BIOPOLITICS OF GENDER

Beatriz Preciado
Philosophy - Princeton University
Paris 8 – Saint-Denis

A Lalia Kowska-Régnier, princess sorceress of estrogens and images.

THE INVENTION OF GENDER, OR THE TECHNOCORD THAT DEVOURS THE WOLVES

In October 1958, a young woman presented herself at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of
California in Los Angeles. They are received by Doctors Stoller, Garfinkel, and Rosen, a team made up of
a psychiatrist, a sociologist, and a psychologist who investigate 'intersexuality' and 'gender dysphoria'
(Garfinkel, 1967: 116-185). Of the young woman, who has just turned nineteen, it is said in the report
doctor who is "white" and who "works as a secretary in an insurance company." The report
She has a convincing feminine appearance. She is tall, slender, and has feminine shapes [...] She has
male genitals and a normally developed penis, as well as secondary sex characteristics
female: medium bust; did not develop hair on the face or body." However, if the young woman
it seems to meet the taxonomic expectations of the three men, primarily because it does not show signs
of 'sexual deviation', of cross-dressing or of homosexuality: 'It has nothing that can differentiate it.
of a girl her age. She has a high-pitched voice, does not wear revealing clothing and inappropriate.
"taste that characterizes transgender women and men with sexual identity issues." The condition of
the possibility of future gender diagnosis is above all that confirmation of normality in terms
of race ('white'), of class ('working') and of sexuality ('is neither a transvestite nor homosexual'). Everything
Diagnosis depends on a prior division between punishment and therapy, between perversion and illness.
Once the body is removed from the field of social or moral pathology, it is possible
instrument the medical techniques (performative, hormonal, surgical...) to help the
nature.

The choice of name always plays a role in medical histories as a last attempt to
identification, of the production of a type in a taxonomy. What remains committed, says Deleuze
and Guattari (2004: 34-35) when talking about the names that father Freud gave to his patients, "both for the
words like 'for things' is 'the relationship of the proper name as intensity with multiplicity
that he apprehends instantly.[...] When everything fragments and loses its identity, there still remains the
word to restore a unit that no longer existed in things.” Garfinkel calls her “Agnès, the woman
"normal, natural" (Garfinkel, 1967: ch. 5). By saying "Agnès", she unknowingly names a revolt in
you sift. The war of the lambs* has not yet occurred. The report continues: 'A pelvic examination
and renal [...] reveals the absence of uterus and ovaries. A bilateral testicular biopsy shows a slight
testicular atrophy. A biopsy of skin cells reveals a type of negative chromatin (or
sea, masculine) [...] Paradoxically, however, a biopsy of the cells of the urethra shows a
elevated estrogen activity.

After thirty-five hours of consultations and countless morphological and endocrinological analyses, the
UCLA team concludes: Agnès is a case of 'true hermaphroditism.' For the team, Agnès
suffers from "testicular feminization syndrome," a rare type of intersexuality in which the testicles
they produce a high amount of estrogens (Stoller, 1968: 365). According to the Money protocol
of treatment for intersex children, which provides for sex reassignment through treatments
hormonal and surgical, the team recommends a therapeutic vaginoplasty, namely the
surgical construction of a vagina from genital tissue to restore the
coherence between 'hormonal identity' and 'physical identity'. In 1959, Agnès undergoes a
operation of 'castration': the cavernous body of the penis and the testicles are amputated, and the
labia of the vagina with the skin of the scrotum (Garfinkel, 1967: 184). Some time later Agnès obtains the
name change on your identity document.

This medical history can be read in two different ways. According to traditional medical discourse, by a
On one side, the story of Agnès seems to address the treatment of an intersex issue that...
medicine managed to respond successfully. According to a genealogical reading of the medical-legal discourse, it would seem
that the processes of normalization, of control over bodies and sexuality operate the
disciplinary institutions, which Foucault described in The Abnormals, reach a peak here.
point of effectiveness. If we compare Agnès's medical history with the tragic story of Herculine Barbin
(autobiography of a hermaphrodite published by Foucault's research group in the late
1970s), it could be concluded that the repressive apparatus, transformed into a public health enterprise,
now has a new endocrinological and surgical sophistication to perform it more effectively
that the medicine of the time of Herculine Barbin had dreamed of: restoring the original relationship between
sex, gender, and sexuality; making the body a readable and referential inscription of the truth of sex.

Excavated and transformed into a best-seller, the autobiography of Herculine Barbin will serve Foucault as
original fiction to build one's own theory of sexuality. Foucault sees in the history of Herculine
the symptom of the emergence of a new discursive regime about sex. While the
nineteenth-century hermaphrodites lived, according to Foucault, in a world without sexual identities in which the
ambiguity of the organs made a plurality of social identifications possible (like Marie)
Madelaine Lefort, born in 1800, could be considered both a woman with a beard and a penis as
a man with breasts: Alice Dreger, 1998), the new episteme of sexuality that Foucault presents
account forces Herculine Barbin to choose a single sexual identity and, consequently, to restore the
coherence between the sexual organs, the sex (female or male: please note that the
biotechnological concept of "gender" had not yet been created) and sexual identity (heterosexual or
perverse). Finally, Herculine introduces a series of irreparable discontinuities in that chain.
causal of sex production, which will lead her to become not only a medical spectacle, but
also in a moral monstrosity.

If we adhere to Foucault's analysis model, it seems logical to lean towards an exaltation of the
Herculine's resistance and a critique of how easily Agnès allows herself to be absorbed by the devices.
biopolitics. However, that Foucauldian reading, which makes the medical discourse appear as a
the instance of normalizing subjectivation becomes problematic when, in 1966, six years after
vaginoplasty, Agnès recounts another account of her own body transformation process. The second
narration challenges and ridicules the scientific techniques of psychiatric and hormonal diagnostics to the
what transgender individuals must undergo in medical-legal institutions starting from the decade
from 1950. The knowledge of the technosheep deceives the wolf pack.

Agnès says that he was a child of anatomical male sex and that at the beginning of his adolescence (at twelve
years) began to secretly take the estrogens that had been prescribed to her mother after a
panhysterectomy, a complete ablation of the uterus and ovaries. According to that second account, everything would have
started as a game: at first it steals the odd capsule occasionally;
then forges the medical prescriptions to access a regular supply of Stilbestrol. Agnès always
she wished to be a woman and, thanks to her mother's estrogen, she begins to see her breasts developing
and that prevents unwanted signs of puberty, such as facial hair (Stoller, 1968: 135). The
the second account allows us to risk a double hypothesis: Agnès questions the theory of power and of the
Foucault's subjectivation, but it also destabilizes or completes certain argumentative axes of the
theory of performative identity by Judith Butler.

WHAT THE LAMB DID TO FOUCAULT: GENDER VERSUS SEX

Foucault designates the transition from a sovereign society to a disciplinary society as the
displacement of a form of power that decides and ritualizes death, to a new form of power
which calculates life in technical terms of population, health, and national interest. Foucault will call
biopower to that form of productive, diffuse, and tentacular power. However, there are two issues that
they highlight the difficulty of using that model in the sex-political context after the Second World War
World.

Secondly, Foucault interrupts his genealogy of sexuality in the 19th century and, although it is about
to elaborate a political analysis on contemporary practices and sexual identities, despite
that I could not ignore the existence of the French and American feminist movements and that
he knew the Californian SM subculture and that of FHAR in France, he preferred to construct a fiction
retrospective from Greek sexuality, which uses as a programmatic hypothesis for the definition
of the new life aesthetics. By exhuming Herculine, it buries Agnès. By operating as a ventriloquist
from a dead voice, it silences the cries of the lively sexual movements. Today it is surprising that the
Definition of life aesthetics in terms of 'technologies of the self' is made without taking into account the
body technologies (biotechnologies, especially surgery and endocrinology) and representation
(photography, cinema, television, cybernetics), which are in full expansion during the second
mid-twentieth century. Foucault highlights a set of transformations that occur starting from the
World War II and, in my opinion, require a third epistemic framework, neither sovereign nor
disciplinary, neither pre-modern nor modern, that takes into account the impact of new technologies of
body, an episteme that I call post-Moneyist referring to the figure of Dr. John Money, whose
Discursive power over sexuality will replace that of Krafft-Ebing and Freud.

The invention of the gender category constitutes the indication of the emergence of that third regime of
sexuality. Far from being a creation of the feminist agenda of the 1960s, the category of
gender belongs to the medical discourse of the late 1940s. During the Cold War period, the
The United States invested a substantial amount of dollars in research on sex and sexuality without
precedents in the world. Let us say immediately that this third model is characterized not only by the
transformation of sex into an object of political management of life, but above all because of the fact that this
management operates through the new dynamics of advanced technocapitalism. Let us remember that the
the periods of World War II and the post-war era constitute an unprecedented moment of
visibility of women in public space, but also of the emergence of visible forms of
male homosexuality in the United States armed forces (Berubé, 1990). McCarthyism
adds to the patriotic persecution of communism the fight against homosexuality as a form of
antinationalism, as well as the exaltation of family values of industrious masculinity and the
domestic motherhood (D’Emilio, 1983). Dozens of research centers are opening across the country.
within the framework of a national public health objective. At the same time, Doctors George Henry and
Robert L. Dickinson initiates a large quantitative study on 'sexual deviation' that is known.
as 'SexVariant' and will extend for almost twenty years (Terry, 1999: 178-218). It is also the
the moment when Harry Benjamin established the clinical use of hormonal molecules, the moment of
the first marketing of estrogens and progesterone obtained from mares (Premarin) and
then in a synthetic form (Norethindrone), and it is undoubtedly the moment when John Money, who has
In charge of the child and adolescent psychiatry department of John Hopkins Hospital in New York, invents the
concept of gender.

To the rigidity of sex in the medical discourse of the 19th century, Money will oppose technological plasticity.
of gender. He uses that concept for the first time in his doctoral thesis in 1947 and further develops it
Afternoon in the clinical area with Anke Ehrhardt, Joan and John Hampson, to discuss the possibility of
hormonally and surgically modify the sex of intersex children born with genital organs
that medicine considers indeterminate (Money, Hampson and Hampson, 1957: 333-336). For
Money, the term gender designates both "physiological sex" (according to Ulrich's tradition) and the
possibility of using technology to modify the body according to a pre-existing regulatory ideal of what
what a human body (female or male) must be (Meyerowitz, 2002: 998-129). The concept of
"genre" of Money is the instrument of a rationalization of life in which the body is no longer
that a parameter. Gender is above all a necessary concept for the emergence and development of a
set of normalization/transformation techniques of life: the photography of the "deviants"
sexuals, cellular identification, hormonal analysis and treatment, chromosomal reading,
transsexual and intersex surgery...

When referencing the genealogy of the anatomical discourse that Thomas Laqueur performs, one can
to affirm that this process of producing sexual difference through techniques of representation of
the body was already being hinted at in the 17th century (Lacqueur, 1990). By the end of the 19th century, long before the
the emergence and perfection of endocrinological and surgical techniques, the truth about sex is
produced through a new technology of representation, photography, whose first uses will be the
anatomopathological representation and pornography. Just ten years after the invention of the
photograph, around 1886, the American surgeon Gordon Buck uses for the first time the
photographic codes of Before and After to illustrate the success of the new plastic surgery in the
bodies of the soldiers wounded in the Civil War (Sander Gilman, 2000: 37). Having in
it recounts the precariousness of the surgical techniques of the time, the photographic representation ensures the
reconstruction effect. This budding medical photography also creates a new code of
realistic representation that breaks with the pictorial tradition of portraiture by displacing the face to the
sexual organs the representation of the truth of the subject.

Let's take, for example, one of the recurring images of the representation of hermaphrodites and the
inverted from that time: body extended, face covered, legs open, and sexual organs exposed
view, all of which a foreign hand shows to the camera. The image accounts for its own process of
discursive production. Share the codes of pornographic representation that emerge during that time:
the doctor's hand that hides and shows the sexual organs at the same time establishes a relationship
of power between the object and the subject of representation. The face, and more specifically the eyes of the
patients are covered. While medicine sees that gesture as the protection of the patient's privacy,
the erasure reveals its inability to access representation as an agent. The
Anthropologist Susanne Kessler demonstrated that Money protocols are based on aesthetic criteria.
identical (the size and shape of the penis or clitoris) to those that prevail in medical photography of
principles of the 20th century. A slight difference: the normalization process that until now only
It could be carried out through representation and is now inscribed in the very structure of life.
Far from the rigidity and exteriority of the body normalization techniques that operate in the
Disciplinary systems, the new gender techniques of the post-moneyist period are flexible, internal.
and assimilable.

If the concept of gender introduces a rupture, it is precisely because it constitutes the first moment
reflective of that economy of building sex. From then on, there is no going back. The
medicine allows for the emergence of its arbitrary foundations, its constructivist nature, and for that reason
opens the door to new forms of resistance and political action. The post-money regime of the
sexuality cannot function without the circulation of a huge flow of hormones, silicone, texts and
representations, of surgical techniques... ultimately, without a constant traffic of biocodes from the
genders. In that political economy of sex, normalization and difference depend on control, of the
reappropriation and the use of those gender flows. When I talk about the rupture that this concept introduces
of gender, I do not mean the passage from one model to another in terms of provoking a form of
drastic discontinuity. It is mainly about a superposition of strata in which the different
Writing techniques of life overlap and are rewritten. The body is not a passive matter here.
but a techno-organic interface, a segmented and territorialized technoliving system according to different
models (textual, computational, biochemical, etc.) (Haraway, 2000: 162). I will give just one example.
from that juxtaposition of somatic fictions of which we are the object. Dean Spade invites us to reflect
about the difference between the definition of rhinoplasty as aesthetic surgery and the current acceptance of it
vaginoplasty and phalloplasty as sex reassignment surgeries (Dean Spade, 2000). While the
first belongs to a regime of post-money bodily identity in which the nose is considered property
individual and market object, the latter remain immersed in a premodern regime and almost
sovereign of corporeality in which the penis and the vagina remain property of the State. Agnès is going to
be sensitive to the gaps and the communicating vessels between different strata, among many systems of
production of the living: it will use its body as a zone of transcoding.

Agnès then allows us to reread Foucault's Herculine. Through the use of the first person, the
Herculine's story reveals the open, porous, and permeable nature of sexual techniques. There is no one
discursive saturation of sexual subjectivity: subjectivity emerges like a worm that traverses the
a mesh of a net and at the same time that it digs it opens a path, traces an inscription, leaves a trace, weaves
a plot that recodes the pre-existing discourse. Herculine is sentenced to death (or more
precisely to suicide), not because it is located at a breaking point between two epistemes of the
sexuality, but because it is as if her body were absorbed in the gap that separates two fictions
discordant of the self. Herculine is not a man trapped in a woman's body nor a woman
trapped in the body of a man. It is above all a body trapped between the dominant knowledges
about sex and the lesser knowledge of the abnormal.

Your first-person text deforms the discursive fabric and opens a new space for enunciation.
politics and poetics of sexual subjectivity. It is above all the producer of a new knowledge about sex.
The text of Herculine could have initiated the insurrection of the subjected knowledges that it speaks of.
Foucault in 1976 with only one condition: Herculine herself, and not Foucault, would have to have done it.
public. If Herculine dies, it is not because her body is saturated with disciplinary languages, but
especially because she does not manage to collectivize the enunciation of her own discourse on sexuality.
Herculine speaks a lesser language that cannot be understood at that moment. The private language of
Herculine is not in a position to recodify the effects of the knowledge-power of medical-legal discourse.
Agnès is a sort of self-designed Herculine whose word becomes political power, a body that
it becomes a collective somatic fiction.

WHAT THE LAMB DID TO BUTLER: GENDER VERSUS PERFORMANCE

Now, Agnès's account does not have as its only effect the displacement of certain terms from the
Foucault's theory of subjectivation, but also reaches the definition of gender as
performance that popularized queer theory. It will be remembered that the new reflection that was initiated by the
queer authors in relation to the second wave feminist theories took the form of an inflection
performative in the analysis of sexual identity. Authors such as Butler, Sedwick, and Halberstam
they used the concepts of performance and performativity as principles external to feminism
to denaturalize sexual difference.

How did that concept of feminism come to social sciences, and more specifically to the language of feminism?
performance, which at first was related to theatrical analysis or with the crisis of the
Aesthetic practices in the 20th century? I can't do a genealogy of the concept of performance here.
feminism and queer theory, so I will limit myself to recalling that the concept has its antecedents
discursive in 1929, in a text by the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere. In Femininity as a Mask,
Joan Riviere first defined femininity as artifice, theatricalization, parody, fiction.
surface effect or mask. Certain 'intermediary women' (this term is used for women who find themselves
between heterosexuality and homosexuality) use the mask, he says, to hide their possible
masculinity. But what is that masculinity that hides behind the mask of femininity? In the
1920s, that masculinity, according to Riviere's analysis, is nothing other than the capacity of the
women to use the word in public space and to develop professional activities and
politics. When Riviere speaks of femininity as a mask behind which women hide their
masculinity, think of a disguise that a woman uses to avoid, she says, "the reprisals that
I feared from those paternal figures as a consequence of their intellectual feats" (Riviere,
1979: 14). Riviere's hypothesis, which deviates from any psychological or familial etiology by presenting a
The political argument to explain femininity was immediately rejected by psychoanalysis.
institutional and it was not recovered until the 1980s, when feminism took it up again
constructivist. In her classic Gender Trouble, Judith Butler revisits the concept of the mask
to analyze the production of femininity, not in Riviere's intermediary woman but in the
performance drag queen, that is to say, that of a biological man who "performs" femininity, to
hyperbolic underside (Butler, 2001).

In fact, Butler's theoretical argument is largely based on the effectiveness with which the
performance of the drag queen allows her to reveal the imitative character of the gender. It could be said that the
Butlerian conception of performative sexual identity is the result of a cross reading of the
performance of the drag queen, which simultaneously draws on Foucault's analysis of the
formation of subjectivities by disciplinary discursive regimes, as well as in the
Derrida's analysis of the performative force of language. Butler will demonstrate the production
performative of the presumed 'natural' relationship between biological sex and gender identity based on
analysis of the practices of female impersonation (imitation of femininity) presented by the
anthropologist Esther Newton in Mother Camp (1972) and, later, the cases of drag performance
queen of the movie 'Paris is Burning' (1991), by Jeannie Livingston. Butler is interested in dissociation.
between sex and gender in drag queen practices, that is to say, in the open space between defined sex
as masculine and the performance of femininity. Since the drag queen occupies that space
paradoxical that lies between anatomical sex and interpreted gender, brings forth imitation, the
re-citation of the codes of gender significance, such as the mechanisms of production of the
truth of sex: "by imitating gender, the dressed implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender"
in itself, as well as its contingency” (Butler, 2001: 169). For Butler, the drag queen performance is
subversive because it denaturalizes the normative relationship between sex and gender and allows for the emergence of the
cultural mechanisms that produce the coherence of heterosexual identity. When in that first
At the moment of his analysis, Butler defines gender as performative, implying that it does not have a
ontological statute beyond the different theatrical repetitions that constitute its reality. Thus, the
the drag queen's performance will allow Butler to conclude that 'the original identity on which is
"gender is a parody without an origin" (Butler, 2001: 169), in which the positions of
gender (masculine and feminine) that is considered natural is the result of performances
subject to constant regulations, iterations, and sanctions.
In a second argumentative process that is increasingly strengthened by the publication of
Bodies that matter, Butler seeks to redefine theatrical performance in terms of performativity.
linguistics (Austin reread by Derrida). It concludes that gender statements, those that are pronounced
At the moment of birth – such as "it's a girl", "it's a boy" – but also the insults.
homophobic terms like 'effeminate' or 'tomboy' are not descriptive statements but above all
performative, that is to say, ritualized invocations or citations of heterosexual law. (Butler, 2002:
323-334)

What happens if that concept of gender performance or even the more sophisticated idea is confronted?
performative identity with Agnès' narrative? Indeed, to some extent it is possible to read the process of
subjectivization of Angès as an instance of resignification and performative reappropriation. In the
the moment she meets with doctors Stoller and Garfinkel, it is possible that Agnès already knows
some autobiographical narratives of transsexuals. Begins taking Stilbestrol in 1952. That same
the year the story of Jorgensen's sex change spreads in the American newspapers with the title
"The American soldier who turned into a blonde" (Jorgensen, 1967: 83), as well as the one of
Roberta Cowell, thanks to whom the American doctor Gillie develops and standardizes his technique of
vaginoplasty. The fictional biography of Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, which was published in 1932 and in that
time was considered a case of hermaphroditism, it will be reissued in the United States in 1953, after the
media success of Jorgensen's story (Hoyer, 1953). That same year, many novels close to
autobiographical genre explores the process of "sex change," which appears as the only argument
possible to situate and resolve the intrigue within the protagonists' own bodies. Thus it appears
a new genre of fictional transgender biography in the gothic tradition of monstrous mutation
(vampire stories, etc.), where the main character, split, divided between anatomy and
image of self, ultimately offers itself to scientific research. All those accounts share a
the same rhetoric: sex change appears in the same way as the response to an incongruity
physiological or morphological. Transsexuality is here simply the medical solution to a condition.
intersex, and never an autonomous (psychological or political) decision to transform oneself and the
body.

What Agnès seems to have learned from the media proliferation of discourses on sexuality
gender identity operates like a script, a narrative, a performative fiction in which the
the body is both the argument and the main character at the same time. Agnès strategically omits
certain stories in the first account he makes of Stoller and Garfinkel. For example, he avoids mentioning the
masturbatory practices with the penis, as well as anal penetration practices with his friend Bill. His
narration, which adheres to the media construction of transsexuality in that era, insists, by the
opposite, in the figures that highlight the points of intersexual diagnosis: its sensitivity and
her love for nature, an innate good taste in women's clothing that distinguishes her from
transvestites and transsexuals, "the sexual insensitivity" of the penis...

Agnès carries out a process of appropriation of performative techniques for identity production.
sexual precisely at the moment when medical discourse and the media circulate the
concepts of gender, intersexuality, and transsexuality. It initiates a traffic of fictions in which
certain statements of gender from the authority of medical discourse for their use by a
new subject of knowledge that now claims its status as an expert. What interests me here is not
it is both the possible 'deviant mimesis' or flawed simesis - the relationship between repetition and disobedience
What does Hommi Bhabha highlight in the analysis of the relationship between the colonized and colonial discourse?
Agnès regarding the medical discourse (Bhabha, 1994: 86-88). What interests me is the production
organic of a self-designed trans political subjectivity. Agnès behaves like the modest witness
(modest witness) by Haraway: uses her body as a zone of transcoding of techniques and the
knowledge about sex (Haraway, 1998). Then the voice of the production of knowledge and activism emerges.
thirty years later, Kate Bornstein, Riki Anne Wilchins, or Del Lagrace Volcano reject the
voice re-education techniques openly affirm their position as trans lesbians or transfeminists
and they even declare that they do not want to belong to either of the two sexes.

While the Butlerian performative analysis has been and continues to be very fruitful, both in terms of
to the production of strategic policies of self-nomination (coming out, post-identity strategies,
etc.) as in relation to the operations of resignification and reappropriation of the insult, of all
ways seem insufficient to account for Agnès's process. Just as it produces effective results for
the understanding of identity in its discursive proliferation (especially textual and linguistic) stumbles
when it comes to explaining the modification of the structure of life that operates in our societies
posmoneyistas.

The performative analysis of identity closes a cycle of reducing identity to an effect of

speech that ignores the specific integration technologies that work in different
performative inscriptions of identity. The concept of gender performance, and even more so that of
performative identity does not take into account the biotechnological processes that make it
certain performances 'pass' as natural and others, on the other hand, do not. Gender is not just an effect
performative; it is above all a process of prosthetic incorporation.

Agnès' account only makes sense through the analysis of the biotechnological inscription processes.
corporal that will allow their imitation of intersexuality to pass as natural. It is not about
simply to point out the constructed nature of gender, but above all to demand the possibility of
intervene in that construction to the point of creating the forms of somatic representation that will go through
natural. However, the journey I embark on with Agnès should not be interpreted as a
break with the Butlerian framework, but as a contribution to what Butler herself calls, without giving
too many details, a scenic and topographical consideration of the construction of sex (Butler,
2002). From now on, and following Teresa de Lauretis, I will mainly talk about the 'technologies of
"gender" as a complex circuit of bodies, techniques, and signs that encompass not only the
performative techniques, but also biotechnological, cinematographic, cybernetic techniques, etc. (De
Lauretis, 1987.

Agnès challenges the logic of imitation according to which a transgender woman is a biological man who imitates
a woman. It puts into tension the relationship that Riviere establishes between mask and femininity and what Butler
install between drag queen and femininity, between copy and original, artifice and nature, irreverence and
seriousness, form and content, extravagance and discretion, ornament and structure. It is a becoming
trans that is not satisfied with merely passing through the resemblance, for which the resemblance would be more than anything a
obstacle. Agnès does not imitate a woman nor does she intend to pass herself off as one through yet another performance.
or less stylized. On the contrary, it is through the management and the dissident use of estrogens and by
the production of a specific narrative that Agnès makes herself pass in physiological terms as
hermaphrodite and can access sex reassignment treatments without going through the protocols
psychiatric and legal aspects of transsexuality.

What Agnès criticizes through her hidden consumption of estrogens is neither masculinity nor the
femininity in themselves, but above all (at a second level of understanding of the complexity of the
gender technologies) the very apparatus of the production of the truth of sex. If Susan Sontag defined
the camp, which emerges from drag culture and travesty, as the critique of the original through the
production processes of the double, the copy, or the imitation (Sontag, 1964), it can then be said
Agnès pushes the concept of camp to the limit to make it obsolete. If in camp the aesthetics
morality is supplanted and theater replaces life, in the case of Agnès the somatic technique supplants the
aesthetics and life replace the theater.

Agnès is a biodrag for whom the body itself is the process of imitation, thereby eliminating the
oppositions of traditional metaphysics that posed so many problems to the performative theory of
Butler: oppositions between facade and interior, between performance and anatomy, between body and spirit,
genetics and identity. Agnès is a cultural artifact with organic consistency, a fiction whose
significants are somatic.

Between Agnès and her mother, there is no genetic affiliation but a pharmaceutical alliance. Agnès inherits the
estrogens from her mother. Due to a curious ancestry, Agnès's testicles begin to produce the
mother's estrogens. Both enter a process of reversibility and mutation, as if they had
signed a secret hormonal contract: the same dose, the same regularity. This is not about a
matter of imitation, but of assisted reproduction with hormones. If it is accepted that Agnès is a
cyborg, a biodrug, so it must be said that his mother is also one, as she depends on ingestion
of a hormonal replacement technique that often seems chaotic, and the biological woman
typical American, who consumes oral contraceptives starting in adolescence. By endorsing those
harmless pills, both embody the biotechnological fictions of identity. The difference
resides in the following: while Agnès seems to reappropriate the techniques of subjectivation and
the generalization of her body, the biological American woman unconsciously swallows those
techniques as if they were "natural" complements to their femininity.

Starting in the 1950s, the construction of femininity is in all cases a process of

somatic cross-dressing or biodrag similar to that performed by Agnès. The breasts, whose volume and
consistency acquires a new importance, becoming a somatic center of production of
gender. They become the site of new pathologies such as hypomastia (small breasts) or cancer of
mom, whose frequency increases exponentially and arises at the same time as the techniques of
mastectomy and reconstruction with synthetic implants (Haiken, 1997). From augmentation to
reconstruction, the breasts of the 20th century primarily function as prosthetics.

Since the early 20th century, new synthetic materials, quasi-architectural structures, and
The montage techniques enter the realm of body transformation. Paraffin is one of the
first substances used for the construction of what is known as island flaps
the island flap for breast implants, but also for cases of testicles or for the
treatment of the 'syphilitic nose'. In the 1920s it was replaced by gum arabic and then by rubber,
cellulose, ivory, and different metals. In 1949, Ivalon was invented, a derivative of polyvinyl alcohol,
for use in the first breast implant through subcutaneous injection. The first recipients
The Japanese sex workers of the post-war and war will be from those rudimentary implants.
cold, whose body will be standardized according to the consumption criteria of heterosexuals in the armed forces
Americans (Yalom, 1997: 236-238). The bodies that were not deformed by the rations of plutonium are
now the object of the deformation of polysiloxane polymers. The mutation of bodies is carried out
silicone on a global scale. From 1953 onwards, pure silicone becomes the leader in the production of
prosthetic implants. Soon after, Dow Corning Corporation introduces the first tube.
standardized silicone gel. Despite its toxicity being tested, it will continue to be used until
early 1990s.

However, the bio-drag dimension or the somatic camp does not only derive from the use of materials.
synthetics for the reconstruction of a presumed natural bodily normality. In fact, one of the
the first techniques of breast reconstruction emerged in the late 19th century, when Doctor Vinzent
Czerny decided to remove the mass of a lipoma in the shape of a bulge that one of his patients had.
I had on my back the effects of compensating for a mastectomy through an autotransplant (Gilman,
1999: 249). A few years later, body fat autotransplants are developed for facelifts and
reconstructions.

Consequently, this is not about evaluating the transition from the organic to the inorganic, but above all about
highlight the emergence of a new model of embodiment: the new techniques are no longer faithful to a
classical organic taxonomy according to which each organ and each tissue corresponds to a single
location, a single function. Far from respecting a formal or material totality of the body, engineering
from the fabrics and prosthetic techniques combines the modes of representation of cinema and architecture,
such as montage or three-dimensional modeling. The new surgery as technology of the
post-monetary sexuality is a tectonic construction process through which organs, tissues, fluids and
molecules are transformed into raw materials with which a new appearance of nature is created.
Before concluding, I would like to pause for a moment on the endocrinological techniques present in the
Agnès' domestic space, especially because of the treatment methods that the mother uses later
the same as those that Gladys Bentley resorts to in the decade of
1950 to nullify the effects of the performance of masculinity. Focusing on Gladys Bentley leads us
will allow reconsidering the performative dimensions of gender prosthetic incorporation.

Gladys Bentley is known as one of the first drag kings, that is to say, a professional of the
performance of masculinity in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s (Serlin, 2004: 111-158).
In 1952, Bentley, an openly masculine African American lesbian, took advantage of the success of the
new hormonal therapies and started an estrogen treatment (with Stilbestrol) for the effects of
attempt a refeminization process at the onset of menopause. When turning to medicine
endocrinological, seeks, as David Serlin rightly pointed out, to start a process of social rehabilitation, not
not only of gender but also of race (Serlin, 2004: 144-145). A few months after starting the
treatment, gives an interview to Ebony magazine and says: 'I became a woman again.'
What is interesting about Bentley's case is that the hormonal treatment contributes precisely
to block the effects of the repetition of the performance of masculinity, as if an excess of
performative masculinity could only be compensated through a biotechnology. It is thanks to that
somatic fiction that Gladys seems able to return to the performance of femininity: to abandon the
public and theatrical space to return to the domestic space.

Secondly, the biological heterosexual American woman is as much of a cyborg as Agnès, since
Take the pill methodically, undoubtedly the most powerful biodrag technique of the second half of the century.
XX. The pill is contemporary with the emergence of the notion of gender. Gregory Pincus created the
first contraceptive made from norethindrone, a synthetic form that can be taken orally of the
active progesterone molecule. It was first tested during a research campaign on
the assisted reproduction techniques for infertility cases in white Catholic families.
It was then tested on the island of Puerto Rico as a method of birth control in the local population.
of color, but also in various groups of female patients from the Worcester State Hospital and from
men from the Oregon state prison between 1956 and 1957, in investigations regarding control of the
libido and even for the 'treatment of homosexuality' (Tone, 2001: 220). The pill is not just a
a method of controlling reproduction, but also a method of ethnic production and purification, a
eugenic technique for species control (Roberts, 1997).

Even more biodrag, the pill is also a technique for gender production. Despite its effectiveness
In 99.9%, the North American Health Institute rejected the first pill because it suppressed
completely menstruation and questioned the femininity of the future women of America.
North. For that reason, a second pill was created, as effective as the first but whose only
the difference lay in that it reproduced the rhythm of natural cycles. Just as Agnès constructed herself from
conscious form as a hermaphrodite thanks to the estrogens from a menopausal treatment, their
biological compatriots contributed to the construction of the somatic fiction of young white women
feminine and fertile of North America.

The process of feminization of Agnès, and by extension that of her mother and her biological compatriots,
they demonstrate that hormones are biopolitical fictions, fictions that can be taken, digested,
to incorporate, biopolitical artifacts that create bodily formations and integrate into organisms
senior politicians, such as political-legal institutions and the nation-state. These artifacts
biopoliticians segregate narratives that can be quoted, recited, and undoubtedly also misquoted. If
It can be said that each hormone, as a political fiction, is subject to possible performative failures.
and, consequently, to incessant processes of decontextualized citations, Agnès's body us
remember that those invocations of the genre, those normative interpellations, are not simple processes
discursive. Those citations mobilize flows, trigger processes of cellular modification of and
hair growth, provoke changes in voice and even act as true generators of
effects. Agnès's body is not the passive matter upon which a set of techniques operates.
biopolitics of normalization of sex, nor the performative effect of a series of discourses on
identity. Agnès' technobody, a truly fascinating sexual monster, self-designed, is a product
from the reappropriation and collective agency of gender technologies to produce new
forms of subjectivation.

To conclude, the only thing left for me to do is invite you to practice some activism exercises.
biopolitical. Draw inspiration from Agnès.

Translation by Joaquín Ibarburu

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