Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism - Libcom

historicizing, drowning in the weight of phenomena, “tripping on
content” as Chris Kraus puts it. 3
So then to clarify: I do not set out to reject an entire wave of feminism.
Under the banner of “sex positivity,” even sexual optimism, are
gestures that would be absurd to reject—the historicizing of sexuality,
demystifying sexuality, giving information surrounding STDs
and contraception to women and queers, disrupting reactionary
forms of shame. What is necessary is far from a sectarian return to
“second wave” theorists, but rather tracing the thread that gave rise
to our present situation—the ways in which sex has been exalted, its
relationship to senses of the Self, and the ideologies of the whole
and natural. Sex positivity as a supposedly coherent social movement
would be only a paper tiger; rather, the object of this essay is to
disrupt the attachment to sex as it has lived in feminism and popular
imagination, and it is a relation that lives well beyond the past 30
years of “sex positive feminism.”
Before continuing, a clarification of my use of the phrase “not-man”:
“Not-man” cannot be understood as shorthand for “women & others.”
It is, rather than a collection of non-male identities, a way of referring
to the product of gender as a relationship of exploitation. “It is
nonsensical to describe not-men as doing something—anything—or
having any unity,” because not-man is a position of silence, an exclusion
from subjectivity as it is put to work within gender and patriarchy.
4 This cannot be confined to any group of bodies or identities,
and to conflate it with a unitary womanhood would be an error on
the order of conflating “proletarian” with “industrial worker.” None
of us are not-men by virtue of anatomy or identification, rather notmen
is a position we are forced into, to greater or lesser degree as the
recipients of gendered violence.
Effectively, the not-man cannot speak, cannot be represented with
total accuracy, as it is defined through lack and absence. Still, it is a
3 Chris Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia (Boston: MIT Press, 2000).
4 P.S. De Beaufort, “Things We’ve Noticed,” Summer Camp, 1(1), 2011.
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