When one goes deeper than the imputed absence of a sex,
woman-reproducing-man becomes woman-reproducing-woman in an anorganic
becoming that—as the cyberpositive formulation of the replicative
economy belonging to the black circuit—recodes time as it inverts the
user-tool relationship to reveal history as loop with a twist. This
resistance to the straight line of the organism’s reproductive
trajectory (that which provides the logic for progressive Western time)
underwrites Plant’s claim—with its important agential marker—that
“cyberfeminism is received from the future”:
Journal #80 - Amy Ireland - Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come
ππππ
When Simone de Beauvoir claims, “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a
woman,” she is appropriating and reinterpreting this doctrine of
constituting acts from the phenomenological tradition. In this sense,
gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which
various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in
time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.
Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and,
hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures,
movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an
abiding gender. Butler
“Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're
missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is
only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always
stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be
that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the
other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the
touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my
sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something
complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both
are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for
another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.”
―
Judith Butler,
Undoing Gender
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