I am entering the adult age when I understand that no one will be able to do anything for my happiness: not my mother or my father, or society, or the state or my girlfriend, or a whore, or testosterone.
How to make your own body – a general question. This is rather easy to answer if anyways you have the recipe in sight; no need to eventually come close to that question, if answers are handed out before questions can rise.
Believing in the truth of reality makes it much easier to conceive your body. A positivist ideology: Making your body means referring to your real body – because what the appearance proofs is said to be real. Whilst you let others conceive your body for you. Whilst sister, mother, daughter are swallowing their daily pill, unconsciously ingesting technologies of subjectification and genderization as if they were supplements of natural femininity. Come on, nature is normal! Who do you refer to, when speaking of the natural body? Who is this Big Other? Which big Leviathan do you imagine when walking along with your (al)ready-made body? Who, do we think, designed reality in its normalcy? Where is the fucking regime situated? And I am asking: Are we really enjoying this?
Conceiving is to receive and to give at the same time. Seeing and Looking. Watching the projection you’re beaming. Seeing is a transitory action, a physical action that changes the object. To conceive is both making and taking at the same time.
The cis-girl wants to transform her body into a consumable image for the greatest number of gazes. She wants to convert it into digital merchandise, in order to be eternal. She wants her pornification, not to produce any pleasure, but to transform her body into abstract capital, into indestructible virtual code: to become an e-body.
It is like being programmed, like being conceived according to a general matrix that guides your actions through society: how to lift your arm so it creates this certain type of image, to be looked at. How to sit, to be like this image called woman on the billboard over there, which comes directly out of a screen that displays the result of the inside of a technological machine that does not produce error but surface. She touches her hair like she used to comb her barbies’ blond plastic hair when she was 5. Her finger tips approach her skin to be a dustless screen.
What is a woman? What is a man? Who is this wo man? Are you talking about me, too? I’m neither more nor less myself. I am not one, I am many. Do you recognize yourself when seeing your image in the window? Your Self as a set of design elements. Political subjectivity emerges exactly when the subject does not recognize itself in its representation. Derecognition, disidentification is a condition for the emergence of the political as the possibility of transforming reality. It allows you to make what you cannot see yet.
So if anyways we are in the middle of the make up – why hide this making, this transitory action of change? Believing in real fiction: imagination, construction, and creation makes it much more free to make your own body.
Experience and experiment the forms of production of knowledge and subjectivity! There is no anatomical truth independent of the cultural and political practices of constrained repetition that lead us toward being man or woman! Intervene in this construction to the point of creating forms of somatic representations that are alive! Bodies as somathéques! Body punk! – the principle of the auto guinea pig, self experimentation with your hegemonic gender body! A kind of experimentation that does not have faith in representation as an exteriority that will bring truth or happiness!
Re-thinking of what you do not think. Realities as imaginations that manifest.
(Thanks to: Beatriz Preciado)
