For reasons I cannot yet divulge – although it may be the allure of
anti-theology sparkling at the centre of the ideas being slowly unpeeled –
Terre Thaemlitz’s Soulnessless is the
most intriguing of Arika’s offerings in
Episode 5 (Hidden in Plain Sight). I am not sure whether its promised slot
will add much more to its description in the pamphlet, but the challenges it
presents to the conceit of identity certainly pleases my cheeky
deconstructionist soul.
Did I say soul? What I ought to say is something less spiritual.
Thaemlitz is having a good look at the language used to describe transexuality,
and seems worried that it buys into the sort of gloopy, new age humanism that
is the closest thing late capitalism has to an original religion. When there is
talk about a person “becoming” a gender, it applies a positive process, a bit
like the process whereby someone becomes fit by going to the gym, or maybe
becomes more fully themselves by doing fifteen minutes meditation a day and
going to therapy for fifteen years.
Thaemlitz goes in the other direction: isn’t transexuality an act of
unbecoming, as it says in the pamphlet, “stemming from an inability to live
with your birth body.” While Thaemlitz is using this description to challenge
the idea of an essential self, which a person can evolve into, I have a feeling
that this way of putting it is likely to be controversial.
The assumption might be that the very concept of an essential self is a
trick, a fiction used by religion (and later, capitalism through its advocacy
of individualism). Rejecting this can make the transgender expression as
process of liberation from those nasty ideas about souls and selves.
Unfortunately, unbecoming doesn’t really have such a good set of
associations: while becoming can imply a transition from one state to another,
to unbecome sounds a bit like disappearing. It’s a negative process. This might
escape the religious implications of the self – although I am not sure that
religion is really that big a bother these days – but it also ties nicely into
those opinions that see transexuality as destructive.
But hey – game on.
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