“I am not out of the language that structures me, but I am not determined by the language that makes this self possible.” In this phrase, Judith Butler makes clear her position regarding gender: there is no “I” impervious to discursive norms, but we are not mere passive containers of them. That tension between the individual and the structural guide the performatic conference Masculinities cyborg, That the Chilean writer and journalist Cristian Alarcón (La Unión, 55 years) offered on Monday night in Madrid, that part of his own biography to illustrate how social norms impact the construction of gender identity. Something that also recently developed in his play Testosterone, where he staged his research on how hormones were injected into homosexual children when considered a disorder.
During the conference, registered in the cycle Talks with heightan activity of the 21 Districts of the Madrid City Council held in the Lencloa Lighthouse, Alarcón displays a genealogy of body discipline marked by the sensitive, the biographical and the political. To sustain his story, he invokes a theoretical framework that accompanies him and power: Jacques Rancière, when he speaks of a “sensitivity policy” inscribed in his family photographs; Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, when the future thinks not as a linear progress, but as a future, a promise in construction that enables other ways to inhabit the body and time.
With this framework in mind, Alarcón enters the concrete of his biography, focusing on the episodes of childhood that illustrate how body obedience is forged before any medical intervention. First remember any afternoon: “I stayed in my parents’ room. The idea came with a pleasure that moved my whole body. How would that mom’s long nightgown stay? He shouted me as if he had seen something worse than everything he had seen in his life. ”
The immediate sequence highlights the structure that regulates the body: “It hit me with a metal spoon. He hits my head and makes me land.
The violence that impacts its way of externalizing is the first episode of what Alarcón calls “early programming”: a mechanism that records the mandate to obey before any discursive explanation. Shortly after, the explicit intervention comes: “I was injected with testosterone to masculinize for two years, at least eight times. It was not only an injection. It was an epistemic modification.” With a precision describes that clinic where the first hormonal applications occurred: “In a celestial, square room, it is like a pool to which they have emptied of water a long time ago. And I feel the smell of sulfur, that smell of devil, to cleaning, to experiment, to laboratory. They nail the needle into my body.”
Thus, Alarcón articulates his chronicle performatic: shows how the intimate and routine (a child who plays, a blow, an injection) reflects “the structure”, that network of norms cisheteropatriarcales that defines what bodies can exist and how. “Early program occurs long before the body enters a medical room. It occurs with everyday gestures, with the looks they control, with the silences that weigh more than the screams,” he explains.
Alarcón points out that, after the injections, the voice he acquired was no longer that of a child under punishment: “Testosterone gave me a voice that I like … It enables me a way of being, but also a way of not being questioned.” For him, this functions as a passport in labor areas dominated by men ciswhere a “stumble”, in regards to hegemonic masculinity, could imply an immediate question. In this sense, the testosteronic voice opened spaces in factories or workshops: “The factory admits doubts: you have to endure the machine and the partner that says: What’s wrong with you, loose?”
Despite recognizing that its masculinity is “a surface surgery that never reached the deepest layers of desire,” Alarcón now claims it as an expression that is not based on control and that is allowed to break it with each gesture and act that comes out of what is expected of it. “The not domesticated was vibrating. It became a rest, weak signal, interference. There my Cyborg masculinity is installed,” he says.
The body image cyborg It synthesizes the Butlerian idea that gender is not a monolithic block, since it contains cracks that allow the emergence of other codes. The concrete (the voice, the posture, the physical reactions) dialogues with the normative structure until generating a subject capable of questioning its own genealogy.
For Alarcón, the same testosterone that in his childhood worked as a control instrument, today provides trans people the possibility of exploring and affirming their identities. “Some transition to a hegemonic masculinity; others use that dose to touch the edge of the non -binary, to say ‘I do not enter their boxes,” he concludes.