer Heresy.” Contagion Press, 2014.
Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, editors. *Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction*. Springer, 2005.
Deleuze, Gilles. *Difference and Repetition*. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Frink, Lisa, Rita Shepard, and Gregory Reinhardt, editors. *Many Faces of Gender: Roles and Relationships through Time in Indigenous Northern Communities*. University Press of Colorado, 2002.
Heidegger, Martin. *Being and Time*. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt, SUNY Press, 2010.
Hume, David. *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding*. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. *Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English*. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton, 2006.
Lee, Butch. *Military Strategy for Women and Children*. Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2011.
Öcalan, Abdullah. *Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution*. International Initiative Edition, 2013.
Plato. Parmenides. Translated by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, Hackett Publishing Company, 1996.
Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Edited by David Leopold, translated by Steven T. Byington, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Ware, John. A Pueblo Social History: Kinship, Sodality, and Community in the Northern Southwest. University of Arizona Press, 2014.