Binarism Is for Robots, or How I Continue to Worry But Also Starting to Love Being a Floating Signifier

I think I read somewhere that the blog is a deeply personal medium, so (cracks knuckles) let's get personal.

For the past few years, I've developed a sort of suspicion for the gender binary. I'm sure that for those of you who know me (and, let's be honest, if anyone's reading this, it is those of you who know me), that's not necessarily a surprise. After all, trans activism and trans studies are two of my passions, my romantic couplet, my girlfriend, my person (as Michelle Tea would say) is agender and one of the numerous things we bonded over were our suspicions about the binary gender system and the whole question of what gender even fucking is supposed to be in the first place and why many of us spend so much time wondering about it, grappling with this nebulous and messy thing.

It's not a groundbreaking discovery that the word 'gender' made its way into English through the French 'genre' - where it means both 'gender' and 'genre' as we know those words in English - after all, even the Father of All Things Obscure and Impenetrable, Jacques Derrida, makes this observation in The Law of Genre: "...a biological genre in the sense of gender, or the human genre, a genre of all that is in general..." (Let's for a second disregard the fact that he refers to gender as a biological thing. Being the Father of All Things Obscure and Impenetrable is not the same as always being right.)

But that's fucking it, isn't it? Gender is the genre in which human beings come. Problem solved. It's a wrap. Let's stop thinking about it, eat our sandwich and go home, right?

Well, I mean, in essence, yeah, but there's also more to it. While it's true that, much like human genres, artistic genres lack any essential definition that cannot be warped or transgressed or broken and, in some ways, do actually operate on a on a performative speech act system - slapping 'A Biography' or 'A Tragicomic' at the end of the title or the book being named The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas despite overtly not being written by Toklas, thus breaking the supposedly essential definition of what is and isn't an autobiography - humans, unlike art, have that pesky ability to speak for themselves and not just be defined by the outside forces of the author or literary criticism.

Many of us recognise that gender categories (and really, what more is there to gender than just placing oneself into a specific category) are non-essential in nature. There is no one thing that all men do, there is no one thing that a person has to do in order to be non-binary. The definition isn't only unstable, there simply can't be one, because, like with literary genres, establishing a definition will inevitably result in the existence of people who don't fit anywhere. That is not to say that literary genres or gender categories need to be completely done away with, but that they need to be acknowledged as a form of shorthand, rather than the defining feature of who or what someone or something is. There are elements that are not essential or constitutive, but that are nevertheless common enough that most people get a general idea of what is meant when someone says 'this person is a woman' or 'this is a collection of poetry'. But even then, as there is no stable definition, those categories become inherently problematic. Some people refuse to acknowledge poetry that doesn't rhyme or that is presented in prose, just as some people refuse to acknowledge women who don't have vaginas. At such a point, the shorthand itself becomes a failure of language and of communication, as the signifier doesn't correspond to the same signifieds (I can't fucking believe I just said this, but I mean it) and the whole signifier then just becomes a 'floating signifier' that has no essential definition and means different things to different people. I'm sure that if any of my university professors read this, particularly those from the Translation Studies Department, where structuralism is their bread and butter, would be proud of me right now.

But okay, I said that this is going to be personal and so far, you've only gotten a bunch of garbled theory (which I'm sure isn't even new to a lot of you) and none of the juicy bits of personal drama and anguish. This is why I can't write for tabloids, people.

Over the past few months, I've gotten to meet a lot of rad non-binary people, which is great and lovely and exciting. Simultaneously, I've also been drifting away from what is socially usually perceived as femininity, which was never a particular aspiration of mine anyways, at least on certain fronts. That is not to say that I've become a 'connoisseur of masculinity' like Alison Bechdel. What I have been trying is to carve out a space in which I can feel comfortable - easily identifiable as a lesbian while also clearly not a man. I still like my make-up and nail polish and the occasional (very occasional) lipstick and maybe a dress on a few days in the summer when I don't feel cold and exposed wearing one, but those things now exist more as options and spice to my life rather than some sort of way to express my inner sense of gender.

Speaking of my inner sense of gender, perhaps the main reason why I started with that long bit on theory and the non-essential nature of gender is because, well, for the past few years I've been realising that I don't call myself a woman because that's some sort of an 'inner truth' of my being. After all, what would be that essential part of me or my character that would constitute me as a woman? My dysphoria? Hardly, since that only exist in the realm of the bodily and the physical and we can all probably agree that that is not the same realm that is occupied by gender. And in some ways, this makes me wonder about other people, cis and trans, and why they so staunchly feel that they are men or women. I wonder this not in a way that I wish to invalidate their self-classification, but merely in a way where I am curious about what led them to thinking of themselves as falling into that either/or.

Because, honestly, for me, the label of 'lesbian' or 'dyke' has come to mean way more to me than that of 'woman'. I find it increasingly difficult to interact with straight women, cis or trans, and feel like I genuinely belong into the same category as they do. And what other point is there to gender categories than making yourself somehow intelligible to others, to say 'I am this and I'm kinda in some ways like the other people who are this'. Monique Wittig once said that 'lesbians are not women' and, when I first saw that, some years ago, I laughed it off as second-wave lesbian feminist bullshit (and there sure was a lot of bullshit in second-wave lesbian feminism). So why do I now feel this way? From whence this doubt? After all, 'lesbian' is just as lacking in essential qualities as 'woman' - hell, I date non-binary people and still call myself a 'lesbian' which goes strictly against the traditional definition of 'woman who's strictly into other women'.

And even then, I am hesitant to completely shed the label of 'woman' - not as an identifier of what my gender is, but as a political term. I still sort of resent Kate Bornstein for not standing her ground when she transitioned and cis women told her that she still isn't a 'real woman' so she instead gave up on womanhood entirely and labelled herself a 'gender outlaw'. My resentment comes from feeling like she didn't really put up a fight, that instead of abandoning calling herself a woman, she could have persisted and instead redefined what a woman could be.

So I refuse to be a hypocrite in this regard. I refuse to abandon the project of womanhood, despite finding the whole venture and the whole binary category somewhat questionable. Because to do so would be, to me, to give in to that sort of essentialist thinking. Instead, I'm going to try and learn how to be both, how to be a woman and a Floating Signifier, that ambiguous whatever that cannot be signified. And I guess, in doing so, I'm actually in some ways following in a time-honoured lesbian tradition, too. To quote Alison Bechdel:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/alison-bechdel-misses-feeling-special.html

That quote and the whole interview, for that matter, aren't without their issues, but it nonetheless resonates with me. Because I think I also want to make new space in the world - a space in which women can be whatever they fucking like without abandoning the label, if they do not want to abandon it. Because while the binary gender categories are inherently suspect, I also can't deny that certain words - 'lesbian'/'dyke' and 'woman', in my case - come with a sense of community and history. And that can give strength and purpose to those who choose to embrace them.

What Riot Grrrl Means to Me

Despite being trans and seen as a boy by the rest of society, I identified as a feminist as far back as I can remember. The group of guys I hung out with in high school used to play a game the rules of which could basically be summed up as 'let's see who can say fucked up shit that will offend Jamie first', which would usually mean saying some racist or sexist bullshit. My identity as a feminist was rough-hewn and didn't stem either from some sort of a progressive upbringing (in fact, my parents are anything but feminist) or me dipping my toes into genuine feminist theory and discourse (this wouldn't happen until late high school). Where it came from was the fact that, internally, I thought of myself as a girl and could empathise with the things I saw the girls around me going through as they were growing up, as well as the fact that the men around me, thinking of me as another one of them, did not put on the usual filters they would when cis girls were around. In some ways, being trans is actually what contributed to my feminism and I doubt I would be the same if I were a cis woman.

Sometimes, I wish high-school me had access to riot grrrl or some other form of feminism accessible to young people, but it was not meant to be. The year 1996 is often listed as the year the riot grrrl movement's shining star faded. The usual story goes that this was due to media misrepresentation, establishment of hierarchies, lack of intersectionality and the simple fact that most of the girls who started riot grrrl and fed its flames through zines and music got older. I was two years old then, being raised as a boy on the other side of the Atlantic. Besides, even in my teenage years, I was never really a punk kid - I was raised on Pink Floyd and heavy metal, moved over to more symphonic forms of rock and metal, where women actually saw some representation (although usually only as singers) and ended up with post-rock.

Despite that, some two years ago, I decided on a whim to give riot grrrl a try. I think this had to do with a number of factors, but the two major ones was that riot grrrl music and culture featured heavily in the game Gone Home which came out in 2013 but which I didn't get to play until roughly 2015. It's a story about two girls falling in love in mid-90s Pacific Northwest, so, you know, exactly my jam. In that game, you find cassettes from bands like Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy and, of course, Bikini Kill and can play them around the house. I don't know why it took a second playthrough with my girlfriend at the time for me to actually sit down and look up that music, because even the first time, it captivated me - it felt like I'd fallen back through time to being my 16-year-old self, confused and lost, stuck with so many feelings of sadness and rage. Listening to riot grrrl for the first time, despite the fact that most of the music was 25 years old at that point, felt like those feelings were, for the first time in my life, given a voice, a sound and an aesthetic. It helped me channel them into a vision of feminism that wasn't just pure theory, but that a feminism that brought with it a sense of urgency and, most importantly, community. It wasn't just that these girls in the early-to-mid-90s were upset with the current state of the world, but that they weren't alone, that together they could try and build a better world.

Flyer written by Kathleen Hannah (singer of Bikini Kill) in 1990 - The Riot Grrrl Collection

In some ways, 2016 couldn't've been a better year for me to discover this piece of feminist history. With the election of Trump, the collective grief briefly (sadly) gave birth to new feminist communities and movements. Armed with my background in feminist theory and some practical experience (GamerGate, which broke out in 2014, was a sort of tipping point for me and a lot of other women and feminists in video games), I jumped to action, excited to build a new and radical movement that would perhaps continue in the spirit of riot grrrl, but would finally be truly intersectional. This did not come to pass, as the movement quickly became overwhelmed with white, middle-class cishet women who were largely unwilling to commit themselves to the radical action that the rest of us - queer women, trans women, poor women, women of colour - needed and pushed for. We made steps backwards instead of forwards, learning nothing from our past. The sheer number of clueless #resistance types I had to deal with has, in all honesty, left me somewhat bitter and anxious about participating in feminist events that aren't organised by people I know and trust. (Most recently, there was a feminist art exhibit in Prague that looked great, but I decided not to go both because national TV was going to be there and because the organisers referred to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists as 'one of the holy grails of feminist literature', completely disregarding the issues with the book itself and CNA's transphobia.)

As I started listening to Bikini Kill on repeat, I decided that it would be good to find out more about queer music of the era, as well as other music by women-centering bands. This has proved to not be an entirely easy thing to do as a lot of the music by these bands, despite being referenced in queer and feminist literature and by people who'd lived through the era, are quite difficult to find, legally or otherwise. Nevertheless, I persevered and added other bands to my angry dyke repertoire, such as: Adickdid, Babes in Toyland, The Butchies, Huggy Bear, Julie Ruin (Kathleen Hannah's solo project), Le Tigre, Sister George, Slant 6, Sleater-Kinney, Team Dresch and Tribe 8. This line-up has become really important to me, even if it's a difficult kind of thing to get other people interested in. Riot grrrl bands and some of the other bands listed here were seriously a time-and-place sort of deal and, if you aren't interested in the experiences of American queer women in the 90s the same way I am, it probably won't speak to you. 

Hell, what is more time-and-place than what is probably my favourite Bikini Kill song 'Thurston Hearts the Who', which was an off-the-cuff performance that, to my knowledge, only exists in one recording - the show where Bikini Kill recorded their first record, which was somehow, magically, recorded on video, too: