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Gender Realism

The Society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women,”

-Luce Irigaray

    

    Crises have lost their novelty. Rising political unrest, looming disasters, and the culture wars are the background noise of modern life. Flame wars and discourse endlessly recycle the same handful of topics; debating the successes and failures of this or that struggle against oppression. Today's flavor of discourse is transgender rights. Tomorrow's is discourse will be about problematic Maoists, last week we covered queer assimilation and the week before that was hammering out a definition of "lesbian" which is already lost to the sands of time. Feminist theory, queer theory, and anti-capitalist strategy blend together. While each of these topics is often segregated into its own school of discourse, it has long-since been clear that capitalism and patriarchy are inextricably linked, and the ideological mechanisms of capitalist realism and heterosexual identity may well be one and the same.

     As any committed leftist will tell you, the fight against sexism is an aspect of a larger class struggle. This analysis helpfully sidelines women’s liberation as a relatively smaller part of another issue. As always in such discussions, Luce Irigaray’s work is eminently helpful. The basis of any mode of production in a patriarchal society is the “exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges,” especially the desire for the scarce commodity that is woman (Irigaray 171). Capitalism, therefore, is based on the exchange of women-commodities among male subjects; “Commodities, women are a mirror of value of and for man,” (Irigaray 177). Women are commodities, capitalism is patriarchy. Indeed, much has been written on the connection between women and commoditiesmost notably Sadie Plant’s Zeros and Onesbut relatively little has been written on the implications of capitalism being patriarchy. If capitalism is patriarchy, what becomes of the more “pure” analyses of capitalism on its own?

    Mark Fisher’s work on the capitalism seems nearly purpose-built to weather the assault Irigaray’s analysis represents. Writing primarily on the legitimation of capital and its redirection of desire, Fisher’s work directly attempts to refute Margaret Thatcher’s proclamation that “There is no alternative.” Fisher’s most famous structure for this project is capitalist realism, a hegemonic perception that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Capitalism remained the only story left standing. "An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized," and the success of  capitalist realism relies on making capitalism non-ideological, a simple fact with no real alternative (Capitalist Realism 16). This deflation of space for alternatives requires both giving up on the future and repackaging the past. As Fisher succinctly puts it, Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics,” (Capitalist Realism 7). When discussing the problems of capitalism, a neoliberal will inevitably jab that the protestor is complaining about capitalism while using twitter on their iPhone; the implication being "that being anti-capitalist entails being an anarcho-primitivist," and not partaking in the fruits of capitalist production (Post-Capitalist). The desire for an iPhone is conflated with a desire for capitalism and vice versa. There is no suggestion of a productive future, only capitalism or pre-capitalism. This tidy double bind serves capitalist realism either way, any desire to return to a pre-capitalist system is already fully accounted for within the structure of Capitalism itself. From Terminator vs Avatar:

Hands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry. Hands up, that is to say, all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities, families and villages. Hands up, furthermore, those who really believe that these desires for a restored organic wholeness are extrinsic to late capitalist culture, rather than in fully incorporated components of the capitalist libidinal infrastructure.

On the opposite side, there is no longer any implication of a future notably different from today, instead we are offered remixes of 20th century ideas of the future, sequels to Star Wars, Star Trek, and Blade Runner. “What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet," (Slow Cancellation). The Left, once a source of anti-capitalism futurism has not escaped this endless rehash of 20th century culture. Rather than promising a radical break with capitalism, the nominally socialist Sanders wing of the Left seeks to return to a Fordist progressive welfare state which promises to undo the harm of austerity and neoliberalism. Even the most radical leftist can be expected to retreat from the "'official' commitment to revolution" in favor of a Canutist "[restaging of] the logics" of the Soviet Union and the other failed escapes from Capitalism (Post-Capitalist Desire). The only imaginable possibilities are more of the same or a return to the pre-capitalist territorialities, commercially packaged and resold.

    Thatcher's "There is no alternative" applies to equally well Capital-Patriarchy, it's structures and cultural legitimation. Patriarchy is the only game in town, the only story left standing on the world stage. While some arguably non-capitalist and non-patriarchal spaces remain, such as North Korea and some indigenous groups respectively, these don’t present a desirable enough alternative to drive a notable number of defectors to these spaces. Just as capital is naturalized through “business ontology,” Patriarchy is naturalized through “compulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated phantasms of ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (Imitation 313). The category of "woman" is especially fraught. As women are exchanged among and corralled into gender performances set by men, she is divided into her physical usefulness and her exchange value. Their bodies become "the supporting material of specularization, of speculation," and their speculative worth is compared to other women (Irigaray 177). This is the position of the commodity "a commodity-a woman-is divided into two irreconcilable "bodies": her "natural" body and her socially valued, exchangeable body, which is a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values" (Irigaray 180). The allowed positions of woman-commodity, such as mother, virgin or prostitute, are all defined within the boundaries of male desires. Each of these roles is centered around the man, raising his children, saving her sexual use for him, seducing him. in none of these roles does the woman have any right to her own use or exchange, her sexuality is not for herself. If "what is required of a 'normal' feminine sexuality is oddly evocative of the characteristics of the status of commodity," and the commodity form is a social construction, how could "woman" be anything other than the same(Irigaray 187)? Doubtless one could turn away from Simone de Beauvoir's injunction that "one is not born, but rather,  becomes a woman," but in doing so, heterosexual identities and patriarchy are naturalized and made inevitable.

    As Butler demonstrates in Imitation and Gender Insubordination, there is no originality or natural necessity to any identity catagory. These categories are essentially a series of symbolic elaborations; every embodying of a gender or sexuality is a performance of the signifiers of it. Whether “man,” “woman,” “heterosexual,” or “homosexual,” any identity is a performance, a drag performance where there is “no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (ibid). As Butler points out in Variations on Sex and Gender, the preservation of these apparently natural categories of gender has necessitated the artificial limiting of sexes to simply male and female, even in the face of an obvious contradiction such as Herculine Barbin. Barbin, an intersex person “escaped univocal sex, and hence the binary system governing sex,” however instead of being designated a third place, Barbin is “punished and banished by the Church authorities, designed univocally as a male” (Variations 34). This deflation is not just limited to the triangulation of bodies; the designation of "male" or "female" carries with it expectations of how these roles are performed. All manner of anatomical, behavioral expressions are described by this designation—the way one walks or talks, looks, acts, holds themselves, dresses, fucks or cares for their partner are all neatly wrapped up within the boundaries of this territoriality. The heterosexual identities of "man" and "woman" limit the field of acceptable behaviors and aesthetics as the only imaginable options. Just as capitalist realism must deflate the field of possibilities of exit, heterosexuality must deflate possibilities outside of acceptable performances of “male” and “female.” The only possibilities can ever be more of the same, more heterosexuality and more capitalist realism.

    Capitalism's failure to deliver a future, it's insistence on reselling the past, is the cancellation of women's liberation. The wide-scale repudiation of the second wave feminists was coextensive with the rise of the Facebook era and early 2000’s nostalgia-bait advertising. Women were entering the workforce, rising through the ranks at companies, even getting degrees at higher rates than men. The need for 90’s “girl power” is over, now is the time for the “girl-boss”; the concern for business acumen over political power can’t be ignored. Discussion of women's liberation is subsumed by women's inclusion in patriarchial power structures, and one is reminded of "Apple's notorious '1984' commercial, which equated personal computers with the liberation from totalitarian control," (Post-Capitalist Desire). Indeed even feminist discussions nominally concerned with liberation often find themselves tied up in arguments about the essence of femininity, endlessly arguing over whether trans women fulfill the requirements of womanhood, for instance. This argument necessarily naturalizes the categories of gender, with the obvious flaw that individual women may not see themselves represented in this essence (Variations 37).  As Fisher points out, passing through Foucault and other radical theorists, "emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’," and rather than challenge this natural order, discussions of essential femininity present heterosexual identity as "necessary and inevitable," (Capitalist Realism 16-17). In truth, as Butler points out in Variation on Sex and Gender,

women have no essence at all, and hence, no natural necessity, and that, indeed, what we call an essence or a material fact is simply an enforced cultural option which has disguised itself as natural truth. 

Much of the modern discourse around sex and gender take anatomical sex determination as a fact of nature, and in doing so, grants the ontological necessity of these actually contingent structures. This is the academic Marxist's"ruthless protection of petit bourgeois interests dressed up as politics," applied to patriarchy (Terminator). In fact, much of the radical feminist movement of the 70's is once again up for debate, "endlessly restaged" like the "failure of May of '68" (ibid). Discussions of trans inclusion, assimilation, and acceptable sexuality are sources of ceaseless discourse online, a "career's worth of quibbling" without any expectation to do anything (ibid). Not only has the future of liberation been thoroughly abandoned, the past is being repacked into a non-threatening remix as the only imaginable alternative.

    Cottagecore, an aesthetic movement based around moving into a remote cottage with a partner, firmly represents "hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism," where one can move away from the problems of larger society and live the dream of  the colonialist patriarch providing for his family (ibid). The rise of the cottagecore and the or "wheat gf" labels promote old gender roles and a return to an explicitly pre-capitalist society, to the organic mud of the feudal village. This return is remixed for sure, cottagecore especially is as open to leftist lesbians as moodboard ecofascists, but the recapitulation of traditional gender roles is clearly evident in the “trad” label and valorization of women’s work like baking, gardening, and weaving. Also notable is the desire to have or be a 1950's style "tradwife," an explicit desire to return to the Fordist territorialities of the nuclear family, stable identities and humanist progressivism. These recapitulations also serve to launder relatively new or marginalized gender presentation into traditional roles. Lesbians can be cottagecore, and a wide swathe of the online right is falling all over itself to explain how a lust for "femboys" or trans women is in line with traditional values. A favorite topic of discussion among men online is "are traps gay?" a transparent attempt to triangulate make their desires intelligible within heterosexual identity. Like with Herculine, patriarchy must find a way to force people into traditional univocal boxes of gender along lines of heterosexuality. Even trans women who don’t desire to be accepted as “trad” are finding themselves pressured to assimilate as cis-pleasing members of society who happen to be transgender, a tantalizing prospect for many. The possibly deterritorializing force of transition is met with an reassertion of gender roles and cis-normativity. This process of deterritorializition and immediate compensatory reterritorialization is the crucial mechanism of Capital-Patriarchy.

    It's no wonder that the cancellation of the future and the cancellation of liberation were concurrent, the events were one and the same. “The economy of exchange-of desire-is man's business,” and this business is justified through capitalist realism and compulsory heterosexuality (Irigaray 177). There is no longer discussion of possible liberation from these power structures, only a selling back of pastiche and traditionalism. Modern leftist and feminist discourse is often corralled into endless restaging of the past resistance or naturalizing the very Capital-Patriarchy that it is trying to exit. The performance of womanhood is commodified, exchange of women is naturalized, and the only possibility of “girlboss feminism” is [copying] the "phallocratic models that have the force of law today,” (Irigaray 191). Any project against capitalist realism must also be a project against compulsory heterosexuality, any project against capitalism must be a project against patriarchy.


[1] Luce Irigaray - This Sex Which is not One

[2] Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher

[3] Mark Fisher - Terminator vs. Avatar

[4] Mark Fisher - The Slow Cancellation of the Future

[5] Judith Butler - Imitation and Gender Insubordination

[6] Judith Butler - Variations on Sex and Gender

[7] Mark Fisher - Postcapitalist Desire


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