Cyberpsychosis: The Feminization of the Postbiological Body

Abstract

Despite the celebrated revolutionary potential of postmodernist approaches to gender, the spectre of biological fundamentalism continues to haunt any genuine attempt to deconstruct the binary organization of the sexes. From ‘strategic essentialism’ to ‘écriture féminine’ feminist theory has persistently sought to denature the patriarchal ideology that social roles are physiologically ordained, indicating how both men and women may access and live out the cultural behaviour deemed appropriate to the ‘opposite’ sex. Yet as a principle of social control the power of gender is tacitly reinforced rather than subverted by these symbolic reversals. This is because the ‘natural attitude’ to gender is never realistically challenged by semiotic philosophies which regard bodily sex as the essential sign of gender even when lived at odds with itself. Indeed, identities are postulated as fluid precisely to the extent that bodies are discursively positioned as immutable such that even tampering with the ‘natural order’ has the tendency to leave this dogma intact. As is well known, the candidate for sex-change surgery has to ‘perform’ their prospective gender more zealously than any so-called member of the ‘biological’ sex, thus securing the power knowledge of psycho-biologism in the very moment of its defiance.