Philosapho of Me

If we imagine the individual human as the locus of all meaning and authority, then from hir springs agency, and from within that agency s/he asserts itself. One organizing method or mechanism of this agency is, of course, temporality, but also gender, which s/he, from birth, is urged to associate to h/is genitals: if the agent displays a penis, he is masculine; if the agent displays no penis, she is female, and can, in light of the appearance of the male’s genitals, assume hers has been castrated, and she therefore lacks. Equipped, therefore, with agency and a penis, the male who is acculturated into Western ideology will become a man. A female who is acculturated into Western ideology will believe herself less than man: woman. She will see the phallic male and, according to the rules of Western ideology, she will know that the only way to truly gain the phallus is to become the mother of a son, whose penis she can acculturate to Western ideology and thereby gain the phallus to amend the lack (she never had). This complex game of “gain the phallus” works, of course, to man’s favor, because he can enjoy sexual intercourse with women (and men), but the added bonus of fucking a woman is that the women sometimes produces offspring that carry man’s impeccable (if he does say so himself) genes and, likely, his way of thinking about life. The female aspires to mother a boy child, and so she entertains whatever he does in order to have one, but she also receives pleasure from fucking, which is an instantly gratifying way to gain the phallus, if only temporarily. Persons choosing to step outside of the game of Western Ideology will no longer wish to gain the phallus, because the phallus exists only in simulacrum, an engorged, always-throbbing penis, superhuman (supermensch) in its performance strength and endurance and capable of producing offspring. Those persons outside of Western ideology participate in life by an entirely different set of rules, rules which sometimes overlap those of the Western world but often do not. Part of being in the “queer” zone outside of Western ideology is enjoying the freedom to express agency outside of gender. This expression can take the (per)form(ance) of anything the agent wishes or it can choose no(t to per)form.