The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto
theanarchistlibrary.org
Vikky Storm and Eme Flores The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto 4/24/2019

thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.

read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
    ·
    2 days ago

    Comment with small things:

    This new system has a few characteristics which define it. Not all of them developed at once, but they’ve been imposed upon the whole world. They are as follows:

    [...]

    1. Marriage is an economic contract between a man and a woman. Men and women are supposed to sign an agreement to be faithful and to stay together and violation of that is seen as a breach of contract and therefore bad.

    2. Marriage is a personal choice done for love rather than a social choice done for necessity. Gone are marriages for alliances or arranged marriages, for the most part. Marriage is only a choice for the two who are getting married.

    Obviously there is some conflict between the ideas of economic marriage and love marriage. The system is in motion; the superstructure shifts focus from 3 to 4 as women become proletarianized. I would have liked to see some exploration.

    Since this third class is defined by its difference from those of the first two classes, it is named queer. Queer people are all those who relate differently to the division of reproductive labor assigned to them by patriarchy. Because of the different relations, queer people are inherently subversive to the class system as a whole and constitute the revolutionary class under patriarchy.

    if women are the oppressed class, doing reproductive labor without any control over it, why wouldn't women be the revolutionary class? this is like axiomatically saying that lumpens, not proles, will be the revolutionary class that brings about the abolition of the proletariat. some people think so but without an argument I'm not convinced

    People whose gender doesn’t match with the gendering of their biological features aren’t exactly new. Many previous systems had explicit classes for people like this, such as the Bugi gender system. These are multigendered systems and they have a space for those who aren’t willing to accept the gender assigned to their biology.

    Nitpick: we opened the piece by saying that gender is a superstructure and reproductive labor divisions are the base, and by explicitly repudiating people who think that sex is the material base of gender. So gender isn't "assigned to biology" in these multigendered systems, it's assigned to labor roles.

    Gender isn’t inherent, but it spreads by assigning us to a class and forcing us to say yes to that class. “Yes, I am a man. It is who I am and who I always have been. I cannot escape it or deny it. I am a man.” This is nothing but a lie we are forced to repeat. But by repeating it enough, we come to believe it. Gender becomes natural, inescapable, eternal. It ceases to be an imposed identity and becomes an eternal part of who we are.

    I don't think this is consistent with the idea of labor role as base and gender as superstructure. Gender can't spread via people internalizing the superstructure and identifying as a man or woman. In this framework gender must spread (or rather maintain itself) by people carrying out the role of gender. I think this section is inconsistent with the one on baking, which is better. People identify as "bakers" not because they think of themselves as a baker and then seek out jobs at a bakery, but because they are economically coerced into wage labor and they end up at a bakery. As the authors write, the superstructural identity of "baker" will wither away once baking is not a job. People really do think of themselves as having a gender. But some Brits think of themselves as "upper crust" and some Indians think of themselves as "Brahmins", and the way to class abolition is not people deciding not to identify as working-class anymore. It's a basal change caused by oppressed people engaging in class struggle and winning. The authors say things like "If everyone says “no” to gender, everyone ceases to accept it, then gender is lost. We find similar strategies among resistance to other class systems." We must be clear that saying "no" to gender has to mean more than just refusing to perform cisgender identity, it has to mean tearing down gendered division of reproductive labor. And if the authors agree, I wish they'd have written more about the specifics of what reproductive labor actually is and how the masses can fight male control of it.

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
      ·
      1 day ago

      Queer people do not carry out their social existence by leeching off the produced labor of the "prole" equivalent here (women), unlike actual lumpenproletariat. They are fundamentally more 'revolutionary' than the lumpenproletariat because no such option is available, beyond simply adopting the social roles of a man. Most queer people choose to live in entirely different novel family configurations which often still take on the labor of child rearing and sometimes even birth, which shows the fundamental difference between queer people and some sort of "gender lumpenproletariat" which would somehow leech off of women giving childbirth (they would have to be literal baby snatchers, arguably)

      • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
        ·
        18 hours ago

        My understanding of reproductive labor is limited, but it isn't just birth and childrearing, it's also stuff like housekeeping which enables wage laborers to work. Both expansion and maintenance of labor. Although queer people engage in that sort of thing (we all do to some extent) more than lumpen are economically productive, the reason I made the comparison is numbers. Lumpen are only a small fraction of society and capitalism tends to maintain a constant reserve army of labor, in contrast to the ever-increasing share of proletarians. Artisans would have been a less loaded example, a small class of laborers that doesn't have much power (except that nobody thinks artisans will lead the revolution). My problem is the authors don't really explain why the fraction of queer people might expand until they are doing enough reproductive labor to take the reins. They just handwave "gender's process of decay".

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
      ·
      1 day ago

      I actually disagree with both you and the article. I think people would still identify as bakers without needing to sell their labor or baking to live. It would just have a different, less desperate social context. Someone who really likes baking may still choose to identify with it, as people have identified with things they've liked since long before capital was a thing.

    • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]M
      ·
      2 days ago

      gender forms its own base/superstructure that is informed by the base/superstructure of society at large. the base/superstructure of labor, gender, race, nationality, ability etc. are all informed by the capital mode of production that forms the base of society. women are part of the revolutionary class, the authors arent excluding them

      • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
        ·
        2 days ago

        It seems like the authors directly contradict that. There's the section I quoted, but they also just don't talk about anything that women will do as a gender class to tear down the gender class system. Some antifeminist communists pay lip service to feminism by saying "of course we're feminist, women are part of the revolutionary proletariat". As you pointed out, the "totality" stuff is pretty tacked on and the bulk of the specifics are about how gender accelerationism is going to bring about gender abolition.