Gender: the Ever-Bending Story
Beauty has little to do with desire.
– Marcel Proust
A romantic notion of the performance of gender, attached to any age or aesthetic, would simply be to suggest that we are attempting, in our mortal and fragile manner, to approach the concept of Beauty. We are to be the beautiful embodied, and this is our sole and singular desire. From the mimicry of fashion, the downward percolation of haute-couture, the adulation of celebrity, the fitness regimes that claim that sixty is the new forty and so on – is thereby twenty the new twelve? Our delayed ethical maturity rates support this other claim at least – such a desire to become and if possible, remain, beautiful, animates much of even popular health discourse. Not an ounce of wasted fat. Sadly, perhaps, few of us attain these heady heights, especially as we age. We are another version of the 99% movement, more or less asexual, displaying genders of uncertain registry, possessing only tattered proof of ownership, gradually weaning ourselves away from glamour.
Though this sensibility maintains a certain surface tension between ideals and realities, it is still a gloss on another, more elemental sense that the limits of mortality place upon us. Rather than simply a desire for the Beautiful, more deeply as well as more simply, we are driven by a basic will to life. We understand that health, in general, lends itself to longevity. That the figure is enhanced by the physique is of secondary import only. And yet, if the prime mover is an attempt not so much at Beauty per se, with neither Truth nor the Good necessarily following along from this, but rather at Godhead itself, it is also true to say that living better has it charms when juxtaposed with simply living longer.
The bodies of the Greek pantheon, for example, are both cliché as well as inspiring what Sontag in our own time referred to as the ‘fascist aesthetic’. Riefenstahl was her particular target, and at the time, this latter duly replied ‘I cannot imagine how someone so smart can be so stupid’. On both counts, the rest of us are guilty. We ape the esthetic of eugenics whilst pretending unawareness of the fascist methods it takes to attain it. It is also a ‘look’ underpinned by health and hygiene, and neither erotism nor even sexuality qua sexuality. In a word, a hot body is a better reproductive machine. It is changing population dynamics, altered political franchises, and transitional personal identities that support the more realistic analytic of the study of gender taken into the social world rather than being left to the wider latitudes and sometimes deadpan platitudes of the world of literature.
This said, if we compare the eugenics height-weight charts of the 1930s with the insurance driven charts of our own day, it is clear that we have lost some weight, as it were. This is a good thing in the sense that women should not be defined by their reproductive physiology and men should not be defined by their ability to carry around the gears of war. Let the latter play out this pre-nuclear destiny in video games, let the former simply adopt. Gender and sex have never been in a one-to-one correspondence with one another. They are regularly completely separate conceptions and thus give forth conflicting sensibilities. ‘Born a woman, born a man’ is someone’s paean to a dubious nostalgia. Who this ‘someone’ may be in today’s world is certainly of interest, but what students of this topic tell us is that it is more of a ‘what’ than a specifically definable ‘who’. Foucault’s conception of ‘bio-power’ is likely the most powerful analytic tool we have to lens these phenomena. Of its relationship to the ability to wage wars of both attrition and obliteration, he states: “But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.” (1978:137 [1976]). Any State which is losing population will have more repressive laws against both LGBTQ2 and abortion; Russia and Poland are obvious examples. If a State has too many people, such as India, laws are loosened to these regards, as we have also recently observed. Within the confines of national boundaries, the same argument covers the actions of waning subcultures or those dominant. Evangelical Protestants have maintained and even succeeded in growing their franchise by teaching against non-heterosexual identities and displaying a vigorous opposition to abortion, this in spite of the fact that it is working and middle class married white women who abort the vast majority of fetuses – simply due to personal constraints of finance and time as well as perhaps, an incipient sense that they are not vessels of mere reproduction after all – and in spite of the fact LGBTQ2 numbers represent an insignificant portion of sectarian franchises. The logic of desire alone argues that the subaltern should be commending post haste alternate sexual identities and practices for the dominant culture, their enemies, instead of making blanket statements that all of us should eschew the bending of gender and sexuality alike.
This straying from rationality also overtakes a strictly biopower approach, for once again, if the goal is political dominance in a democracy, one’s enemies should be encouraged to abort, to be gay etc. and to generally practice a hedonism that will never lead to stable family and reproductive relationships. Given that this is manifestly not what we observe, it may be the case that subalterns already know that their enemies will not heed their advice, so they can rest in preaching to the choir, hoping that at least these latter will in fact do so. In lesser democracies, governments have more ability to impose restrictions and cast to the historical winds any opposition. Even so, there are ways to counter such Herodian measures. If one is expected to add to the population of one’s homeland in the effort to make it more powerful as a military figure, or to help insulate it against the otherwise necessary importation of immigrant labour pools – which in turns heralds a latent ethnicism; the proverbial ‘fear of a ‘black’ planet’ – one can simply practice safer sex. It is of interest that while this is an oft impotent cliché in the education of youth, we do not so much hear a peep of it regarding adults, especially those in conjugal relations. Speaking of the hygiene of eugenics, it was the Reich’s ideal to reproduce as rapidly as possible, hence the gaudy medals given out to the mothers who bore the most children per annum. One suspects Russia, for instance, of providing more vulgar trophies, this time for the men, given the paucity of laws against domestic and child abuse in that country. Zhivym boitsam pochot i chest’, don’t want to marry, settle down and have kids? Well, here, guys, do whatever you want to your women (and children) and the State will turn a blind eye to it. How’s that for a deal?
While it is also sadly likely the case that many men in all nations would find such an offer attractive – why should there be opportunities for this kind of recreation as performance in the theaters of abuse that include aspects of the sex industry as well as the far more real abuses that yet take place in some schools in certain countries and in most homes around the world if this were not the case? – it is also plausible to suggest that the more public LGBTQ2 phenomena is suggestive of a transition away from not only the bourgeois family and its repressed esthetic of binary erotism but even more importantly, from the call of duty the homeland has customarily represented. Nuclear weapons have provided an ironic egress from both of these structured strictures. On the one hand, vast armies are no longer required to wage war. On the other, everyone is now a warrior, however passive, for in contemporary global war, all perish and not merely those who serve. It may raise eyebrows to declare a direct relation between weapons of mass destruction and the wider advent of the LGBTQ2, but this is, to me, quite clear.
The key to using this aesthetic and ethical disconnect to the advantage of overcoming the cause and working more intimately with the effect is to ensure that no matter the local cultural source of youth, the new ideology of global interrelations and dialogue be taught as the commanding presence in educational processes. Yes, this too is an argument, but it rests in the service of life. For the first time in the history of gender-bending, those who on the face of it mean to become comfortable with their extant bodies through gender transition or other methods, also have this wider calling. Their example must teach the rest of us how to overcome the dual and allied forces of State and Family. I think that those who resist LGBTQ2 persons are aware of this very threat, even though their response is too steeped in Hexis to attain a specific rationality. The rhetoric that a god is displeased with alternate sexual identities cannot possibly resonate in a diverse world of many creeds and creditors. No, the best defense against non-binary gender is to simply have as many children as possible within the subculture in question and then teach them about man and woman as they were ‘meant’ to be. Ignore whatever else is going on and hope that the rest of us will simply die out for lack of reproductive potential, in another irony, kind of the like the Shakers. Now, will the women of Poland, of Russia, or for that matter, of Texas and Utah, comply?
I would like to doubt it. There is an alliance between feminism and ‘genderism’, for lack of a better term. So the only other tactic that can be employed by a waning culture is to try to convince at least some of the rest of us to join in. Men, are you feeling a little ‘incel’ these days? Join us! We have young women aplenty eager to serve you, and we too will look the other way if you enjoy disciplining them (and their children) in some old-world fashion. A number of threads in VoyForums, for example, attest to this marketing and its grim results, which are celebrated as if domestic abuse were a common good. On the other side, the rest of us, however asexual and denuded of our own desires, must put our remaining energies into curtailing all such activities to their null point, while accessing the spirit of Antigone but transcending her choice, which in turn may mean simply destroying the sources which promote, and continue to promote, the inhumane ideals of family and state alike.
Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of forty-five books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.