<<TRANSMATHOME

Note 1. Gender, Sexuality

The idea that active or free connections between human bodies are  processes of ‘entering into composition’ – this idea leads to important lines of thought in relation to sexuality. Entering into composition with another body is a deep connection that involves a transduction (mutative transfer) of the other body’s ways of moving and global motional states (emotions and states of engagement). This deep-level sensual and transformational engagement is a sustained, powerful encounter – it is a species of joy, a process or dance of becoming with another body.

However, there is something designatable as ‘sexuality’ which is radically separable from this micrological process of entering into composition with another body. Sexuality here is the name for an organic, stratificatory modality which involves fixation on specific points or zones (at the limit, in the human, these points can even be displaced from the human body). Sexuality in this limited but major sense is  a passion: it has an active central thread or core, but for the bodies involved its fixatory nature brings about a de-intensification of engagement (it is only the recurrent involvement of other active processes that screens this fact).

However, sexual organic stratification is also bound up with anthropological stratification. The abstract machine of faciality is a domain of constricted modes of engagement which also has fixatory points - these pre-eminently being the zones of the face, and in particular, the eyes. These ‘facial’ and subjective points of fixation work alongside the fixatory points of organic stratification in relays of constricted engagement, and in a further process both sets of points can be connected up with  a whole array of different forms of ‘augmentation’ – cosmetics,  clothes, jewellry etc. Furthermore, the organic points can slide to other parts of the body, and also to the augmentations  (these are  different kinds of ‘fetishism’). One layer of stratification has been superimposed on another, leaving an extremely complex picture, with all kinds of inter-fusions and ‘fractures’. However, beyond these constrictive modes is the  endlessly differentiated world of micrological or micro-sexual becomings. A question of transductions or intensifications of activity-range  across the whole field of the body, and in as many different ways as there are emotions and modes of action on the part of the other bodies. A question of impersonal, non-subjective  processes of becoming (and of flight from stratification).   Beyond the cultivated world of human organico-anthopological stratification there is what appears to be the desert. But the desert turns out to be populated by groups of nomad-travellers, and turns out to not be a desert at all. The world beyond stratification is an incandescent cosmic ocean of inter-fusions and intensifications.

In relation initially to women’s side of  the domain of ‘gender’ (as opposed to sexuality), it is valuable to bring up the fact – pointed out in A Thousand Plateaus - that there is a loosely demarcatable domain of modes of microcorporeal freedom or fluency that is closely associated with women,  though at the same time not at all limited to them. This is a world of modes of fluidity or ‘non-grave’ behaviour which fall within a particular ‘bandwidth’ of fluidity both in terms of range of action and in terms of  speeds.  It is a non-affectational space of kinds of  smooth movement, curved motion, laughter, and play.  Making a connection with this microcorporeal zone is what A Thousand Plateaus  refers to as the process of ‘becoming-woman’. But this becoming is therefore a path traversed by both women and men. It is not that women  have the modes of freedom, which are  subsequently  acquired by men (TP p.275). It must be stressed therefore that  this process of entering into composition involves engagement with a field which does not only consist of women. The modes of microcorporeal freedom involved are predominantly taken up in a sustained way by women  (hence the name ‘becoming-woman’), but men also enter into composition along these lines. What is at stake can be brought out in part by pointing out that the laughter engaged with in this becoming is not the grave  laughter  of a suppressive ridicule, but is the laughter of joy - a joy which can also express itself as ridicule, but in a way which frees things them up, rather than closing them down. A question of being ‘innocent a priori’ (TP p.290 ). But more widely this becoming concerns the experimental deepening of fluidity within context-bound constraints of never shocking people by moving in a viscerally stacatto or percussive way. The next becoming is a becoming-child (engagement with modes of fluidity and play which do not have the ‘adult’ blocks), but beyond this there  are  becomings which pass beyond the human.

Human becomings can be with individuals and with groups, and can also be processes of becoming-woman and becoming-child. The reason why it does not make sense with this analysis to talk about a ‘becoming-man’ is that there is no field of fluidity which has a pre-eminent connection to the overall field of the male. Far from this being the case, what in certain ways is prevalent  with men  is the ‘gravity’ of the  judgemental subjectificatory global  modes – the whole nuanced field of  disdain, contempt, piety, outrage and oppresive irony. This is what is associated with the widespread organisational split in the field of human social formations that leaves men more liable to be sedimented as points of dominance than women. Women also take up the ‘grave’ dominatory modes. The  passing appearance in women of grave, judgemental modes is more common than intermittent phases of becoming-woman in men, so that there is a displaced parallel between becoming-woman and the acquistion of these modes. However, it is not a matter of a deterritorialized becoming-man being involved in the functioning or brief appearance of these subjectified modes. Instead, the initial acquisitions of the modes is very early and de-intensificatory in nature, and – more importantly - when there is a  movement later it is a transition from one mode of  subjectification to another, where the new mode does not involve a line of increasing microcorporeal fluidity, and fluidity of movement. The most that is involved is a minimal body-surface acquisition of new grave ‘facial’ aspects of constrictive, dominatory functioning, where this at the overall level is surrounded by de-intensification (it is the thread of movement of a stratificatory  becoming).

The little girl is encouraged in certain ways to pass smoothly in the direction of fluid motion, though within a particular and narrowing range. The closing-down process in part involves dis-incentives and preventions and also involves order-word constructions terming the child as ‘crazy’, or ‘boyish’, or ‘wierd’ (‘they’ll think you’re mad’). The little boy is often allowed to develop relatively freely for longer, but then the trap closes with immense force (‘they’ll think you’re a girl’). The ‘set-up’ is that the boy is allowed to engage with fluidity with his eyes, but not with his whole body. And at the same time there is encouragement toward ‘serious’, subjectificatory  modes, and therefore toward being a master of judgements and suppressions, or toward being a point of dominance. Children are torn away from their intense  differential proximities, and though many ‘anomalous’ outcomes and pathways can emerge, at this point the journey is always in large part away from a love of bodies and embodiment that has nothing to do with subjectification. The following is the account of this process from  A Thousand Plateaus:

The question is fundamentally that of the body – the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms. The body is stolen first from the girl: Stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc. The girl’s becoming is stolen first in order to impose a history, or prehistory, upon her. The boy’s turn comes next, but it is by using the girl as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire, that an opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too (TP p. 276).

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