Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 13:19:30 +0000
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Third Sexing and Androgyny


Perhaps the point to address about androgyny and 3rd sexing is 
their *contradictoriness* as strategies whereby capital and 
its ideological and statal instances attempts to secure its 
conditions of existence and also as strategies of capitalist 
accumulation. 

This is the real common ground Leo Casey and I have. And when Yoshie 
Furuhashi speaks of the 'ideology of romantic love' she no doubt 
has in mind the ways in which capitalism (and patriarchy generally, 
historically-speaking) captures for its own purposes certain 
biological, physiological and psychological givens of human gender 
difference. I am thinking about the nature of the family, gens,
tribe, harem and all the related forms of ownership of women and 
control of reproduction by which men have attempted to guarantee 
transmission of genes. All these forms of converting women 
into property, culminating in romantic love and its embodiment 
in idealised monogamy, are rooted in the basic biology of male 
potential mass dissemination and the contrasting female biology 
of production of small numbers of potential genetic inheritors. 
The difference in physilogical attributes does determine the
different social interests. In patriarchy men require harems,
women nurseries under their control.

Under communism, where private property ceases to be, the 
disappearance of men's property rights in women is inevitable 
and simply a given. 3rd sexing, androgyny, bisexuality and other 
forms of 'deviancy' prefigure this, ie, sex whose purpose is not 
ensuring genetic inheritance or the transmission of property rights.
That is partly why bisexuality/3rd sexing is subversive. 

And also why few things are more repugnant to communist women 
than to see romantic love resurface as a programmatic endeavour 
of communist men. But the biology of 
sexuality and of sexual attraction can also be appropriated by 
communism, and must be. It simply has to be shorn of possession as 
a goal and possessiveness as an attribute, as Engels said, to 
become truly humanised.

Insofar as the 3rd sexing/bisexuality of comrades like Leo Casey 
and Yoshie Furuhasi prefigures this, then they are our teachers 
and the rest of us better listen up. But only when we disentangle 
what is truly human, loving and generous from the deepest entanglements 
those attributes have with sexuality as a form of possession, an
instance of patriarchy, can truly loving relationships be possible, 
which is why this moment of emancipation is really at the heart 
of our politics.

The fact that capitalism now (as indeed in the 1920s, and in Edwardian times
too) finds it necessary to mobilise such strategies as androgyny/3rd sexing 
is actually an index of the depth of its crises, as it was in both those 
hurrah-capitalist epochs. It is a clear index of an approaching
revolutionary coupure (which is also why deviancy is once again the subject
of hysterias and moral panics). 

Deviancy is a form of social control, like criminalising poverty, 
homelessness and unemployed. But more than that, 3rd sexing is an 
actively-pursued strategy for capitalism, and huge sums are being invested
in genetic engineering, ex vitro embryology and gene 'therapy' not just
because they are medium-term profit opportunities but because they embody
potentially a radical assault on the autonomy and EXISTENCE of the 
proletariat. They are new holocaust technologies, which make fascist eugenics
and gas chambers and even nuclear weapons seem less dangerous by contrast.
Yet they also embody profoundly liberatory dimensions both politically 
AND socially/technically, which is why they are contradictory.


Mark



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