What is Gender Nihilism? A Reader

373 Pages·2016·4.89 MB·English

by  coll.

W h at Is O
G ender /
N ihilism ·
A READER
What Is Gender Nihilism?
A Reader
December 2016, version 1.2.
Set in Chaparral and Avenir using the
TgX typesetting system.
Covers printed on a Challenge 15KA letterpress.
The editors welcome feedback
and other correspondence at [email protected].
Contents
Bibliographical Information i
Introduction: The Crisis of Gender and Nihilism iii
I. Inspirations ix
1883 Manifesto of Nihilist Women 1
1970 The Woman-Identified-Woman 3
1976 History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (excerpt) 13
1978 introduction to Herculine Barbin (excerpt) 15
»980 Compulsory Heterosexuality... (excerpt) 21
1981 One is Not Born A Woman 33
1988 Performative Acts... (excerpt) 49
1987 The Empire Strikes Back 53
1994 My Words to Victor Frankenstein... 87
1997 The Point is Not to Interpret Whiteness... 115
2002 Romancing the Transgender Native (excerpt) 127
2008 The Coloniality of Gender (excerpt) 137
2011 Communization and the Abolition of Gender 145
2011 Statement by Olga Ekonomidou (excerpt) 169
II. Examples
173
2008 Testo Junkie (excerpt) 175
20x0 Preliminary Notes on Modes of Reproduction 177
2009 My Preferred Gender Pronoun is Negation 197
2010 Manifesto for the Trans-Feminist Insurrection 201
2010 Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism 203
2012 Identity in Crisis 209
2012 Musings on Nothingness (excerpt) 227
2011 Introduction to Queens Against Society 239
2011 Dysphoria Means Total Destroy 255
2012 An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender 261
2014 Against the Gendered Nighmare (excerpt) 267
2014 Wildfire: Toward Anonymous War on Civilization 299
•ii) (1 rnder Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto 307
•Oft) Xrnofeminism: A Politics for Alienation 319
!·&) Gender Nihilism (Aidan Rowe) 341
101) Against Gender, Against Society 349

Bibliographical Information
In t hr spirit of making a reader, we have excerpted from
Home of the longer (mainly academic) selections, and
truncated footnotes and bibliographical references in
the name. In the spirit of encouraging further reading
and queer research, we are providing the full references
for the texts missing bibliographical information in our
reader. All other selections are either provided in their
entirety, or excerpts that do not exclude any bibliograph­
ical data.
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian
existence.” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Norton, 1994.
Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman.” In The Straight
Mind and Other Essays. Beacon, 1992.
Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual
Manifesto.” In Stryker and Whittle, eds., The Transgender
Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006.
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the
Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” In
Stryker and Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader:
Routledge, 2006.
Bibliographical Information
Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan, “Romancing the
Transgender Native:
Rethinking the Use of the ‘Third Gender’ Concept.” GLQ:A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.4 (2002) 469-497.
Maria Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds and Knowl­
edges Otherwise Vol. 2 Dossier 2 (2008).
Introduction
Tilt* Crisis of Gender and Nihilism
In 2015, a call for contributions for an anthology on the
topic of gender nihilism circulated online, accompa­
nied by a list of readings divided into inspirations and
•Wimples. That list is the principal source of the present
collection's table of contents. The second source is our
own archive of related texts, which we selected from to
Complement the initial list and probably inflect it in the
directions most curious for us.
The intention behind compiling these pieces is in one
way to create a companion to the coming collection, but
alno to make possible an existence for some of these ideas
t in the face-to-face encounters of tabling, study groups,
and collective spaces.1 We're also excited to think about
the book adrift in the world, in coffee shops and libraries,
1 Wc also intend this collection as an deliberately weird response-
echo to the Communist Research Cluster’s Revolutionary Femi­
nism (Communist Interventions, Volume III) reader. One way to
discern the bifurcation in our approaches is by noting that the
CRC curiously places Valerie Solanas in their section on “biologi­
cal reproduction." We’re pretty sure that everything Valerie said
on the subject was an acidly ironic caique of the speculative talk
of many proto-feminists in the mid-sixties; we prefer the mutant
Solanas channeled by Paul B. Preciado, translating her parodie
Introduction: The Crisis of Gender and Nihilism
riding on buses and snuck into schools, and traveling far
from where our language is spoken to be read in ways we
can’t imagine. We’ve titled our collection What is Gender
Nihilism? to suggest that such encounters are desirable
and possible, channeling the inventive will in the initial
call. It is, among other things, a will to knowledge...
Taking a broad view, one might observe that each
component of the phrase gender nihilism names a dis­
tinct crisis. The bulk of the readings gathered here could
be read as a genealogy of the crisis of the idea of gen­
der, proposed in the last century variously as a cultural
complement to natural/biological sex, a euphemism that
verbally distances certain behaviors and character traits
from an overt reference to sexuality, and, most recently,
an unstable and ever-growing proliferation of identity
categories with various degrees of uptake depending
where you are and whether you are online. In any case,
the thought provoked by this crisis to consider here is
that there is no version of gender worth saving; that all
projects based on distinguishing sex and gender, expli­
cating gender as this or that kind of construction, and
vindicating gender as identity or expression are equally
doomed to the same crisis, because none of them have
sufficient escape velocity with respect to gender s orig-
(though quite serious) misandry into a more general antigender
sentiment. Many of the writers in the “examples” section repeat
this transition and probably pass more fully from the antigen­
der to the antisocial perspective, recognizing, as Avital Ronell
wrote in her essay on SCUM, that “the effect of gender is always
screened from a projection booth of social determinations.”