CRACK CAPITALISM

s/he does not solve it either, because it suggests a pronoun that
claims to be timelessly correct, and so obscures a real shift in the
gender composition of the subject. There is a sense in which the
labourer really is a 'he' and the doer really is a 'she', so, when we
speak of the revolt of doing against labour, we are speaking of a
real movement of she against he. Where it is necessary to use a
pronoun, we shall refer to labourers as 'he' and doers as 'she'.
However, the very division of people into two clearly defined
genders is part of the more general process of identification,
an aspect of the world of abstract labour. The substitution of
one gender for another is, therefore, not really the answer. Our
shadowy figure, the anti-identitarian subject, is also anti-gender,
a movement against-and-beyond the division of society into two
clear genders. In her novel Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge
Piercy uses 'per' as a pronoun to represent the un-gendered
subject, but this refers to an imaginary society in which gender
divisions are really overcome.12 Perhaps then we should say
simply that behind the 'he' of the character mask stands a
shadowy figure who is 'she', but this she is not a different gender
but the crisis both of he-ness and she-ness, the crisis of sexual
dimorphism, the erotic revolt of polymorphous perversity.13
3. WE ARE THE REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT:
WE WHO ARE SCHIZOPHRENIC AND REPRESSED.
The shadowy figure (the mulier abscondita) is simply We.
We, because the use of the third person, whether 'he', 'she' or
'they', excludes us, and we write and read not from outside the
problem of how to change the world, but from inside it. The
third person identifies, even if it is a vague 'they', because it
draws a defining line that excludes us.14 'We', on the other hand,
are open, a questionY 'We' may be a defining, identitarian 'we'
(we university professors, we Irish, we men), but not necessarily:
left without a qualification, 'we' is undefined and open. To say
that 'we' are the subject, the shadowy figure behind the mask,
is also to say that theory cannot be separated from practice: the
'we' who read or write this book are not just reflecting upon
changing the world, we are not theorising about it as though it
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