File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 817


Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 11:08:05 +0000
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Third Sexing and Androgyny


Replying to Leo, one gigantic leap of logic, I agree, may only a 
small step make. But pls don't trouble to infer too much from what 
I say. I usualy don't mean more than I say which is why I
write at such toe-curling length.
But let me just ask you this: if you are androgynous and late-capitalism happens
to seek/create androgynous models of the human being (and maybe it's your good
fortune to live in such a time, and that's possible -- even in Hell some
people benefit, so why not under the latest version of capitalism?) --
 does that make it OK *in general*?

Capitalism's capacity to turn deviancy into niche-market opportunities is what's
made pink-capitalism such a goer, and made reactionaries out of so many gay
people, but maybe it behoves us therefore to rethink the whole deviancy/straight
subordinate/dominant antinomies a little more closely (don't worry this isn't code
for a preemptive WASP backlash on Thaxis).

I thought my idea was clear enough: Bill Cochrane just said that biological
reproduction is an unsurpassable barrier to capital, but it is not. Capital will
design and get the workers it wants. Aldous Huxley had it right, and 3rd-sexing
images the protypical worker-robots of the future. Yoshie just mentioned 20's 
images of androgyny and I hadn't been thinking of that, but yes, it's 
curious how the  20's prefigured some of those concerns. Fritz Lang's
Metropolis. Constructivism. Breton, tne Surrealist Manifestoes. 
E M Forster's The Machine Stops, prefiguring what we  are spending  
our time doing right now. The triumphalism of Prohibition hurrah-
capitalism. But I'm going to try to answer Yoshie separately.

Mark

LeoCasey wrote:

> Mark:
> >And what seems hardly less important, how we militate
> >against third-sexing and androgyny as the emerging ideologies of
> >incorporation of women into waged labour thru their conscription
> >into the labour market (which my friend Doug Henwood has argued
> >FOR, especially in 3rd world countries).
>
> Doug:
> >Hmm, well I like some porn (and what I don't like I don't trouble myself
> >over), and I think third-sexing and androgyny are just fine, so I'm guilty
> >on the first two counts. On the last, I think I've said that wage labor can
> >offer women some kind of liberation from patriarchal rural social
> >structures and the isolating nature of homework.
>
> Leo:
> I think that Doug is mostly right about the liberatory potential of wage labor
> , given a certain social context, but I'll be damned if I can even make sense
> out of how third sexing and androgyny has even a tangential relationship,
> ideological or whatever, to the incorporation of women into wage labor.
> Indeed, insofar as I understand the common usage of those terms, I fall into
> the catgeory of third-sexer and androgynist. It appears, from the context,
> that Mark wants us to infer that these are "bad things," but this gigantic
> leap of logic hardly makes the case,
>
>      --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



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