Abstract
In this article, I want to begin to question the grammar, the understanding, the illocution, and the theoretical nature of genderlessness, in Haraway’s posthuman turn. Furthermore, I want to bring to the surface a complication of the understandings of power within Haraway put into a more significant and more critical conversation with poststructural work that more fully grapples with productivity and comes to understand the discursive insinuations of gender and sexuality as simultaneously productive and violent - a mixture that should not be reduced to liberation or justness as a procession of/with the negation of gender. Even more so, within the same form of critique, I will also make the argument that specific posthumanisms such as Haraway’s invocation not only disregard the productivity of gender as an essential critical space to grapple with but also that posthuman literature remands a reality yet topples the very concept that imbibes reality with substance. In particular, once we name gender, there is not only violence in imagining the nonexistence of gender (the absence of gender as a means of realizing/being), but also such imaginings and impossibilities descend further into a conundrum of attempting to realize a reality that no longer holds any substance of reality qua reality.
References
ADORNO, T. (1991) The Culture Industry. New York: Routledge
AGAMBEN, G. (1998) Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
AIKENHEAD, G. (2008) Objectivity: The Opiate of the Academic? Cultural Studies of Science Education. 3(3). Pp. 581–585
ALEXANDER, D. (2018) Faces of Abjectivity: The Uncanny Mystique of Transsexaulity. In: Goodrum, M., Prescott, T. & Smith, P. (eds.) Gender and the Superhero Narrative. Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Pp. 180–204
BAKOŠOVÁ, P. & ODORČÁK, J. (2020) Posthumanism and Human Extinction: Apocalypse, Species, and Two Posthuman Ecologies. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies. 19 (57)
BAUDRILLARD, J. (2010) The Agony of Power. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)
BENARD, A. (2016) Colonizing Black Female Bodies Within Patriarchal Capitalism: Feminist and Human Rights Perspectives. Sexualization, Media, & Society. 2(4). Pp. 1–11
BENSON, P. (2014) Derrida on Language. Philosophy Now. 100. Pp. 13–15
BERTEK, T. (2014) Beyond Gender? Imagining Utopia in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”. Budapest: Central European University
BEY, H. (1991) Temporary Autonomous Zone. New York: Autonomedia
BHABHA, H. (2004) The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge
BILLEY, A. & DRABINSKI, E. (2019) Questioning Authority: Changing Library Cataloging Standards to Be More Inclusive to a Gender Identity Spectrum. Transgender Studies Quarterly. 6(1). Pp. 117–123
BOURDIEU, P., & WACQUANT, L. (1999) On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason. Theory Culture Society. 16(1). Pp. 41–58
BUTLER, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge
BUTLER, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
BUTLER, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press
CHANCER, L.(2017) Sadomasochism or the Art of Loving: Fromm and Feminist Theory. The Psychoanalytic Review. 104(4). Pp. 469–484
CRISPIN, J.(2017) The Failures of Mainstream Feminism. The New Republic. February 13
CRUZ, D.(2002) Disestablishing Sex and Gender. California Law Review. 90(4). Pp. 999–1044
DELEUZE, G.(1993) Logic of Sense. Edited by C. V. Boundas. Translated by M. Lester and C. Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press
DELEUZE, G., & GUATTARI F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
DERRIDA, J. (1978) Writing and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
DERRIDA, J. (1998) Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MY: Johns Hopkins University
DERRIDA, J. (2006) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. New York: Routledge
DOMINGO, R. (2017) Feminist Critique of Posthuman Embodiment. In Mamoru Oshii’s Film Ghost In The Shell. Budapest: Central European University
DVORSKY, G. (2008) Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary. Hartford, CT: Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
ELLSWORTH, E. (1997) Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. New York: Teachers College Press
ERDAL, M. & PAWLAK M. (2017) Reproducing, Transforming and Contesting Gender Relations and Identities through Migration and Transnational Ties. Gender, Place & Culture. 25(6). Pp. 882–898
FERRI, B., & GREGG N. (1998) Women with Disabilities: Missing Voices. Women’s Studies International Forum 21(4). Pp. 429–439
FIRESTONE, S. (1970) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company
FISH, R. (2022) Stratified Medicalization of Schooling Difficulties. Social Science & Medicine. 305(5)
FOUCAULT, M. (1995) Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books
FOUCAULT, M. (2003) Technologies of the Self. The Essential Foucault. Pp. 145–169
FOUCAULT, M. (2010) The Birth of Biopolitics. London, UK: Picador
GODMAN, M. (2018) Gender as a Historical Kind: A Tale of Two Genders? Biology & Philosophy. 33(3–4). Pp. 21
GORE, J. (2002) Pedagogy, Power, and Bodies: On the Un(der)-acknowledged Effects of Schooling. In: Shapiro, H. & Shapiro, S. (eds.). Body movements: Pedagogy, politics, and Social Change. New York: Hampton Press. Pp. 75–95
HALBERSTAM, J. (2006) Skinflick: Posthuman Gender in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. In: Stryker, S. & Whittle, S.(eds.) The Transgender Studies Reader, New York: Routledge
HALBERSTAM, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
HALE, J. (1996) Are Lesbians Women? Hypatia. Pp. 94–121
HARAWAY, D. (2016) Manifestly Hara. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
HEPBURN, A. (1999) Derrida and Psychology: Deconstruction and Its Ab/uses in Critical and Discursive Psychologies. Theory & Psychology. 9(5). Pp. 639–665
HERDT, G. (2020) Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
HESTER, D. (2010) Intersexes and the End of Gender: Corporeal Ethics and Postgender Bodies. Journal of Gender Studies. 13(3). Pp. 215–225
HIRST, P. (2004) Power/Knowledge – Constructed Space and the Subject. In: Preziosi, D. & Farago, C. (eds.) Grasping the World. London, UK: Routledge. Pp. 380–381
KING, T. (2017) Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Critical Ethnic Studies. 3(1). Pp. 162–185
LAFONTAINE, C. (2007) The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory’. Theory, Culture & Society. 24(5). Pp. 27–46
MARTIN, A. & MASON M. (2022) What Does it Mean to be (seen as) Human? The Importance of Gender in Humanization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.123(2). Pp. 292–315
MBEMBE, A. (2019) Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
MORGAN, P., FARKAS, G., HILLEMEIER, M., WANG, Y., MANDEL, Z., DEJARNETT, Ch., & MACZUGA, S. (2019) Are Students with Disabilities Suspended more Frequently than Otherwise Similar Students without Disabilities? Journal of School Psychology. 72. Pp. 1–13
MOSES, T.(2018) Suicide Attempts Among Adolescents with Self-Reported Disabilities. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. 49. Pp. 420–433
NAYAR, P. (2014) Posthumanism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
NEWMAN, S. (2010) The Politics of Postanarchism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
NEWMAN, S. (2021) Contagious Politics: Posthuman anarchism. In: Newman, S. & Topuzovski, T. (eds.) London The Posthuman Pandemic. UK: Bloomsbury Academic
PETERSON, Ch. (2011) The Posthumanism to Come. Angelaki. 16(2). Pp. 127–141
PRECIADO, P. (2020) An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)
RANCIERE, J. (1999) Dis-agreement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
RIGOLOT, C. (2020) Transdisciplinarity as a Discipline and a Way of Being: Complementarities and Creative Tensions. Humanities and Social Science Communications. 7(100)
SPIVAK, G. (1993) Outside the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge
STROSS, Ch. (2006) Glasshouse. New York: Ace Books
STRÓŻEWSKI, W. (2008) What Does it Mean to Be Really? Dialogue and Universalism. 18(4/6). Pp. 83–104
WALBY, S. (2005) Gender Mainstreaming: Productive Tensions in Theory and Practice.
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society. 12(3). Pp. 321–343
WEHELIYE, A. (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
WOLFE, C.(2013) What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press
WYNTERS, S. (2003) Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review. 3(3). Pp. 257–337
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Brad Bierdz
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Journal of Gender and Power is an Open Access Journal. Copyright of the article published in the Journal of Gender and Power is retained by the authors with first publication rights granted to the Adam Mickiewicz University Press.