Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Next Prog Frontier: Against Genital Privileging

All this talk of Gender Politics privileges sexual organs above other organs.

What about identity based on fingers, toes, noses, lips, knees, belly buttons, ears, armpits, etc?

Instead of gender studies, why not organ studies? All organs should define identity. And we need to understand to which organs are biological realities or social constructs.

Unfortunately, elitist and exclusionary world of academia privileges the brains and genitals above all else.
Academia favors the brains because they use ideas and the genitals because they offer intense pleasure. (In a sense, 'gender studies' are a variation of leisure studies.)
But should the processes of thought and the experience of pleasure be privileged over other bodily functions that are no less important to the existence and well-being of people?
Besides, who is to say other body parts don’t think? Maybe they just 'think differently'. Maybe one’s neck thinks in its own special way. Or one’s thighs or feet.
And maybe we need to expand the meaning of ‘orgasm’ to include any body part. Maybe every part of the part is a erogenous zone in its own way. After all, aren't tongues pleasure zones? And don't muscles feel pleasure when massaged?

And maybe we should instigate certain neglected organs to rebel against other organs that are favored and privileged.
Body Politics will consider the ways in which the body is in revolutionary struggle with itself, and a dialectical understanding is necessary to understand the conflict among the various organs that are complementary but also contradictory. For example, the stomach cries out for more food, but other organs say, "please, no more, because we are turning fat and ugly." Or the mouth cries out for more beer or sugary beverages, but the buttocks and thighs call for reduction of consumption because they are turning lardy as the result of mouth's insatiable gluttony and thirst.

Maybe we should go even further. When we conceptualize ‘oneself”, we tend to differentiate between the cellular body and the things not innate to it but co-mingling with it. So, we talk of the body and germs as if germs are something apart from the body. Also, we don’t consider feces or urine as part of the body but as ‘waste material’. We don’t consider booger and snot as part of the body either. We don’t consider abscess and puss as part of the body. But such a view could be said to be xenorgophobic, or drawing an exclusionary distinction between the cellular self and the Other.

Also, the notions of 'diseases' and 'parasites' are judgmental and exclusionary. Why should hookworms be considered a foreign element feeding on the body than as parts of the body?
Why should cancer be considered a disease instead of as an alternative form of biology?
Indeed, the very notion of health vs disease must be questioned because ‘health’ denies and denigrates the kinds of lifeforms and/or processes that are deemed to be ‘harmful’ to the body. But that is to privilege one's human body over other organisms.

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