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ON 'THE SEXUAL IS POLITICAL' A REPLY TO SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK’S REMARKS ON 'TRANSGENDERISM'
Lecture performance |
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On 'The Sexual is Political', video documentation of the lecture performance at
AMOQA (53 min) >> |
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This lecture performance is a reply to Slavoj Žižek’s
essay
'The Sexual
is Political', in which the Slovenian philosopher expresses
a clear anti-transgender attitude, connecting so-called ‘transgenderism’ with
capitalist political forces and a misunderstanding of basic human sexual
antagonism. I show in my text, both from a personal and philosophical point of
view, where Žižek basically fails and expresses a severe lack of knowledge
regarding this subject. As such the lecture is also a fundamental criticism of
Jacques Lacan’s heteronormative logic of the sexes. Besides it
points out that the rejection of transgender rights, as more or less openly
advocated by Slavoj Žižek in his essay, favours a society that is based on traditional values, patriarchal logic and a
binary gender code, which inevitably results in the maintenance of an
inequality between the sexes and a continuing underprivileged status not only
for sexual minorities as transgender persons currently may be, but in the very
first place for women on a whole scale and in every social field – which usually
is accompanied with other forms of discrimination along lines of ‘race’, ‘class’
etc. as well as the exploitation of second and third world countries. As such
Žižek's essay is exposed as the expression of a deeply
patricharchal point of view based on a male fear of loss of power – or
castration fear – which Zizek himself attests to transgender people as the true
source of their sexual identy problem.
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