"Post-Gender" or Gender Poets?

Hearing so-called transhumanists calling gender a "disease" fills me with unease. After all, the transhumanists also like to say that aging and death are diseases, and seriously propose that imminent medical breakthroughs will eliminate vulnerability and mortality altogether, that freezing their brains will enable them to be revived in immortal robot bodies, or that they will be able one day to "upload" a snapshot-scan of their minds into heavenly digital-spiritual computer networks. My point isn't to dismiss these beliefs because they're weird (lots of weird beliefs end up becoming commonsense in time, after all) but to point out that this is just techno-triumphalism, a fantasy that loose talk of "science" and "technology" can handwave away what are essentially social and political and cultural problems. Sexism isn't something science can steamroller away on the road to a techno-utopian future. It is far more likely that sexism will shape the uses to which scientific discoveries are put in ways few but feminists will be warning us about.

In the first sentence of his "Postgenderism" article, George Dvorsky first claims to be "frustrated with modern feminism" and to desire a "sensible male approach to gender issues." Apart from wondering why a "post-genderist" would have truck with the very idea of a "male approach" to anything, let alone "gender issues" (shouldn't he be "post" both of these things?), the simple truth is I get nervous when another straight white guy claims to be frustrated with "feminism" -- as if that were a single thing -- and then proposes to junk "it" and replace "it" with another internet manifesto and "movement" he just invented consisting of a neologism and a few ideas every one of which has already been under discussion by at least some feminists for years and years.

In several of his writings on this topic Dvorsky claims that Donna Haraway is another contributor to this "movement" he is talking about. Perhaps he would be interested in a few comments made by Haraway in 1999, published in the Donna Haraway Reader in 2004.

DH: I have no patience with the term "post-gender." I have never liked it.

Interviewer: But you used it in the manifesto…" [The interviewer refers to Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," published fifteen years before the interview, and probably her most influential essay so far. --d]

DH: Yes, I did. But I had no idea that it would become this "ism"! [Laughter] You know, I have never used it since! Because post-gender ends up meaning a very strange array of things. Gender is a verb, not a noun. Gender is always about the production of subjects in relation to other subjects, and in relation to artifacts. Gender is about material-semiotic production of these assemblages, these human-artifact assemblages that are people. People are always already in assemblage with worlds. Humans are congeries of things that are not us. We are not self-identical. Gender is specifically a production of men and women. It is an obligatory distribution of subjects in unequal relationships, where some have property in others. Gender is a specific production of subjects in sexualized forms where some have rights in others to reproductivity, and sexuality, and other modes of being in the world. So, gender is specifically a system of that kind, but not continuous across history. Things need not be this way, and in this particular sense that puts focus on a critical relationship to gender along the lines of critical theory's "things need not be this way" -- in this sense of blasting gender I approve of the term "post-gender." But this is not "post-gender" in a utopian, beyond-masculine-and-feminine sense, which it is often taken to mean. It is the blasting of necessity, the non-necessity of this way of doing the world….

It has much to do with "post-gender" in the sense of blasting the scandal of gender and with a feminism that does not embrace Woman, but is for women. This kind of "post-gender" involves the powerful theories of intersection that came out of post-colonial theory, and women of color feminist theory, and that came overwhelmingly, though not only, from people who had been oppressed in colonial and racial ways. They insisted on a kind of relentless intersectionality, that refused any gender analysis standing on its own, and in this context, I find that the term "post-gender" makes sense. Here it can be understood as a kind of intensified critical understanding of these many threads of production of inequality.

As you can see, Haraway doesn't reject the term completely, probably reluctant to throw out completely any tool that shows any promise at all of helping us tinker with patriarchal sex-gender systems in ways that might help more actually existing people live more freely and more legibly within its shifting still too constricting terms. But I don't think Dvorsky -- and other so-called "technoprogressives" and "transhumanists" -- should take much comfort in Haraway's concession because I think his use of the term exactly the sort of clumsy insensitive techno-utopian appropriation she is so skeptical of.

Historically, as more medical techniques to help women more safely end and prevent unwanted pregnancies, as more alternate reproductive technologies (ARTs) to facilitate wanted ones, as more transsexual surgeries and therapies and so on become available they have been taken up creatively and opportunistically by people to practice their sexed, gendered, desiring lives in ways that accord better with their own sense of who they are and what they want, while at once, to be sure, these emerging techniques have also been deployed in risky, confused, exploitative ways (surrogacy and organ harvesting stratified by realities of poverty, fraud, misinformation, duress, for example -- and one can only imagine the abuses in unregulated quests for reproductive cloning given current ignorance and risks) and were understood in terms of prevailing norms used to police possibility and constrain sexed-gendered lifeways even as they ramify them. Technology isn't inherently emancipatory -- it isn't inherently anything -- techniques and artifacts become emancipatory only as they are taken up by people organized to ensure emancipatory outcomes. The very same gender reassignment techniques that empower an informed and consenting transsexual person might be deployed to coerce an intersex child in ways that disempower them catastrophically. I worry that the technological determinism of Dvorsky's transhumanist handwaving about inherently emancipatory technologies, his airy dismissal of modern feminism, his glib acquiescence to a simplistic and sexist vision of genetic destiny (why treat the ways in which men and women presumably are different from one another as more salient than the ways in which men differ from one another and women differ from one another?) all point to an epic underestimation of the practical political work of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-cisssexist discourse and practice and witness and play to democratize gender, peer-to-peer.

Part of what Haraway is getting at that seems a bit lost on the transhumanist "post-genderists" is her point that sex-gender is, in her words, "an obligatory distribution of subjects in unequal relationships." I mean, leave it to a straight white guy to actually imagine he has "accomplished" the incarnation of a post-gender subjecthood. It isn't enough to point to the evil of the violations and vulnerabilities of sexism and heteronormativity, the fact remains that sex-gender is not so much a disease as a language we all speak, a language we learn if we are to speak at all. People who recognize that language can be used to lie or confuse don't declare ourselves post-linguistic, but strive to remake language to tell more truth. We use it to testify to neglected experiences, we subject it to critical scrutiny, we use it to make poetry.

When we push against the customary demands and expectations of sex and gender to live our lives more as we see fit, we are subversively citing and reciting sexed and gendered terms in the world we are born into. We are not then "post-gender" so much as we are striving to write new poetry with gender. And when we push against sex and gender in the real world we know that sex and gender push back, they exact costs on us, they impose risks on us, they take us by surprise in ways that can be dangerous and deranging. Deviance and defiance aren't happening on the Holodeck in an episode of Star Trek. Who needs to cheerlead about shiny immortal teledildonic robot bodies that may never arrive when people here and now are using language and bodylanguage and artifacts to play with sex-gender norms and make them sing a new tune, with real costs and real risks at stake? There is nothing "post-gender" about subversive but still citational queer practices (and I mean queer in the most capacious understanding of that term) of butch/femme, polyamorous, top/bottom, S/M, bisex/asex/intersex recodings of desire and pleasure and practice. This is about the real world politics of consensual lifeway multiculture, peer to peer. I think I'll stick with the feminists in the real world for now, thanks, and leave the transhumanoid "post-genderists" in the science fiction aisle (after all, we might have a good mutually enriching conversation about Octavia Butler's novels there).