SISYPHOS' PUSHED STONE Of GENDER—— REFLECTING ON TWO ESCAPES IN LIFE

Idolum

The cunning of the power of discourse is evident

I was involved desperately by the tyranny of phantasm

accepted the holy annunciation with ecstasy

made dirty dealings with the norm

dancing deliciously with evil

then I was quickly abandoned by joy

Tossing in the swell of definition

exhausted to hold on the raft to the place of drifting

not far from the vast plain, the land appears

swimming through the endless void

still can't reach the edge

a mocking voice said: "it wasn't a continent front but just a mirage."[1]

Abstract

Although I experienced those numerous struggles, I no longer require any hormonal or biologically surgical sexual change/transplant, nor do I want to ungratefully erase that dark, miserable days from my life so easily. Although I "rescued" myself in time, I also didn't want to stand up against trans people and hold the banner of liberation high because there are still many people hanging on obscure spaces. Reflecting on the obsession with being trans at that stage, I came here through a narrow and dark tunnel, sitting here and thinking about what gender used to mean to a person who wanted to change his biological sex with extreme fanaticism? Or, what exactly do transgender people want to transcend?

Through this kind of thinking simulation exercise, I realized how I used to stand in the matrix of heterosexual hegemony. I carefully protect my secrets from leakage while subconsciously seeing Logos phallocentrism as an embodiment of generative power. Then, pretending and treating with contempt those who seem to be ravaged by the same tyranny of norms as me. I want to apologize to you and myself.

In this brief essay with some excerpted diary, you can see how I was pushed into a state of misery by norms through a long, dark canyon and now into the broader grasslands.

1. It's just a futile game.

Becoming Him (Using myself as an example to talk about what transgender people are transforming? What are they consolidating?) and Rebecoming Her.

The following are some excerpts from the author's diary:

"I went to the store and bought several rolls of scotch tape, the largest size. I secretly locked the bathroom door, took off my shirt, and completely wrapped my chest with tape. I don't know how many times I rolled it until the tender pink flesh-coloured skin tended to zinc white under the intense plastic package. This piece of skin colour made me look like a robot artificial skin part that will be manufactured in the future. I didn't think about what came next. But at that moment, I could only chuckle that I had found such a clever way to make my well-developed breasts look pretty flat, like a boy's. I looked at myself in the mirror, and all I felt were bursts of ecstasy, delighted as if the tape had stitched up the wound before the wound reacted to pain. Well, nothing happened. The teacher's stubby hands didn't touch me, nor did his thin, oily hair, mixed with grey, brush from my smooth face to my breasts. No one can do what the teacher did to me just now. Because this time, I am sure to kill my immature girlishness. I've already become more like a man. When I looked at my flat chest in the mirror, all the strange uncomfortable experiences that had just happened disappeared.[2]"

(The author's diary fragments above record the first time she was sexually harassed at a teacher's home, she was not fear but worried that she didn't look masculine enough.）

"Don't be undefined. This seems to be the only thing that can't be left and right, and your gender must have a belonging; that is, no matter what the truth of your gender is, your message to the public must be clear, even if it is the result of your layers of coverage.

Enjoying the dreamy happiness of a single-sex being accepted by a closed, rigid group, this strange happiness of imprisonment, danger, and compulsion. I watched these men, and I envied the fact that nothing could get them out of their absolutely masculine world, their certainty and the sheer intensity of their masculinity reminding me every moment of how fragile my pretense was. Their whiskers grow freely around their mouths and need no nourishment, spreading across the pond like plankton. The movement of the vocal cords in swallowing seems to me to be a manifestation of being sharp, stuck in the throat, a sign of the perpetuation of power."

"I paid so much attention to the appearance of this container; I regarded it as the body of a sculpture, like rough jade, before the birth of an exquisite handicraft. I worked tirelessly daily to brush fine grout on it and smartly and discreetly decorated it with strips of finely rubbed clay. I don't want to be Adam's rib. I'm going to make myself a rib.

One of the most stressful and frightening things I've had over the years is someone staring in confusion and asking me, "Are you a boy or a girl?" In the car, wherever there are people. Most of the time, I tell friendly people who are just curious. But for some people who don't show a lovely face, I usually immediately look like an angry little beast with puffed cheeks and a defensive stance. Over time, these recognition experiences have trained me to be as sensitive as a secret signal on the verge of triggering. I swear to kill all the femininity in me. I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself viciously, contemplating that no one would ask such a question that made me blush instantly.

By chance, I met a "brother" who was selling hormones. That is my 16 birthdays, and I began to secretly take it every day, one tablet in the morning and one in the evening. These amber capsules from the Netherlands started the irreversible changes in my body slowly but safely, and at the same time, I felt satisfied. My body and mind began to gallop on the smooth road of matching. I imagined this drug was a pump of penicillin, capsules fused with the blood, and any femininity that appeared in me had to be killed by those like harmful bacteria."[3]

(The author experimented with using hormones to alter her sexuality to be PASS under normative scrutiny.)

Many philosophers have questioned the fundamental dualism; It seems to be a suspicion of binary gender opposition, but this basic model of gender into biological-sex and social gender provides a practical mirror and more understandable version for observing the construction of sociocultural gender. Structuralist anthropologist Levi Strauss believed in his The Elementary Structures of Kinship[4] that the relationship between the raw and the cooked is converted through kinship. Society is a product of the social activity, and gender is a product of socialization. Only through the relationship of the various families to each other can each individual achieve a definitive identity. The nature of each person has experienced the initial division and restriction completed by the small unit relationship network - family from birth.

Under this assumption, the first step for transgender people is to escape from the division of the smallest unit of the family—a profound aversion to family titles, family roles, and conventions of discourse production. Because of the mainstream duality that emphasizes that a person cannot exist ambiguously; in other words, it cannot exist without meaning. But ultimately, the meaning can only come from complicity with the norm. For transgender people themselves, the meaning is that the body conforms to the requirements of social gender norms—in order to change the body through surgery. To complete the resistance and transcendence of family kinship and social identity, sexual organ reconstruction surgery is a trans' pursuit of the male/ female body's materiality (sexual organs). Trans people are reckless in carrying out physical transformation. The discursive construction of the genitals came back to haunt them.

As mentioned above, people need to be urgently categorized by existing discourses and norms to prevent ambiguity, which symbolizes fluidity, changeability, danger, and exclusion. Moreover, evident duality makes human subjects and meaning possible. Transgender people need to be treated in an apparent dichotomy, therefore transgender people are more masculine and feminine than biological males or females. So, the subversion we think does not exist in the gender field but the subversion of medical ethics. On the contrary, the seemingly bold and experimental concept and behaviour of "trans" is a return to traditional gender cognition and strengthens the awareness of binary gender culture. Because my pursuit of physical and cultural masculinity shows my disgust and rejection of biological and cultural female, the authoritative and influential subjects are further uttered and cited.

Butler talked about the relationship between body and discourse. Only a body that conforms to norms is a body that can be genuinely capitalized and accepted by the culture. Women's cultural bodies have always been rejected and rejected by social power. Women have been in many areas since ancient times and are forbidden to appear in many traditional scenes or be detained outside the male public field.

In the situation where the author both has misandry and misogyny, it is apparent that I chose the male role without hesitation in the scene where he could only choose one or the other. Because becoming a male can better avoid the oppression brought by men, which was equal to "I am not in danger, I am the danger," although it sounds ironic. The author wants to become a male and no longer needs to be stared at by a male as a female, which to some extent, dispels the author's aversion to males. It's a way of rebelling against ancient gender definitions and depressing and temporarily holdable --even though the rebellion is fundamentally a failure.

2. Rebecoming X

(Accept fluidity and the adventure, deconstruct self-cognition, and move towards true liberation)

An exhibition at The Store X and the New Museum in 2017 well presented and discussed the possibility of gender. Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon is exciting and thinks about the idea of ​​"beyond the binary. "This exhibition has undoubtedly disintegrated many things that can be called authoritative objects and began to touch and contemplate more unspoken areas with a more inclusive perspective.

The exhibition in Munich in 2022, TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900–1950. It makes clear the thread of thoughts in aspects of queer history, from the persecution of the group to political interference, and to showing how this vulnerable group, excluded from the political norms, fought for a voice, how it was repressed by norm and, and then how to trigger the influence of queer role models, generate their own discourse and the process of idol restatement. In this process, new interpretations, reinterpretations, and revisions of moral alternatives are brought about, and new content and discourse construction are continuously injected. This fluid history also increases the visibility of the unspoken, making it a cultural embodiment that can be understood and spoken. Although this process may inevitably lead to a new level of discourse and logic, at least there are only a few effective ways of struggle left for vulnerable groups.

As Gregg Bordowitz said, "I think behind the hard criticism, there's a censoring ideological impulse. Whenever we're talking about struggle, we're talking about the struggle to articulate. I don't see how you do that without varying languages. Personally, I'm deeply invested in theory, because it teaches me how to make novel formulations." [5]

We create a "real" normative gender environment, whether physical or cultural, through a generative system that establishes relevant rules that stabilize the premise that gender is unstable. Since the beginning of the Anthropocene, we have gradually invented terms and gamely merged with them. We have produced norm rights and hierarchy through discourse, interrogation, repetition, and interpellation. In terms of internalization, and we have used discourses to generate subjects. And gender identity is merely an illusion produced by the discourses. The pursuit of any form of identity is therefore doomed to failure. This kind of fantasy is just trying to lift the dominoes that don't exist.

In this regard, try a possible escape line: find the mechanism of discourse generation and operation behind hegemony, produce discourse-repeat discourse-perform, and attempt to dissolve the solidified hegemony discourse system. Although this also has the risk of forming a new ontology of hierarchical order.

    Where the gender will flow next, the only certainty is that I don't know. But I will gain complete freedom after learning that the body is doomed never to be free. We should always strive to create a situation where we can practice this uncertainty: to approach freedom in continuously degenerative and generative discourse; New declarations will constantly generate the subject, but the meaning is always elsewhere.

[1] Idolum, a poem was written by the author.

[2] The author's diary excerpts.

[3] The author's diary excerpts.

[4] Claude Lévi-Strauss et al., The Elementary Structures of Kinship = (Les Structures Élémentaires de La Parenté) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

[5] Pobric, Pac. “‘I Embrace Whatever Label Is Attached to Me’: Activist and Artist Gregg Bordowitz on Identity Politics and Why the AIDS Crisis Is Only Beginning.” Artnet News, June 16, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/gregg-bordowitz-interview-ps1-1978625.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

———. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 2011.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, John Richard, James Harle Bell, and Rodney Needham. The Elementary Structures of Kinship = (Les Structures Élémentaires de La Parenté). Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Dazed. “The Artists Using Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.” Dazed, September 25, 2017. https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/37526/1/the-artists-using-gender-as-a-tool-and-a-weapon-new-museum.

Pobric, Pac. “‘I Embrace Whatever Label Is Attached to Me’: Activist and Artist Gregg Bordowitz on Identity Politics and Why the AIDS Crisis Is Only Beginning.” Artnet News, June 16, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/gregg-bordowitz-interview-ps1-1978625.

[1] Idolum, a poem was written by the author.

[2] The author's diary excerpts.

[3] The author's diary excerpts.

[4] Claude Lévi-Strauss et al., The Elementary Structures of Kinship = (Les Structures Élémentaires de La Parenté) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

[5] Pobric, Pac. “‘I Embrace Whatever Label Is Attached to Me’: Activist and Artist Gregg Bordowitz on Identity Politics and Why the AIDS Crisis Is Only Beginning.” Artnet News, June 16, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/gregg-bordowitz-interview-ps1-1978625.