Faggotization and the Extant Gender Ternary
Hello! I've just published my brief(ish) essay about my current working hypothesis about the Extant Gender Ternary ("there are only three genders!") and how it relates to the process of Faggotization / the policing of the Gender Subaltern Class.
I attempt to use a Marxist-Leninist framework applied to a materialist feminism to assess what the actual nature of gender which exists under the current gender regime is.
Please give it a read and a share/rechost, if you feel so inclined! I also welcome good faith comments, questions, and critiques. Please try to come into this essay with an open mind! I suspect that some of the things I say are going to be rather controversial, including to other transgender women, but I think that my analysis is both cogent and, hopefully, valuable.
[Also! The Substack link is accessible, and has a voice-over from yours truly for disabled audiences! Or if you just want to hear my pretty voice read my own writing lol.]
Picture of my tits for The Algo
I think this is a pretty interesting framework. I highly recommend reading the original essay (in general, and especially before reading what I'm about to write.)
It does not seem entirely different from some existing gender theories I've read that come out of the mainstream feminist and queer theory spaces, and I think it would be interesting to connect it more to other marxist feminist concepts such as reproductive labor as the feminized labor of women as a class.
It reminds me of analyses which posit that unhoused panhandlers are still doing a type of labor that benefits the bourgeoisie. Panhandling reminds housed and employed workers of the consequences they face should they fail to continue to acquire money. The fear of becoming an unhoused panhandler is the sword of Damocles for most proletarians and this dynamic manifests with the near-universal hatred for the unhoused that we see from people of every socioeconomic status.
I definitely agree that the western colonial gender binary system is not a true binary. I've been saying that faggot is a gender for a long time. You see the faggot depicted in media and it's true that not all gay men are gendered as a faggot. I think that if we were to create a full typology of the gender archetypes we see in the western colonial gender system it might be more than 3, but I agree that if we are describing classes purely in terms of material relationships to power, it makes sense to categorize people as Power, Not-Power, and The Other Ones.
I think I disagree with the terming of the third category as "faggot-subaltern." The "subaltern" generally is a colonized person, and most of the global subaltern do not live in the United States and Canada; but the categories of people we see in the faggot-subaltern class per this essay are categories we primarily see among proletarians in the United States and Canada. The severity of harm that comes to you when "faggotized" depends highly upon where you already stand in the racial and socioeconomic structures of the US, but also upon things like geography. The tradwife in Utah who got married at 18 is at risk of severe harm and subalternization if she fails to meet gender expectations of Not-Power. The chances she'll be disowned, cut off from social capital, and left on the streets to become an unhoused panhandler are a lot worse than in other parts of the country or other originating family situations. Compare to a cis woman from a more secular family in the Northeast, and failure to meet gendered expectations likely won't push her into the subaltern even if she transitions fully. Even if it affects her socioeconomically, it is very unlikely to push her into a low enough status in society that we could term her as subaltern on the global scale. When we look at the parts of the world where most of the subaltern live, we see different systems of gender expectations and levels of punishment that I think would warrant a closer analysis under this framework. (Unless, perhaps, the framework cannot be applied to those who are already subaltern under neocolonialism, in which case it is a framework that is unable to be applied to most human beings and geographies in the world.)
And I think this framework also fails to account for why those assigned Power are punished so strictly and harshly for failure to meet the aesthetic expectations of their class, while those in Not-Power are given more wiggle room. Why is it Faggot-Subaltern and not D*ke-Subaltern? Wouldn't a system like this be far more concerned with policing the behavior of the Not-Power to keep them in check?
I think this framework does a good job at providing more wiggle-room, but I think conflating the subaltern with the faggot just leaves us with not enough wiggle room to account for how much porousness there is in the system. Most LGBTQ people within the United States still are not subaltern even when facing heavy discrimination and social punishment.
I think perhaps Power, Not-Power, (always provisional membership in both) and Punished-Other might work better here. Or perhaps Wretched-Other (bringing Necropolitics into this). Yet I still feel like it's difficult to account for like, how much more weight things like race and existing socioeconomic status push against gender-deviance in the scales of one's descent into the subaltern. If you are rich and white enough, it does not matter how much you deviate from the gender class system, you remain in Power.
I'm also interested in looking at what labor is associated with the Faggot-Subaltern class. If I am looking at just the cultural archetype of the Faggot, we have entertainment, cosmetology, fashion, panhandling, and sex work (and tech, but faggots-in-tech generally aren't anywhere close to becoming subaltern). Cosmetology, fashion, and sex work are ironically all about helping Power and Not-Power conform to their own gendered expectations (through dressing up the Not-Power, and through providing an outlet to Power for forbidden desires lest her become subalternized/faggotized). Interesting! What's up with that.
It's clear, I think, that in a lot of the imperial core the gender system is shifting. There definitely aren't attempts for the system to assimilate new meanings into what it means to hold power and not-power. The girlbossification of Power is an ongoing transformation happening alongside attempts to reassert control over biological reproduction. But all of this gender transformation is happening inside of the imperial core. Not that there is no sort of change or LGBT movements happening anywhere else, but rather, that the processes I am observing simply are data coming from the imperial core. Which makes me hesitate to use words like subaltern. I feel like it ends up making more sense to say "Gender non-conformity creates a risk of someone becoming subaltern through rejection and ejection from their position in society, though it is possible to avoid this."
I think that it is a correct psychoanalysis that disgust at gender non-conformity serves a function of reinforcing gender conformity, but I'm not sure if this is a system of economic classes akin to a colonizer-colonized relationship, I suppose. Though absolutely a lot of gender non-conforming people are colonized people especially since the imposition of these gender norms is itself a part of colonization and social control of the colonized by eradicating indigenous cultural norms around gender and gendered labor. As Sally Markowitz writes in her essay Pelvic Politics: the colonial gender norms themselves exist to render the colonized body as gender non-conforming and therefore inferior and subhuman, and what those norms are will freely shift in order to maintain that the colonized body is still not conforming. (This is, somehow, also depicted in Sneeches in Beaches, the Dr. Seuss book about racism being bad that he made after decades of creating racist caricatures of Chinese and Japanese people.)
Idk! This is my raw reactions and thoughts after reading the essay (Which I think is very worth reading and pondering) and these raw reactions are even less refined and coherent. I don't have a thesis here just lots of thoughts and reactions for places of further investigation.
