Gender storm

What the ungendered body says about you...

You only need to read a little on the storm of controversy around Storm Witterick to realize how big a deal gender really is. And it is about 'is'. About the state and status of being. The essentials. Being real. Being true. Being unquestionable. Being absolute.

Storm Witterick was born last May to an interesting couple in Toronto. Storm's parents chose to not disclose their baby's gender to anyone outside a small, select circle. Their purpose: to allow their baby to grow up as far and as long as possible in a gender-free, or at least gender neutral, environment. Nothing more.

And then the howl of horror and protest rose up against this unconscionable 'gender experiment.' Please note. Storm's parents were doing nothing to or with their baby. Nothing beyond not disclosing the child's gender to people who had no business knowing. Nothing more.

And yet this little bit of unknowledge was intolerable in the strict binary system of heteronormativity. There are two and two only. Nothing more and nothing less. Definitely nothing less and nothing outside.

This repellent overreaction certainly reveals a lot about us. We just can't handle even the slightest challenge to the twinkle two two world of gender totalitarianism. We depend on it. And we will make the most ridiculous statements and claims and arguments to defend it. We simply can't leave a little baby alone and outside.

The non-gendered body is a creature of horror because it unconceals (yeah, that's the best way to describe it) the naked truth of the abject body. As Judith Butler says (please forgive the long quotation but I think it's necessary):

'This exclusionary matrix [the system of twos] by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet "subjects," but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject...designates here precisely those "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the "unlivable" is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject's domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which--and by virtue of which--the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, "inside" the subject as its own founding repudiation (Bodies That Matter, p. 3).'

Yup, we are terrified of the naked truth of the abject body. And a little baby becoms an object of horror along the lines of the creature in Alien.

Is that why we're so obsessed with zombies? They are the ultimate abject body...?