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Introduction: The Crisis of Gender and Nihilism
I. Inspirations
1883 Manifesto of Nihilist Women
1970 The Woman-Identified-Woman – Radicalesbians
1976 History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (excerpt) – Michel Foucault [fr]
1978 Introduction to Herculine Barbin (excerpt) – Michel Foucault [fr]
1980 Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (excerpt) – Adrienne Rich [fr]
1981 One is Not Born A Woman – Monique Wittig [fr]
1988 Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (excerpt) – Judith Butler
1987 The Empire Strikes Back : A Posttransexual manifesto – Sandy Stone
1994 My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix – Susan Stryker [fr]
1997 The Point is Not to Interpret Whiteness But to Abolish It – Noel Ignatiev
2002 Romancing the Transgender Native (excerpt) – Evan B. Towle & Lynn Marie Morgan
2008 The Coloniality of Gender (excerpt) – Maria Lugones
2011 Communization and the Abolition of Gender – Maya Gonzalez
2011 Statement by Olga Ekonomidou (excerpt)
II. Examples
2008 Testo Junkie (excerpt) – Paul Preciado [fr]
2010 Preliminary Notes on Modes of Reproduction – gender mutiny [fr]
2009 My Preferred Gender Pronoun is Negation [fr]
2010 Manifesto for the Trans-Feminist Insurrection – The WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network
2010 Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism – some deceptive trannies [fr]
2012 Identity in Crisis – baedan [fr]
2012 Musings on Nothingness (excerpt) – baedan
2011 Introduction to Queens Against Society – Ehn Nothing
2011 Dysphoria Means Total Destroy – Ignorant Research Institute
2012 An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender – Lupa
2014 Against the Gendered Nighmare (excerpt) – baedan [fr]
2014 Wildfire: Toward Anonymous War on Civilization
2015 Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto [fr]
2015 Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation – Laboria Cuboniks [fr]
2015 Gender Nihilism – Alys Rowe
2013 Against Gender, Against Society – Nila [fr]
Introduction: The Crisis of Gender and Nihilism
In 2015, a call for contributions for an anthology on the topic of gender nihilism circulated online, accompanied by a list of readings divided into inspirations and examples. 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 also to make possible an existence for some of these ideast 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, 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 distinct crisis. The bulk of the readings gathered here could be read as a genealogy of the crisis of the idea of gender, 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, explicating 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 originary binary, euphemistic, and metaphysical dispensation, which is, in a word, oppressive.
The term nihilism seems to have been accessed to name this crisis and perhaps some of our responses to it. In this reader, the gender nihilism “anti-manifesto” holes an “impasse” and a “predicament” that occasion the position it argues for as “stance and method”, while the Laboria Cuboniks collective describes a “world in vertigo » in their xenofeminist manifesto. Alys Rowe writes of “nihilism as a point to pass through and as a position to act from”, both politically valuable, but leaves the explanation for another time. As for those of us involved in making this reader, we have thought and written about something we called queer nihilism—less as a position to maintain, define, or identify with, and more as a method; retroactively, as an exit event in a process of timespace displacement. It’s worth recalling that, meanwhile, in a shorter time span and a set of spaces more narrowly limited to radical milieus, nihilism itself not only designated but itself entered into a kind of crisis. In the last ten or so years we’ve seen the term nihilism used both to diagnose an implosion of values and a consequent helplessness or meaninglessness as well as to distinguish an active, destructive position against society; but arguably, more than either of those in a clear way, we’ve seen confused and sloppy uses of the term, appending it with hyphens to this and that theory, position or identity. When we see it appended to gender in this, the moment of its crisis, we cannot but recall that trajectory. But we prefer to see in gender nihilism a strange and thought-provoking coupling. What if it names, not two parallel crises, but the same crisis?
There is, of course, a more specific reason why these words have been paired together. The old conversation on the abolition of gender, initiated by some second-wave feminists, has taken some odd turns as of late. For some it’s mutated into a more or less explicit anti-trans discourse that, to whatever degree it is coherent, would seem to be oriented towards some sort of androgyny as a goal for all: a reaffirmation of bio-sex coupled with a minimization of differences implied by it. (It shares its sexual ontology with those who would reaffirm bio-sex so as to reinstate traditional sex roles, in effect maximizing the differences implied in it.) In the spaces and exchanges where this discourse is associated with gender abolition (more precisely having made itself known as “gender critical feminism »), it makes sense to propose gender nihilism as a response or at least specification. In this sense a minimum definition of gender nihilism would be that it involves envisioning both the abolition of gender and the survival of what would then cease to be gendered expressions and behaviors under some other regime of meaning or meaninglessness. Gender could survive in a negative mode or under erasure, as something expressive of nothing at all, nothing with large-scale or systematic social power, in any case. (At the same time, this summary shows that everything still remains to be discussed. For example, within the discourse of gender nihilism, or the practices it informs or emerges from, what is the place of sex or sexuality? Would some or all of us not, having done with gender, return to sex, not as bio-sex with its determinations, but as unknowable and weird fleshy materiality?
We say that what has unfolded in interpersonal and internetworked exchanges resonates, or at least can resonate far beyond those exchanges. The appearance of the term nihilism is a first clue. We have gathered these readings and added our selection and intention to them to see how much farther we can push this discourse, and what practices have already or will soon appear alongside it as further clues and openings. Without discussion, without critique, and without what is not critique, there would be no point in this. This is where we are coming from: we don’t really need to identify more forms of nihilism, and we don’t really want any more gender positions or descriptors. The desirable possibility here is that the two, gender and nihilism, are paired in order to deconstruct or decompose each other. The even more desirable possibility is to stick around to see what comes after.
[1] We also intend this collection as an deliberately weird response-echo to the Communist Research Cluster’s Revolutionary Feminism (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 “biological reproduction. » We’re pretty sure that everything Valerie said on the subject was an acidly ironic calque 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 (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 antigender 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.”
[2] And is this close to what thinkers such as Alenka Zupančič mean when they say that sexual difference is “not ontologizable »? Is it what Rosi Braidotti has in mind in her article on the “demise of gender » when she writes that sexuality deterritorializes and undoes gender? Is it what Foucault had in mind when he rejected the modern scientia sexualis (of which gender is undeniably apart) in favor of an ars erotica?