Critique of Transgender Marxism, Essay 5

The author of this piece chose to remain anonymous.

This is a review and commentary on “A Queer Marxist Trans Feminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction” by Nat Raha, from Transgender Marxism. This review is from an agender perspective.

In the essay, Raha says that domestic social reproduction is a “feminine act.” In other words, they reify gender based on the particular gendered expression that occurs in the context of various societies where gendered signification is fungible, and ultimately arbitrary, based on which generation you’re in. In other words, the essay romanticizes a domesticated, sexist view of femininity, where feminine people do domestic work. I always disliked the word feminine, as it implies a traditional, binary sex, and never tries to overcome this binary to go beyond a representational view of gender.

Gender is fungible in every generation you’re in. Queerness itself is outside of time, responsible for all change – temporality, time itself, and the variable context of each generation is what constitutes the gendered expression of each era. Gendered expression does, as the book says, have its own emotional labor that one must go through for queer people. For queer people such as myself and my partner, not being recognized as queer is a sort of invisibility that can occur. Essays like this erase the experience of being agender. An agender view of these gendered phenomena is that like capitalism and its axiom of profit, gender is not extended anywhere in space. Heteronormativity is in contrast to queer gender, which takes traditional gender and performs it as straight people perform it, or it bends the expression.

But for me, gender expression is fungible. Archers in the past wore high heels; indigenous peoples and royalty such as pharaohs wore leggings and makeup. The makeup industry made makeup a feminine thing, as with other things that are bought and sold back to us through gendered expression of capital; we try to differentiate ourselves as the particular tries to differentiate itself but end up only creating a new universal. This is what occurs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the “Sense Certainty” and “Perception” sections. When you point to a thing, you get a universal of language. Language can only speak about things on a general level; it cannot capture the infinite difference of sense, and our ideas about gender are in fact immobile.

Because the only things which relate to the immobile motor in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti Oedipus are Oedipus, capital, and heteronormativity, it makes me wonder: is gender itself a sort of machinic normativity, reproduced by representational sameness? Whenever we try to say gender is a fixed idea, we are not recognizing that our concepts of gender flow as through a stream, or as through the flows of the mega-machine; whatever its dominant beauty standards deem is gender is bought or sold to us. Ultimately, this strain of Marxist feminism does not want to produce rhizomatic views of gender that are not based on binary dichotomies. They focus on an idea of a binary domesticated sexism, but nonetheless think femininity relates to a very narrow time in history’s view of domesticity and femininity. It’s a performative contradiction.

The essay suggests that there should be compensation for all the extra work that queer people do that is not caught up in the creation of surplus value for capitalists, like emotional labor and nurturing actions. Wouldn’t it be beneficial to call nurturing and mutual aid a human action, instead of further stigmatizing and entrenching rigid gender boundaries that make one think they need to repress their emotions to perform as a man or diminish their needs for the sake of others to perform as a woman? That’s an ass backwards view of gender, and gender itself is an identity which is formed under capitalism. It would be better to reject it for a view that does not even have a work/play divide. In Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman shows that work and play are a false dichotomy, a dichotomy that goes unaddressed by essay 5 of Transgender Marxism. It would instead claim emotional labor for “femmes” and reify gender essentialism amidst its claims to emancipation. Another performative contradiction.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of DSA Cleveland as a whole.

Sources/Further Reading: