Gender as the Shape of Our Relationality
Gender as the Shape of Our Relationality//For a while I’ve felt my inspiration around the concept of identity fading with respect to gender. It seems about so much more than identity, or even so much “less” depending on how you want to look at it—even though somatic being is not lesser than ideas about it. What many of us call gender feels so related to place. A watershed, a confluence of place, culture/race/ethnicity, animistic relations/hauntings, and sovereignty. I think gender and personhood are very closely coupled. In fact I don’t know if they are really separate things. It feels confusing that they’ve been so separated in ‘modern’ & colonial ideologies. In the feminist deconstructionist framework that I came of age in, people shied away from the oppressive specter of “roles” and gravitated towards “identity.” For good reason. But that all left me wanting a role. Left me remembering my time at the monastery, or milking the sheep and my own Strangeness burrowed into the land like a thousand tiny worms.
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Maybe some in Euro-centric worlds worry that to conflate gender with place, land, even soul is to depoliticize it. Yet place, land is the ground of (cosmo-)politics! When I think of what gender is to me, I think about a few key elements. One is Eros (more-than-human & Not sex-centric). Eros is about the human-inclusive animal, plant, fungal, and even molecular desire inherent in the cosmos to connect with Other and Self simultaneously, to connect and transform, evolve and decompose. Relationality, kinship, & signification/biosemiotics, feel like related key elements too.
This is to say concepts of Eros and desire have been far too sexualized and human-centered in my circles. We make ourselves into symbols and we signify things to Others. Not just human others, but beyond-human Others (this is a core aspect of mystical ascetic traditions). The body as beacon, as apocalyptic vehicle, as blinking neon sign to the ‘Divine.’ Our body as story, gender as not so much about identity and ideas but gender as dance. Body as habitus.
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If non-human animals possess personhood, if fish and slime molds have a social life, then is the shape of our relationality really such a human trait? In this view my cat has a ‘gender’ and a lichen has one too. So what are we really talking about now? Soul, perhaps, blood, consciousness—another dance. Soul, a word not used in social justice circles much, nor broached much in academia. And yes I fear that to conflate gender with Soul or Personhood conspires with some spiritual bypassing transformative narratives that I and we have been exposed to and that continue to do harm. The (often white and cisgender) thought leaders of older generations who claim that queerness/transness is part of the dreaded “ego” or not part of the soul’s image. Not somehow transcendent. The mentor who suggested I chose to appear gender non-conforming when I expressed I was tired of being stared at, when we all know people stare for reasons way beyond fashion and way closer to Soul and Shadow than we like to publicly admit. Blah blah blah. Add your transformational micro aggressions story here. Indeed “I am” is less syllables than “I identify as.” It’s even speech used by a god. Who the fuck can argue with that? Soul/Animx and transformative experience is at the heart of @queernature’s work, yet it feels like it’s taken years to build the conversation in partnership with @queerquechua (snd alongside others doing similar work) because of the trash pile of racist and homo/transphobic attitudes at the core of so many transformational movements. Y’all know what I’m talking about! Let’s show our doubting peers and mentors that we can acknowledge the journeyS (because they are plural and multiform , [neuro]diverse as ecologies) of souls and also acknowledge our political realities and intersectional bodies of experience. The collective definition of what “transformation” even is will benefit from it.
