Language itself is mobilized to exterminate that which does not feel neatly into the narrow categories delineated within cisness, to which the only alternative must be constant refusal.

Bey ’22 [Marqius Bey, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University; “Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender”; Duke University Press; 08-2022; doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2rr3g52; accessed via University of Michigan libraries, 07-17-2024] dliang

What I wish for deeply is something we don’t have yet that might emerge from a failure to inherit the lineage bestowed upon us. That which might emerge if we manage to cultivate a conditional refusal of cis alignment and the violences therein, the thing that emerges when its condition of possibility is a constant refusal of what has come to be coercively demanded of us. The question that presents itself to us, in this initial moment, is why? Why do such a thing, why fail to inherit what we are told is our birthright, why give up that which gives us over to the world as the powerful, competent beasts we quite vigorously want to be, be, be?

What is gained from this failure is another kind of life to be lived that does not require a constant murder of emergent subjectivities that do not fit. Too, what is gained is a different groove for us to trek along and to step to, a groove that references a relation between us on grounds more hospitable, loving, open, vulnerable, proliferative. To fail at our inheritance is to spit in our ancestors’ faces, and I want the spit to be venomous. There is much talk, albeit from a diferent kind of lineage, about venerating our ancestors, acknowledging how those before us have enabled our life. And I love those ancestors. We have, though, a hefty genealogy of ancestors, as some of them are the drunk uncle who fucked up the planet for us, the shady cousin who gave us nudie magazines in our youth, the violent brother who used to hit us when mom’s back was turned, the stepdad who told us that no one would ever, ever love us if we did not dominate, did not win, did not kill, did not devour the lot of weaklings in our path. Those ancestors cannot continue to hold sway in how our world unfolds. They cannot be forgotten, I know; they cannot be disowned as if they did not place their grubby hands on the soil on which we try to walk. They can, though, be disavowed: declared invalid, recalled, refused to be associated with. They have given us something they felt sacred. Some of it we do not want, and dare not retain, for what they’ve given us is deadly.

Inasmuch as I have been given this side as my own birthright and have been understood as having not given that up, I am uniquely called to task. What I have been called to task on is how I take my own strides, how my own subjectivity bears on my thinking. It is often an indictment, one I need, one that refuses to let me of the hook. Are you, they ask, blowing up your Narnia? Far from simply saying Yes, digging my heels into my self-identification as a feminist—a weak-ass move if there ever was one, using identificatory proclamation in lieu of putting in the radical work of undoing one’s subjectivity and agitating, via myriad means, for sociopolitical devastation—what I am indicted for is any trace of enjoying the fruits of what is often shallowly called privilege garnered by how my gender is read. What I am tasked with, then, is an unbecoming. That unbecoming is being called another name, a name that I timidly find myself enlivened by. In some circles the name is queer, in others trans. But sometimes I cannot lay claim to these names. And, some other times, they are the only names I ever want to call myself even if no one has ever called me them.

remember when vines were a thing? Short clips of often humorous and instantly quotable occurrences in everyday people’s lives. I’ve grown to appreciate them more as I’ve gotten older, having on multiple occasions fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole of Vine after Vine. There is one that always gets me. A child in a field saturated with the squawks of moderately sized white birds. We call these birds “geese.” The camera scans the field’s avian serenity and lands on the child’s face, staring intently at the birds, then up to the sky at the flying birds we also call geese. But the child does not call these birds geese. “Look over there, look over there,” the child tells the person holding the camera. And then, with a flourish of the hand, the child says it, the phrase that went viral.

Look at all those chickens!

The kicker is that the birds were not chickens; they were geese. But the child was so sure, so confident that they were chickens. And perhaps the child, who could have been no more than five, was not “mistaken” per se but had only one word for winged, feathery, flying creatures: chickens. When you have inadequate language for a phenomenon you rely on what you have, paltry as it may be. If unchecked, you might become adamant, maybe even violent, about there being only chickens. There are no other birds. I’ve been calling them chickens my whole life. What are geese?

Paltry language is not merely a shoulder-shrugging “Oh, well, this is all we have”; linguistic scarcity is emplotted. We have no language for something oftentimes because the existing language claims that it is the only language there could and should be. Language, as Barthes would have it, is fascistic. To be possible in the world is, in some ways, to be given language through which to emerge. I know who you are because I know what to call you, and thus the rules and regulations for relating to you. I call you chicken, because that is the name for someone like you, and there are no other names for someone like you. And even if you look a bit of, like a weird chicken, all there are are chickens, so you are not a goose but a defective chicken. Which means you are a wrong chicken, not a right goose. The language and names at hand amount to coercive laws, Barthes writes, laws that permit communication . . . but in exchange (or on the other hand) impose a way of being, a subjecthood, a subjectivity on one: under the weight of syntax, one must be this very subject and not another.1 Be a chicken, or else. If I see “geese,” which are not a thing, I will exterminate them. Because geese will threaten the existence of chickens, which are all there are. Be chickens because you can be nothing else. Or, be chickens or I will make sure that you can be nothing else.

What happens when we (think we) only have two words for what people, and nonhuman animals, are? We encounter human geese but so quickly, so confidently, call them chickens, and maybe hens. And that is all. You aren’t a chicken? Then what are you? You are a winged, feathery, flying creature, therefore you are a chicken. There are no other kinds of birds. Just chickens. Goose is made up, a defiance in the face of nature. My taxonomy is natural law; here in Narnia we only have lions and witches and fauns. Humans? Mythical.

And yet humans there are.

Identity failed me. . . . I have been traversing the sunless territory of non-identity.—Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

Cistem failure does not have an identifiable look. I mean, one cannot read on another the failure of the cistem, as such would in fact undermine the aim, partly: that one cannot make recourse to the identifiable body as revealing, transparently, the gender or nongender of that body. The blowing up of Narnia and its attending cisnormative assumptions— that all bodies are and will only ever be cis, the transing of bodies and surgical interventions confirming gender subjectivity mere ruses papering over immutable hardware—results in the radical fracturing of how we come to mean in relation to one another. It opens up another possible world. Where I want to go is someplace else, ambling about in the remains of cut up men through a shadowy radical feminism enthralled with murky modes of undoing, unbecoming, and violating.2 Where I want to go is the place where identity fails and we traverse Woolf ’s sun- less territory of non-identity because that right there, with its non-ness, its un-ness, is the start of blowing stuff up in the magical land of Narnia.

Having no identity, things then get epically, beautifully, generatively weird. Dionne Brand said something once that messed me up, gloriously:

And then there was one, another woman who did not want to be in the world, or the world she was dragged into, who noticed right away the fatal harm but who gave birth to a woman who wanted to be in the world true and absolutely whole and therefore lived with ghosts since that world could not happen yet. . . . These two women even when they gave birth to men the men were women. That is. They were undone by something or other and lay on apartment floors gurgling up some exhaustion with masculinity or killed that exhaustion in some violent Greyhound flight from Miami to New York.3

The woman of whom she speaks is a woman who might not be a woman, “woman” being the closest approximation to that minoritarian force implicatory of an evacuation of racialized gendered normativity. This woman, no doubt for Brand a woman colliding with blackness, does not wish to be in the world because the world cannot hold her. She was thrown, dragged into the world when she did not and could not inhabit the world on terms of her own precisely because those terms would render the destruction of the world. Those terms are unworldly terms. She is “she,” she is a “woman,” only because those are what the world has given to her, but she is more eruptive than that, and if that subjective eruption were to be permitted she would not be a being in this world. Those are what she was given in order to inhabit, and to be allowed to remain uncritiqued in, the Narnia into which she was thrown, dragged. Narnia demanded either he or she. The ghosts the woman birthed by the other woman were haunted by are specters of worlds outside of Narnia. They bespeak a world that has not yet happened because Narnia has stanched its actualization, for Narnia does not wish its own demise. The ghosts were futuristic traces of the ash of Narnia. And those ghosts were surely present when the women gave birth to men who were also women, because those men were surely black and could not be, did not wish to be, the kinds of men the world demanded they be. So, they were women, expressions of a kind of detonated first tier of Narnia, with innumerable tiers to go, but at least one is down. These men who were women strike me as illustrious possibilities, maybe even kin to me, my siblings, as maybe, if I could count myself worthy enough, we all came from the same womb. These men who were women gurgled up their exhaustion with cis masculinity, as I try to do; they came into the world via that exhaustion, as I hope to do. They live at the precipice of the end of Narnia’s reign.

The aim is not just for men to “become” women. (I think “women” should also be in quotes. . . .) I do not want to become a woman; that, to me, is not what gendered liberation looks like, nor is it what must occur for me to “be” trans. “Woman,” categorically, is also a violence. Not of the same register and tenor of “man,” sure, but a violence nonetheless. In my younger years, when I, naïvely, thought to myself that maybe life would be better as not a girl, but, not a boy, I was reaching for something else. But maybe all I had then was a hope that “the other” gender would not constrict my airways as much, or would constrict them differently, a difference that would be welcomed if only because it might tap other pathways that might feel gentler. But now, in not wanting to be a man, not wanting to bound about the world launching masculinity’s archive ahead of me, I neither want to be a woman nor to proliferate, necessarily, femininity. I am certainly, by most metrics, not feminine. (Perhaps the issue is with metrics themselves?) At least not corporeally or sartorially. Though I suspect there might be a realm in which femininity treads that is not simply about the visual, a realm inclusive of other modalities of relation. But that’s the thing: Why must I be a gender? Must I be woman, feminine, if not man, masculine? If I assert another posture for my body and extra-/nonbody, will it inevitably be inducted into the closest category we have? It feels like I am in pursuit of becoming something else entirely by seeking, first, now, to be nobody. And that requires no spectacular alteration, it requires no passing of a threshold in order to enter into valid unterrain. I wish not to be anybody, really, for to be somebody is subject to the extant registers that cannot hold breadth. While being nobody—not yet a blown up somebody but perhaps a somebody with ticking timebombs strapped to it, impending doom lived ebulliently—I’m chillin’ with ghosts and specters who, too, are nobodies, having no gender because they never lived and were not subject to this world’s grammars, and thus never really died either.4 I would like some other kind of being, ungendered or nongendered or too enthralled with something else there is no time to consider gender. And I would like to not have to die to get there. Or maybe I must die to get there. And then I’ll finally be able to live.

the conflagratory language I use to denote the dismantling of cis genders might belie my intentions, both that of how cisness happens via accrual as well as that of how blowing things up can be read along masculinist lines. I am sorry for this, I am. And I hope such a slippage is permitted if only because, as I see it, the demise of the gargantuan citadel that is alignment with the gender binary is helpfully understood in language that evokes the spectacular. But, really, it is a tiny, quotidian accrual that makes cis genders so inviolable. It happens and happens, in small gestures and moments, in quiet and timid events. Almost imperceptible at times, natural and normal at other times. This is how it works so well. If we don’t notice something is happening we cannot say that something has happened, only that this is how it is, nothing happened, in fact, it just is, was, and always will be. Such is its strength, its longevity. How sneaky it is, creeping along the sides of walls.