biopower – GV Loewen

Tricks of the Transgendered Trade

Tricks of the Transgendered Trade (On the liminal figure in the cultural imagination)

Could it be that the often-vicious popular invective directed against transgendered persons and others who identify with alternate sexual orientations and gendered persona emanates from a deeper source in our still shared culture? I am going to suggest that the liminal figure has traditionally been regarded with some suspicion, even fear. Such a persona can never truly be a person, this suspicion cautions. Liminality was meant to be performed as a social role alone, and not as a selfhood. Consider the shaman, the eunuch, the court jester. Consider the representation of liminality in symbolic form, the daemon, the angel, even the joker in a deck of cards. A figure with uncertain registry, such a role-player could not be identified through gender or sexuality, though it was possessed of both. In service of society as a whole, in representing the expression of all that culture could not perform in mundane task, the liminal figure was itself unable to express anything mundane. Its ‘trans’ character is at once transient, transitive, and in translation. And what is lost in this language of the threshold, or ‘limen’, is not so much our moral compass, but rather the sense that our own identities can be vouchsafed with any ultimate certainty.

This is a deeper source of why the contemporary liminal figure is seen as such a threat. It almost seems as if the liminal figure must shed its very humanity in order to take on the shadow of society’s self-lit lumen. From lumen to limen then, is the ongoing and repetitive passage the shamanesque character must make. But they, as a performer, and it, as a social role performed, makes that passage on our behalf. In doing so, there had always been a space, perhaps begrudging but also admired, for the liminalist. The shaman was at once a seer, medicine person, sorcerer, and spiritual leader in times of crisis. The mistake the men’s movement made with this figure was in masculinizing it. Correspondingly, the error the women’s movement made was in associating the sorceress cum midwife with the feminine.

But by definition the liminal figure cannot be co-opted by either dominant gender. In social contract societies, the shaman was truly the only specialized role player. In such small-scale affairs, one might well expect at least one member to be outside the normative performances associated with male and female, though neither of these were especially dominant early on, when the only division of labor was based not on sex, but rather upon age. In horticultural societies, we see the beginnings of a stricter separation of men and women, but only in periods of specific passage, such as the communal menstrual hut that no male would dare invade. ‘Secret societies’ of all kinds appear only in ‘chiefdom’ organizations, and are most often gender exclusive. But the shaman could, and did, make passage amongst any and all. Its role was that of the card-playing joker, and indeed, their personality might well be said to be that of a ‘card’, to use an archaism. ‘Oscar’s Wild’, we might smirk, thinking ourselves to be clever.

This aside, it is clear that the liminal figure’s central role was to facilitate the rites of passage. On the Northwest Coast, the shaman guided the spirit of the dying to the puma, who would then carry it to the world of spirits, or, by contrast, if it was not one’s time to pass on, scare it back down the shadowy tunnel where the shaman could then tend to its cure. Birth, puberty/adulthood, marriage, death. These four forms appear to have been universal for our ancestors, and even today they mark us, remarking upon our personal nomenclature that we are no longer inexistent, no longer a child, no longer singular, and finally, no longer amongst the living once again. The more fundamental lesson presented by such major life changes is that each of us must participate, even if only for a time, in the liminality of human finitude.

This is then the yet deeper reason for our suspicion of the transitive person today. We feel that such transitions occur only within short periods, perhaps at most a few years, such as adolescence and engagement, sickening and dying. These periods mark themselves out from the rest of our existence, which is stable, mundane, and more certain of its identity. It cannot possibly come as a surprise then, that it is overwhelmingly youth, who are already fully imbricated in the liminal space of adolescence, for which society has not yet found an enduring place – mainly because the identity and role is itself transient – who are turning to transgenderedness as a possible way of representing this liminality. No longer a child, not yet fully an adult, why not no longer a girl, not fully a boy, or vice-versa? Even so, no society has ever existed where entire blocs of a demographic group have remained liminal in their identities or in their social role performances. In traditional cultures, a week at most for the rite of passage from child to adult, wherein one’s sexuality is discovered and perhaps performed, but only in view of reproduction, both in the physiological and social sense. In a global society where warfare is intermittent and where out-and-out conquest is mitigated by the possession of nuclear weapons, there is no need for large scale populations. In spite of labor shortages and economic stressors associated with population pyramids turning on their heads, the very fact that our contemporary world generally does not consider masses of persons to be expendable in direct conflict allows for the wider exploration of alternate genders and sexualities. In a word, biopower is on the wane, and where it is not, such as in Russia, it is a precise factor in the calculation that suggests, even if tacitly, that weapons of mass destruction, while handy to possess, cannot ever truly be used.

The question then remains: do we accept the liminal figure as a kind of categorical third wheel in our mundane social relations, given that ’breeding’ is no longer of the utmost, neither in its sense of cultural pedigree nor in the sponsorship of additional births, or do we ourselves take on a performance which is not, and was never our own? That is, do we don the trickster’s garb and level our collective sorcery against the very source of cultural chiaroscuro? Do we state flatly that trans people are to be prescribed for the theater and the secret society alone? Or do we more gently shrug our shoulders and tell ourselves that what really matters is how one performs one’s job, one’s Samaritanism, one’s person and not one’s persona? But if we do practice an authentic acceptance, would this also entail a sense, not so much novel but perhaps suppressed, that we too, as vehicles of living change and transition, must come to terms with the human condition of not being any one thing for overlong? For in doing this, we are placed upon an existential limen far more profound than any gendered identity, a threshold which pronounces a leveling upon all of us and thence takes all across its mysterious barrier.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, education, health, aesthetics and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Replacing the ‘Replacement Theory’

Replacing the ‘Replacement Theory’

Lower birth rates amongst ‘Caucasian’ populations are due to the gradual development of advanced technical and industrial economic platforms. These require simply less labour power than did previous such structures, the most noticeable shift being between the agrarian mode of production and that ‘bourgeois’. It is pure happenstance that the ethnic backgrounds of the population cohorts that first underwent such world-historical transitions were ‘white’; a coincidence in the sense that northern climes produced persons with less melatonin as well as an outward looking maritime culture rather than the self-contained massive irrigation civilizations of Asia. Such similar declines in birth rates will follow along as other nations, the successors to these great cultures, develop in kind. The first significant decrease will be observed in immigrant cohorts cleaving themselves to Western societies and indeed this is happening today, from Latin Americans in the United States to those from the sub-continent in Canada and the UK, to Chinese in Australia and Middle Easterners in Western Europe.

This shift in the character of biopower is sourced in an equally shifting economics, and is thus no conspiracy of ‘elites’ or anyone else. It is the direct result of an anonymous global process and even if governments seek to control it, mainly through anti-abortion policies on one side, the legalization of homosexuality on the other, they cannot. If the concern is about the loss of ‘European Culture’, this too is misrepresented. The tens of thousands of young Chinese piano students practice Chopin and Mozart. Is Yo Yo Ma white? Yes, I would far prefer to be listening to Bruckner instead of popular music for ten-year-olds when I shop at Wal-Mart, but I am not willing to murder people to do so. After all, I can always turn Bruckner on when I return home. The hypothetical Fourth Reich, wherein great art leads and politicians only follow this most noble path remains elusive, mainly because art and science, philosophy and literature are by birthright the purview of every human being no matter their ethnic background, and cannot be the preserve of some self-interested elite. Defenders of ‘whiteness’ and ‘European culture’ today sound like warmed-over and illiterate versions of Nazis and can serve no meritorious purpose in the authentic interest and passion for high culture of any kind.

As far as the mythical ‘Jewish Race’ and its cultural interest is concerned, this is an effect of old world property laws that created the focused intensity persons of Jewish descent brought, and still bring, to the arts and culture, as was noted by Marx and Engels in their response to the racist ‘theories’ of their day, specifically those of Gobineau. It is a happy coincidence for the rest of us, because more or less singlehandedly, these noble people have been the most staunch defenders of culture, arts, music and literature and number amongst the most important contributors to it. Such a list of names includes those like Marx, Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Husserl, Proust and on and on. When Wagner said to his virtuoso musicians who surrounded him and recognized in his music the future of art rather than the future of politics, ‘You are the perfect human beings; all you need to do is lose your Jewishness’, they took him to mean that ethnicity as a category of human condition was in itself a regression, and they were correct no matter what Wagner’s own intent may have been. Ethnic identity alone is a lower form of life. But that includes all those who strut their ‘whiteness’ as superior or even relevant. It is important to note that every person who has been a major figure in the history of art or thought has placed their own happenstance ethnic pedigree far in the background to their work, just as their successors, we ourselves, must do with other such variables; gender, age, sexual orientation, and religious belief.

Instead, the universal birthright of human consciousness, reason, language, creative art, and the ability to adapt to radical shifts in the character of world and history, belongs to no ethnicity and caters to no person. It is of the species-essence that each of us defend what belongs to all, and to do so without prejudice based on baseless provincialisms hailing from the prior epochs of illiteracy, ignorance, tribal and ethnic rivalries, and yes, far more threatening today, competing nation states. All of these represent halting way-stations on the road to a superior being, one that is both human and humane, one that does not shrink from its fullest humanity in the face of shadowy fears of being ‘replaced’, and one which does not itself fear self-sacrifice in the name of a collective ideal that embraces the entire diversity of the great cultures. For the very best of human consciousness is present to counter the very worst; art against politics, science against superstition, love against hatred, compassion against desire. This is its pan-historic mission. Let us then join ourselves to its future vision; a world bereft of the fear of difference alone, but also a world in which authentically noble differences, those that open us up to the very cosmos itself and give us the perspective we need to comprehend it, are recognized as the better part of our shared and mortal lot.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty books on ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Gender: the Ever-Bending Story

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.