by Ethan Seavey
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau (some guy who wound up as the father of French philosophy)
How much you can divide this sentence into similarly incorrect phrases?
[Man is born free and everywhere he is.] “Everywhere” is incorrect because the idea of a man is extremely limited to the societal sphere in which he lives. The American white man is gendered so differently from the French white man. The American white man is also different from his neighbor who is Black, his neighbor who is gay, and his neighbor who is white but born into poverty. They are all Men and they experience that differently. Any attempt to define what a man is by social attributes alone is futile because it will always exclude people who identify as men.
[Man is born free] is incorrect because they are subjected to forces more powerful than them which force them into labor and strip freedoms.
[Man is born] is incorrect because Man is made. Consider: a baby is born into a world. A doctor inspects the baby’s genitalia. The doctor decides which sex the baby will be labeled. In some cases, the doctor will modify the baby’s body to ensure that they will fit into one of two options. Then the baby is not a baby. He is a baby boy; she is a baby girl. In that order. He is a To-Be-Man; she is a To-Be-Woman. The troubling part is that every person is labeled a To-Be-Something before they have the opportunity to decide what they are, or what that even means for them.
The position of being a Young Man or a Young Woman may be the first time that the person has the opportunity for choice. With the independence to explore their connection to their gender for the first time, it can be exciting. For cisgender, heterosexual people, it’s a euphoric moment of being recognized as you truly want to be.
For queer people, this euphoria does not come with being recognized as a Man or Woman. The very opposite is true, leading to what I’d call Gender Insecurity. In my own experience, I found that Gender Insecurity transformed into two different manifestations, fighting within myself.
The first evolution is Gender Extremism, a process of defiantly solidifying the gender which one was assigned at birth. It is a defensive way of facing Gender Insecurity. Consider a young boy who realizes that he are attracted to other men (as well as women) and, knowing that personal and social recognition of his same-sex attraction could lessen the conception of his Manhood, he defensively clings to queerphobia and hyper- masculine presentations in order to anneal his gender. I wasn’t happy to be wearing everything that people wanted me to wear, and I wasn’t happy acting like a man, but I did it to prove my manliness, even as I knew it was an unwinnable fight. I would never be accepted as a real Man for the sole reason that I am homosexual; I would always be denied that by some people. So why hurt myself trying to hold it up, over my head?
I clung to catholicism and other systems that affirmed my rigid gender beliefs and which helped me to repress my atypical gender expressions. I do believe that a form of Gender Extremism is weaponized by some organized religions.
The second evolution I’ve experience is Gender Existentialism.
For me, it began with the recognition that I did not identify with the gender that I was assigned to at birth. It didn’t make sense, though, because I certainly did not feel like a Woman.
While many genderqueer people are satisfied by a binary transition, others are uncomfortable with either option. Who can blame them? But I say that as someone who considers themself to be critical of both masculinity and femininity and who feels dissonance with both. Some people build a gender that they are comfortable in. That’s an existentialist idea, to build something meaningful out of nothing. They may use the term “non-binary” to express that their transition from the binary gender which they were assigned doesn’t match them anymore. It just didn’t take. They may have a definition for you if you ask, a term they prefer. Like me, they might prefer “person” to “man” or “woman,” and use pronouns to designate that difference.
The world projects masculinity and femininity onto their bodies and their actions, which impact their gender expression, but does not change their gender identification. They should have the capacity to explore qualities associated with different genders without fear of invalidating their identity.
Gender Existentialism, then, is not a single choice. It is not a choice because there is not that much freedom, really. Camus writes that “The absurd does not liberate; it binds,” (The Myth of Sisyphus) and in this case, gender is the absurd. Gender is a series of choices, to do what feels right. To ask why someone feels comfortable in their gender is as absurd of asking someone to explain why they like the food they like, why they like the genres they like. There are reasons, sure, but those reasons are only validated by an arbitrary force inside our bodies which are our minds.
Gender is also absurd because it is an attempt to prescribe meaning to something as meaningless as a human body. Our knowledge of the 300,000 years of human history is very patchy, but it clearly demonstrates that humans have been humans for much longer than they have lived in organized, sedentary societies. They had homosexual relationships like hundreds of other animals in the world, from mallards to giraffes to dolphins. They had bodies that looked like ours, where there is one fetal genital, which changes into something which would later be labeled “penis” and “vagina,” or something else entirely.
The binary system of sex is one of the fundamental enemies of queer theory. The WHO reported in 2019 that “genital diversity is part of the normal spectrum of human biology,” and called for an end for unnecessary surgeries on intersex children. Other critics will point to sex chromosomes, XY and XX, but those theories have been challenged as scientists have come to understand the chromosomes which determine what goes into one’s “sex,” meaning the totality of all of their sexual characteristics, are not as simple as explained in a standard American education. Sexual characteristics can be corollated to people having chromosomes we call XX and XY, but it is certainly not a direct ratio or a binary system (Ainsworth, 2018).
The other enemy is a depiction of gender as binary, or even as a spectrum. It is not really; it is like a game of bocce ball where everyone in the audience is their own referee and decides where the goal ball is, awarding winners and shaming losers for what is really not a fair game at all.
“Or does it turn out that the ‘I’ who ought to be bearing its gender is undone by being a gender, that gender is always coming from a source that is elsewhere and directed towards something that is beyond me, constituted in a sociality I do not fully author?”
(Gender Trouble, p. 16)
In their application of Plato in their theory of how the system controls our bodies: “[…] the terms by which it [the body] is named must be consistently applied, not in order to make the name fit the thing named but precisely because that which is to be named can have no proper name, bounds and threatens the sphere of linguistic propriety, and, therefore, must be controlled by a forcibly imposed set of nominative rules.”
(Bodies that Matter, p. 44)
Butler led me to the conclusion that the body is infinitely more excessive and expansive than any language or system can understand, because it is intrinsically connected to a system of gender that implies a binary. My body is unnameable; my body is undefinable. And that was soothing to my immediate angst, to want to destroy the monster that had held me back for so long. Of course, later I would reassemble my thoughts and realize that Butler’s approach is about the freedom in gender as much as it is about the necessity to conform to the gender that the body enjoys. We need freedom to be comfortable in gender because it is essential to mental health, the mental which is the body which is the soul.
Existentialism entails that people are born totally free, but I think Gender Existentialism takes a different approach. People are born into systems which bind them and shape them. Some feel that dissonance and insecurity, and it is then that they come to find Gender Existentialism waiting for them. It is the moment that you realize that you have control over your life and the freedom to express yourself. To enjoy what you enjoy openly. To cast aside the limitations which your gender gives you. To accept a new gender altogether or to expand your definition of your gender assigned at birth.
Camus wanted us to believe that he truly believed in his philosophy. And at the same time, he couldn’t see beyond gender. He was a man who knew men and wrote about manhood. He wrote for men. He rarely wrote about women and when he did, he did not write full characters, but projections of masculine perceptions of women. Camus was unafraid to say that the absurd is in all of our definitions of ourselves, but was unable to look at masculinity the same way.
There have been many well-organized critiques of Camus’ novel. Some of those critiques are best accessed through more fiction: The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud explores the heavy-handed colonialism and racism of the original text. This story is told as a one-sided dialogue between a silent, curious journalist and Harun, the newly- invented brother of the character Camus referred to as “the Arab.” Using Harun’s voice, Daoud creates a new story for “the Arab,” giving him the right to a name (Musa) and to thorough characterization. Harun speaks to the journalist with a vengeful tone. He is sickened by the fame of Meursault’s narrative. Daoud’s frustration leaks through the text. His thick disgust comes from being an Arabic man and reading a text about a white Frenchman who kills a nameless man, for seemingly no reason. It is exacerbated by the original novel’s fame in the white European literary canon.
And yet, Daoud still seems to be entranced by the novel, much in the same way that many other people are. Its prose is simple and beautiful, and its story beats are epic and iconic. In an act of defiance, he rewrites those story beats in his own masterful prose. He gives Harun his own scene of senseless murder. He even rewrites the original tale, by casting doubt on whether or not Meursault’s mother even died, and changing the story so that Musa’s body had disappeared. Lastly, he writes that the reason Meursault kills Musa is because Musa is seen reposing, relaxing, and in the French existentialist framework, wasting time could be seen as a sin. He takes the chance to rework the philosophy, into one which embraces his Algerian culture, which puts emphasis on the importance of rest and spending time doing nothing. In doing so, he decolonizes the philosophical message of Camus’ text.
Daoud opened up many doors to me, giving me permission to focus on another glaring fault of Camus’ text: excessively gendered violence, and blatant sexism. As The Meursault Investigation briefly acknowledges, there are only three female characters in Camus’ work: the mother (who is dead at the beginning of the text), the blissfully unaware lover, Marie, and the (alleged) sex worker with no name.
I was always uncomfortable with the idea of limits within Camus’ existentialism in two ways. The first is in his rigid understandings of sex and gender. To be clear, Camus was no feminist, even as he had a demonstrated connection to the “first” feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. His stories fail to feature women who are outside of the virgin-whore dynamic (or static, caring mothers). It was a glaring fault of Camus to say that man is born with infinite freedom to do anything, but that women seemingly can be identified by these three identities which reduce a person down to their relationship to sex and reproduction. Camus offered the ultimate freedom to men alone. He was ignorant to the arbitrary systems of sex and gender, both of whose binary systems were invented and imposed across the world through colonization in a massive attempt to homogenize people, and to eliminate queerness. This is the liberation that Camus feared.
It’s strange, considering his contemporary Simone de Beauvoir was so radical in her creation of The Second Sex. She was the first to link gender and existentialism. Beauvoir writes that the definition or model of a woman she is supposed to fit was created by men in order to make women less; and this is true; but her conclusion ends with the fact that she, born female and raised a woman, must go about the confusing process of redefining womanhood for herself. I don’t mean to do her any injustice—her path to understanding her gender is famously brilliant for her time—but the existentialist can take it much further than that. You have even more free will than the few choices you are given at birth. The contemporary (and potentially nonbinary) existentialist looks at the two options of man and woman and sees fault in the way both are constructed. Liberation from a constructed binary is necessary for the existentialist to construct a new system in its place.
My second critique came from his insistence that meaning can be created, but that Gods are impossible. If humans have the ability to create meaning, what is stopping them from creating more than that? I approach Camus with the influence first of René Descartes and Jean Beaudrillard, both of whom left me with the impression that a person’s lived experience exists entirely separately from whatever “objective” viewpoint might (or might not) exist. To a believer in Christianity, the world is ruled by one God, made up in three parts. To a believer in Hinduism, the world is governed by many, many more. That is their truth, proven by their lived perspective.
If everything is meaningless, why waste energy giving limits meaning? Why limit your mind when it comes to spirituality? Why restrict your body when it comes to gender? These restrictions only make it more difficult to live happily, when it is already so difficult to find joy.
Sartre wrote that “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterward” (“Existentialism is a Humanism”).
I’ll take a glittery red pen to that line: A person first of all exists, encounters their gender, surges up in the world—and defines themself afterward.
It is the experience of a genderqueer person, or any person who has taken the time to liberate their gender expression. It is confidence and self-unity. It is finding a way to be comfortable with your one and only body. It can only be done through exploration and taking joy where it can be found.
Gender Existentialism is acknowledging that binary gender is the last absurd, the one that goes hidden. That ensnares the human. That makes the human afraid to identify themself, because it will result in being othered. It is both biological and social, and those two do not contradict because the social is biological. Binary Gender is a divine governor who tells you that it’s okay to have doubts but that it will smite you when those doubts turn into disbelief.
***
Bibliography
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