GenderCraft
This essay is an introduction to a series called GenderCraft discussing how beliefs form in society
When virtually the whole of a society, including supposedly thoughtful, educated, intelligent persons, commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather, it is ideology. And ideology is impossible for anyone to analyze rationally who remains trapped on its terrain.
Barbara Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
During the past few years I’ve found myself perpetually slack-jawed, watching the “thoughtful, educated, intelligent persons” that surround me descend into what seemed to me obvious absurdity. Sentences were constructed with the words “gender” or “gender identity” that, more often than not, made zero rational sense. This is a weird experience to have, to feel such a major ideological slippage occur between yourself and your peers in real time. How does something like this occur?
I’ve been looking for a little project to motivate some steady writing and this question seems like a useful vehicle. If beliefs about “gender identity”, like race, are “not hallucination or delusion… it is ideology”, how does one understand it on those terms? The tendency all too often is to explore ideology and its manifestation in terms of simple narratives: a story about the invention of a belief, its spread and adoption, and a closing chapter explaining how that belief shapes events and behaviors. Of this impulse amongst historians of race and slavery in the US, Fields writes: it’s "as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.” This privileging of easily consumable narratives (white supremacy) over more material analyses leaves us with a poorer understanding of the world.
Crafting Gender
In the same way that ideology isn’t simply untethered ideas floating around spreading through the masses, it’s also not just the economy, or just politics, or just biology, or just any other one thing. It can’t be meaningfully understood as a causal chain of events playing out one after the other. Gender Identity is like a face carved by time on the side of a mountain. It’s a form shaped by countless indifferent rainstorms and snow melts from which a face finally emerges through an act of human imagination.
To comprehend where the face came from, it’s best to take ourselves outside the stream of time. It’s more fruitful to look at the rainstorms and snow melts, not as discrete events to be accounted for, but as prevalent or recurring phenomenon, forces that are always acting on the world in specific ways. Instead of asking why some people saw that one face on that one mountain, it’s much more useful to explore the general human tendency to see faces in things - whether it be clouds, shadows, ketchup stains and stone.
Racecraft, as described by the Fields sisters, is the societal reflex of explaining racism as a function of something called race. Race is an invented tool, a mystical belief about groups adopt in order to facilitate seemingly rational explanations of the socio-economic arrangements we see around us. So where does the belief in the concept of gender identity come from? What is the societal process, the “gendercraft”, that produces it and what is it meant to explain?
I’m planning to explore this in a series of essays I’ll be publishing over the next few months. What kind of society - it’s economy, it’s politics, its technology, its civilizational artifacts - creates the vague features of this conceptual abstraction. What about the human primate - its habits of mind, its social practices, its relation to the political economy - predisposes it to “see” gender identity in the shadows of society’s current social arrangements.
I’ll be editing this introduction to add links to all the pieces as they go up; starting here:
In Search of the Gendered Soul
In this piece I discuss how believing in Gender Identity, and all it implies socially and medically, is a mysticism that is based in and mirrors the common and strongly held belief in an immaterial essence within each of us - Mind/Body Dualism.
The Spectacle of Gender
I use philosopher Guy Debord's abstraction of "The Spectacle" to try and explain one of the ways that, in our modern society, mass ideological alignment emerges around something as bizarre as Gender Identity.
Riding the Gender Bubble
Gender hysteria lives at the nexus of an economic, social, and political bubble - in this piece I talk about how sustaining the mysticism relies on making us hyper-invested in the benefit of the moment to blind us to the catastrophic harms in the future
Immiserate, Medicate, Replicate
An exploration of the psychiatric symptom as an emergent societal phenomenon. A symptom which is then reified and made into a concrete essence by the structure of the psycho-medical industry and our collective credulity to it.
P.S. If you have thoughts about any of these pieces, the ideas (in terms of details or the big picture) or the writing (from small mistakes to critiques of style) I’d be grateful for any feedback. I would love nothing more than for writing to be a participatory project and that all pieces are ever evolving in both substance and style. Leave a comment or get in touch some other way.