Queer Becomings: Deleuze and Guattari’s Critique of Static Identity Categories

In this paper I argue that trans exclusionary action from cis lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) political pundits is generated and sustained by a need for recognition by the capturing apparatus of the state, thereby conserving heterosexual familial structures and enforcing a need to identify deviant behavior. Anti-trans activists—including those who are often seen as part of the queer community—increasingly find efforts to affirm trans individuals to be a threat to static notions of gender and identity, which, as these anti-trans advocates claim, undermine attempts for integration of cis LGB individuals into the capitalist order. What I take to be at stake in the struggle for trans liberation is less a political issue than a metaphysical one, e.g., how making sexual identities visible to the state cuts off various possibilities of becoming. This paper is not meant to prescribe solutions to the problem of the lack of allyship from cis gay men and cis lesbians, but rather direct to a problem that stems from static identity categories. \n \nThe issue brought to light in this paper goes much deeper than merely debating the biology of the trans individual as current political discourse tends to follow. I am arguing that we must take a metaphysical approach to this problem—going past static notions of gender and sexuality as extant and to place in question the need for recognition politics. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it is possible to escape the traps of the political and biological (which in turn generate the terms by which trans people must justify themselves) by shaking up the notion of the static categories of sexual identities and aligning it with minoritarian transness. For the purposes of my thesis, I explore Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts, in conversation with other philosophers in the wake of May 68, to bolster a key point in the liberation of queer individuals in France. The thesis leans thus heavily on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-imperceptible, moving away from a medicalized understanding of transness–which stems from a pathologizing of transness, and in this way conditions my argument regarding the movement of trans and gay identities. Through putting Deleuze and Guattari’s work in relation to these other thinkers, I show that first, the codification of sexual desire as homosexual or non-homosexual, or desire to express a certain gender as trans or cis, has created the conditions more precisely for policing these desires; second, and going further, the more authentic desire and its ability to produce and create has been taken from our hands through the crystallization of these categories.

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