male DJs with female names
some things i would like to posit before i attempt the real project of this essay:
i.the tautology "trans women are women'' participates in the generation of a critical perspective whose (unintentional) effect is to reproduce the binary opposition of realness and artifice, as naturally the vigorous assertion that trans women are women (borne out of a sense of political and rhetorical necessity) is also the assertion that trans women are actual women, that for measurable, qualitative reasons they belong to the real and definable category of womanhood. however, the attendant reproduction of the negative, unnamed category of the artificial, the false woman, which goes unconstructed but implicit in such discourses, reinscribes the notion of gender as a group of categories to which one belongs by virtue of some set of properties rather than a collectively developed set of repressive social practices. the goal, then, should be to achieve a synthetic unity of the practical teleology of gender as pointing towards structures whose abolition is necessary for the liberation of marginalized, colonized, and otherwise subjugated persons, and the fluidity and individuality of the expressions that are categorized as “trans''. in this schema the motive behind assimilating trans and non-trans femininities is not to reaffirm a classification but to produce the conditions for a solidarity based on a theoretical and practical unity (and useful disunities, where they exist) in understanding misogyny.
ii.the near-universally enforced stance of persons towards femininity is the presumption of availability to power (on the sociopolitical level) and control (on the interpersonal level).
iii. transness is defined, in part, by bodily abjection taken as self-realization, the pursuit of aesthesis and an asymptotically possible outward aesthetic, as well as the coexistence of self-loathing a kind of prideless vanity in the same breath.
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thus, in light of these axioms, i suggest that the aesthetic expression of transfeminity exists at the dialectic moment of tension between hyperdigestibility (the result of the aforementioned presumption of availability) and ugliness (tied to that which is, at the very least, primarily understood by the world at large as bodily abjection). this moment came to be represented in the liminal explorations of outre pop music before it could even be widely understood as an expression of transfemininity, and was received by the critical establishment with a hostility that belied an unsystematized, unconscious transmisogyny (and also a more general cluster of misogynistic impulses).
lauren martin’s 2014 article for VICE magazine “Please, Don’t Let 2014 Be the Year that Female DJs are a Novelty” complains that there’s “something that pinches at [Martin] about men who choose names that are either explicitly female (Lucy, Millie and Andrea) or imply femininity (Miss Modular, She Works The Night, Body Issues), and do so in an attempt at anonymity, or playful indulgence”. it goes on further to address SOPHIE’s use of voice modification to replicate the vocal qualities of a young girl (whose purpose is admittedly only clear in retrospect) as “weird”, “unnecessary”, and “hiding behind the feminine in an attempt to create better work through a false persona”. the assignment of (negatively positioned) artificiality, frivolity, perfidiousness, and a general otherness to someone who is perceived as a man adopting the role of womanhood is clearly transmisogynistic, regardless of whether it was immediately perceptible as such in the intellectual landscape of 2014. martin goes on further still to essentially form a vulgar liberal feminist argument that suggests that the role of musicians ought to be discursively degendered, deploying the classic, inevitable line about how they should be judged by the work itself which is obviously contradicted by her aggressive maintenance of the impermeability of gender categories. hence the immortalized embarrassment of a phrase that gives this essay its title: SOPHIE and artists like her are nothing more than a “male DJs with female names”.
the grand irony, however, is that SOPHIE’s music is, if anything, supremely interested in questioning the very commodification of identity which Martin rails against. she combines the hypersexual mode of previously disallowed and marginal non-heterosexual desiring and the desexed (but compulsively, totally fetishistic) gaze of advertisement - it is the logical endpoint of the capitalist subsumption of the marginalized which nevertheless rejects the vulgarity of the directly satirical: it neither sacrifices nor diminishes any element in her chimeric-synthetic pastiche to accomodate the others. for example, note the bodily quality of her early singles even as they contain, too, the mutual coldnesses of an impishly experimental sensibility and hypercorporate gloss. one only needs to register the pairing of the singles “hard” and “lemonade” (a song so utterly assimilable as to soundtrack a mcdonald’s ad) to observe this quality. yet, her later work disquiets even the comfortable rhythm of contradiction she had established by introducing a seemingly directly emotive tone into her songs (“it’s okay to cry” “immaterial”). her music typifies the restless construction and reconstruction which characterizes transfeminine presentations.
the music of laura les and dylan brady’s 100gecs has been approached primarily with two critical languages: one suggests that it is a work of ironic distanciation, a joke at the expense of pop music, and one suggests that it is “post-ironic” (frankly, it’s hard to think of a feebler and less useful with the same level of infuriating pervasiveness), a considered experiment in “internet music” (another intellectual dead-end) whose primary virtue is a disarming sincerity. both methods seek to reinforce the binaristic dichotomy of the real and artificial in absolute terms: 100gecs must be pure parody or it must be an unbridled, joyous romp across the generic confines of the musically embarrassing, neither pole tolerating the possibility of the other. but of course the music can be both: you can laugh at and with it, revel in its celebratory affective qualities even as you understand it as equally distanciated (in strong contrast with laura les’ solo work, whose balance of the two qualities decidedly leans more towards the emo). this is the essence of appreciating cringe: by labelling it as such (rather than rejecting the discomfort which that acknowledgement engenders) and yet embracing it wholeheartedly, you bring about a microcosmic collapse of the distinction between the two. the boundaries between real and artificial, the genuine and smirking, the cringe and the cool, all become blurred within the boundaries of cultural theory, and to topple one is to lay the groundwork for erasing the others.
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a sidenote on the role of PC Music which both relates to the position of transfeminine aesthetics as i understand them and is not, strictly speaking, implicated in the central topic:
PC Music is not, as almost all critics outside of relatively fringe publications like TMT (RIP), have suggested, a challenge to the dominant notions of what pop music should be and can do, but the pursuit of normativity with a nearly irresponsible abandon. it is, i will grant, self-consciously acrid music, in that said pursuit is borne less of a “poptimist” impulse than by an absolute contempt for its contemporary expressions. contra pitchfork’s review of Hannah Diamond’s Reflections, PC Music’s attitude is “less pop music is shallow as hell, and by the way, isn’t shallow uncanny?” and more “if pop music is defined by the empty signification of personality then why softball it?”. the artists involved largely embrace the hollowness of their work to a degree that speeds past descriptors like “uncanny” and into the territory of nauseous hyperconsumption, the repulsive confessional, the emotional nakedness prized by the current wave of pop criticism cranked up until it becomes distressingly unrecognizable as human sentiment. in this sense PC Music both hastens the contradictions of and undeniably sediments the predominating motives of pop in the 2010s, an uneasy admixture whose preoccupations far outstrip in persisting relevance and conceptual sophistication of its peers which music criticism has generally deemed more worthy of salvaging.
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to the transmisogynistic sect, trans women signify the excesses of capitalist identitarian discourses (which in reality persecute them with almost unbelievable fervor) and the enshrinement of the oppressive social constitution of gender (which in reality their very existence challenges). the task of the transfeminist cultural critic is to dismantle these mythologies in a way that clarifies the actual position of the transfem in relation to misogyny, which necessitates challenging the aesthetic transmisogyny which (unrecognized even by its messengers) reinforces the confusion of transmisogynistic thought. my interest is not, then, in building a transfeminine aesthetics except within the confines of dismantling those positions: it is a pseudo-Wittgensteinian quietism, and so my conceptual scaffolding (which seeks to abolish certain essentialisms but which inevitably embodies others) ought to give way to the fluidity of practiced transness when its task is finished. i have built nothing that should last; i have built a glass cannon.
oh yeah, and, to ian cohen: shut the fuck up bitch
(re: Default Genders but also in general)