01 Jul 2020
changing my thoughts
Two books that I have been reading help me think through the gender question. One is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and the other one is The Double Goddess : Women Sharing Power by Vicki Noble. I will soon receive the book Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love by Christine Drowning and I hope this one too will help me shape my opinion on the matter.
When I had to write my text about queer feminism, I conclude it with the idea that gender abolition would solve the issues of gender inequalities. This conclusion was quite precipitated, and I kind of used it as a sortie d’urgence in my text since the real path to gender equality is a long one that cannot be summarized quickly. I was also reading text in the vibe of the Cyborg Manifesto, therefore I was ‘‘in the mood for gender abolition’’. But this ‘‘mood’’ was one that has been in the air for a long time, as I realized a few days ago that it has now been a year that I am somewhat questioning my gender, considering that I might fit more the non-binary label than the woman one. But the thing is, when I was writing this text, one thing I haven’t took in consideration was spirituality.
Even though there is plenty of androgynous and hermaphrodite characters in mythology, rare (or even non-existent?) are the religious systems where genders are completely discarded. Maybe the mythology solely based on animal could be an exception, but still there, the culture of people having animal-based mythology still have gender roles in their society.
I mean, gender roles were a normal thing to have in the past. Today they are less appropriate, namely because we don’t really need it anymore. So yeah, gender abolition now wouldn’t cause any problem to society itself. But what about our psyche?
Before I dig into the psyche question, I want to bring a fact I didn’t know of when I was writing my queer feminist text. I used to say that even if women and men are different biologically, if one ‘‘works hard enough’’, they can reach the ‘‘biological advantage of the other’’, i.e. if women are born weaker physically than men, they can still workout to reach the average men strength. Nonetheless, I discovered in my Double Goddess book that men and women didn’t react the same way to stress. While men have the typical fight of fly response, women secrete different hormones that rather lead to a ‘‘tend and befriend’’ reaction (this is overly simplified of course). This finding suggests that women would probably more peaceful leaders, and maybe better leaders overall.
When we look in the archeology discipline, it is an objective fact that a lot of primitive society were matriarchy. We also see that many archeologists tend to see that the patriarchy is ‘‘the normal evolution’’ of those, as if matriarchy was something primitive to be replaced by something better. Nonetheless, this scientific finding about the stress response makes me rethink it. I mean, I’ve been thinking for a while that patriarchy is an issue, and that matriarchy is somewhat better, but at the same time, womanhood isn’t what it used to be, so could we invent a ‘‘queerarchy’’ or something like that? (I must confess that this idea appeared out of the blue just now.)
When I say that womanhood isn’t what it used to be, maybe I am only thinking through my own biases of ‘‘I am a bit afraid of women/feminine toxicity’’. Or maybe not. It brings back a conversation of the historical nurturing nature of women. The question I had on that matter was ‘‘are women more caring because they experience birth, and if yes, does it mean that a woman who doesn’t go through pregnancy, like it is the case for many modern women, doesn’t systematically have this maternal caring instinct?’’ And, therefore, I guess my question in regard to a possible come back to matriarchy is, are today’s women that similar to women of the past, and do they still have this potential of being great rulers? If we had to the equation years of generational traumas and alienation regarding a woman’s worth (the desirability lie) and the relations of that to womanhood/sisterhood (competition), can we really expect women to be able ‘‘to fix everything about society’’ when they already seems to have to fix so many things in regard of themselves first? Or is this maybe exactly the path that is required to heal womanhood?
But I mentioned earlier that The Left Hand of Darkness influenced me, and yet I haven’t talked about it. In this sci-fi work, the people do not have gender, but the protagonist does, he is a man from another planet, and tries to understand this reality. We can learn that the inhabitant of the planet he visits aren’t ‘‘always sexual’’, as they only feel need for sex when they are in ‘‘kemmer’’. It goes back to this concept of estrus which is, according to Oxford Languages, ‘‘a recurring period of sexual receptivity and fertility in many female mammals; heat’’, phase who would normally correlated with when a female bleeds, the bleeding signaling the receptivity. But, as Vicki Noble remarks in her book, ‘‘human sexuality detached itself from reproduction through the aegis of the vacillating female hormonal cycle , in which the female human is “continuously sexually receptive,” to quote the male-based anthropological view.’’ As the main character, Mr. Ai, explores les us et coutûmes of the place, the inhabitants are also curious about Mr. Ai’s birthplace, wondering how does the ‘‘constant sexual nature’’ (as in, theoretical constant sexual receptivity) of the aliens influence their society.
I am not advocating to go back to a society where women and men solely have sex when there is menstruation here, and I don’t advance that is used to be 100% like that in the past. I’m a sex-positive person, if such a thing would happen, I’d be quite sad. But still, this idea is something I want to come back to later. Nonetheless, there is another thing interesting in Le Guin ‘‘kemmering’’ idea. To give more detail about the physical process, when two people in kemmer wants to mate, they both secrete hormone, and depending on the partners, one will secrete some ‘‘female’’ hormone, and another, ‘‘male’’ hormone and then their genitalia will morph for the occasion, therefore everybody has the potential to become pregnant/’‘a mother’’, as they will never know in advance if they will morph into a female or a male for a sexual intercourse.
In The Double Goddess, Noble affirms and reaffirms often that one key characteristic of the feminine is her bipolar nature (not in the clinical sense). She claims that that bipolar/cyclical nature is foundational to femininity. Therefore, if we go back to Le Guin’s universe, I’d say that those agender folks are somewhat female, because bipolarity is part of them. But I don’t know where this idea should lead me yet. I mean, to say that we should fight gender inequality by bio-engineering humanity so it looks more like some imaginary other species would be quite crazy of me. But yeah, surely, one of the key of gender equality would be that everybody can (and should?) understands the others’ reality. Which goes back to my constructivism way of seeing thing.
I need to research if constructivism is a thing in other field than international relations
EDIT : it does, but it doesn’t mean the same thing, but in the end, I should question if I ever understood properly the constructivist theory in IR lol
30 Jun 2020
On kink as a war machine, and the problems of it
Following some interrogations I had about BDSM as a practice that could leave us closer to the emancipation from the patriarchy, I decided to look up in the academia what has already been said on the matter. I’ve read two chapters on this book by Fanghanel, about out to disrupt rape culture (which is, in my opinion, similar to this idea of emancipation from the patriarchy), namely the one specifically about kink and the kink-community and the other one about her overall opinion on this disruption matter.
I’ve come across some interesting ideas, which some confirmed some intuitions I had and some others brought new questions to the table. The main question revolves around the idea of community itself. Fanghanel, just like the others scholars before them, interviewed kink practitioners who would often state as ‘‘being part of a BDSM community’’. This doesn’t involve necessarily sharing a physical space, as nowadays the online world allows us to be connected with everywhere in the world. But since those were sharing commons specific practices and felt like they were all together in this learning journey, a feeling of community was there.
The idea of feeling like a part of community has nothing bad in itself. Nonetheless, when the author accused the kink culture as somehow perpetuates the rape culture, she would blame it on the community, how they organize and the culture inherent of it. Because many of the prominent BDSM community of the world namely group together people that already comes from a place of privilege, the culture in it is very individualist. The emphasis on self-sufficiency, self-realization and status are namely problematic. For say, if ones breaks the consent of another, the status of the violator can bring him some immunity towards their acts. Also, the idea of self-sufficiency and self-realization (and the idea of freedom intrinsic to them) leads to a lack of organization around those bad behaviors. And when some actions are taken towards those, it is nothing close to efficient, since it is normally some kind of punitive justice that no real superior authority is able to apply (I don’t know why but it reminds me of International Law). Therefore, this element of silencing of rape culture is very present in the BDSM community, and the fact that the people who are usually the ‘‘winner’’ in those situations are usually white charismatic people, often male, also suggest that the BDSM community is perpetuating the status quo.
After reading about that situation, I immediately thought ‘‘let’s just inject some anarchy in there’’ (become anarchy is a way or organizing a community, not pure chaos). Nonetheless, this is not the direction I want to explore. As I am not myself a member of a BDSM community (well, not one that I can reorganize, that’s for sure), I will leave this thought experiment for another time.
The interrogations that still plane in the here look more like this:
-It is assumed that people in BDSM community are somehow ‘‘kink-driven’’ instead of ‘‘people-driven’’, aka the object of their desire is a practice and not necessarily a person. Well, first I wonder if I understood this assumption correctly. If it is right, then I could understand the need for this community where you can find potential people-tool-for-practice, and since it is necessary, it is interesting to rethink those communities to make them, if not safer, at least not perpetuating (the bad) status quo.
-Nonetheless, I consider myself a kinky person (I swore to myself that I would only have kinky sex from now on at the beginning of the year), but it is true that I am into the ‘‘charmed kink circle’’, as my kinks are ‘‘normal ones’’, since I am a switch into bondage and role-play. Also, I am a cute intelligent privileged young relationship anarchist witch. Therefore, I never felt like I wouldn’t be able to find a partner with whom I can ‘‘practice’’ my kink in my personal circle of people that I already know and appreciate dearly. I don’t think it would be crazy to state that this is an ideal situation that everybody should be able to enjoy. This also goes along with my belief that sexuality, and namely sexuality involving BDSM, is a spiritual experience that should lead to some healing.
-So I am somehow wondering in the idea of a BDSM community itself just perpetuate this idea of ‘‘spectacularisation’’ of sexuality, which might or might not be a necessary step towards a world where desire and sex are somewhat more understood and accepted as something ‘‘not so special’’. Especially since I still have this hypothesis that there is no true 100% vanilla people because we live in a broken society, which has been broken for generations now, and ancestral traumas are real. Mmmh.
I still need to read more about the psychology behind BDSM (and power-play in general) and sexual alchemy.
05 Jun 2020
'’Ce n’est pas l’opinion qui change le monde, mais le désir.’’
-Catherine Dorion
According to Wikipedia, diversity of tactics is a phenomenon wherein a social movement makes periodic use of force for disruptive or defensive purposes, stepping beyond the limits of nonviolence, but also stopping short of total militarization. It also refers to the theory which asserts this to be the most effective strategy of civil disobedience for social change.
I am the first to praise diversity of tactics, even if I never suggested that we should use force while I was organizing student strikes. One thing that I very like about this concept is to apply it to the individuals, as in how can individuals cultivate different thing in themselves in order to become a better activist/healer/citizen, etc. I must say that even though I talk about individuals, when I think about this I mostly wonder about how this can apply to myself.
I reached the conclusion that there was 4 key-aspects to my personal diversity of tactics : healing work, art, embodiment of values and learning useful skills. I shall explain those briefly in the following lines.
- Healing work, as in becoming a more strong and genuine person, but also as in becoming a better healer in general. Hurt people hurt people, right?
- The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. As we live in a time where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (see Capitalist Realism ), I think it is fundamental to create new narratives and utopias to spark hope in oneself and in others.
- Embodiment of value as in to ‘‘not dream of labor’’, to be interdisciplinary, to be a relationship anarchist, to value the intuitive, the pleasurable, the spiritual… This is my personal list, but the idea is to put the emphasis in applying one’s values in their daily life as much as possible, no matter how those values do not fit/aren’t very accepted within the current world we live in.
- Learning useful skills could mean once again different things for different person. But the idea behind this is to learn stuff that is useful for one’s aspirations, life or community instead of learning stuff useful for the economy. I would even go one step further and say learn useful skills for the revolution, as an example, I would say that in my case, it would then be more “useful” to learn cryptography technology versus some new popular web framework.
When I was thinking about that, some other questions sprung to my mind, namely :
-
If it isn’t opinion who has the power to change the world but rather desire (like the first quote of this post suggest), then how do we cultivate that flame of desire for a better world in the people? How do we make this flame strong enough so it burns the ugly, the wrong?
–> by making them become accustomed to real desire, to the real power of it?
–> by empowering them into believing that indeed desire can change the world, namely that they are strong enough to make a difference?
–> also by bringing the fact that the oppressors are just humans, and therefore aren’t gods, so they can be smashed out/we can stop believing in their power?
- Even if the American dream seems desire-centered, is it really? I don’t think it is. Well, it doesn’t try to truly fulfill the human drive towards non-material things, aka towards the being (as in, becoming what you really want, if it is outside of the “correct and useful roles” already set by society), therefore desire-centered or not, it does not lead in the right direction.
- On art : Visuals are great - more popular, more accessible on a day-to-day basis, more shareable - but are they powerful enough to change to the core, to spark real emotions? VS Writing, as it allows to portray a more complex situation, and where ones necessarily identifies/is more involved with the story… but sometimes the message is not enough direct, but is it a matter of subconscious at this point? Plus the question of attention deficit in our postmodern time….
No matter how much unanswered questions there are, I still feel like the idea of personal diversity of tactics is an interesting one.
23 May 2020
We know that humans are social creatures, and that they want to feel like they are part of a group. We also know that they will probably strive for status in some kind of hierarchy because it’s good for self-esteem/self-actualization. But striving for power can increase violence. Nonetheless, when there are multiple ‘‘positions of power’’ available, there is less competition, so the negative feedback of this pursuit becomes less intense.
Basically anarchism proposes a decentralized system with multiple autonomous zones. And the internet already offers a multiple hierarchies framework. So what do we do about that? We could explore this in two ways :
- How can this situation spark the collective imagination into a possible anarchist narrative for the real world?
- Even if internet creates many subculture and groups, how does that could translate in physical place, regarding the fact that the people in those groups are physically all over the world AND part of multiple groups at once?
I think I could summarize an answer with something like “those internet made subcultures can help the human psyche with its understanding of autonomous zone but they do not offer a real concrete ground to operate the construction of them unfortunately.” I mean, I could imagine a sci-fi scenario where we all live in virtual realities, but this “virtualization of the world” can only happen when all basic needs are met, and yeah, that won’t be an instant thing for a new autonomous zone.
But still, like Gwern writes in The Melancholy of Subcultures:
The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground—our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution! […]
But, in all cases, since the world as it is right now is too hard to be apprehended in his total complexity, the idea of a smaller-scale world is welcomed for the tortured brain. As Jaron Lanier says in the same text (a text worth reading in its entirety, by the way): “Leaving a culture, and joining a subculture, is a way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world.”
And this lead to a few other questions :
- If the “main culture” is broken into “smaller cultures”, does this involve the multiplication of narrative and, if so, how do we manage to keep them coexisting? Or maybe our postmodern era characterized by its lack of significant narrative (except maybe “consume more, amass more wealth”) implies that the “habit of narrative-making” is somewhat lost?
- In the same line of thoughts, could a global revolutionary project emerge from that? Is a global revolutionary project even the way to go, or should we give up on the idea of global thing now? But can we pretend giving up on the global in a world where everything/everybody is connected?
I feel like reading about Saul Newman’s post-anarchism could help me apprehend my interrogations. But the truth is that maybe I shall write this sci-fi scenario to picture more accurately what it could mean. Mmhh.
EDIT 29/08/2020 : I found a good description to deepen this idea of hierarchy mentionned above in Riane Eisler’s Tomorrow’s Children, which says that :
There is a distinction between hierarchies of domination and hierarchies of actualization. Hierarchies of domination are imposed and maintained by fear. They are held in place by the power that is idealized, and even sanctified, in societies that orient primarly to the dominator model : the power to inflict pain, to hurt and kill. By contrast, hierarchies of actualization are primarly based not on power over, but on power to (creative power, the power to help and to nurture others) as well as power with (the collective power to accomplish things together, as in what is today called teamwork). In hierarchies of actualization, accountability flows not only from the bottom up but also from the top down. That is, acountability flows in both directions.
05 May 2020
Yesterday’s reading on mystical anarchism (Critchley, « Mystical Anarchism ».) opened my eyes on many things, namely the source of the fight between anarchists and authoritarians.
Since, one argues that humans are good and society perverts them and the other says that humans are evil and society regulates this evilness, no one will ever reach a satisfying answer because it lies within the nature of human beings, and the nature of human beings will always remain hard to prove scientifically. But that’s where mystical anarchism — as like what was involved in the middle age Movement of the Free Spirit — comes in.
The movement suggests a path where one needs to destroy the ego, a.k.a a path that overcomes the “first sin”. Therefore, no matter how the human nature is at the beginning of the process (and if there such thing as human nature), once one has gone through the path of the destruction of the self (or some part of “self-deification”), they are then a good individual which can “only be” a positive factor in society. A society where all the people in it would have gone through that process wouldn’t require any rule since everybody would be “spiritually free”.
The 2009 historico-philosophical text ends on this idea of a politics of love and how it isn’t a question about the future but how we act right now. This resonates with the theory of Gustav Landauer (the contemporary thinker of mystical anarchism, who has put the focus back on the importance of community in the anarchist pursuit) who says “kill yourself, not others” in the sense of when one is free of selfishness (in a buddhist-ish vibes, even though Landauer was a jew) they then become necessarily a great agent in a group, because they operate with pure love.
On my side, it goes back to me fighting with my “relationship anarchist flag” and it works well with my mashup of Freire/Foucault/Nietzsche theory about oppression, sex and pleasure/taboos. At the same time, it doesn’t mean forcing people out of monogamy (so they love everybody with “pure love”) but only making people realize what is toxic in the monogamous discourse. It also goes hand in hand with disrupting rape culture.
As (originally) an environmental activist, it might seem a long way to reach “climate justice”, but a part of me feels like, no matter if this is the wrong or right answer, to try to fight what is at the root of a problem is always somewhat a good strategy. We need empathy to care about climate, and when we cannot even understand our desire and fear, how can we understand others’ ?