#cyborgism

3! for book asks

SQRT∞:\\superhumanoid_AI\conn.exe

Xenoestrogenic, even without the prefix trans-, is already an overgrown, weedy keyword sinking heterogeneous taproots into the histories, politics, and embodiments of life on planet Earth. Hence my recourse to etymology. It is an adjectival form of xenoestrogen: that is, an estrogen anthropocentrically and racially marked as “foreign” or “alien,” which includes those estrogens belonging to plants (phytoestrogens) and fungi (mycoestrogens) as well as various kinds of synthetic estrogens (e.g., Bisphenol A). The xenoestrogenic tangles with the more familiar rootstock of steroidal estrogens — estrone, estradiol, and estriol — that have come to define the female sex hormone. It therefore twines itself with the lives of transwomen who situate themselves within the milieu of hormonal transition or “hormone replacement therapy” (HRT). Prefixing trans- to xeno- produces fruitful tension. Trans- further concatenates the oversimplified alienations and -phobias connected to xeno- by enacting “movements-across-into-strangeness” that foster new conjugations, allowing xeno- to suggest alternate worldings rather than marking a discontinuous zone of incommensurable and inaccessible difference (King 2012). Trans-ing xeno- unsettles the oversimplified Others necessary for the production of stratification and disallowance, without in the process destroying difference and the ethics of encounter. Transxenoestrogenesis, a word with prefixes like nerve endings, recapitulates the syntax of sensate life folding over itself, invaginating itself, to encounter its own materiality.

If we are to dislodge transgender from the event of its medicalization and meditate, alternatively, on the handmade dimensionality of experience, what might transgender come to mean? The labor of making transgender identity is handmade: collective — made with and across bodies, objects, and forces of power — a process, unfinished yet enough (process, not progress); autonomous choreography; free; do-it-yourself; nongeometrical transformation; freeform. The handmade is a haptic, affective theorization of the transgender body, a mode of animating material experience and accumulative felt matter. As bodily feeling and sensation transform flesh parallel to diagnostic and administrative forces, a handmade orientation foregrounds the work of crafting identity. The material properties of soft and pliable forms of emotional life, skin elasticity, scar tissue, cellular organization, and bodily capacity and dimension operate as a corrective to the limited categories of surface/depth and before/after. Density and texture yield felt knowledge. Labor congeals as residual emotion. Transgender life is made and remade as matter, identity, politics. The handmade generates new evidence of what a body and its difference might be.

Beware not to use the future as an excuse to ignore living in the present. Instead, pretend that tomorrow is today.

The flaming signs of the Universe hidden from our senses will flash before man's spectroscopic eye in their infinite variety, and the voice of the elements will penetrate audibly to his spectroscopic ear. A new and strange communion between him and Nature will lavish its cornucopia of chemical secrets, of which our painfully acquired science does not even dream, on the man of the future.