was discussing this with a friend of mine (she’s an anarchist but she actually organizes and shit). she was saying there can be no such thing as revolutionary masculinity because the two things are contradictory. but i’m a marxist so contradictions really butter my bread.

i think in a utopian, communist world gender identity would be completely different, to the point where it might not even be legible to us today, but my question is more about how we get from here to there. basically, can we men find a way to not be shitheads in such a way as to bring about communism, or does that not even make sense

feel free to dunk on me if this is a dumb question

Death to America

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      this is blatantly untrue unless you mean it in a hegemonic or ideological, and not aesthetic way. If you DO mean it in an aesthetic way than what do you think transmasc people are supposed to do? Die?

      I don’t give a shit about aesthetics, but I think it’s good to remember that MLs, too, believe in the saying that “So long as there is a state, there is no freedom, and we can only talk about ‘freedom’ existing insofar as there is no state” and yet also advocate for the creation of new states at the same time as seeking the liberation of the human race. Statehood cannot simply be abolished in one stroke, it must be systematically destroyed, and the system doing the destruction is itself a state, and that state tends towards its last action being the completion its own destruction.

      Something similar can be said for gender. There is no contradiction between holding gender as being fundamentally backwards and yet acknowledging that we live in a gendered world where people – for reasons other than having an inborn gender, as gender is socially constructed – need to cope in different ways, cis and trans identities included. Eventually, there should be no gender and therefore no cis or trans people, but that doesn’t mean telling all of humanity right now to cleanse the entirety of gender from their minds or die.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          It might be worth interrogating the connection between aesthetic values and other values, as in Society of the Spectacle in its real meaning and not the flanderized “wot if e’erywun wah jus’ wa’chin’ the telly?” version. Gender is overwhelmingly what makes what we view as gendered presentations appealing, and this is demonstrated by the way that it varies across cultural differences in what gendered presentation is. To use a very obvious example, I would fully expect wearing a skirt to make a transmasc person here and now feel potentially dysphoric, but in medieval Scotland transmasc people were generally probably quite happy to wear kilts in the situations they could get away with doing so. Why? It’s just a slightly different arrangement of cloth! Because it is a signifier for a certain position in a certain framework of social values, not just aesthetic ones.