On the ANDROGYNOUS SELF; or TO BE A COMRADE
Gender, to use a simple definition, is a cultural phenomenon and social system that is deeply rooted in the psyche as a self-identity. Gender may be externally ascribed to an individual at birth based on the appearance of genitalia or determined by the culturally-connotated behaviors and roles they perform as they develop into adulthood, and this role or social category may change over time. This performance has to be recognized by the self and community to be properly gendered in their social interactions, as a social construct as a mechanism in a system only exists if the society agrees it exists and materializes this within the system.
For European Christianity and the cultures it colonized, the existing gender binary ultimately comes from Genesis 1:27:
"God created human beings; he created them godlike, Reflecting God's nature. He created them male and female."
Sexual dimorphism is the result of the natural variation of genetic makeup and phenotype of reproductive traits, including chromosomes, endocrine makeup, internal sex organs, outward appearance of genitalia, development of breast tissue, facial hair, and so on. Due to sexual dimorphism as a spectrum oscillating between "male" and "female" poles, it's considerably common for cultures to have genders to reflect this. However, Christianity limits its gendered system to these two poles, and modern Euro-American culture associates gender as intrinsically attached to one sex or the other, often without allowing social acknowledgement of sexual variations or freedom of movement between genders.
Humans, as a general majority, may be born with and develop a standard collection of "male" or "female" sex traits, but a considerable portion of people are born with traits we could consider as either/or, neither, or a mix of both. Throughout history this has been known by many names including hermaphroditism and today as intersexuality. Some forms of being intersex include chromosomal disorders, but chromosomal testing is a young science and the majority of people do not actually know for certain what their chromosomes are, allowing for potentially wider variation than we currently understand. Many intersex individuals are born with genitalia associated with one gender but internal organs associated with another, or a blend between both, but in Western countries it is standard to perform surgery to change these children's genitals to resemble either the male or female sex and assign the corresponding gender, often with the child never being privy to this happening. Some intersex individuals feel comfortable with their gender assigned at birth, but many are also transexual or consider their intersexuality to result in a natural in-between gender. Many people who don'tt consider or know themselves to be intersex have natural variations in their sex that they are not aware of due to the various ways this binary enforces people to stay at one pole or the other.
Transexuality or transgenderism is our modern word for when an individual's internal sense of gender is incongruent with their assigned sex or societal gender role, resulting in dysphoria around their sexed traits and social unease. The expression of this gender identity may include changing names and pronouns to those associated with one's internal gender, and aesthetically or medically modifying their appearance to match their internal gender, but is also inclusive of gender non-conformity and complex relationships between sexuality and gender. These genders may align with the male/Man female/Woman binary or may represent an alignment as neither or in between the binary, also known as third genders.
Womanhood within the context of Euro-Christian binary is a role assigned on the basis of natal female sex or gendered appearance, with prescribed sets of interests and traits which serve to present the woman within the boundaries of societal "purity" while still alluding to reproductive fertility. Behavioral expectations include self-suppression, empathetic sensibility, loyalty, and a pristine appearance, the beauty standards for which have historically centered Caucasian, Anglican, or European facial features, and modern standards are steeped with a pedophilic fetishization of youth.
This gendered division reinforces itself by means of media evoking a "perfect feminine" or social consequences for "un-womanly" behavior. This works in service of an overbearingly aggressive and dominant yet supposedly level-headed Manhood which constructs and confines Womanhood, although oppression on the basis of natal female sex and reproductive ability has also developed independent of Abrahamic influence in a variety of systems and cultures.
Manhood, on the other end of the spectrum, is culturally defined by idealistic strength, protective fortitude, a sharp mind, and a lack of attention to details in favor of the bigger image of their sense of self. Men are incentivized to find ways to own ovarian reproduction and suppress women's legal rights because they are sold the idea that a secure bloodline and Nuclear Family structure defines their reputation and future, and they feel they are owed sexual interaction and will acquire it at any cost as a supposed "natural" vice.
Throughout the Germanic tribes, Roman slave-economy, Ottoman empire, Monarchial Europe, Capitalist America, and in several formerly colonized and imperialized nations, women as a class have been denied several legal and social rights in purpose of Man's control over reproduction and domestic labor. Women were denied the right to vote in Western nations before the Suffragette movement, and black women were still disenfranchised, all while the right to vote was tied to property ownership, many white women owned black women, and marriage to women itself was a form of acquiring property. Campaigns throughout history have proclaimed illegalization of and called for violence against homosexuality and transexuality in order to Catholicize or "modernize" these cultures and embed a gendered power dynamic. Infant genital mutilation to "correct" one's sex to a preferred standard has been practiced to enforce an ideal femininity and to erase the existence of intersex variation, and while female genital mutilation is outlawed in the West, many Abrahamic cultures still perform surgery on female infants and males for religious purposes.
These distinctions that religion allowed the Europeans to draw on Colonized people served a dual economic purpose- to entrench colonized workers, namely women and third genders, within hierarchies of oppression. It ensures at least a portion of the population would be legally sanctioned and denied aid by their community, left with no option but to rely on an exploitative work dynamic, to enslave themselves to European business looking for cheap labor, or to be victims of human trafficking and sex slavery.
The Enlightenment of Europe retained Christian values, even in "unbiased" scientific research, so sexology as a study did first assume definite male and female sexes, using materialist methods of chromosomal and cultural study has proven otherwise. All science, as methodologies created by humans, are biased by our experience and perspectives, including of what gets to be deemed "scientific." But practice allows the witness of science to write it down; our hypotheses and conclusions, even if through flawed lenses- and repetitive practice shows proof of these universal truths in science. The average American public school curriculum may teach a rudimentary entry-level version of sexology, but modern and advanced sexology concurs that human sexual dimorphism is a spectrum of natural variation, that gendered systems are able to accommodate variations if willing.
In the late 19th and 20th century, researchers in Germany and American found that homosexuality, variations in natal sex, and third genders have existed for possibly all of human history across a variety of cultures, and gender expression is not inherently tied to one's natal sex. Many pre-colonial cultures have had dynamic gender constructs, divisions, and hierarchies independent of and unique to what the European and Abrahamic axes understand as the male/Man and female/Woman gender binary. These variations exist even in cultures where the correlating performances may not be permissible and may become an oppressed minority class. The full range of gender expression worldwide is unknown due to this binary colonizing the Global South, and the resultant colonized genders being interpreted through the Western lens.
This means that gender variance exists across the world regardless of race or ethnicity, but Western Christian tradition seeks to "other" these alternative concepts of self-identity and socialization to the global working class. As such, we who are born under this Patriarchal reproductive hierarchy, Socialist or not, may exhibit the consequences of this gendering and "othering," psychologically, socially, and in relations of production. This may be opposed through disciplined education of the working class and protection of women and sexual minorities.
This gender binary also contains a dialectic which we should like to see through to its conclusion: the original status of mankind being split into gendered categories, on one end the Man which represents external life and exploits the labor of the diametric opposite, the constructed Woman and colonized Other which holds reproductive value, seeks to retain their labor and to increase their social standing. To minimize the gap of this dialectic, to reach its synthesis, would be for the Woman and Other to reverse their conditions of exploitation and degender their social systems and interactions.
Therefore, I conclude this gendering may also be opposed by adopting some conceptualization of Bambara's Androgynous Self in order to shift one's perspective of self-identity and behaviors in social relations- which is to say, how we perceive our own gender as we interact with other genders under Capitalism should be free and malleable, conscious, and equitable.
Bambara writes:
"In the last few years I have frequently been been asked to speak on the topic of the Black Woman's Role in the Revolution ... I'm not altogether sure we agree on the term "revolution" or I wouldn't be having so much difficulty with the phrase "woman's role.
I have always, I think, opposed the stereotypic definitions of "masculine" and "feminine," not only because I thought it was a lot of merchandising non-sense, but rather because I always found the either/or implicit in those definitions antithetical to what I was all about–and what revolution for self is all about–the whole person. And I am beginning to see, especially lately, that the usual notions of sexual differentiation in roles is an obstacle to political consciousness, that the way those terms are generally defined and acted upon in this part of the world is a hindrance to full development. And that is a shame, for a revolutionary must be capable of, above all, total self-autonomy.
...we profess to be about liberation but behave in a constricting manner; we rap about being correct but ignore the danger of having one half of our population regard the other with such condescension and perhaps fear that that half finds it necessary to "reclaim his manhood" by denying her her peoplehood. Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood ... It perhaps takes less heart to pick up the gun than to face the task of creating a new identity, a self, perhaps an androgynous self, via commitment to the struggle."
- On the Issue of Roles, The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970).
As a white Socialist, I try not to appropriate the analysis of Blackness inherent to Bambara's writing, but as a transexual who aims to deconstruct gendered systems, I posit that, regardless of race, perhaps we need to let go of notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Socialism.
This is most pertinent to the Colonized Woman under Capitalism as a form of freedom from Patriarchy, but holds a lesson relevant to the process of deconstructing Capitalism and building a new society, and so relevant to those who seek to deconstruct any hierarchy of oppression in their social environment. This lesson pertains to cis men, white or Black, who may (sub)consciously patronize and disregard women. This pertains to trans men who may reinforce these standards to affirm their own manhood, to white women, cis or trans, and to intersex and nonbinary individuals, who may not realize the ways they feed into these systems as well.
So what Bambara suggests as the Androgynous Self, I would also posit is interrelated with the identity of a "Comrade", which political theorist Jodi Dean conceptualizes well in her book of the same name. The androgynous "Comrade" would be the synthesis of the Capitalist Manhood inverted with a Proletarianized Womanhood.
"Comrade" is a relation-based identity, which means that the core trait is not self-imposed but instead defined by the actions and perceptions of such taken between individuals identifying as a Socialist as well as the material fidelity of the truth of these actions. According to Dean, to be a Comrade is to embody a relation characterized by sameness, equality, and solidarity. For Socialists, this sameness and solidarity is purposefully utopian in order to cut through the deterministic social structures of Capitalism. With regard to gender, the utopian solution to sexed and gendered oppression is an androgynous trajectory in our social and productive relations.
This is not to say that our individual choices in our social interactions will immediately deconstruct these systems, but that such an entrenched economic and cultural structure which includes our social interactions must be opposed forthright, and to do this openly is to be an example to others to take steps towards a material deconstruction. The change starts quantitatively, with us shifting our intentions, and then qualitatively to collective structural change.
To do so a Comrade must act in accordance with degendered principles and opposition to oppression. As such, being a Comrade means to decry and correct Sexism, Homophobia, Racism, and other Reactionary tendencies. The Comrade should understand the manner in which women, sexual minorities, and third genders are reproductively and socially oppressed, how layers of racialization embolden this oppression, and should take action against these social processes.
Being a Comrade also means to neuter the gendered connotations of our social interactions, to not assume or prescribe behaviors or traits to ourselves or others merely on the basis of sex or gender. The Comrade should distribute labor in the workplace, domestic space, and in Radical space in an equitable manner without special regard of one's sex or gender. The Comrade must not fetishize nor demonize on the basis of an ascribed gender but judge on the basis of how individuals treat the humanity of others within this system.
It's imperative that we address within ourselves the conceptions of "feminine" or "masculine," the traits we associate with each and how that skews our perspectives of each other, why we see them as opposing realms of culture and behavior and why one is made to submit while the other dominates, instead of perceiving and thus relating to everyone as a free agent that could take any shape in any gender and could be liberated from economic, judicial, reproductive, and social oppression.
Don't let men talk down to women or others on the basis of Male Supremacy, don't let white women weaponize their race and role against Black people, do not condone gendered violence nor sexual assault or rape, do not view your own relationships as being in possession of a woman who cares for you in a way an ideal mother would, or as being protected by a man who actually enacts material control over a woman's life, and do not see your children as an extension of your own psyche or ability- also raise them as free human being.
We must not see women or anyone assigned female at birth as inherently more frail, emotional, or compassionate than men, and we should not see anyone assigned male as inherently stronger, more rational, nor as a danger, lest we give in to an unscientific biological determinism. Sex is not immutable, and neither are the genders which we construct, and no singular trait is inherent to either side of the binary. The sociological middle of this spectrum allows for extremities of either side to be holistically incorporated into an Androgynous Self, represented through behavior or through self-identity, and is the realm to explore neutrality and flexibility. If this neutral or flexible self is possible to achieve through social performance and biological modification, then it is also possible for cisgender people to achieve, regardless of their personal identification with gender.
Therefore, all Comrades should aim to deconstruct these hierarchies in their minds, cultural systems, and relations of production. This might mean that some find they feel neutral in their personal practice of gender, while others have to contend with what it means to behave equitably in their gendered relations while retaining their instilled gender. Regardless, any Socialist who seeks to understand humanity beyond the aforementioned could hugely benefit from undertaking a sense of this Androgynous Self, as a Comrade, and as a fellow human.
Bambara, Toni. (1970). "On the Issue of Roles" The Black Woman: An Anthology.
Dean, Jodi. (2019). "Comrade" An Essay on Political Belonging.
Engels, Frederick. (1884). "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" Marx/Engels Internet Archive.
Boydston, Jeanne. (2008). "Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis" Gender & History.
Green, Jamison. (2020). "History, Societal Attitudes, and Contexts" Gender Confirmation Surgery: Principles and Techniques for an Emerging Field, Springer Nature.
Bussey, Kay. (2011). "Gender Identity Development" Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, Springer.
Butler, Judith. (1999). "Gender Trouble" Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge.
Lorber, Judith. (2011). "Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology" The Gendered Society Reader, Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Joy. Repta, Robin. (2002). "Sex and Gender: Beyond the Binaries" Designing and Conducting Gender, Sex, & Health Research.
Narayan, Yasmeen. (2018). "Intersectionality, Nationalism, Biocoloniality" Ethnic and Racial Studies.
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