Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Technology and transexuality: Secret alliances 17
femaleness and femininity, instead of harbouring the seeds of
insurrection for all the other sexes and genders involved. Female sexchangers
emerge as a category that is not only under-represented in
terms of numbers, but also under-theorised.
It is evident that the traditional transsexuals (male-to-female) do not
pass beyond sex and gender, but instead only confirm their
indebtedness to binary divisions. In Hausman’s words: ‘one cannot
‘escape’ gender by switching roles or performances and thereby
confuse the binary logic, because that logic defines the possibility of
the switching in the first place’. 57 Gender is swapped and sex is
changed against the backdrop of a binary sex/gender system and the
possibilities are always already demarcated. Going beyond sex and
gender does not seem to be a workable embodied option, since every
attempt to do so is always already a response to the sex/gender
system. In my view the more truly transgressive figures are those who
articulate their differences differently from what is expected in the
heterosexual matrix and who do not work with expectations of the
transcendence of differences. A few of these differently sexed and
gendered individuals may include: the drag kings who parade the
supposed ‘unperformativity’ of masculinity; transgenderist transsexuals
who live as the other sex without undergoing complete
reassignment surgery; female-born individuals who think of
themselves as masculine but not necessarily as male or female; the
witches of Mpumalanga; 58 cyber-sluts; porn stars who turn into
performance artists; femmes; tomboys; masculine heterosexual
women; stone butches and soft butches; working mothers; women
with beards and bull dykes. I also include those who have inhabited
unnameable sexed and gendered spaces and positions, whether real
or/and virtual; those who have an entry into both worlds; those who
‘hav[e] it both ways’, and those ‘borderlanders’ who live through
their own monstrosities.
In conclusion, in keeping with my overall argument, neither sex nor
gender is constructed by means of willed acts or ‘do-it-yourself’
enactments that can be forced onto bodies, whether real and/or
virtual, by means of new technologies. Gender is not a piece of
clothing to be worn whenever the opportunity arises; neither is sex an
attentive plastic substance. As Theresa Senft wisely warns those who
think of sex and gender in terms of willed agency: ‘if you do not
believe in sex and gender, remember they believe in you’. 59 In other
57 Hausman (n 1 above) 198.
58 The witches of the Mpumalanga province come from one of the largest rural areas
in South Africa and can be described as fitting into the category of being otherly
sexed and gendered. These women are still regularly ostracised and murdered
(burnt) by their societies exactly on account of their sex and gender, which
immediately make them suspect and labelled as wicked.
59 Senft (n 22 above).