RiotLinguist on Nostr: Over the last 2-3 years I’ve been crystalizing a “transfeminist theory of ...

Over the last 2-3 years I’ve been crystalizing a “transfeminist theory of boyhood,” imma call it Masculinist Gender Futurity

General thesis goes something like:

- "boy" is not the same gender as "man"
- "woman" and "child" are not sharply distinguished (women are infantilized, children are feminized)
- but "child" and "boy" are also not sharply distinguished ("boy" is the "default" of "child")
- “(cis) man” is the “axis” around which other genders are organized
- “man" <--> "woman" are sharply distinguished
- “man" <--> "child" are sharply distinguished
- “man" <--> "boy" are sharply distinguished
- "boy" is an inherently temporally bound gender (like how “child” is a temporally bound identity) -- it is the only “gender status/identity” you are *SUPPOSED* to transition out of completely. (“Woman” never completely transitions out of “child”) This capacity to transition is what distinguishes it from “woman-child”
- the transition has to be marked by violence/pain, by the experience of violence and demonstrating the capacity to wield violence
- even more importantly the transition has to be sexualized: because “sex” and sexual practices are a key site of the production of patriarchal gender, specifically as a key practice of domination and subjugation and Self-Other reification
- “sex” is (as such) the key marker of adulthood, for all genders (even though “woman” and “child” are not sharply distinguished, the difference lies largely in the notion of “virginity” as girlhood, i.e., “maidenhead,” “pureness,” vs “wife”)
- all this taken together, “boy” is an inherently ambiguous, unstable, androgynous gender, both subjugated as a subordinate, infantilized-feminized gender group AND elevated as “future men” or “men in the making” — as such, children assigned male at birth must be trained to identify with “man” and aspire toward it, seeing younger children, girls, and eventually women (especially as they reach teenage years) as inferior, or at least feeling a strong social pressure to perform superiority to those people as a means of identifying with “man”
- for these reasons, the figure of “ the Boy” is a site of particular patriarchal anxiety
- convincing boys to disidentify with “man,” and to see cis men as their oppressors instead of through the lens of “aspiration/gender-futurity” is crucial to dismantling patriarchy
- this is strongly linked to youth liberation and dismantling aetonormativity and allonormative “sexual futurity
- this is one of the reasons why transfemininity, especially where it interacts with childhood/boyhood, is extremely threatening to patriarchy, and one of the reasons why transfemininity has to be very extremely abjected and reviled, because boys canNOT be allowed to see themselves as having (or potentially having) more in common with women (in their condition in the present as “boys,” (the temporally bound gender) than with men (gender futurity)