medicamenticality: the invention of subjects and production of bodies in trans theory
keywords
genocide, pharmacopornographic capital, technogender, cisnormativity, monstrosity, transhumanism, hyperphoria
synkar's concepts
medicamenticality the medical/mental/“mentical” regime that manufactures bodies and subjects and stages their conflict.
hysterotaxis ordering ideology by the womb; a policing of legitimacy via reproductive logics.
gynophoria socially imposed burden of carrying the artifact of “woman” (incl. its libidinal residues).
hyperphoria system-level condition in which bodies/acts/avatars detach from stable grounds under total technicization.
avatars a. long-chu, bettcher, boyer, braidotti, feinberg, edelman, halberstam, hausman, karkazis, preciado, rothblatt, s. stone, s. stryker,
figures balzac, butler, irigaray, baudrillard, sloterdijk, deleuze, lacan, derrida, foucault,
persons octavia-butler, m. maxwell, raymond, solanas, wilde, c. m. kosemen, shelley, gigi gorgeous, loftus, william ernst henley, magnus hirschfeld
simulars tiqqun, frankenstein, oankali
additional operatives
mentical, standing-monkeys, civilian displacing villain, anxious auto-rape, auto-prostitutive, kamikaze of subjectivity, contagious transweapon, masochistic bimbification ritual, merciless stripping to fantasy, tragic fate of menification, latourian purificationists vs. affirmationists, store of the body, symbolic drafting procedures, apolcayptically recalled glitch, mendicaments (medicamenticalities), face-removal, insidedness through phone-screen wombs, masturbatory potentiality as curse-resource, villanous reversal, romantically barren criticism, romantically barren criticality, pathological-industrial complex, secret trans-admiring technoprofessionals, living artifacts, living artworks
dedication
my mother, jack halberstam, ghislaine maxwell, mae, nikki from britian, my alleged jewish ancestors
chapters
- the invention of subjects
- the production of bodies
- hysterotaxis
- gynophoria
- hyperphoria
the invention of subjects
discourses pertaining to transitude have been stuck in a war that continously is unable to decide whether clinical ideology and affective accounts of trans people co-produce the transed body in an attempt to create transsubjectivity from an ontological foreground, or whether transsubjectivity is produced by pharmacopornography, technoscience and capital's reterritorializations, which produce biocodes and artifacts on the trans body before (or only with the use of which) it can determine its own fate. cisheteronormativity and its equally manic dispositions only serves to obscure the fight between capital, transitude and the medical clinic. this work will be an attempt to only make this account less clear, but to hopefully force some dialectical tensions out of the situation...
creatures emprically show proto-art and culture without language, such as whales evolving song traditions, bowerbirds decorated courts, and chimpanzee's tool-related rituals. our species-construct may be restricted from understanding certain other more developed forms due to certain epistemic wounds arising from our perceptive limits such as language-use, meaning it isn't preordained that we even possess the necessary meaning-making constructs. poerksen makes particular references to the way our ability to process language conflicts with the activities that arise as a result of it in plastic words, where he shows how beurocrats are unable to think of reflective insights outside of practicalizing their gain, adding terminologies such as "project" to the end of pursuits in order to instrumentalize their "interdisciplinary approaches".
in a yet unpublished paper, i argue that our ability to interpret our own art to a full degree but other creatures to a lesser, has enabled a type of narcissism that counter-productively exposes situations where we've had to define our own identities simultaneously from a cosmological, existential and a cultural perspective. the paper calls humans "standing-monkeys" and argues that, in this speculative cosmology, humanity itself is not uniquely narcassistic, and that other various species, if given the ability to create abstractions, serve to also create uniquely tortorous methods, such as elephants over-harmonalizing the world around them, lizards force-freezing and force-accelerating spacetime itself to a degree that other animals can't keep up with and etc.
this conflict has spawned in contradictions where whichever political apparatus currently is in charge is forced to assimilate different subjectivity-forms all in one category. speculative zoologist mehmet kosemen requires the creative construction of superpowerful aliens that torture humanity through genetic mutation in order to even remotely reflect on our invention of subjectivities for animals that enable them to be properly genocided by our current techno-cultural apparatus and sustained cultural logic.
slowly, as all our essential cosmologies are stripped from us, we come into the ground we were always supposed to occupy - self-conscious and paranoid language users with no other creatures to share and morally reflect on our abstractions with, which leads to selfish and confused mass genocidal activity corresponding with ecological suicide in an attempted self-annihilation. octavia's xenogenesis frames the narrative of abstractions leading to annihilation to us, ironically, through the use of aliens, who invade earth and liberate it from destruction, coming to serve as projections of what we do to creatures on this planet in order to understand ourselves - to the level of near-suicide. the conflict of destiny and identity seems so unnaturally high for our construct-species complex, that all inventions seem to be pathologically related to a process of various latent clinicalized self-reflective tendencies.
this conflict appears not just for general but also particular categorical identities, such as sandy stone's understanding of the medically invented transsubjectivity in her posttransexual manifesto, where she identifies that harry benjamin’s transsexual phenomenon provided the model or standard reference under which researchers evaluated transsexuals for their suitability for surgery, only later discovering that they themselves were building themselves around benjamin's model in order to form more acceptable behavioral profiles. trans women studied it and performed it accordingly, after which clinicians “confirmed” its accuracy with new case studies, leading sandy to the realization, amongst a lot of other similar and different cases that medical institutions don't just regulate but also produce subjectivities and mental illnesses according to the logic of the institutions themselves. whats important for later is that stone also finds that mehl concludes there is no greater psychopathology in transgender individuals as opposed to the general population.
corresponding with techno-pharmaceutical advancement was also the re-discovery of the complexities of the body, which de-essentialized us only ever-further. turns out, gametes - the cells of sexual reproduction - are rigged where only dual extremes (the large and static female, the tiny and active male) win, allowing no divergence from a strict dimorphism. creatures have unique sex organs, multi-factoral sexual characteristics, simultaneous hermaphoriditsm and so fourth, but not unique reproductive cells. for humans, it gets even more strict, our secondary sex traits and primary sexual structures also feature less divergence than other species, including sea creatures, fungi and plants. my intention here isn't to argue that gametes show absolute determinism (see: joan roughgarden, anne fausto-sterling), but simply to push back slightly against preciado's theory, which i will extensively develop commentary on in a second.
octavia's aliens posses a third sex which mates with humans. in a certain sense, their focus on reproductivity as destiny (octavia frames them as gene-traders) turns them into forced transhumanists. the same way the civilian will eventually displace the villian category entirely, the transhumanist may displace the civilian, in an odd moment where the transgender and the transhuman become the same thing, as the alien becomes one of us, and we create ourselves all over again in a totally new image, the image of the new female, or reproductive herald, of mankind, which is a theme that i will tackle later through andrea long-chu, the concept of the woman as a surface.
the theme of villians and civillians is an old talking point in socialist discourse, where marx calls for the abolition of the distinction between town and country, rousseau stresses how villians are forced to transform into civillians in order to preserve their well-being, not only due to the higher living standard supported by the latter, but also by the way in which the former is suddenly put in a dangerous position if he does not abide by the socially structural logic of the time. the idea is also seen in bordiga, who advances the abolishing of the capitalist mode of production as correlated to a type of savior complex towards rural populations, and the unification between agrarian and urban settlements.
technogender and pharmacopornographic era, two chapters in preciado's testo junkie feature the most radical and ambitious pursuit in proof of and simultaneously in pursuit of (given its call to avoid drowning it in rousseauian utopian-dystopian narratives or hegelian apocalypticism) transhumanism-transsexualism that i've come across. what is otherwise disguised as another affective-personalized pamphlet and yet another burdensome anthropological study actually hides within it an entirely new, albeit fragmented ontology that also arrives with a relatively stable conceptual political programme accompanied by a cybernetic study.
in it, he argues that the postwar period's increasing capacity for scientific innovation lead to its medically managing intersex babies, producing somatic fictions tied to primary sexual structures, whilst also introducing variables - such as chromosomes, hormones and psychology itself - that shattered the epistemology of strict sexual difference. he insists that, rather than admiting multiplicity, pharmacist medicinal ideology artificially reinforced dimorphism with surgical and hormonal interventions. all other sexual features in humans have been certainly shown to be multi-factoral.
the reason this work is so ambitious is that, instead of arguing that gender is a "social construct" instead of an essential product, it blames feminist movements for wrongfully claiming they helped propogate this viewpoint instead of pharmacopornographic capital, which literally produced sexual bimorphism as a culturally determinate divide amongst the generally noted badiouian modernity-induced saturation and latourian-mortian propagation of networked hyperobjects, movable ideas and enhanced nonhuman visceral permutations (products of biotech), whilst also both physically and culturally engineering intersexual and multi-factoral characteristics away from bodies so as to maintain the illusion that gametes and primary sexual characteristics are determinate of nuanced gendered behaviors.
according to preciado, this is where queer theory came in, butler and de lauretis developed theories of performativity to fill in the lack of an explanation for what ended up being called gendered identity - a stand in for american neoliberalism's insistence on collective practices pertaining to self-identification taken to cosmological grounds. preciado shows us how owning the means of the production of the body is the definitive determinant constant of gendered divides, not cultural discourses nor scientific discoveries.
preciado heralds technosomatic communism, the reclaiming of biocodes - hormones and prostheses - from pharma-state institutions and their imposed regulations. he invokes sloterdijk's voluntary auto-intoxiciation and auto-guineapigism are called on as viewing the body through a dual scheme of subjugation-experimentation. preciado may or may not see the that self-guinead doctor also attempts to attain an inner consistency where he is supposedly only a consistent representative of the new magic, never a victim to it, disallowing total immersion as deleuze would view - frozen scientification. i see his strategic call or programme as slightly derivative when in comparison to what i believe will actually be the felt consequence of capital that will arise in the future, but nontheless, his call is ultimately inspiring.
although its the best example, this work fits into an existing conversation - whereas preciado invents masturbatory potentiality as a type of biotech force governing souls that serves as a central piece to the formation and maintenance of subjectivities by the western world - rothblatt speculates the scenario where souls are uploaded to minds, referencing morgan's altered carbon where souls inhabiting artificially constructed nanotech bodies fight alongside the original human bodily shell in a racist clash. rothblatt's version of masturbatory potential is a biotechnical resource that future actual transhumans will have to fight for their right to possess.
rothblatt argues that cognitive consciousness as a resource will arise way earlier in transhumans than erotic sensations, in which case preciado's force will go from an opressive curse or weapon into a war for re-discovery. rothblatt cynically and surgically treats the future speculative transhumanists as our transgender peers, oddly speculating on their utilitarian prospects and managing their social resources as a fight for attaining quantities or qualities of joy relative to their predisposition. this type of measuring conflict is a natural consequense of our technological dissection of the world, where speculating on possible gains is something that appears as something of a fundamental strategy for engaging in the form of life itself, a narrative that is reproduced earlier in tiqqun's cybernetic manifesto.
her argumentative positivism reminds me of the way in which we find a historical homology of technizing gender through for example balzac's parodies in the physiognomy of marriage where he's forced to reproduce quantifiable statistics on bachelors (the name for incels two hundred years ago) and the ways in which they can strategize to out-compete other men for the limited amount of tiqqunian young girls (datable women as opposed to generalized females, an ever-thinning margin due to the unnatural benefits of forming yourself into the former over the latter category), where gender theory at some point forces thinkers like rothblatt to dabble into pseudo-statisticology and fourier-type speculative tables, where color-coded gendered profiles emerge as a way to gain maximum benefit from your constructed subjectivity as it corresponds to certain political terrains. political opportunism arises the moment where constructed subjects begin to be reified on top of the world's existing subjectivities, forcing a clash that requires a resolution which can only draw its power from social economics.
braidotti's deathly holistic works on the posthuman do offer us a few rare scaffolds to cling to, such as the idea that the structures of the political economy of bio-genetic capitalism can be anti-anthropocentric without being anti-humanistic, in an attempt to seize the status of the agent by coating it in a shell of cybernetic intelligence and preserving it, or that machinic autopoiesis itself indicates that technology isnt anthropocentric. however, the holistic prerogative reads too much like a programme to me, especially when the entire language is aesthetically coded in it, which doesn't allow the occassional protrusion of concepts, at least not in the way you'll find it in preciado's anthropology.
the production of bodies
in regards to the question of why the production of bodies - correlated to foucauldian disciplinary modernity - appears second in this paper, when chronologically it ought to be first is precisely because, for as long as postmodernity happened to believe that subjectivity was the primary discoursive crutch of all symbolic processes and the cumulative design philosophy for the engineered world, capital and its oversaturation and propagation complexes do in fact produce ontologies from under us faster than we can keep up, in a villanous reversal that shows us how technology is suddenly naturalized - appearing in autopoietic constructs, when previously thought to be locked to allopoietic constructs - and vice versa - the natural world suddenly shown to be fully synthesizable leading to auto-reificatory constructs, when modernity previously deemed reification as solely a social construct.
a decade before preciado, stryker reclaimed monstrosity as an impending transformation that invades nature, and rage as its counterpart - the frankensteinian product of external pathologization but also intrinsic generative intensity. putting into question creatures as creations instead of dehumanizeds, the f-turned-t-monster is seen through the vision of the lovely eccentric dysphorics as an embodiment of technology turned against itself in an attempt to dictate conditions of assimilability.
shelley's frankenstein serves as our historical middle-point between the human, the animal, the machine and the alien, so it's the perfect description of a creature, monster, natural and artifical creation all at once, the perfect schizophrenic being who belongs the least, making it the most radical. however, the question remains of whether this being if speculated from todays perspective can contain itself as its own site of creation or whether it dissipates in its own self-mutilation as something enchanted with an excitable-frustrative tendency to self-immolate or drown under its own affect.
whereas preciado's theories show abundant examples of intersex problematics from an empirical standpoint, the strongest suits there are still philosophical, whereas in karkazis' fixing sex, empirical examples of clinical intersex authority consensus and status quo decadence take the front row, showing how although there are seemingly minimal studies that show how early intrusive gential surgery actually helps concerns such as future bodily comfort, orgasm-ability and parents initial and extended concerns over the consequences of queered experiences, technological professionals and their efficient clinical operative tendencies tend to smoothe out what appears to be anxities over gender-atypical bodies, serving to smoothe out and eliminate inconsistencies over worries about non-normative experiences, or about the very fact of the existence of such bodies.
the production of bodies takes the front row, where heteronormative discourse, what karkazis refers to as the heterosexual paradigm, allows for young boys with smaller sexual reproductive organs to remain in possession of them, whilst simultaneously smoothing out any "inconsistencies" in girls with "severe virilization", even after they are well aware of the fact that studies are largerly inconclusive or lightly point away from the idea that these surgeries are beneficial whatsoever.
whats important is that she also discovers how doctors are generally open to discussing the possibility of the stigma attached to these procedures, but not the extent of the procedures themselves, which is humorously and bureaucratically exemplified by numerous conferences such as the chicago consensus meeting, where rhetoric about mutilation instead of normalization seems to be a crutch by activists to avoid the uncomfortable reality of technological discourse further gatekeeping uncomfortable intersex bodies from existing in the way they otherwise would, as well as essentially encouraging psychological support, and rejecting equating homosexuality with failed treatment, whilst still continuing the technological operations of forming the bodies in the particular ways that they've been deemed to be formed by the medicamentalities of the pharmaceutical-medicinal apparatus.
at the beginning of the twentieth century, hirschfeld, a german progressive coined the terms transvestite and then soon after transsexual, opening clinical spaces for gendered varience. he was initially an advocate of homosexuality, which caused outrage all over germany, partially influenced by the commonality of self-harm scars on the arms of his patients, as well as oscar wilde's death. he would be one of the first advocates of homosexuality as natural, which was viewed by the popular newspapers of the time as promoting "freaks" in the "name of pseudoscience". after that, in the fifties, some of the first gender-affirming surgeries would be performed in this institute, only after his exile and its raid by nazis, which he would escape from by touring the world and promoting orgasm pills, as well as settling in nice, france. ironically, he would only promote heterosexuality and increased intimate and emotional comfort to american audiences upon learning of their xenophobic attitude, at one time being known as the einstein of sex in that region and a "romantic expert".
whats interesting to note about the magnus hirschfeld institute and the nazis raiding is the irony of todays political problems regarding trans experiences and regulations being almost of the exact same character. trans theory has been historically disciplined into an anthropology-of-regulation, where practical and political fights over legitimacy and validation have triumphed over actual ontological discourses, preventing it from becoming a philosophy and constantly relegating it into a cultural movement, partially due to the fact that american discourses have a tendency to be locked into rituals of legitimacy that dont favour conceptual scaffolding, but instead are particularly interested in the way cybernetics and affect link together with practical and political procedures of management, which is why figures like foucault become so popular overseas, and, ironically, this very vested interest in networks, media cultures and affective theories is the perfect drawing-point for something like trans discourses
some time shortly after the first institution was formed in germany, in the sixties, the previously mentioned work benjamin's transsexual phenomenon would release, as well as the johns hopkins clinic which instituionalized surgical programs. raymond gives an account of how disgustingly patriarchal and downright insidious these practices are, it almost comes off as a "sexed" or engendering performance where men get to evaluate the perceived womanhood and qualifiability to be a woman of the candidates that have a built-in waiting period for where they can be accepted for surgery, having to "live out" as women, almost suspended in a state of auto-prostitutive conduct.
around this time pathologization would dominate, which would soon be followed by the first trans autobiographies in the seventies. in the early eighties the first terf writing, raymond's transsexual empire would release, which sandy stone's empire strikes back responds to. feinberg during this time would finally tie it existing conflict theories. around this time also, anthropologists would begin to highlight an ethnographic and indigenous account of third genders in order to politicize it further, which is a curious and honestly quite ineffective move in my view, due to the way in which irrelevant social contexts can be dragged into discussions which do largely pertain to technologization of gender, as globalism and modernity in my view don't allow for enough cultural pluralism to actually produce substantial mystical affects of this variety.
in 2013, the dsm-5 would replace gender identity disorder with the term dysphoria, which does pretty much nothing from an outward political view other than attempting to destigmatize existing clinical legitimacy structures. in the early parts of the new century, conspiracists and bored populists would turn trans rights into a mainstream political issue, highlighting gender criticality discourses and worries over puberty blockers and detransitioning, which have been shown to be beneficial almost across the board for trans people.
the conflict between technogendered queer negativists and genderfluid alchemists and technogendering intersex-consensus appealing medical cultists draws boundaries between two equally insane parties, the cisdoctor supported by engineered "normal" civilians who are no longer subjectively naturalized but hold onto the myth to protect their sanity, and the transdoctor, supported by doomsday prophets who en-doctor themselves so they can have a fair shot at blasting the contagious transweapon at what they rightfully believe is an equally disingenous secret trans-admiring, albeit normativized technoprofessional consortium.
just to be clear, you see one side arguing that queer negativity succeeds and overcomes clinical ideology, terfs arguing that clinicians and trans people work hand-in-hand to reproduce their ideology, more centrist-leaning anthropological trans readings arguing that doctors are complicit in stigmatizing trans people and reproducing heteronormativity but nontheless usually are empirically shown to be attempting to have a positive or constructive view towards aiding them, and yet another side arguing that capitals appropriation of biotech needs to be communionized and reappropriated.
i don't necessarily think there are "more or less" correct narratives, but i do think about how heteronormativity can just as easily be viewed through clinical ideology as its own normativizing function, not just from within intersexed discourses and the way it relates and mirrors back from their stigma of trans people, but even more directly, i believe that heterosexual relationships are fundamnetally pathological, in that they are built under more perverse fetishtic bonds, as the appropriative and economcially abstractive social schema forces them to become less organic and more cultivated, requiring higher amounts of concentrated fetish to maintain.
as for stone herself, my view is that her criticism of transgenders "passing" does in fact obscure their history and the "mixing of genres" that comes off as a result of this is in fact a type of queer negativity, and creates a much more powerful standpoint for them. however, passing, in certain socio-practical situations, diffuses inconsistencies, stigmas and so fourth. essentially, i'm not arguing that transgenders ought to avoid not passing, but that there could be reasons that they were doing so until recently, that they were fitting into the discourse precisely for long enough to be partially allowed wider and more attentive degrees of normalization, enough to manage to pass through uncorrupted but still legitimized enough to explore their own genre (over gender) correctly.
hausman in her work changing sex argues that transsexuals work in cohorts with normativity-doctors in order to produce standard accounts of transgender identities in order to argue in favor of surgeries, leading to the engineering of trans bodies that work in defense of transsubjectivity. her misreading of stone as shown through bettcher's commentary as well as her argument with posser show how liturgical voices and affective narratives serve to split the subject into autobiographical accounts that correlate the body, with the preconceived notion of always having been the opposite gender, with further accounts of legitimizing and ritualizing the procedure of the convergence, as well as the act of maintaining this narrative itself, and the ways in which this all ties together shows how there is a certain cosmologization or authentication of the transed body.
bettcher's conclusion is that even radical feminist accounts can appear as trans exclusionary in increasingly disasterous ways especially when following a particular narrative position, however, i am more fascinated by the way in which medical ideology may have indirect consequences on non-clinically relevant trans persons, as i do think there is a correlation between the pathology produced from clinical ideology and the way in which, at the very least, transitude has been influenced to develop its specific theory of subjectivity, even if this isnt the sole reason.
hausman in her work mentions maltz's text new faces - new futures, where he argues that because of the way social attitudes react to and inform expectations of beauty, people who don't fit that current constructive standard would be alliviated of their pain from being sort of, indirectly influenced in considering themselves crooked or deformed by having to accept getting the plastic surgery as a compromise for fitting that specific time-periods ideas of beauty. this sort of paints a lot of surgical procedures as pathological normalizations of bureaucratically inscribed weakness, essentailly, the tainting of a persons self-will to restrain himself not to fit the current status quo standards.
hausman, on top of this, will want to argue that views on what normalcy constitutes can only be considered in correlation with an ideology that only exists due to the fact that these technical procedures exist and tend to influence expectations on what they can and should produce - therefore constituting a backwards legitimacy with artifical benefits such as "customer approval and happiness". hausman humorously notes that that couldn't be the same criteria for something like heart surgery, which doesn't serve to question the legitimacy of the criteria for cosmetic surgery, but the way in which something can even be culturally enforced as cosmetic and to which extent this can be seen as interacting with ideas of supposed non essential tissue. the text also points out how these very procedures have their own normative standard, not only taking in patient expectations but existing ideas of which types of classes and preconfigurations fit in with which specific type of adjustments. this quickly turns surgery away from a liberational idea that can conquer and fight against the standard model, to placing it instead in the deepest corners of a pathological-industrial complex.
to a certain extent, i'm reminded of william ernest henley's hospital poems, and the way the clinic was originally a horror house, where surgical and clinical developments were slow, lethal, tortorous and unbelievably dense, scientists historically have made so many mistakes and wrong turns, and ego and status games prevented the discovery of tuberculosis strains, proper hygenic practices like handwashing, glove wearing and the late developments of anasthesia, incorrect uses of various substances such as nitrous, including the horrible history of "plasticky" interventions into peoples lives, causing freak accidents due to the accidental and often times ignorant administration of heavy metals in childrens medication pills, or the way certain sterile ideologies correlate with the destruction of metabolic bacteria that cause various problems with the body's microbiology.
all of those freak accidents, when juxtaposed with the way that the clinical institute currently produces bodies in an increasingly sterile, plasticky way, devoid of the original horror and suffering of clinical procedures, shows some type of twisted, backwards, villanous and maybe even pathologically traumatic fragment of the way the physical sciences developed, especially when they had to face off against the techno-biological ailments caused by modernity. the clinical institute served as the way to identify the curses that modernity produced, but it also serves as the scapegoat, technological society dumped all of its waste products and engineered contemporary man out of the literal flesh of its victims, it ripped together and spliced bodies apart, symbolically in a similar way to the way we engineer bodies now. todays artifical and synthetic engineering could be a type of weird performative roleplay of those same type of practices.
it is often noted in anthropological studies that balkan and chinese societies or historically societies in poverty suddenly developed increasing interest in meat-eating cultures, sportscars and other various technologies they weren't permitted to. in a similar way, clinical technology and its ideology may have at some point as baudrillard notes, eliminated negative ailments, forcing itself to create saturated (positive, synthetic) enemies like hiv and cancer in order to continue to face off against an enemy, whilst turning all of its tools to suture the skin of anyone that wants to perform as a medicinal subject in the meanwhile.
whilst stryker manages to produce images where the frankensteinan monster evades all biophysiological dogmas and manages to fit into his own monstrosity, finding a place among the rest of the world in a way that fundamentally re-essentializes all difference as substitutive of the total correlation between all created beings in their experiences as moving towards the image of god in unity, hausman manages to trample difference and pick through the minor things, never allowing herself to see the exact way in which construction slides its affective charge into onto-politicality and the way in which this agenda revolutionizes our understanding of essence itself. at the very least, if nothing else, her striking and creative criticality is romantically barren, her dreams appaer as shallow when looked at from above-ground.
the production of bodies propagates and reformulates different functionalities of the body, however, the most important conflict between subjectification and ideological embodiement here naturally is the womb.
hysterotaxis
amidst the chaos, exclusionary radicals like jeffreys use social constructivism against the supposed essentialism of transness in works such as gender hurts, but their opponents themselves sound way more like preciado - way less concerned with essence - than jeffreys would be happy with. jeffreys's attack on transness as non essential doesnt do the boring thing of social constructivism but the fun thing of essentially rooting things like mania, self obsession, medical aesthetic interests and the power of applied femininity into the idea of identity as essential rather than, the essentiality of identity - to then ruin it all by arguing its used to silence women's conflict against patriarchal cisnormativity.
although most terfs anthropological understandings of transgenderism, such as its construction by clinical ideology and its occurance within frameworks of categorical modernity are accurate, their reliance on sexological frameworks supplied by blanchard, bailey and lawrence such as autogynephilia, paraphilia and particular identifiable constructs that attempt to piece together intentions seem like less of a consensus on trans identities and more of a weaponization. this makes the view immediately suspect, due to the way in which it attempts to fit an entire narrative into transsubjectivity as a predisposition for it rather than a possible explanation.
unlike foucault, who traces the construction of homosexuality in the nineteenth century as a form of speculative genealogy, exclusionary radicals mirror the perspective of somebody who is afraid of what transsubjectivity reveals about heteronormativity, which says more about the latter than the former.
this gay (man-loving) fight over who hates men more - or rather, derrida's phallogocentrism, rarely anything outside of discourse, has only obscured how craze-freaked transitude is, and how equally manic hysterotaxis (my term for ordering ideology by-the-womb) is as a terf response-weapon, let alone, the way drawing on sexualized psychic investment isnt harmful to begin with, as stryker herself would admit.
yet, if you destabilize cisnormativity itself as equally freaky as trans thinkers have done, half of the theoretical weight of the problem is already gone. preciado argues that by denying cisnormativity and subjecting it to a rigorous framework of specific forms of mania, whilst positing transness as auto-pathological or even auto-technical, the conflict has no middle ground to exist in its closed frame or form.
cisnormativity's play with womens consent boundaries, war as indigenous conflict crossplay and patriarchy as solanas money-fetishistic society is itself manic. the destabilizing factor is what makes these concepts constructive, those who add "cispatriarchy is normal but evil, it created trans people to distract from also normal but good radfeminism" mirror the equally lazy trans-approving justice-oriented version of this conflict, the "transness is both confused but justified dysphoria and anti cispatriarchy simultaneously" that stryker and others espouse.
cispatriarchphallocentrism itself will not escape allegations of transmutation, for it heralds its own form of evolving and normative mania-coded subversions and nature-questioning subversions, can also be seen in preciado, who could simply be fighting with conservationists and latourian purificationists, never affirmationists of pharmaco-technoscience, who themselves may be the crazed scientists preciado fears them to be, who restrict everyone elses ability to be trans simply so they can steal even more of it, rather than planning something more boring like trapping us all in a neverendless homosexuality - which, as carriere-bouchard has been seen arguing for online, should be the real term for heterosexuality given its intense homogeneity.
regarding the conflict, preciado would argue that this regime is instead more concerned with the control of orgasmic power and the way it produces a disciplinary regime of reproductive logics. or otherwise, so that the normativity scientists can supposedly impose onto us latent self-control mechanisms over our own bodies, which is a popular narrative in contemporary theory circles today, which can be seen all the way back into baudrillard and as forward as byung chul-han.
as a result of this double-sided conspiracy, preciado produces techno junkies of all kinds, he'll say - the world cannot tell apart experiment from slave as it slowly transitions into a post-conflict society, no longer disciplinary nor controlling, something that can see through regulations but doesn't feel the need to fight them if no real enemy is present and science and the body are allowed to roll around in medicamentalities, pushing forward into techno-transcendence as we envision the body, much like preciado envisions our own medicament, as unable to slow down.
raymond in her empire argues that women's bodies are auto-raped by transsexuals who enter them and turn them into an appropriable artifact, where rape isn't a force but a deception, a self-constituted mockery. in this fascinating but hurtful exposition, wouldn't raymond have to then admit that the transsexual is an auto-arabic terrorist, performing a form of latent but degradive rather than spectacular kamikaze, in the sense that this self-exposition also degrades the character of whoever is performing this role on top of the attempt to degrade women's characters and bodies?
raymond's focus in her work is on the way in which sexual fetish is seen as a burden by women, something they have to spawn in and deal with, when in comparison to the transsexual, who sees it as a devoted ritual obligation, simultaneously something to control and attempt to put in its rightful place, as well as an obsession of form and function, and a general fixation, something that one can also view their sexual liberation as incomplete without.
however, the aspect of mirroring sexual female organs itself is auto-castrative, in that, yes, you can use feminist readings as andrea long-chu would do with reversing freud's reading of penis envy back onto men, but nontheless, this type of devotion for what in patriarchal societies is seen as a vulnerability or opening can hardly be seen as a type of one-sided parodic affiliation or positivist inclination if not removed from a type of sacrifical devotedness of a more pleasant and puritan type, the christian-obsessive victim, purification, completionist complex rather than the manipulative one.
all of this is argued for, of course, on top of the existing, now well understood fact that there's no way these types of ideas are actually synonymous with trans experiences or forms of reasonings, which is why i herald this as more an experiment to understand how terfs comprehend feminine burden rather than my attempt at a defense of transitude.
bettcher points out some of her contradictions quite well, such as the idea that male to female transitioners are sexist both if they evade heternormativity and if they enable it, that clinical ideology both perpetuates heternormative surgical operations and enables particular demands by trans people, as well as integrity - the wholeness of sex roles that can only be seen as its whole, and integration - the blending of all sexual roles in order to construct a synthetic hole - can only be conflictually solved by a removal of integration, which, seemingly would do nothing but harm integrationists whilst everyone is still waiting around to achieve integrity, especially given the poor way in which raymond seems to treat feminist strategies against patriarchy.
butler argues against reymonds theories of integrity in gender trouble, where she notices how signification appears in an orbit of repetition, the necessity to be a certain gender produces the failures that the subject then positions itself around, meaning that to configure itself, it must update its understanding of what it means to be engendered, which cant happen as a transcendental motive but as an existing co-constitutive experience.
integration is equalized with integrity, where the essence of the engendered performance can't be thought of as seperate to its constitutive reality. this constitutivity is also a key argument for the way in which no subject can be thought of as possessing anything that fundamentally damns it, or causes a total incapacitation, symbolic or otherwise, on account of the subject. the phallus is always relative or co-constituve of the experience, the body, the womb, all forms of responsibility, surfaces, social styles, everything is created in the moment that all of us allow eachother to experience our engendered reality.
hysterotaxis appears almost as a fundamental operative around which to base the way in which womanhood escapes its surfacivity and allows itself to become beholden to a three dimensionality. pregnancy, a blessing of the wound, is seen as the way in which the body achieves an actual dimensional state, an operative mode where the achievement of a body inside of a body creates the being itself, who can finally allow itself to achieve its productive state. the technology of the body is built to sustain the body inside of itself, preganancy becomes both a cannibalization and an ontological re-formulation of beings. the "purity" of the woman is also finalized by the technologically abstract and machinic process of the formulation of organs and the transformation of woman into man that happens in the envelope of the pregnant experience
transwombs, their eventual forthcoming introduction, not yet present but properly ritualizable (transitude can still experience the wombed state, but it will always be abstracted away until technology can permit it correctly) might themselves relativize the synthetic-biological aspect of the existing status of pregnancy, revealing the womb to be a theatre rather than a shell, a production studio rather than an organic cover. the cultural logic will attempt to build the womb from scratch, it may be evocative of the time in which it exists, from cds to usbs to bluetooth, the womb will reflect the decisions of the time, it will have buttons in cybertopia, it will have dial-remote switching, or maybe it will be an app on your phone where you can stare at your baby whilst it cooks.
in the long future, faces will be deemed unecessary and removed, as you stare at the world directly through your phone screen, which is several amounts more pixelated and accurate than the eye - now with ultraviolet light! just like samsung switch, you can directly position yourself inside your own womb, and confirm that you are in fact an insidedness. men possess such no insidedness, their dewombified state will make them mundane characters in the social and civil experience, and a type of latent matriarchy may develop. raymond wonders why there are far more male to women transitioners than the other way around, blaming female to male ones as validative scapegoats. but what if this is because of the superiority of a woman, not as a fetishistic or devoted construct, nor as a product of techno-orgasmic social encodedness or engendering, but because of practices that validate matter itself, or the way in which women help us understand spatiotemporal realms by divorcing one part of themselves in order to arrive at a whole?
gynophoria
in females, andrea long-chu argues that femaleness is defined by a type of self-negation that depends on mechanisms of social regulation and appropriation - and that identification becomes ever-harder as genderedness is weaponized against the identities of its inhabitors rather than in favor of their emancipation. i think what andrea is doing here is theorizing a concept i call gynophoria - my term for the burden of the forced carrying of this social artifact of the failure for responsible womanhood or transwomens cultivation of it as a site of libidinally repressed energies.
long-chu argues that comedian loftus, in an attempt to parody performative male genius by engaging in contextually inappropriate acts with the book infinite jest after being urged to read it by men who also didn't know what it was about, ended up also performing female stupidity due to her exhibiting herself as above it whilst precise mimicking the very action of stupidity towards it in an attempt to mock men's status-signalling.
she possesses an obsession with male validation complexes on both sides of resistance and subsumption because she herself is a product of the way the femaleness - the condition of constant cultural engendering practices of non ascetic - non universilizable, culturally inclined - men - has transformed women into men, but worse, more frail versions who either have to pose as desirable ascetic men who are transformable but roughly and with resistance, or simply as whores (andrea's dumb blodedness) that enact performative resistance that itself is already subsumed entirely.
in a reading of gigi gorgeous's bimbification ritual, andrea fails to realize that whilst the process of exhibition does entail leaning into someone elses fantasy in order to perform an embarassing display of stripping yourself down to a purer and more elaborate image of someone else's desire - the very act of this merciless and functional stripping away of characteristic actually serves as a backhanded criticism of the very foundation of others desires, framing desire as secondary to the function of its becoming, which is the menification that women precisely attempt to avoid but nontheless encounter in their tragic fate.
in long-chu's concept-realm, rather than everyone being a woman and hating it, women dont really exist. if its true that only mens culture exists as an engendering concept whilst women cant really resist in any meaningful way, then the fantasy of a woman as something that doesnt resist and only subsumes is incompatible with the way that resistance itself, in all its embarassing subsumptive exposition, actually shows the imperfectness of a proper subsumption, even when stripped down to its functional harmony. the lack of women ever achieving themselves as proper "surfaces" is precisely present in their men-ification, their complete reliance on humanity's very sharp and twangy, non-flat textured cultural experiences.
meanwhile, menhood persist everywhere, as the gradient of dumb womanhood just falls one step lower every time men fall further into whoreism (self-embarassement) complexes, as andrea shows in a twist of the castration complex as men possessing vagina-envy and dreaming of becoming subsumed subjects in their own right, hoping to avoid responsibility whilst falling into its embarassing reality. meanwhile, actual agenthood in the ungendered way is just everyone who already creates their own worlds, which means theyre fully narcissistic but not obsessive in the slightest, whoever those people are. especially females who arent women, or at the very least who arent tiqqunian young girls, to the point of not even recognizing themselves as women in the proper sense or not needing to.
the lacanian split of womanhood itself is a false equivalence, given the nun and the whore do want to become one another, but its precisely the agent who is the nun, the man who is the whore, and the woman who simply doesnt appear in her own equation, unable to be both the sexiest surface, the most anhedonic man, and the fantasy-subject of desire itself, if displaced in lacanianism, or otherwise, producing too much intensity whilst stripping itself away, failing to become a woman under lyotardianism either. conflict always eats itself alive, i can see myself writing andrea's book exactly as it is, ironically, the production vs. invention of theory...
against long-chu, if you want to escape imperfect womanhood into proper menhood, you can resist being socially conditioned, codified and assorted, but you mustnt do that whilst identifying for the possibility of a construct and waiting for validation. andrea cant think outside of validative complexes and thats creating a hazard for her own philosophy. she explains the concept of the woman-turned-male as a tragedy of the commons (mike ma's formulation) perfectly, but is stuck being too much of what she thinks a woman ends up being (not literally but in her own figurative extrapolation) to tell that not everyone - in fact no one - is a woman. meanwhile though, her description of women's commodification isnt half bad, but too anthropologically-confined to create a conceptual scaffolding that can holster it, whilst at the same time, her description of womanhood actually properly describes their inescapable menification.
her insistence on solanas gets close to this theory when she argues that instead of transness serving as the pathological assimilation of mysoginist steryotypes, it instead serves as the rule governing all gender - except the romanticized reactionary essentialist currently non existent alternative of surpressed females drives that chu sees in solanas and humorously argues that she may have been the last untempered survivor of.
its odd that andrea calls solanas theory outdated to a byzantine degree, when she has simply mirrored and flipped the theory to argue for its exact opposite - with caveats like the removal of essentialism - mainly corresponding to the idea that instead of surpressed instincts being carried over into the production surplus social shaping, surplus social shaping carries surpressed instincts into the re-production of essential conditions - namely womanhood, which is why i have no problem positing that instead of this theory, the abstract object of woman can at best be replicated as a social artifact and never truly achieved, if the concepts of repression-intension carry the cultural weight of social-abstractive processes all on their own with no additive technological advancements.
meanwhile, in deeper tangles of trans theory, halberstam's polemic in the queer art of failure makes use of solanas nihilistic misandrist intensity in order to indict edelman of elitism, abstraction, apolitical formalism as well as bersani and gay male aesthets as a whole of irony, ennui and generalized formal detachment that secludes attempts at queer negativity by, essentially, being overwhelmingly kantian about things, as well as drawing on an archive of polemical writers and artists that limits the cvetkovichian "archive of feelings" down to a pre-selected camp, that depends on sentimentalization and lacks in faux realism and broader kitsch juxtapositions, in order to preclude itself away from the contemporary order of things.
what halberstam and edelman show us is that gender discourses themselves serve as productive sites for the creation of aesthetic and cultural styles rather than strictly serving for rationalized discoursive programs. territorial stakes are placed on top of gender, even justice-oriented speakers are attempting to seize gender into their idea of what it should represent stylistically and not just politically, maybe even political positionality isn't the point as much as the way status and social positioning impact the way gendered affect actually circulates, which would explain the overwhelming amount of testimonials, with serano's whipping girl as the crowned example.
in the envelope, irigaray argues that god, as providing his own envelope and being as substance and self-caused, is conceived through his own path. in irigaray, man creates god in order to ground himself, and uses women as a standing pole from which to create his own envelope, so he may necessarily do so. evil arises when a body prevents a thought and vice versa, and if the woman is reduced to this surface, then, there is no way for the agents to exchange their own reciprocal freedoms or work off one another on an ontological plane. she argues that rape is auto-interactive and non-constituve of an intellectualized body, and in a certain sense, that woman herself has been reduced to this role if forced to take on the role of man's receptacle.
gynophoria helps tie together affective charges, stylistically-preferential hyperobjects and aesthetic boards with ontological-theological readings of femininity in a way where, no matter the responsibility the concept carries with it, no one single theorist, from beauvoir to gillian rose, neither weil nor anna winters can serve to totalize it, whilst all of them can still somehow entirely capture it. this creates this type of discrepancy that allows it to proliferate as both an ontological and a gendered perspective.
hyperphoria
the way to escape hysterotaxis along with gynophoria is precisely through the creation of alien sexual organs, something butler needs to and does argue against when she wants to keep up the specific transposition she carries along in her theory, requiring symbolic charges to prevent manic clustering mechanisms.
a perfectly queered apparatus is one that resists theories of burden, responsibility or essential property - and instead argues for their total deterritorialization and reappropriation into new socially symbolic systems. however, as our cultural machinic-network requires its advanced abstractive complex in order to discharge its own conflict-states, the creation of novel technogendered biocodes - quite literally a re-engineering of territories, to the level of the alienefication - not machination but videogamification of avatars will be required to really achieve states of peace.
the discovery of an elaborate physical world - the medicinal regime produces the medical, mental and mentical (medicamental), leading to predicaments - mendicaments (medicamenticalities), the alchemical mends the invention of new chemical forces, pushing forward the engineering of productive forces, which circulate back into new forms of subjectivity - creating synthetic products - which co-exist as technology that can already be discovered in the natural body as a machine.
the seemingly artificial pharmaco-technical weaponization of biology was all along an existing property of the physical world. the world itself is a macro-engineered version of itself (biology is a scaled imitiation of chemistry, which abides by the laws as a scaled imitation of original pre-atom physics - quarks and their interactions - the likely original proprietors of the four "laws" governing the universe), where quarks combine into atoms and then into cells to form ever-complex systems, which eventually get divorced from their prior contexts - the misunderstanding of ontological alienation can easily be fully patched up. the world comes to us pre-engineered, we dissolve it of all its shared contexts and let it wash over us, and we end up as medicinal subjects - as machines of ourselves, trying to navigate a world which we believe we are simultaneously creating, as someone like latour may argue.
the medicamentical phenomenon emerges in order to suggestively and selectively order in between the ontologization of alchemical and clinical reality and their ever-stronger craft, and the way in which subjectivities attempt to constitute themselves, or fight against the way the terrain constitutes them, all whilst pharmacopornogaphy sells commodities in the form of their own subjectivities, hyperobjects proliferate their experience, and cultural styles link identities to lived experiences, but only of affect and characteristic and never of political reality. medicamenticalities surge and proliferate stylistical and aesthetic combinations which help the mental body recuperate against the abstracted body, and calm the excitation produced by anxious auto-rape. in garments against women, boyer shows us how the physical constitution of spaces is capital's way of creating infinite laboratories, conditions, where electirified grids serve as tortorous electrocutionary chambers, forms of latent cybernetic reaction-retraction processes, and stochkolm syndrome connects in a lyotardian manner to our inner drives.
auto-rape glitches into the places capital proliferates through, as bodies are seen magnetically pulled towards one another in a spectacular show, where the body is mutilated, re-transformed in place, used as matter for building, quickly deconstructed, organs harvested, the subjectivity is quickly pulled together, the soul in a vat is re-downloaded, the body is out in space, bodies grind against eachother, once sexually, once in a vaccuum, once in an orgasmically triumphant call, once in a ritual disposition where animals use the sapien body as a way to do their push ups, once where bodies accidentally spawn into one another crushing eachother, the glitch is seen as a type of tragic curse in some places, an apocalyptic call. the avatar (a recombination of all possible affective zones into an alienation of character, political subject and social reality, where zones of characteristics themselves are seen as performative-intensive productions) and simultar (online avatar, incapable of representing a subjectivity but only an act) merge, and acts themselves are bodies, bodies no longer have a lived reality of their own. hyperphoria is not necessarily a subjective condition, its more like the lived reality of the state of the world itself, hyperphoria doesnt call or harken to a particular subject, it literally floats like spirit around the mountains and dwellings of the cities and constitutes the lived and retroactive energy of the de-egoified wholeness of the world.
whats interesting though, is that instead of dysphoria, further processes of alienation between thought and body, constitutive and constructed parts, and a further saturization between the production and subjectification of machinic assemblages may instead lead us to hyperphoria - the loss of stable or essentially pre-determined ground. in this situation, you will really be able to tell the difference between soft essence and hard essence, something preciado himself doesn't consider when he urges prototranshumans to smear themselves in testo gel. he may argue it has already been achieved, where subjects are pre-produced by capital and auto-genocided by masturbatory potentiality. however, this displacement still isn't fully realized, since we still posess a variety of non fully gameafiable biocodes.
if you think dysphoria is a product of pharmacopornography, producing vast amounts of mania and generally confused states, the higher states of reification that we haven't achieved yet may fully commodify our bodies, to the point that andrea's formulation of women will not only be extinct, but quite literally unappropriable (double-alienated back into novel originality, in tiqqun's formulation of the concept of the hipster) locked away forever in a dungeon of complete relativity, where womanhood in its purest form is only the highest and most confined, most territorialized curse of the creature, who, being able to choose any form he wants, but never cursed with a pre-defined form, will be unable to achieve libidinal excitation, masturbatory potential as a capacity or innate ability cast from exterior machines of propagation (due to complete relativity of characteristics), nor ultimately even the ability to feel satisfied with one's own identity.
hyperphoria produces subjects that accelerate their own bodily composition and consistently swap out their avatars in an attempt to artificially synchronize their felt sense of self with their now fully commodificationally derived product of their subjectivity or their idea of fundamental characteristics that pertain to them. since all of these characteristics only serve to feed into a composed market-form, none of them feel experienced, so the fundamental embodiement turns them into a kind of "store of the body". this isn't just a normally reified subject without a tiqqunian form-of-life such as in our contemporary world, but a fundamentally and increasingly anxious disposition, that ends up literally creating living artifacts, and sometimes, although rarely, living artworks on the very body of the hyperphoriac.
like our current economy of ever-accumulating commodities, artifical degrowth and stagnation may have to be inferred back to our subjectivities the way sanctions and regulations are superficially imposed, as future nazi-states imprison us into a type of symbolic drafting procedure where we are forced to slow down our shapeshifting in order to feel even a sense of a lost natural responsibility towards the world.
integrated concepts
pharmacopornographic capitalism, technogender, technosomatic communism, masturbatory potentiality – preciado. gender performativity, citationality – judith butler. phallogocentrism – derrida. queer negativity, the queer art of failure – lee edelman; halberstam. transgender rage / monstrosity – susan stryker. posttranssexual manifesto – sandy stone. fixing sex – katrina karkazis. transsexual phenomenon – harry benjamin. dsm gender dysphoria/identity disorder – american psychiatric association. the transsexual empire – janice raymond. changing sex – bernice hausman. whipping girl – julia serano. archive of feelings – ann cvetkovich. deathly holistic posthumanism – rosi braidotti. autopoiesis / machinic autopoiesis – maturana/varela; guattari/deleuze; braidotti. hyperobjects – timothy morton. plastic words – ernst pörksen. auto-intoxication / auto-guineapigism – sloterdijk. tragedy of the commons – garrett hardin; tragedy of commons – mike ma. latourian purification vs. hybridization – bruno latour. prosthesis of origin / biocode – derrida / preciado. xenogenesis / gene-traders – octavia butler. third sex / sexual intermediaries – magnus hirschfeld. autogynephilia, paraphilia – blanchard, bailey, lawrence. freak/monster figuration – shelley via stryker. nihilistic misandry – solanas. disciplinary modernity, biopower – foucault.
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