Changed my mind, I want the next #TranspiringConsiderations to be fun and a bit trivial because I've been writing nothing but heavy stuff for a while. Which of the following sounds more fun for our next discussion?

So, um, this #TranspiringConsiderations ended up getting very long and a bit heady. I would love some feedback on this one.

What did you think of the ideas and the writing? Was it still approachable or too abstract?

So you prefer more concrete pieces, a more theoretical one like this, or both?

Are my threads getting way too long or is this still tolerable? 😅

Are people reading here or on the webpage version?

Let me know what you think!

#TranspiringConsiderations

(33/33)

In the closing pre-chorus of SOPHIE’s Immaterial, she declares the manifesto of cyborg gender:

“I could be anything I want…Anyhow, any place, anywhere, anyone...Any form, any shape, anyway, anything, anything I want.”

In claiming myself that night, I began writing a new story that does not need the one that created me. I no longer depended upon the facts or fictions they had given me. I instead began to sing of cyborg liberation.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(32/33)

From “Immaterial”:
“You could be me and I could be you”

In seizing the means of producing our embodiment for ourselves, despite being produced through the tools of the patriarchal capitalism we were born into, we have destabilized the very mythological structures and social realities that uphold this oppressive system.

Haraway says, “Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate...we could hardly hope for more potent myths of resistence and recoupling.”

#TranspiringConsiderations

(31/33)

Trans people are cyborgs, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, no afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” I have held both man and woman and more in the fiction that is told of me. And as Haraway predicts I see, “from both persepctives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable.”

#TranspiringConsiderations

(30/33)

In the common tellings of the Abrahamic mythos that dominates the Western imagination, there were no cyborgs in the Garden of Eden. Neither were there transgender people as we understand ourselves today. Fascism seeks to redeem a fallen, degenerate world by killing its way back to restoring Eden. This is why we are dangerous to it – we are outside their story writing a story they can’t comprehend or control.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(29/33)

Haraway identifies another irony: Despite being the realization of the potential of our current ideologies, it also has no reverence for them. “Immaterial” declares the immaterial girl lives “with no type of story.” Haraway argues, “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it...cannot dream of returning to dust” – the cyborg does not retell the story that birthed it. The cyborg does not seek to restore the past or achieve its father’s vision.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(28/33)

Haraway describes the cyborg as the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” – collapsing the public and private, the technological and natural, freedom from dependency on material reality and the ultimate materialization of the idealized individual.

Then why does the bridge of “Faceshopping” seemingly transcends through these contradictions and dissonances into an ethereal harmony? Why does Haraway see an agent of liberation?

#TranspiringConsiderations

(27/33)

The means of producing our bodies and selves as trans people are often held by capital – pharmaceutical companies brands on our HRT, corporate medical providers, clothing companies, social media platforms. Our public face through private hands. Yet, through the harsh dissonances and distortions, there is something exhilarating, isn’t there? A power brewing through the song on the edge of exploding.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(26/33)

This reading is reinforced by the visuals of the music video. Much of the video involves rapid contrasts of images of symbols of the organic and synthetic, commercial and personal. Sweating skin vs. Chemicals in beakers. Corporate logos vs. SOPHIE’s face. Blooming flowers and flesh. Inverted colors and manipulated CGI. All the while, an exaggerated 3D model of her face is inflated, deflated, twisted about, sliced up. A non-physical face exposed to physics.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(25/33)

When I first heard this, I couldn’t help but think about shopping *for* a face. Trans women often shop for a surgeon to perform FFS, deciding what aesthetics are important to us in our face. Are we trying to make ourselves more “real?” Are we creating something “fake” through this? Do we make ourselves more passable, or do we create a more visible queerness?

Our fiction becomes our fact becomes our fiction. We are artificial and natural. Visible and Hidden.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(24/33)

To photoshop one’s picture is a trope in discussions about how fake and deceptive advertising is. Was that instagram picture of you photoshopped to look prettier or wealthier or happier?

But for trans people, they often photoshop their picture or use faceapp to affirm their “real” selves that a picture might not show. Heck, maybe we shop our faces to be “real” in the sense of passable as a woman or man. To shop my face is both fact and fiction.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(23/33)

“I’m real when I shop my face.”

To “shop” here can have multiple meanings. It can mean to sell one’s face. It could mean to photoshop or “shop” how one’s face looks. There might also be the implication of “shopping for” one’s face.

To say one is “real” when selling oneself, there is a constant theme of attempting to seem authentic and truthful in the business of marketing oneself on social media and in creative content. The fact/fiction blurs further.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(22/33)

“My shop is the face I front.”

When people are “fronting,” we take that to mean as they are presenting a fake version of themselves. The “face I front” is the potentially inauthentic presentation I make of myself. Or, if a person is plural, it is the member of themselves that interacts with the world. We are all now in the industry of creating our own brands and selling a presentation or front of ourselves.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(21/33)

“My face is the real shop front.”

This face is also the frontend of the shop. It is what people actually see as they stroll the digital town square, deciding to spend their attention on me. Maybe it is “real” in the drag sense – a face that is selling my passable femininity.

I can’t help but also read “face” as “Facebook,” as some languages have taken to abbreviating it as such. Implying social media like Facebook is where we really do our business.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(20/33)

“My face is the front of shop”

On social media, we are often selling ourselves. Our face may literally appear in a profile picture, but we also present a “face” to the world that only represents a part of our “real” selves. My presentation of myself is the brand of whatever it is that I am presenting to the public. It is also the front of a bigger business, with a “back of shop” that the public does not see as I produce my face for them.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(19/33)

This brings me around to the dada-esque chorus of the song:
“My face is the front of shop.
My face is the real shop front.
My shop is the face I front.
I’m real when I shop my face.”

I want to look closer at each of these.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(18/33)

The reality is that cis and trans people’s bodies often share the same characteristics and properties. It is a fiction we’ve written to distinguish between bodies that deserve to exist and bodies that don’t. This is extra ironic given that the narrative of transphobic shitheads like Ben Shapiro is that it’s a “fact” that our trans bodies aren’t real. We have synthesized the real, our facts are fiction, their fictions are facts.

#TranspiringConsiderations

(17/33)

I suggest reading @Impossible_PhD’s recent piece on this topic to challenge further the way we conflate the natural and artificial dichotomy with a hierarchy that assumes “natural” cis women’s bodies are better.

https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/romancing-the-ghost-in-the-shell

#TranspiringConsiderations

(16/33)

Cis people are portrayed as natural and real. Trans people as artificial and fake. Some trans women’s breasts can be described as artificial breasts, silicon implants. Nevermind that far more cis women get breast augmentation, they are assumed to have natural boobs that are “real.” Even moreso, that many trans women’s breasts are produced by their own body through the same mechanisms as cis women thanks to HRT.