On the ANDROGYNOUS SELF; or TO BE A COMRADE (v2 REVISION)
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"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."
In spirit of Toni Bambara's "On the Issue of Roles", this essay expands on her concept of an "Androgynous Self" and proposes its application across race and ethnicity for both cisgender and transexual people, written in regard to gender divisions in class systems as well as radical spaces. Potentially any Socialist looking to dismantle cisnormative Patriarchy and Misogyny, or to deepen their understanding of Decolonial theory, could benefit their understanding of gender and social roles under Capitalism by adopting this Androgynous Self in service of Radicalism.
Throughout the Germanic tribes, Roman slave-economy, Monarchal Europe, Capitalist America, in several formerly colonized and imperialized nations, and across other cultural spheres, women as a gender and a class have been denied several legal and social rights in purpose of Man's control over reproduction and domestic labor. Campaigns throughout history have proclaimed illegalization and called for violence against homosexuality and transexuality in order to Catholicize or "modernize" their cultures, and to embed a gendered power dynamic. Infant genital mutilation to "correct" one's sex to a preferred standard has been practiced in a variety of contexts, to enforce an ideal femininity and to erase the existence of intersex variation.
The distinctions that religious institutions allowed Europeans to draw on Colonized people also served a dual economic purpose- to entrench colonized workers, namely women and third genders, within hierarchies of oppression. It ensured at least a portion of the population would be legally sanctioned and denied aid by their community, and would be left with no other choice 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.
As such, we who are born under this 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. I conclude this 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. In other words, how we perceive our own gender as we interact with other genders under Capitalism should be free and malleable, conscious, and equitable.
"...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).
I try not to appropriate the analysis of Blackness inherent to Bambara's writing, but regardless of race, I posit that perhaps we need to let go of notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Socialism. The analytical method of dialectics leads me to believe that the solution to gendered oppression is political androgyny. Not that we are all to be androgynous as de-gendered individuals, but that our interactions become so, to propel a gender revolution, so to speak, which transcends beyond the confines of sex deterministic gender roles in social, domestic, productive, and legislative life.
If the male gender, Man, represents a role which weaponizes control of life and labor over the female gender, Women, as well as any non-Man, and if sex or gender are used as the justification for this oppression, then all non-Men must smash the power of Man, break their chains and rid themselves of enforced gender roles.
No more Womanhood as prescribed by society- just women, people, experiencing humanity among man.
Transexuality can peel open many layers of gender, of intersecting realities, such as the truth that gender is malleable and defined by our social systems, and that it is possible to move through it freely. This could be possible for everyone, regardless of social or physical dysphoria, if we as a people could gain a consciousness about gender and take equitable action.
This is most pertinent to the Colonized Woman under Capitalism as a form of freedom from Patriarchy, but also holds a lesson relevant to the process of deconstructing Capitalism and building a new society, relevant to those who seek to rectify any hierarchy of oppression in their environment.
What Bambara describes 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.
Not just in the general sense but especially in a gendered sense, to be a Comrade is to embody this relation characterized by common understanding, equality, and solidarity. This equality and solidarity are purposefully utopian in order to cut through the social structures of Capitalism, which have become ingrained and deterministic to our cultures. The utopian solution to gendered oppression is an androgynous trajectory in our social interactions.
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