User Profile

Objectification here is correlated with the notion that one does not get to "consent to oneself." While gender without transition can exist through a basic act of recognition of that gender as a possibility or desire in the other, whether by the person themselves or, if in a social capacity, among others, the degree to which it has an effect and impact on the world is the degree to which it is allowed to be performed socially, the correspondence of this performance to that identity negotiated socially. In other words, the very assignment of gender, whether correspondent to someone's identity or otherwise, requires a negotiation. And yet, it cannot be seen as an entirely consensual process for two reasons: (1) the power of others in granting the social existence of a given identity is always greater than the power of oneself to do so--that is, the negotiating strategy of someone with a given sense of identity always must be on the defense rather than offense, which is why the creation and production of distinct communities from that of cissies has been so important for queers and trans people; (2) people are often assigned a label, role, given a demand or expectation, prior to their ability to even be reflectively conscious or able to manipulate language and sign systems, or understand the social world around them--that is, as children or infants.

In a sense, (2) is a social prescription of identity that can only later be refused at a stage when the person comes to understand what they have been made to be up to that point, for the impact on themselves--it is at this stage that engagement with gender can be seen as broadly consensual. (2) is a necessary operation, in any world in which the infant or child must have an entry-point into the social world at all. There is no form of entry into society that can be universal or universalistic, but rather every entry into society must adjust itself to the particularities of life and specific desires of the family and community into which the child is born. The point is, it is the desire of the other, the particularities of the form of life that others are bound by, that determines the social conditions which the impulses, reflexes, and strivings of the given organism must developmentally confront and wrestle with. In sum, it is objectification that makes the development of an intrapersonal "gender system," i.e. an internal gender(ed) narrative or mapping, possible.

Consequently, all gender(ed) narratives also already presuppose a fundamental concession to or for the other: that their desires come to matter to and shape my identity, even if in a negative capacity (even in those cases, there is an affirmation of the desire of some hypothetical other, a kind of wish for desire-otherwise). It is no wonder then that many feminists often place themselves at risk of falling into a trap when they criticize objectification, namely the trap of robbing women of their agency in regards to their identities, performances, preferences, at the same time that those identities and performances or preferences are reduced to accounts or effects of patriarchal objectification.

If objectification precedes or runs parallel to identity formation, then critique of objectification runs the risk of paternalistically objectifying those with certain identities in order to render their identities and performances semi-public projects. This is why characterizing certain identities or performances of those identities as "misogynistic," whether by ciswomen or, especially among transphobes, for transwomen, is simplistic and reductionist. While objectification in a society that is bad at consent is often going to have a strong adverse emotional charge or negative valence, "objectification" in its most positive iterations can be analyzed as a kind of social gift: a means of still having value to or for others independent of one's actions, presumed character, efforts, social status, productivity, etc. In other words, a technology by which it is still possible to be desired and wanted unconditionally. And it is unconditional precisely because it is a phenomena that happens independent of me, even when I am consenting to it. After all, my consent is not what makes someone else experience, in their own head, that side of me which may be an object for them, as this always exist; rather, my consent is what allows me to be socially useful by giving myself to them in some corresponding capacity.

In other words, to become gendered is to succumb to and affirm "femaleness," understood as a psychic operation or ontological condition of evacuation of self for alien forces, together with a deferral of desire. When using HRT, one is accepting and succumbing to the uncertainties and ambiguities of the hormonal agent, almost as if to affirm the "desires" of the hormone. To be trans is to exist for the agency of the hormone, or the body more generally, at the same time that it also means a kind of disconnection or detachment from the body that provides the motive force to resign to its transformation. Transness--or even cis gender performance and expression--involves a negation or disavowal of the body as an actual extended substance with determinant essential qualities, and the affirmation of or fixation on the body as a virtual dynamic form with constituted determined qualities. Gender is not about organs, its about motion and movement. Twitches. Posture and pose. Shape, pheromones, heat. Engine. Equally, its then about how the body uses its muscles and weight with reference to social space-time.

To reiterate for those without context, "female" is meant here figuratively as a universal ontological condition or psychic operation that involves an "evacuation of self for alien forces and the deferral of desire." Again, with that in mind, this observation doesn't seem all that incredible. However, again, the question of how it is that particular kinds of bodies are the ones that occupy a position to come to know or experience this otherwise universal condition or psychic operation remains unanswered. In my opinion, this is where true insight would lie. However, the characterization of gender transition is more interesting, as it brings to a forefront a question: for whom's fantasy?

This corresponds to a conservative claim that "women dress up for men," often met with a chorus of "women dress up for themselves." Ultimately, it seems more accurate if we were to say that everybody is dressing for themselves through their externalized image. People, in other words, become objectified for themselves through a transfer of perspective towards an implicit other, but an other that is not an actual, substantial thing, but rather a virtual object that simply fulfills a formal role for the formation of a self through an identification with an image. It is desire at this "pre-self" level which constitutes the act, and it is why this desire can be seen as "alien" without also being experienced as threatening to the self. The mirror is alien, and yet it is an invitation to selfhood in its production of a reflexive image, such production itself being an "alien" force.

This would explain why gender transition is not just a process of beautification according to conventional standards of female beauty in order to count as a woman, but, as said here, something more like a fulfillment of an "alien" demand. But this would, of course, imply that "femaleness" as defined here is a condition one struggles with internally. Is the man I bought the mirror from at fault for my "femaleness" (my vulnerability to alien forces that constitute me)? At what point is struggling against him struggling against myself? And when am I free in any image without these anxieties of power lurking in the alienness of my fantasies? Interestingly, the same questions would meet a man, though the particulars of the anxiety may differ. To hate the mirror is ultimately either to hate this pre-egoic constitutive desire (thereby oneself), or to hate the processes of production and reproduction that under-gird the resultant dis-identifying image (thereby to hate the unspecified other). But in either case, both the image and mirror-production would have to be simultaneously transformed. Is this not what transition is, to have an ambivalent relation to the mirror? There are many feminisms that sometimes seem to want to have their cake and eat it too, and simply try to destroy the mirror.

In this case, the conclusion seems like a non-sequitur. I believe my previous analysis of Solanas, together with what was said of her in this book, is closer to establishing a claim similar enough to the one that ends this paragraph. If "femaleness" is a universal (albeit asymmetrically intuited) condition or psychic operation, then to say that feminists necessarily had to see femaleness as bad in order to struggle against or with such a condition and thereby engage in their political projects, is not the same as to say that being a woman is bad, particularly in a sense which would conform with misogyny rather than the real experiences produced for women under patriarchy. The argument seems to rely on equivocation.

That being said, the relationship between such an existential condition and gender suggests that feminisms whose political projects are limited to the politics of gender, or the politicization of gender, can either be conceived as doomed or perpetual. After all, gender is not simply something which exists as a product of patriarchy, as a product of sexual relationships established within a patriarchal logic, but it is also a response to a universal condition or psychic operation of the social human being.

In fact, it may be possible to hypothesize that patriarchy can affect gender only insofar as it constraints and conditions the strategies used to confront this more universal condition or, perhaps traumatic, psychic operation. In this way, in opposing misogyny, a feminism can fall into the trap of condemning people's personal attempts to navigate this condition or cope with this traumatic, primitive psychic operation, thereby reveling in misogyny. The personal coping mechanisms or defense mechanisms of women are "not enough" or an indictment of their character, as they "fail" the cause. In this way, there is an implicit concession that somehow these women are "at fault" for any failures of feminism, hence their own lack of liberation, i.e. at fault for their very oppression. It should be clear how this replicates patriarchal tropes, and seems to potentially idealize the way masculinized bodies implicitly confront the same ontological condition or psychic operation that is "femaleness," especially when those bodies are those of cismen.

I presume "women hate being female" is said with such universality and confidence here because "being female" is meant here as "engaging in the psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another." But, given politics is about self-negation, from a Marxist point of view, it can be said that there is nothing inherently problematic about this, depending on our particular reading of this psychic operation, or, at least, depending on the context in which it occurs. The key phrase, after, all is, "desires of another." Again, who is "another" and what do they "desire"? Is this even possible to answer ahead of time? etc. That being said, there is a sense in which it is true that "femaleness" understood this way would at least be universally regarded with a sense of ambivalence.

In addition to that quibble, the answer "because everyone already does" is not a very convincing answer to me. Sure, the value of doing this is understandable insofar as this definition of "femaleness" aids a (self-)critique internal to patriarchy itself, but if the condition also can be posited as something which outlasts and is independent of patriarchy and particular configurations of gender in cultural history and geography, it is not satisfying that it be called "femaleness" simply for that reason. There must be some particular process or operation which is responsible for the particularized pole onto which the universal theme of "femaleness" has bodily written itself. What allowed an otherwise universal psychic operation or ontological condition to become constructed as an asymmetric bodily experience or intuition?

There's a few questions for the given definition:

• What self? The Freudian ego? Superego? The Lacanian self, but then if so in what position in the triad of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real? Or in what way does the operation work across registers? Or, is what is meant more colloquial, as asserted boundaries and territories made to support one's social identity?

• What does it take to, and how does one, "make room" for the desires of another, especially in such a way as to "let someone else do [the] desiring for" oneself? The keyword "let" here suggests a kind of permission, however thin and brittle it may be. A kind of hidden power expressed through, and hidden by, its own withdrawal. The alien force may be alien, in that it is not oneself and it is not transparent to oneself, but insofar as it is "let," it cannot be entirely illegible or unfamiliar. There is a sense in which the "alien force" must be formative or transformative of the self, then, such that it can be both strange and alien and yet disguise itself as familiar and legible. It is legible and familiar insofar as it grants me an external experience, a simulation, of my interiority. There is a tension here.

• What is the expense? What is expended? What must one pay for transformative alien desire? What does it cost? Does it vary with bodies? This is the question which approaches politics, albeit more of a political economy of sexuation (as Lacan would call it), or "gendering" as we may say generally. However, despite the transformation I allege changing the entire table of cost and benefits itslef to begin with (given a transformation of self also entails a preference shift of some sort), there is always a cost.