Queer Becomings: Deleuze and Guattari’s Critique of Static Identity Categories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.089 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".