Anti-binary theories can align misogynists with radical feminists

Evidence

Given the advances of reproductive technologies, Burroughs hopes women will become unnecessary: ”in the words of one of a great misogynist’s plain Mr Jones, in Conrad’s Victory: ‘Women are a perfect curse.’ I think they were a basic mistake, and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error. Women are no longer essential to reproduction as this article indicates: oxford scientists reproduce frogs from single cells by Walter Sullivan” (Job 116). Interestingly, in fact, Burroughs is very close here, both in sentiment and in tone, to the thought of early second-wave radical feminists such as Valerie Solanas and Shulamith Firestone, and also to the antibinaristic theories of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. They agree that the ”whole dualistic universe” was produced by the initiation of the hierarchized gender binary, and that the elimination of this hierarchy is the precondition for universal liberation. Solanas feels exactly about men the way Burroughs does about women—their positions neatly mirror one another (Solanas’s The scum Manifesto argues for the elimination of the male gender). — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 629

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: DeKoven holds a genuinely uncomfortable structural insight — that the abolition-of-dualism argument lets a misogynist and second-wave feminists occupy identical logical ground — worth sitting with.
• XREF: Ties to any gender/feminist theory reading, particularly the shared target of binary hierarchy abstraction. — connects to: Attacking hierarchy-producing binaries actually magnified the differences they sought to erase. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 832; Firestone’s technological utopianism prefigured queer theory and cyborg feminism — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 879; Rejecting femininity cannot yield neutrality; every rejection enacts a positive position — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1921 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Rejecting femininity cannot yield neutrality; every rejection enacts a positive position #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1921