Maleing and Femaleing — Exploring The Queer Body and its Chaos Through Process Philosophy
Why do we say “it is raining” instead of “there is rain outside”, or “is it snowing” instead of “there is snow in the air”? Rain, here, has ultimately a dual nature: as an object (a noun) and as an event (a verb). “Rain” is an object, or a ‘thing’ that exists — something you can touch and perceive through your five senses. “It rains”, however, is not something that exists. You cannot say “it rains exists”, it does not make sense. “It rains”, instead, is an event that happens.
If whenever we are in the presence of rain we claim that “it rains” and whenever we are in the presence of snow we claim that “it snows”, then why aren’t we completely justified in saying “it is mooning” instead of “look at the moon on the sky!” and “it is sunning” instead of “there is a sun on the sky”? Who decided when we should use nouns instead of verbs?
And why don’t we go as far as to say “it is chairing here” instead of “there is a chair here”? From the point of view of process philosophy, we may be tempted to say that although the latter proposition is more grammatically correct, the former is more philosophically correct. Process philosophy is a way of understanding reality as dynamic and ever-changing rather than static. In traditional metaphysics, reality is often pictured as being made up of discrete “things” or objects, each with its own stable existence and properties. However, process philosophy challenges this view by proposing that nothing truly ‘is’ in a permanent sense; instead, everything is continuously becoming, changing, and evolving.
For process philosophy, identity is secondary to difference, sameness is secondary to change and being is secondary to becoming. Why is that the reason? Because a complete metaphysics needs to take care of explaining both what is and what happens, but while the former cannot explain the latter, the latter can explain the former. It is fruitless to try to treat events, what happens, as if they are objects or things that exist. But it’s much more fruitful to treat objects as events. In our case, a chair does not exist, a chair happens. What we commonly call objects or ‘things’ are simply events that happen in the same or in a similar way over a period of time. A chair is an event or a process that happens similarly over a long period of time, such that it makes pragmatic sense to call it a chair and treat it as an object. But like all things in life, it is subject to change and decay. A tree is also an event that happens, a process in constant evolution, which starts as a seed, turns into a sapling, grows and then dies. But it changes so slowly that we can treat one of its various ‘phases’ as an individual thing for pragmatic purposes.
Events, thus, cannot be thought of as objects that exist, but objects can be thought of as events that happen. The whole of reality is then made up of ‘happenings’ rather than of beings. Can’t we apply the same logic to the chaotic nature of our bodies? A human body is not simply a collection of parts that we call ‘organs’: that would make up a cadaver, not a living body. A body also requires a collection of happenings, of events that take place within it: the beating of the heart, the pumping of blood through veins and arteries, the digestion of food, the absorption and metabolization of nutrients, etc. It does not make any sense to treat, for example, the beating of a heart as a thing that exists, as an organ that is part of the body. It is an event that can only occur through time. Organs are thought to exist outside time, events insist or inhere through time. But why can’t we go far enough to treat all parts of the body as events that happen? If the beating of a heart is an event that happens through time, and the flowing of blood through veins is another event that happens through time, what if the heart and the veins are also events that happen through time, but that just happen to happen in a very similar way over a period of time that they give the illusion of stability? In other words, there is no heart in your body, instead your body is “heart-ing”, it’s just hearting in the same way over a period of time that it gives the illusion that you have a heart.
This gives a whole new spin to Deleuze’s notion of “the body without organs”. Deleuze and Guattari say that “The Body-without-Organs is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit”¹. Perhaps all bodies are in the end bodies without organs. The BwO does not exist, it rather insists or inheres, it is the pure event, the sense expressed in a proposition. In Anti-Oedipus, D&G characterize the body without organs as anti-productive, as a wrench in the system, that which goes wrong in a set of processes: “the body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced”². To modify Deleuze’s notion, we can reinterpret the BwO not as something “anti-productive” in the sense of being inert or resistant to the processes it interacts with, but as the dynamic interplay of processes that refuses to crystallize into stable, enduring identities.
In this light, a body is not a sum of its organs but a field of overlapping processes that happen in contingent and sometimes chaotic ways. For instance, digestion is not merely the “work” of the stomach but the interplay of enzymes, bacteria, muscle contractions, and chemical transformations — a constellation of events that collectively “digest.” The stomach, like the chair mentioned earlier, is not a static thing but a long-duration process we pragmatically treat as an organ. Thus, the BwO becomes the body understood as pure process, stripped of the illusion of stability imposed by language, medical diagrams, or mechanistic models.
Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the BwO is something we approach asymptotically — it is never fully realized but always being constructed. In the context of process philosophy, this makes perfect sense: we can never fully strip the body of its apparent stability because perception itself is bound by pragmatic needs. Language and thought inevitably impose patterns on chaos, creating the illusion of organs as discrete, independent entities. Yet, by thinking of the body as an event, we dissolve this illusion and recognize the flux and mutability that define life itself.
I do not have a liver, instead my body is livering, I do not have two kidneys, instead my body is kidneying in two zones, and I do not have arms and legs, instead my body is arming and legging constantly. And why don’t we go far enough with this notion in our understanding of biological sex? What if biological sex is not a distinction between what body parts one possess, but instead of what processes run through one’s body, in the same way that various ‘processes’ are running simultaneously in task manager when you CTRL+ALT+DEL on a Windows computer?
There are no males and females because there are no ‘somethings’, period. There are bodies which are maleing and femaleing instead. And what if a body can be maleing and femaleing at the same time in various ways, where what we consider as a “male”, for example, is simply a body which is maleing more than is femaleing?
This correction is indeed next to useless when we are dealing with 99% of situations. For about 99% of situations in life, saying that there are only two biological sexes that everyone fits in is pragmatically useful enough. We can compare the biological model of two sexes to Newton’s equations in physics. Once upon a time, we thought that Netwon’s equations were correct. Modern physics proved them wrong. To this day, our current understanding is that Newton’s equations are incorrect. However, in 99% of situations, when we are dealing with regular-sized objects, Newton’s equations are still useful because they give an extremely good approximation of reality. The error caused by Newton’s equations for regular-sized objects is incredibly small that it’s negligible. It is only when we’re dealing with subatomic particles or planets and stars that Newton’s equations stop working. Similarly enough, we can view the “there are only two sexes, male and female” biological model as Newton’s equations. Incredibly useful in science for 99% of situations (for example, when a scientist wants to test a new medicine and wants to see whether it affects males and females differently), but still technically wrong. And I am not talking about gender here, I am talking about biological sex, because the debate about gender is simply boring and uninteresting to me. If you ask 10 different people what gender is, you’ll get 20 different answers. The debate about sex is more interesting since it deals with the body, with the material reality we live in, not with abstract ideas.
The next step in the rejection of the view that there are only two sexes would be to suggest that biological sex is a spectrum with a bimodal distribution, with male on one end and female on the other end and with intersex people and transgender people in the middle of transitioning being placed somewhere in the middle. But this view is also incomplete, since it implies that maleness and femaleness are opposites. They are different, but not opposites. It’s almost as if the more male you are, the less female you are, as if you gain one ‘point’ of maleness by losing one point of femaleness. But this is absurd. Viewing sex as a spectrum still treats sex as a binary category, because the two poles of that spectrum are defined by the pre-existing binary.
Instead, we should view sex as a rhizome. A spectrum only goes in two directions: left and right, male and female. A rhizome goes in all directions. A rhizome is an interconnected web without a beginning and end.
This philosophy does away with all being and turns instead to becoming. Since the human body is subject to change and evolution, it is also subject to becoming. For example, if I change my diet and because of the diet, my body starts producing less testosterone, I can say that I am becoming-female for a very short period of time. Not that I am female, but I am becoming one. If I change my diet again such that I produce more testosterone, I am becoming-male for a very short period of time in a very small way as well. And these two events can occur simultaneously, perhaps a change in my diet can cause my body to become more female-like in some ways and more male-like in other ways. This is why there is no spectrum here, no direction, male and female are not opposites. And if I start taking steroids, then I am neither male-to-female, nor female-to-male, I am male-to-alpha-male. These effects are negligible enough to be ignored, but in the case of a transgender person actively taking estrogen or testosterone to change their body such that it matches their gender identity better, they are noticeable enough to be taken into consideration. They are neither male or female, no one is male or female, instead their body is maleing and femaleing at the same time, and the proportion of estrogen and testosterone will make their body start maleing and femaleing in different ways and proportions than before.
This view of reality as fluid and ever-changing, in a continuous process of becoming, should not be limited to our analysis of the body. It should also be applied to our analysis of language and meaning in the very debates about transgender issues. Who is to say that a statement has a fixed and stable meaning? The meaning of a word changes through time. We shall do away with all models of language based on representation. The ‘standard’ way to view language is that I have a fixed idea in my head, I use a word to describe it, and then that word should implant the same idea in your head. Nothing new is created here, it is only a repetition of the old, of the same. What if the purpose of language is not to describe reality, but to change it? Language is a call to action, and desire is the active imposition of one’s will on the world.
When I tell my lover “I love you”, the meaning of love here is not static and fixed, what that statement meant at the beginning of the relationship is not the same as what it means today and what it will mean tomorrow, and the meaning of a past statement can be retroactively reinterpreted by future events. The sense of a proposition, however, is not something that exists, it rather “subsists or insists”³, according to Deleuze. Sense is the pure event, what happens to the proposition when it is expressed. Deleuze makes clear that sense is a “surface effect”⁴, it does not reach for the heights of heaven or the depths of hell. The meaning of a statement is not in the heights, up in the sky, like in the realm of the Platonic forms. Nor is it in the “depths”, like the essences behind appearances. Instead, it is in the surface interaction between signifiers.
When I tell someone “I love you” during a passionate moment in sex, it would be ridiculous and it would ruin the moment to ask “but what do you mean when you say love here?”. The statement is an expression of desire, a call to action, and a revelation of emotion all at the same time. The meaning is not in the “depths”, hidden behind appearances. It is in the appearances themselves, the raw emotion that inheres and subsists in the statement. We should apply a similar logic to an expression of identities. When a transgender person says “I am a man” or “I am a woman” or “I am neither a man nor a woman”, our first instinct very often is to ask ourselves “But what do you mean by that, what does it actually mean to not feel like a man nor a woman?”. But this is the wrong approach. Identification with an image is an expression of raw desire, a pure passion taking effect through language, like a moan or a grunt during sex. The statement “I am a woman” is like a moan. We would not ask ourselves what a moan means. Or, consider the situation in which you have an argument with someone and become so angry that you start shouting at them and calling them names: is your aim there really to most efficiently communicate a rational idea from your mind to the other person? I would argue not. The moment you lose your temper and start calling people names, language is not used for the purpose of the transfer of ideas (“signifieds”), but for expression, kind of like an artist expressing themselves through painting or music not to communicate ideas in a mathematical way but to convey a feeling.
Then why should we ask what someone means when they say they feel like a woman? What if that statement is like a moan or grunt during sex, or like a shout during a fight? We often think to ourselves “they feel like ‘what’ exactly?, because if a woman is simply someone who identifies as such, then we are told that the definition is circular”. But circularity is the mark of the death drive, the endless repetition and return of difference. All definitions are circular in the end: look up any word you want in the dictionary, its definition will be made up of other words. Those other words have definition that are made up of even more words, and if you keep looking up the definition of every word that the previous definition is made up of, you will inevitably end up in a loop.
What this implies, then, is that language cannot be devolved from affect, from emotion. Therefore, when people ask “What is a woman?” the only correct response must be sarcastic and caustic, to match the energy of the other person, to respond to an emotion with the same emotion. The only correct answer to “What is a woman?” is “a featherless biped”.
What we have to remember therefore is that nothing is. Whenever someone starts a sentence with “I am…”, treat it as metaphorical. I am not a philosopher, I do philosophy. I am not a coder, I write code. I am not a writer, I write. There are no students, there are only people who study. There are no teachers, only people who teach, no doctors, only people who heal. There are no singers, only people who sing and no gamers, only people who play video games.
Similarly enough, there are no men and women, only bodies who are ‘maleing’ and ‘femaleing’. This philosophy does away with all identities, be they cisgender, transgender or intersex. There are no people who exist, only events that happen. When progressives complain that conservatives do not affirm or validate transgender identities, our response should be to not affirm or validate cisgender identities either. Jacques Lacan once said that “a beggar who thinks himself a king is surely mad, but a king who thinks that he’s a king is just as mad”. Couldn’t we also say that “a man who believes he is a woman is surely mad, but a woman that believes she is a woman is just as mad”?
This is the philosophy of difference. The purpose of this article is not to make things clear, but to make them even more confusing; to force you to think. This article is successful if it gave you an ego death. The point of philosophy is not to appeal to our common sense, that would be a philosophy of ‘sameness’ where it would simply repeat what we already knew about the world. The point of philosophy is to cause change. Good philosophy provokes, challenges, disturbs and shakes things up. It does not leave things where they already were. Philosophy must be the equivalent of a good LSD trip. Like Deleuze suggests in his collaboration with Guattari “What is Philosophy?”, good philosophy is not supposed to be true, but to be interesting.
“There is no sink here,
There is only sinking.
There are no dumb people,
There is only thinking.
It is not fall now,
There is only falling.
There are no bugs here,
There is only crawling.
There is no flying
In the house of flies.
I am not crying
Through my teary-eyes.
There are no dogs there,
There is only barking.
In the very loud park
There’s no single parking.
The world goes dark now,
It is very frightening
Because there is no light,
There is only lightning.
The world is fluid like honey,
It is very strange.
There is no single money,
There is only change.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —-
REFERENCES:
1: Deleuze & Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus”, p. 150
2: Deleuze & Guattari, “Anti-Oedipus”, p. 8
3: Gilles Deleuze, “The Logic of Sense”, p. 21
4: ibid., p. 70
