Throughout my exploration, one of the many things I learned was that the internet is a wonderful forum for gender expression (and queer porn but mostly, gender expression). The use of technology in looking at gender is called postgenderism.  It is defined by George Dvorsky and Dr. James Hughes as “an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological, and social role of gender” (1).  Moreover, it is an argument for why the erosion of the gender binary will be liberating.  Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential and the human body itself.  Online sex/gender fluidity is one of the many technologies that erode the binary.  It is a resource in which like bodied individuals can discuss their identities openly and honestly.  Not only is it positive for those who identify as gender queer, but all of us who, no matter how “normative” we may appear, struggle with gender identity and presentation. 

On a personal note, my own tumblr was the first venue in which I openly addressed my own body declaration and my sexuality.  So fuck yeah, internet! Thanks for giving us a place to voice our identities!

Despite society’s refusal to recognize that sexual desire does not exist only between a self that is gendered feminine and one that is gendered masculine, it is possible to take possession of your body through sexuality.  As Susan Stryker writes, “Sexuality is analytically distinct from gender but intimately bound with it, like two lines on a graph that have to intersect” (16).  Sexual relations are another way in which to establish differential gender categories and transcend gender itself.  To examine sexuality and the gender queer body, I turned to pornography which has not always been seen as a positive force within the feminist community.  However, views are shifting.  In her article, “The Necessary Revolution: Sex-Positive Feminism in the Post-Barnard Era,” Carol Queen explains her view of sex-positivism.  She states:

It’s the cultural philosophy that understands sexuality as a potentially positive force in one’s life, and it can, of course, be contrasted with sex-negativity, which sees sex as problematic, disruptive, dangerous. Sex-positivity allows for and in fact celebrates sexual diversity, differing desires and relationships structures, and individual choices based on consent (2008).

Much like the productive power discussing in regards of gender, sexuality can assume the same type of autonomy over the body.  Jiz Lee, a revolutionary gender queer performance artist and porn star, believes that porn and radical sex is activism, especially for people of marginalized communities, where creating their own images and media representation is critical.

As those who transcend gender norms continue to find androgynous to be a troublesome term, another has emerged in its place.  Emerging in 1990s as a positive term formerly used as a homophobic slur, the word queer became a new kind of unabashedly “pro-gay, nonseperatist, antiassimilationist alliance politics,” according to Susan Stryker in her book, Transgender History (134).  Without denying that that gender systems produce oppressive inequalities for those who fall outside of the binary, the new use of queer focuses on gender’s productive power.  This idea draws from Foucault’s theory that social power is decentralized and distributed rather than flowing from a single source.  Each of us has a certain power over our situations and our bodies.  It re-imagines gender as a ‘network of power’ in which we can express ourselves and work within (128).  Queer is rebellion.  It is just as much a political orientation as a way of describing gender and sexuality (20).  The queer body is a body that resists gender norms.  Those who identify as genderqueer may think of themselves as being both man and woman, as being neither, or as falling completely outside the binary.  Most importantly, they embrace productive power and gender autarky over their own bodies.

Before we can relate gender to our bodies, we must first discover how we convey gender to others.  In her work Performative Acts and Gender Construction,  Judith Butler writes that all gender is produced through performance.  Gender, she writes, is no way a stable identity or locus of agency which various acts proceed.  It is, instead, an identity that is continually formed in time.  That is to say that the body is never static, perpetually in transition.  “Gender is instituted through the stylization of the body itself, therefore, must be understood by the way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self,” she writes (901).  Gender is not passively scripted onto our body, rather, it is what we put on.  There is nothing about a gender binary system that is a given which in itself is erodes the very idea of a fixed gender system.