Deleuze, Gender, and The Authentic Experience
I think it is fair to say that all authors have a certain taste about them, whether that be the dried cum and black-tar heroin of William F. Burroughs, the wildflowers and streams of Walt Whitman, or the pheasants and meat pies of Bill Shakespeare. Such characterization is not alien to nonfiction writers, though they are often much more dry, style does flavor how we compose thinkers in our minds. When I think of the work of Gilles Deleuze, what I think of is a simmering broth which, accompanied with the right ingredients, might make a delicious soup. No one eats broth on its own, as a rule, and no one can entertain the Deleuzian body separate from its functions. The body without organs might be portrayed as the soup without its ingredients, and the organs without body might be portrayed as the potatoes, beef, or carrots chopped up and mixed into the pot. What is the purpose of such an elaborate allegory? I believe that it illustrates how the Deleuzian body takes the functions assigned to it by an external force and then incorporate themselves into the full body, so that, even if the pieces themselves were removed, the flavor still lingers. The palette of this zeitgeist calls for authenticity, a natural flavor that arises away from the polluting systems of power. However, as a queer person I find myself drawn to a Deleuzian framework, for queerness is synonymous with the unnatural, the artificial, and the degraded. Over the course of this essay, I plan to explore how such a framework answers back the cult of authenticity.
When we speak of authenticity it is impossible to separate the concept from desire. Even when we achieve what is ostensibly the thing in which we desire, whether it be power or love or wealth, desire never stops, and what we have achieved is obfuscated as inauthentic. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan explains that we pursue the real in a ellipse, getting closer or farther away from it while always perceiving our movement as forward momentum, delighting in the refractions we attain, what he defines as “jouissance.” Even in the birthplace of western philosophy, the Greek peninsula, we discover a similar obsession with the authentic world. Plato’s Republic demonstrates as such with the classical allegory of the cave, an ontological parable that has been the white whale for fleets of philosophers. Those who are shackled to the cave can see only the silhouettes of form, and no meaningful interpretation can occur because even a single object can cast different shadows from different angles and points in time. Notably, both The Meno and this section of Republic emphatically address the sophists, for whom all truth was relative or there was no truth; therefore, only strong rhetoric could privilege your shadow above that of your peers. Plato rejected this conception, which was the dominant framework of the time, and proclaimed that there was a way to escape the cave and gain knowledge of the real world, what he referred to as the Good, and it is thus the duty of the wise to pass this knowledge down to the ignorant through politics. This is a prototypical example of Hegelian negation, and it was necessary to rebuke the Sophists who found authenticity only in the structure of language, yet we know that Plato’s framework introduces new problems. He expounds from theory to a political project, one where the wise are favored to rule and the ignorant must be subservient to their wisdom, a sort of pedagogical authoritarianism where it is unstated that women, slaves, and any non-citizen shall be counted among the ignorant. For Plato there are two classes of people: one class is those who have arisen from the cave and must use their power to pass down their knowledge, and the other class is those who are still in the cave and must accept the wisdom of their betters. Those of us who are familiar with postcolonial thought will notice a marked reflection of this same logic in the justification of empire, that the enlightened society must use power to educate the savages. This dichotomy of the wise actors and ignorant subservients is not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s concept of master morality and slave morality. For our purposes, the master may establish what is authentic and what is not, and slave must contend with what the master declares as a priori, whether they justify it through the power of rhetoric, access to the Good, or biological truths.
Jill Marsden takes this dichotomy, using the eyes of a feminist and a Deleuzian framework, and analyzes its effect on women bodily. It is no great revelation to observe that the gender binary links masculinity to violence and femininity to victimhood, yet even as the women’s movement tries to mitigate these roles one kernel continues to arise. Sex cannot be untangled from sexual differences, and within feminist discourse there is an impasse over whether militancy is necessary for meaningful structural change and can be accomplished through femininity or if violence itself is inherently masculinist and thus undermines the structural project of feminism. Marsden problematizes these choices by questioning their underlying premise, asking why women are alienated from the field of violence and why we assume that they can reject it.
“The fact that men are capable of inflicting sexual violence on women is seen by some as a dismaying but inevitable consequence of biology. […] In sharp contrast to this view, Deleuze contends that the ‘capacity’ of bodies is an expression of their sensible experiences and not their biological organization: ‘Bodies are not defined by their genus or species, by their organs and functions, but by what they can do, by the affects of which they are capable/in passion as well as action’” (309).
For Deleuze the body is not a singular entity one and the same with a person, nor is it a separate object that either the psyche controls or is caged by, but instead an arbitrary delineation of forces constantly acting and being acted upon. The flow of thought is not independent of these forces, it is neither more nor less than any of them, and it acts upon the body which in turn acts upon it. One might characterize it as a microcosm of human society, that the mind imposes order on the inherent chaos of the body just as a government imposes order on the inherent chaos of the demos, yet both are ultimately part of the chaos and only delude themselves as being ‘above it all.’ Oppression, as a phenomenon, may only be observed through how it limits the freedom one has through both conceptual and physical barriers, and oppression becomes more evident the more barriers it imposes and the smaller plane of existence a person can occupy. Therefore, it follows that one can also oppress themselves (though not in a vacuum away from generalized structural oppression) by limiting the space that both their mind and body are allowed to exist in. We circle back once more to the master morality and the slave morality, and we must call into question how oppression makes us ‘set a watchman’ for ourselves, a kind of internal panopticon where the mind and body define one another through a projected mediator. The organs without body can be seen as this mediator, because they act as functions which are imposed upon the body while also presenting as immanent within the body. Considering Marsden’s discussion of sexual violence, the capacity for violence is the body without organs and that violence as a foregone imperative is the organ without body, one that is employed unequally to those assigned male and those assigned female.
Marsden continues with this line of logic by referencing Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Instead of the essentialist reading where master morality is ‘masculine’ and slave morality is ‘feminine,’ she adopts Deleuze’s conception of this duality:
“Deleuze indicates how Nietzsche’s notions of ‘master morality’ and ‘slave morality’ (and related notions of ‘nobility’ and ‘baseness’) do not primarily refer to personal characteristics or social class but are descriptions of forces in dynamic relation with one another. He shows how a ‘masterly’ interpretation of an object expresses ‘active force’. Active forces dominate other forces by reaching out for power, seeking ‘to impose forms, to create forms by exploiting circumstances” (310).
Therefore, it is not that the master morality is one defined by crude violence, but instead the access it has towards the power of transformation. Slave morality, in contrast, is defined by self-torment, bad conscience, and anxiety-ridden conviction to society’s dominant moral and political conventions. Nietzsche identifies this slave morality in both god-fearing piety and mechanistic Darwinism, regardless of their difference in premises, for they both reach the same conclusion of a static, utilitarian livelihood. The only true, meaningful influence slave morality can have upon the world is its ability to suppress masterly forces, yet that is arguably only taking advantage of the slave immanent within the supposed master. The two forces are dynamic because no single person is born completely one or the other, and only through the intervention of an external force does one fully integrate into an enslaved morality. In relation to sexual violence, there is an assumption that men are the natural aggressors and women are the natural victims, and any sort of violence that a woman can exploit in such situations is only ineffectual recourse. Many people know, on some level, that women can be aggressors and that men can be victims in a substantial number of cases, let alone statistically important cases where both parties are the same sex or the victim is transgender. However, these instances are deemed the exception over the rule, not primarily to absolve these predators of their crimes, but instead as a symptom of the assumption that women are already excluded from the realm of violence. This positivist conception of biology once again turns the woman’s body into its own oppressor, just as it has been used throughout history such as with the pseudo-psychological drivel of feminine hysteria.
“This identification of the male body with the capacity to rape and the female body with the capacity to be raped perpetuates the slavish notion that bodies are ontologically distinct from psyches, that anatomy as such is sufficient to explain the prevalence of forcible intercourse. This is an idea that is so deeply embedded ideologically that it seems impossible to contest. However, if brute force has such explanatory power, it is difficult to see why most adults refrain from violence towards children and the elderly. The capacity to inflict high-grade injuries with minimal force also ‘incontrovertibly exists’ (for example, the use of teeth and fingernails as weapons) but the ‘anatomical capacity’ does not explain the social reality that certain acts of violence prevail whereas others do not. What stands in need of explanation is why particular ideas gain ascendancy and are acted upon” (311).
Empirically we understand that human beings possess the capacity for some activities and lack the capacity for others, such as how humans have the capacity to swim yet not the capacity to breathe underwater. However, just because humans have evolved to possess the capacity for many things does not mean they will actually fulfill these capacities, such as how people living in the desert are less likely to need swimming than people living on a coastline. The biological determinist would be tempted to say that these capacities are favored based on survival vectors, but in many cases these activities are either neutral or even detrimental to the dual Darwinist principles of longevity and reproduction. Art may be construed as passing on useful information, yet this can only be in a teleological and vague sense, while castration and infanticide are both practices totally in conflict with both principles. Just because we have the capacity for a function does not cement an imperative for this function, as it is only the culture that determines how and why certain capacities are fulfilled. Why then, we must ask, would a culture favor the anatomical capacity for sexual violence against women? Because a culture values women as property and rape as both a reification of power and a pretense for women’s impotence. Human beings are creatures of language, so they can disregard ‘objective’ facts and logistic truths in service of an attractive and comprehensive narrative. Men are greater than women, and if women were to be unmoored from their designated men they would be at the whims of the savagery of other men, thus it is better for women to suffer the indignities of domesticity as long as they are the object of their man’s better judgement. In this patriarchal formulation, you may notice that women are totally passive and left as free floating signifiers within the matrix of male violence. Women are privy neither to “savagery” nor “ownership,” and for them to gain access to such concepts would be an obscene conglomerate of maleness and femininity. Is this the case because women lack the basic capacity for such violence, or because women are externally barred from such violence by force?
I believe it is at this point called for that I clarify some of my argument, for I do not wish to misconstrue my readers. Emphatically, sexual violence is never good nor justified no matter the perpetrator or the victim. However, it is a harmful paradigm where women are excluded from the realm of violence, sexual or otherwise, and it, in truth, breeds rape instead of combating it. The legal declaration that ‘men shall not rape’ retroactively projects onto men the imperative for rape, justifying the law itself by asserting that without it men would default to their base desires and commit sexual violence at will. The prohibition creates the desire and not the other way around, manifesting an ideological fantasy that before the law such violation was commonplace and enacted with impunity. It is a Hobbesian framework, taking order and peace hostage in order to facilitate agreement with a social contract you never had a choice of refusing in the first place. Marsden understands this and endorses Sharon Marcus’ critique of the legalistic abolition of rape:
“Attempts to stop rape through legal deterrence fundamentally aim ‘to persuade men not to rape.’ Such policies presuppose that men ‘simply have the power to rape and concede this primary power to them.’ In terms that resonate with Deleuze’s account of reactive forces, Marcus contends that women are socialized to become subjects of fear, identifying a vulnerable, sexualized body with the self. As a correlative, she suggests that men are constructed as agents of violence and benefit from an enforced ignorance concerning the vulnerability of their own bodies” (312).
The issue is not the prohibition of rape, but how the law implicity reinforces the dichotomy of men as universal aggressors and women as universal victims. We can see this manifest in the justice system, where the burden of proof is placed on the victim and more often than not convictions are neither forthcoming nor equivalent to the scope of the crime. This is not just because victims lack sufficient proof, but more that the tactics of rape are already ingrained in the privileged male and so there must be significant excess in their behavior to justify any real retribution. On the other hand, when the accused is not a member of a privileged class, such as the case ofEmmett Till and countless lynching victims, rape is used as a bludgeon against ‘uncivilized’ males. The activist and academic Angela Davis commented on this in her 1981 book Women, Race, and Class, saying that “the myth of the Black rapist has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justifications. If Black women have been conspicuously absent from the ranks of the contemporary anti-rape movement, it may be due, in part, to that movement’s indifferent posture toward the frame-up rape charge as an incitement to racist aggression” (101). It is notable that, in the case of black women, they are placed in a sort of limbo based on the intersection of their race and class. They are quite often victims of rape, especially by white men in positions of power over them, yet at once they are seen as ineffectual victims and conniving temptresses who bring any sort of sexual violence onto themselves. In the intersection of two distinct, yet intertwining, hierarchies we can better examine the contradictions inherent to our society.
Trans women are another group that problematizes our conception of sexual violence by their very existence. Despite suffering both rape and murder at proportional rates far exceeding women as a whole, they are routinely left unacknowledged and their abusers left unpunished. In many states there still exists what is known as the “trans panic” defense, where those guilty of the most heinous crimes are exempted because they were supposedly tricked into having sex or lusting after a non-cis woman. Therefore, it becomes the trans woman’s job to prove her innocence by providing evidence for her very existence (if she is even alive to do so), something that is never asked of a cis-woman nor even the accused. Trans people must “pass” as their cis counterparts, lest they put their ability to live and their very lives at risk. It is thus imperative to ask, how do trans women throw such a wrench into the cogs of the hegemonic understanding of sexual violence? I think that the best way to address this is to acknowledge the two fundamentally opposing possibilities we are presented when interpolating trans women into this framework: either (A) trans women are “authentic” women, and as such they must be universal victims barred from the plane of violence; or (B) trans women are not “authentic” women, and as such they only masquerade as women as a tactic of the immanent violence within men. The first option has been adopted by more progressive feminists, and, as a queer person, I will concede that is the more preferable of the two. However, the mere existence of trans people creates a sharp divide between socially constructed gender and supposedly “purely biological” sex, as it is self-evident that trans people must have or will have transitioned from previously dysphoric sexual traits in order to be transgender, yet that immediately causes the biological determinist argument to collapse in on itself. The second option is what has been largely adopted throughout the world, and it is the one that more easily fits in with patriarchal gender roles. If trans women are not women then they must be men that are deluded or have some sort of ulterior motive, thus also conveniently reinforcing the homophobic concept of homosexuals as inherent sexual predators. We will return to the first option later on, but to the second I shall exhibit that every argument to justify why trans women are not women can be logically and systematically refuted.
Julia Serano is a trans woman and an author most well known for her book Whipping Girl: A Transexual Woman of Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. She has used her understanding of biology and feminist theory to make a point by point response to every commonly presented argument against her identity. It is not her imperative to figure an ontological framework using Deleuze, yet we can build upon her discussion of trans existence to analyze how it reflects on gender as a whole.
“Trans women differ greatly from one another. Perhaps the only thing that we share in common is a self-understanding that there was something wrong with our being assigned a male sex at birth and/or that we should be female instead. While some cisgender people refuse to take our experiences seriously, the fact of the matter is that transgender people can be found in virtually every culture and throughout history; current estimates suggest that we make up 0.2–0.3% of the population. In other words, we simply exist” (via Medium).
No two women are exactly the same, whether they be cis or trans there is a wide variance in what womanhood means to all of them. Some transphobes refuse to even acknowledge trans people in general as they see their existence as a statistical anomaly or societal quirk. Such conceptions recall the homophobic notion that same sex attraction is the result of societal decay from traditional moral imperatives, and this notion can be observed in most (if not all) arguments against the existence of trans women. However, the fact of the matter is that trans demographics are neither statistically negligible, nor are they constrained to one geographic area. In fact, archaeology and oral history have revealed roles integrated into certain cultures that have accounted for gender transition and even non-binary identities. For all intents and purposes, trans people seem to have existed for as long as gender has existed, and they evolved as gender evolved, the only thing that has changed in modern times is the visibility of these individuals. Feminist academics and activists who reject the idea that trans women are women are faced with an ontological issue as to why men born into a patriarchal society would choose to live as women. A handful of theories have popped up to resolve this issue, not the least of which being Ray Blanchard’s theory that trans women are either effeminate homosexual men or autogynephilic men (The Case Against Autogynephilia 176). The theory reflects a general trend in transphobic thought that proposes that, if trans women are not biologically women, straight trans women must be deluded homosexual cis-males, and lesbian or bisexual trans women must be sexually devious predators. It is true that sexuality cannot be fully divorced from gender, yet this pathologizing indicates a certain paranoia about those deemed a priori inauthentically female. It is similar to the archetypal idea of the animalistic male rapist, a character manufactured through culture that more often than not protects actual sexual predators and is used as a bludgeon against those already marginalized in society. The transphobic position requires its practitioners to disavow their own creation of the central archetype, and their primary tactic for doing this is harnessing biological determinist arguments.
“I would argue that all of these appeals to biology are inherently anti-feminist. Sexists routinely dismiss women by pointing to real or presumed biological differences. Feminists have long challenged the objectification of our bodies, and have argued that we are not limited by our biology. So it is hypocritical for any self-identified feminist to use ‘biology’ and ‘body parts’ arguments in their attempts to dismiss trans women” (via Medium).
All three biological determinist arguments against trans women that Serano cites have equivalent arguments against feminism in general. An argument from genetics depends on circular logic, starting from the premise that trans women are not genetically women, moving to the overly simplistic conception that there is a hard lock on female (XX) chromosomes and male (XY) chromosomes, and returning to the conclusion that a trans woman cannot be a woman because she has only one X chromosome. We find a similar logic surfacing again and again in patriarchal arguments for how women are genetically predisposed to be passive and subservient to men, yet in both cases no single gene has been established to definitely render a person male or female. The two gene types most often referenced as “sex-determining” are SRY and DAX-1 genes, which are present in both primates and mice, and are linked to the development of primary sex characteristics in the womb. However, these genes were targeted because they were present in individuals with XX chromosomes that, nonetheless, appear physically male. The anthropologist Joan Fujimura examined the experiments surrounding these genes and found that their methodology was flawed precisely because they had applied outdated assumptions about human gender and sexuality back onto the mice test subjects (57). Another argument for why trans women are not women comes from the fact that they do not have the reproductive capacity of women, as they lack the menstruation cycle and the ability to become pregnant. Even ignoring that plenty of cis-women are born without these capacities, we return to the same Deleuzian issue of capacity and imperative. It has long been a narrative of the patriarchy that women only exist to provide children for men, and that this function is their raison d’etre. Throughout the entire history of feminism activists and scholars have tried to dispute this narrative, yet trans-exclusionists totally ignore this blatant cognitive dissonance. Finally, the argument based on one’s genitals makes this cognitive dissonance even more stark. It effectively erases the privacy expected of one’s genitalia and renders those women with non-standard genitals and intersex women moot along with trans women. Reducing women to simply their genitals employs the patriarchal conception that outside of their sexual characteristics women have no defining human traits. Already we can see that the existence of trans women has an inherent effect on how cis-women view themselves, even outside the field of biology.
“These days, trans-women-are-not-women arguments invariably cite Caitlyn Jenner, typically making the following claim: ‘How can someone like Jenner, who lived their entire life as a man and experienced the privilege associated with that, ever possibly claim to be a woman?’ There are likely appeals to biology in this particular example, as many people remember Jenner as a physically masculine decathlete. But the main thrust of this assertion is that women are women because of socialization and/or their experiences with sexism” (via Medium).
This argument is not totally without merit, as gender is largely and demonstrably contingent on a person’s socialization. Even before we are born we are provided with gendered signifiers and roles that impact our conception of the world and how we interact with it. However, the argument falters at two major points: (1) the vague determination of how much socialization is required for ‘authenticy’ and (2) the assumption that socialization is a finite process. Serano addresses the first point with her own experience, as she herself transitioned rather early on in her life. The question thus becomes why and whether or not her socialization as a woman earlier than another trans woman makes her more of a woman. If it does make her more of a woman, what exactly is this point where one has lived as a woman long enough to be one? If it does not make her more of a woman, what age would? Would she have had to transition as a young child? Clearly these questions would be regarded as absurd by actual transphobes, who often resent the idea of children transitioning at all, and as well it ignores how trans people take different paths to come to the conclusion to their identity, some longer than others. Serano proposes a hypothetical scenario where a female person is raised their whole life to believe that they are male, with everyone in their life treating them as such, until they are informed that they are actually female once they have reached adulthood. If this person started performing as a woman, would she be a woman despite her lack of lived experience? Presumably a transphobe would say yes, if they were arguing in good faith, as they would take it as a priori that this person is authentically female. If this person decided to continue living as a man, would he be a man despite his lack of male biology? No, at least not according to a transphobe, because regardless of lived experience they will treat this person as a deluded woman. The fact of the matter is that this argument is self-contradictory and cannot be sustained with the trans-exclusionist’s actual and practical beliefs. Furthermore, socialization is not a stringent process and encompasses experiences relative only to trans people as well as the sexism faced by women in general.
“One offshoot of the socialization argument goes something like this: Despite transitioning to female and moving through the world as women, trans women nevertheless still possess ‘male privilege’ or ‘male energy.’ The ‘male energy’ claim seems especially sexist to me, as it implies that men have some kind of magical or mystical life force that women do not or cannot possess” (via Medium).
This argument can be disproven in a similar manner to the last, though it is notable because it brings up both the sociological concept of privilege and the metaphysical concept of essence. It is evident that privilege does exist for men in their access to jobs, benefits from patriarchy, and freedom to ignore the oppression women experience in their lives. However, the assertion that trans women posess male privilege once again relies on a circular logic starting from the premise that trans women are not women and reaching the conclusion that trans women are not women. Privilege arises from social interaction and structural bias, and once a trans woman starts presenting as a woman there is no transcendent barrier that protects her from the oppression experienced by cis-women. Moreover, privilege does not exist in a vacuum, and if we acknowledge that male privilege exists then it seems disingenuous to deny that cisgender privilege exists. As stated before, cis-women do not have to contend with defending their very existence on a regular basis, and, as these very arguments attest to, they have the freedom to ignore the oppression trans women experience in their lives. Privilege does not arise from someone’s “essence,” but instead the way in which society does or does not acknowledge them. The issue of “essence” is a sticky one because it is a two-way street, as it is also used in arguments to support the existence of trans people. Often, it is simply a rhetorical device to explain trans people to the layman, saying that a trans woman has a “woman’s soul” trapped in a “man’s body.” The problem with these arguments in both directions is that neither of them are falsifiable, they rely on ethereal things that cannot be disputed by empirical evidence. The difference between the arguments, though, is that the one in favor of trans women is just short hand for more complicated theories, while the argument against trans women is just a quick way to handwave away a person’s prejudice.
“People who make the trans-women-aren’t-women case will often insist that there is a distinction between cis women and trans women, yet trans women refuse to acknowledge this distinction. I find such claims endlessly frustrating. I have never once in my life heard a trans woman claim that our experiences are 100 percent identical to those of cis women. Indeed, the very fact that we in the trans community describe people as being ‘transgender’ and ‘cisgender’ points to an acknowledgement of potential differences!” (via Medium).
This points marks an essential summation of the discourse between trans people and transphobes, where the ultimate purpose is muddled in semantics and anecdotes. Trans individuals aim to establish an ontological concept of gender that includes themselves and their experiences, where those who aim to exclude them misrepresent this argument as one of literal interpretation. As Serano describes, when trans women establish that they are women, it is absurd to assume that they mean they experience the exact same physical and social phenomena as cis-women, but what they do mean is that they hold equal claim to the ontological reality of ‘womanhood’ as cis-women. Once this actual point becomes evident in debate, the only semblance of a coherent argument trans-exclusionists can make is one that appeals to biological essentialism, yet this line of reasoning is one that is ultimately incompatible with feminism as a whole. This is why the trans-exclusionist must muddle the actual thrust of the argument, narrowing the scope down to semantics in order to stall debate and delegitimize their opponents. Whether the route is direct or roundabout, however, it still leads to the same cult of authenticity, and with it the sort of courtship with reactionaries that we see right now. It is self-evident that authenticity is power in the form of hegemony, and both the trans-exclusionist and general reactionary have the primary focus of maintaining their hegemony.
Let us return back to address people who do accept trans women as “authentic” women, which I have already conceded as largely preferable to the trans-exclusionist perspective, though this should be the default position of anyone who wants to advance emancipatory politics. Along with this, it would be disingenuous of me to say that the fight for trans existence is not the most important one as of this moment, for it is clear that trans people face large-scale reactionary terrorism, domestic violence, and legal discrimination. However, there is a point at which the discourse must move forward with structural projects, and even at this time that is an important topic to discuss. Judith Butler makes an important point about the political concept of “authentic” womanhood, admitting that it is necessary to define “woman” as a general signifier, yet no amount of inclusion within the term will result in perfect representation (Gender Trouble 4). For one, the hegemonic conception of “authentic” womanhood is quite euro-chauvinist, as, prior to colonialism, many cultures had their own unique systems of gender that were not always binary. The Lakȟóta people have their own genders for male and female, as well as genders for those who transition from one to the other, and all of these are already included in the traditional spirituality of this culture (Hinskéhanska). In this way, the retrofitting of “authentic” womanhood onto colonized peoples is not unlike the retrofitting of the Oedipal complex onto these same peoples, as Deleuze himself describes in his seminal work Anti-Oedipus. In both cases the signifier is forced onto these people by way of coercion, as this signifier serves a double purpose of justifying and facilitating colonization. “The imperialism of the signifier does not take us beyond the question, ‘What does it mean?’; it is content to bar the question in advance, to render all the answers insufficient by relegating them to the status of a simple signified” (208). For the colonialist, a native is guilty of disproportionate expression of a signifier precisely because they are ignorant of that signifier, and any skepticism about the signifier is just taken as further proof of their ignorance. In this manner, it becomes exceedingly clear that a cohesive, materialist model of feminism requires an understanding of how the concept of “authentic” womanhood itself has been used as a tool to maintain hierarchy through the conjoined forces of imperialism and capitalism.
I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression with this essay, as Deleuze was a Marxist and a psychoanalyst above all else, and adapting his work for feminist or LGBTQ+ thought is still something of an aggressive reading. However, this does not mean that Deleuzian feminism is untenable, as I would argue it provides the most comprehensive bridge between marxist feminism and Butlerian feminism. Were we to think of theory in terms of food, we might consider that some of the best dishes are often composed of many complex and diverse flavors. As a chef, Karl Marx was radical for taking Hegel’s dishes, which were overwhelmingly idealist, and recooking them through materialist methods, in the process developing whole new methods through sociology and the concept of political economy. Judith Butler mixed up Freud and Foucault with her own spices as a homosexual woman. The greatest commonality between philosophy and food is that both require experimentation, and there is no point at which either of them will stop refining their recipes or splitting off into wild variations. In the face of an epoch where LGBTQ+ individuals are becoming more and more visible, it is imperative that we unpack the essential functions of hierarchy. The mind, race, class, gender, and sexuality all stand to other people from the “authentic” human experience, and we are met at an impasse between two paths: on the first path we can allow ourselves to be domesticated and integrated into the superstructure that has always oppressed us; on the other path we can continue to problematize the superstructure itself until we can properly dismantle its foundation.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. Print.
Davis, Angela Y. “Women, Race, & Class.” Random House (1981). New York. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Fľix Guattari. Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2003. Print.
Fujimura, Joan H. “Sex Genes: A Critical Sociomaterial Approach to the Politics and Molecular Genetics of Sex Determination.” Signs (2006), Vol. 32 №1, p49–82. JSTOR 14 October 2018.
Hinskéhanska. “Kill the Wíŋyaŋ, and Save the Woman; Settler-Colonialism in Gender.” Wordpress. 11 October, 2018.<https://hinskehanska.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/kill-the-winyan-and-save-the-woman-settler-colonialism-in-gender/>
Marsden, Jill. “Deleuzian Bodies, Feminist Tactics.” Women: A Cultural Review (2004), Vol. 15 №3, p308–319. Taylor and Francis Group Online 30 Sep, 2018.
Serano, Julia. “The Case Against Autogynephilia.” International Journal of Transgenderism (9 October, 2010.), Vol. 12 №3, p176–186.
Serano, Julia. “Debunking ‘Trans Women Are Not Women’ Arguments.” Medium. 27 June, 2017.
<https://medium.com/@juliaserano/debunking-trans-women-are-not-women-arguments-85fd5ab0e19c>
