The Trials of the Man-Standard

Preface to Speciation

A few months shy of his triumphant dinner with Donald Trump and Ye at Mar-a-Lago, which would take place shortly after Trump's announcement of his campaign for a second term, Nick Fuentes, arch-anti-semite, neo-Nazi organizer, incel influencer, and self-proclaimed misogynist, was in crisis management with his base.^[i] His incel credentials had been called into question after he confessed the unthinkable: he had kissed a girl in high school.^[ii] In the ensuing uproar, he was accused of being a "fakecel," a voluntary rather than involuntary celibate. To add insult to injury, his basement renter, no less than the treasurer of the America First Foundation, left the house, left the movement, and married a woman. Fuentes had been living in contaminating proximity to a closeted woman-lover, and a traitor too! To save his reputation, he assured his followers of his undying disgust for women. "I don't think I'll get the same joy out of a woman that I would with a monkey. .. Because monkeys are like funny and endearing, and women are just kind of like annoying and cringe.^[iii]" He has never had a girlfriend, he assured, and never would. This conjured up a new danger he had to parry. "What? People calling me gay because I've never had a girlfriend? I think if anything—if anything—it makes me less gay. If anything it makes me not gay. As opposed to less gay. Not that there's any gay, but it makes me not gay … It’s the reverse. That actually makes me really more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay. … What’s gayer than being ‘I like cuddles, I need kisses'?” "Having sex with women is gay. And having sex with men is gay and it’s really all gay." Not gay, less gay, any gay, all gay. Doth he protest too much? Not a few alt-right Reddit discussion threads thought so. But fear not. He really is the "straightest guy." "I'm more heterosexual than anybody." "If you wanna know the truth, the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel." The dinner with Trump gave him a much-needed image reboot. But wait … there he is again in contaminating proximity to a womanizer. Round and round it goes.

The only straight heterosexual position is to be asexual. Let that sink in a moment. Then recall that the other only straight heterosexual position celebrated in these circles is to "grab pussy" with Trumpian abandon. How do these mutually exclusive positions belong to the same "manosphere"? What makes their representatives circle round, like pigs at the same trough or, much the same, Mar-a-Lago guests at the same table? Why do sexless incels worship sexed-up Trump? (And what about that monkey business? Who invited bestiality to the party?)

The question could be asked, how does all this belong to the same gender?

That's the question. Not whether Fuentes is gay or not. That's a personal question, of minimal import in the larger scheme of things (that is, outside incel world). Take it all instead as a question posed to the structure of gender. That's the political question.

Gender designations are commonly presented as opposed identities. It takes little examination to realize that they are united in their opposition to each other. Man is defined by contrast to Woman, making Woman a constitituve function of man. An exclusion is inscribed in the nature of the excluder, in hollow, like an intaglio. This is what A.N. Whitehead calls negative prehension, noting that the form left by the act of exclusion in the excluder constitutes a positive bond that is integral to its make-up. In poststructuralist theory, this was called "ex-inscription." It is a basic point of radical feminism to point out that Man is dependent on its "othering" of Woman for its own formation. The terms are capitalized because at this level these are categories of a general and abstract character, whose relation to actually existing empirical entities is fraught.^[iv] The relation is fraught because the categories fundamentally designate normative standards. They are not descriptive categories, they are prescriptive. They erect an image against which bodies in the world are judged and selectively triaged. Man is a test: fulfill these conditions, and you are in the club. If you do not fulfill the requirements, you are cast aside into a lesser category, such as Woman. The structure of mutually constitutive oppositions is a hierarchy, Man at the top, in the exalted position. Woman – not to mention such categories as Child and Animal – fall on a sliding scale toward lesser value. Implicit in Man is White, as the topmost top of the hierarchy.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call this structure the "Man-Standard," asserting that it "whiteness in person."^[v] Whiteness, not white people, it is important to emphasize. By "in person" they mean "in and of itself," as an abstract, yet effective category – effective, because it is not only applied to lives as the yardstick of their value, it is imposed on them in the imperative, as a norm a life is duty-bound to embody as definitive of its mode of existence. One does not have an identity. One is identified, through application of a category and the superimposition of its normative mold on the shape of life. It goes without saying that, categorically speaking, Man (Whiteness) is a synonym for Straight (not to mention Neurotypical).

The formative inclusion of the opposing categories in each other's constitution creates a situation of unavoidable contamination. They have impressed their mark on each other. This may be experienced as a stain, particularly by those who bear the Man-Standard on their shoulders in the most gravity-laden of ways. A Standard He-Man, stoic exemplar of rigid masculinity, may feel duty-bound to expel the mark of the other to safeguard its perceived gender purity. The haunting by the mark of the other is experienced as a threat to be exorcized. But as a constitutive stain, it cannot be expelled. The attempt may escalate into increasingly extreme exorcism measures. The other may be positioned not only as inferior, but as abject, even unworthy of life.

This dynamic is familiar from twentieth-century fascism, as seen in its organizing figure of the leader as head Strong Man, at the pinnacle of the state. It was active as well as in the prelude to mature mid-century fascism, for example among the pre-Nazi militias studied by Klaus Theweleit.^[vi] It is a feature, to one degree of intensity or another, of all forms of misogyny. The animus is never only directed at women. It naturally, and necessarily, extends to the other devalued terms in the categorical hierarchy, in particular to the foreign or non-white body and the gender nonconforming body, as well as to the liberal or progressive apologists for their existence. Exemplifying the targeting of the latter is the current rightwing rhetoric of "toxic empathy," which identifies being "soft" on forms of life embodying resistance to or deviations from the norms of the Man-Standard and its well-ordered hierarchy as an existential threat to Western civilization that needs to be rooted out by any means necessary.

It must be noted, however, that this Strong-Man/He-Man figure of the Man-Standard, while still among us and still spewing its toxic non-empathy, is no longer, I am convinced, exclusively at the core of contemporary fascism and associated manospheric shenanigans. As we will see, the Man-Standard has undergone a transformation which (just to rankle its defenders) might be characterized as its becoming postmodern. The questions and contradictions raised by Nick Fuentes's seemingly nonsensical statements about his heterosexuality, which he treats as synonymous with his Manhood, need to be situated in relation to that transformation. There is a logic to his statements, in spite of first impressions, and it is tributary to the Trump-era logic of the Man-Standard.

In Fuentes's protestations, a strange slippage occurs. The more he protests, the more in danger he is of sliding towards the categories he excoriates. His statements led many among his base to the conclusion that, far from being the "most heterosexual" of men, he is abundantly gay. In his flailing around to prove himself, he rebounds from gayness into the even more questionable company of monkeys. It's as if the more he pulls to the masculinist extreme of the Man-Standard, the more he is pulled away from it, toward the constituent subcategories it embroilingly defines itself against.

What I mean here has nothing to do with the age-old stereotype that "we are really all bisexual." That is an essentialist statement attributing a fixed, if subterranean, character to "human nature." The point here is processual. It concerns the dynamic enveloped in and triggered by a seemingly static social structure of binary oppositions multiplied into a multipolar array of subcategories in differential solidarity with each other (Man-Woman, White-Black, Straight-Gay, Adult-Child, Human-Animal, etc). It is a statement about the poweroperations of the Man-Standard.

It is clear that Strong Man/He-Man figure standing at the masculinist extreme of the structure is an operation of power. It attempts to impose a normative frame on all bodies, and selectively judges and punishes those that do not submit, or cannot live with(in) their assigned subcategory, even if they try. To the extent that the masculinist extreme effectively hooks into the flesh like a burr, it manoforms the dynamic patterns of a body (in the way we speak of terraforming an alien planet). It is naturalized into the life of a body, becoming a constituent factor in its subsequent becoming. A body cannot but desire constituent factors of its life's dynamic that have contributed to defining it as the body it is. The extreme figure of the Man-Standard begins not only to impose itself, but to exert a pull. It becomes an attractor governing a tendency toward itself. As such, it features as a determinant of desire. Its desire rerouted, the body has been inducted into the Man-Standard's orbit, as a consequence of the power-play of the social application of the category.

The second movement is the slippage toward a devalued term. No matter how far a body goes toward the masculinist extreme, no matter how vigourously it protests, ex-inscribed terms in the structure exert their own pull. This is a structural effect of the ex-inscription, which is like a carving-out that is never fully sutured over. It continues to be felt in negative prehension: in a feeling of the form of the exclusion. The ex-inscription niggles with an itch, like an infected cut unhealed by a protective scab. An itch attracts. It niggles and beckons. It incites a body to worry it: from application to induction to incitation. A new counter-tendency is born. Devalued terms become constituent under-tendencies of the Man-Standard. The structure now draws a palimsest, with two superimposed, oppositely oriented tendencies operating at the same time: antagonistically co-operating co-tendencies.

Nick Fuentes inadvertantly inflamed the itch in his flailing to cleave to the opposite tendency. The more he flailed, the worse it got. He tried to correct course by making the masculinist extreme even more extreme. He not only doubled down on exorcistically excoriating the devalued terms of the Man-Standard, he attempted to expunge all sensuality from it. It's as if the only way to turn off the itch was to turn off all sensually tinged incitation: to turn off desire. But does that not also amount to a desire? An anti-desire desire, excising any possibility of its orientation toward a sensual terminus? He attempted to purify the Man-Standard, absolutizing it as if it could stand utterly alone, uncontaminated, in no relation to another term, like a polarity without a complement, as if north could secede from its implication with south, east and west and withdraw into its own planetary solitude.

This desire purified of any positive attractive orientation to an object is a purely reactive dynamic (in the sense of reaction developed in my last Substack post, "The Pathic, Reaction, Ressentiment"). But that niggling feeling, it just won't turn off. Once something is ex-inscribed in you, you can't will it away. You can't un-negatively prehend. In this mathematics of processual existence, two negative acts don't make a positive one. You can't cut out a cut-out without just making it bigger. The only way to eliminate the itch it is to eliminate the object that takes upon itself the attractive force of a category.

The "object" of desire is what stands for the terminus toward which an attraction pulls. The terminus itself is not, processually speaking, an object. It is a set of bodily connections, relational postures, gestures, calls-and-responses and associated intensities, toward which and through a life cycles, with an in-felt urge to repeat the exercise (in other words, the terminus is the attractor governing a "drive"). The object is what represents the terminus for purposes of orientation, like a cardinal point on compass pointing to a repeat destination. "Fetish" is another word for it, if that word can be relieved of negative judgment. The object is a form of expression of the process, which becomes a working part of the process. A repeat destination patterning a life is an existential territory. The object of desire indexes the existential territory, like a signpost that can be seen from a distance and guide an approach.

In the movement of the Man-Standard toward its extremest extreme, the terminus and the orientation towards it, as formally represented by an object of desire, is suppressed. The movement becomes a war machine: a dynamic of attack against any body desiring in orientation toward a sensual terminus, and whose only "object" is it own iteration. This is in no way to say that all asexuality is of this kind. At issue here is the hijacking of the desiring body by reaction.^[vii] At the limit for which Fuentes reaches, reaction becomes its own self-driving, purportedly self-sufficient orientation, a cardinal direction of one – the One (Man). Punishment, vengeance, retribution become the key of an existence absolutely intolerant of otherly-oriented existences, targeted for erasure or even annihilation. This anti-desire is an extreme form of microfascism. When it spreads to take in multiple bodies, accumulating toward a macrofascism, the world is in trouble.

The Man-Standard was described earlier as an operation of power. A category, with the hierarchy of values it carries and the normative frame that upholds them, is applied to a body. It sinks its hooks into it and endeavours to manoform it: render it into conformity with the normative standards. This is done through external means of coersion and, perhaps even more damagingly, by inducing a body to assume its assigned category as its own image, and internalize its values and norms as constituent factors in its subsequent life dynamic ("induction" can be understood here in an almost military sense). Fuentes's expunging of sensually oriented desire distills the Man-Standard down to its bare operation of power. It's almost as if his project were to live up to the 1970s feminist dictum that sex is power – except without the sex. So it might be more accurate to say here, rather than that sex is power, that gender is violence. For what is this structure that holds sets of opposing binary categories in tension-filled solidarity owing to the way they mutually ex-inscribe each other to stand resolutely together against each other as formative factors in each other's constitution – if not Gender "in person"? The Man-Standard is the structure of gender. This gives a new twist to the radical feminist observation that Man requires the opposing, devalued category of Woman to erect itself and uphold the value it claims for itself. This formative factoring of Woman into the make-up of the category Man means that there is in fact only one gender. Gender is the solidarity structure of Man vis-à-vis its devalued terms.^[viii]

Confusingly – or suggestively – the structure includes not just the Man-Woman binary, but also the intersecting Adult-Child, Gay-Straight, White-Black, and Human-Animal binaries, where the first term in each pair coincides with Man, and the second term deviates from it in its own contrastive way (the list, it should be noted, is not exhaustive). If we look at this oppositional solidarity-structure from the angle of the Adult-Child, we could call it, as Deleuze and Guattari often do, the Major. If we look at it from the angle of the Human-Animal, we can call it the HuMan. HuMan carries all the resonances of the Man of European modernity as critiqued by thinkers like Sylvia Winter. It is the figure of white supremacism as staged in colonialism, stacked on top of the species supremacism staged in the accompanying capitalist developmentalism. Here, genderstructure angles toward species being. The Animal, like Woman on another level, is the inferiority upon which Man grounds its structural supremacy. These two ascribed inferiorities contribute to the same supremacism. They are part and parcel of the same formation. Their intersecting in the constitution of Man unites them in the same structure, as indicated in the nomination HuMan.^[ix]

All of this creates a quite a tangle. If a drive to a sensual object-orientation is another term for a "sexuality," then Fuentes's distilling it out of the Man-Standard that is the One gender would seem to force a return to the sex-gender distinction that has been the crux of so many controversies in feminist and queer theorizing. Then on top of that, as the figure of the HuMan, gender angles itself toward species-being.^[x] Sex-gender, gender-species: this knot will have to be untangled. This will be attempted later in this essay by adding a fourth term: a new, processual concept of speciation as distinct from sex, gender, and biological species-being. For the moment, it is necessary to follow a detour through Trump, the contemporary form of fascism of which he is the figurehead, and the mutations in the Man-Standard that come to expression through that alliance.

Start with the question: what is a figure like Fuentes to Trump? What brings them to the same trough?

Figures like Fuentes set one of the boundary conditions of the Man-Standard. Fuentes stakes out the extremest extreme, at the outer limit. This absolves Trump of having to occupy that limit, which is in any case impossible. As we saw with Fuentes, the closer a body comes to it, the stronger is the counter-tendency to slip back toward a devalued category, and the more frenetically the body has to try to flail its way back. As Kadji Amin writes, "the notion of an alignment so exact between one’s personal sense of identity and the gender role assigned to one that there is no rub, no ambivalence, and no sense of constraint—is and has always been a fantasy. Nobody has ever felt that way. … Contamination is the companion of categorization."^[xi] A category is a logical construct: a set of characteristics said to define a true type. The type, the category itself, has no characteristics. The category Animal does not have four feet. A category is an abstract general idea that is draped over selected segmentation of the world to identify it, clothe it with regulatory norms, and apply value judgments to it. The fit is loose: no particular to which a prêt-à-porter general category is assigned fits the abstract clothing without wrinkles and chafing. That is because no body is a particular. The particular is a logical operator, complementary to and inseparable from the general. It is the form of content for the application of a general-level logical construct. All bodies are singular, not particular. And they are not contained. They leak and dodge and swerve, always overspilling their kind. There is no particular instance belonging to (claimed by) a general category whose vitality does not give that category the lie. Each body, each living reality, is in the final analysis sui generis – not so much one of a kind, as a kind of one.

All of the constituent categories of the Man-Standard are just that: categories, with a merely logical, though powerfully socially invested, status implcated in all manner of power operations. They are in essence empty. The purified image of Man that Fuentes attempts to embody is the summit of emptiness. It is the true north of masculinism, extrapolated by drawing an imaginary line. Or, it is the north star of masculinism, plotting an orientation whose terminus orbits so high in the atmosphere as to be purely aspirational. Because the image cannot be fulfilled, a body under its pull has no choice but to go on self-defensive and self-justifying reactive attack against the threat of slippage represented by its formative subcategories, devaluing them up to the point of abjection.

The extremest extreme that is the ideal of Man functions as a limit-pole. It polarizes bodies that enter its magnetic field, exerting an unearthly pull on them. It plots the ideal of heterosexuality as so exclusive a category that it excludes its own exercise. It takes its categorical nature so radically to heart that it subjects it to a reduction to absurdity. Oddly, rather than undermining the image of masculinism, it paradoxically strengthens it – by absolving bodies feeling its pull from actually having to embody it. It gives them license to indulge themselves in their peccadillos of slippage. Because a figure like Nick Fuentes exists as a sentinal of it, other bodies are acquitted of the imperative to occupy that unliveable extreme for their own part. The extreme of the Man-Standard operates as an attractor, inducting bodies into a field of orientation. At the same time, it gives license to those under its pull to fail to attain it. It governs by self-recission (not unlike the current US Congress, which passes budget allocations only to rescind them in order to hand autocratic power to their northstar, Trump).

Bodies liable to fall under its sway include any tending to reaction and ressentiment. To the extent that they feel its aspirational pull, they are included in its orientational field, whose name is MAGA. Trump followers, like Trump himself, are not beholden to embody the extreme – although the invitation is certainly there for any body of a desire to try. They can occupy a variable degree toward the pole in a manner of their own, discounting their singularities through their acts of allegiance without having to undergo the torturous operation of excising or entirely suppressing them. Slippages they embody may be overlooked – as long as they indulge liberally (excuse the term) in performative allegiance to the ideal of the Man-Standard, and pledge, equally performatively, to uphold the subcategory ascribed to them, assuming, if disingenuously, its devalued status. Performative is not being used here to mean "fake." The enactive pledging of allegiance to the Man-Standard is a way it gets its hooks into the flesh. It is a vector of manoforming. It is assumed, through practice, as the body's truth. But it is a complex truth, befitting the unfittable.

This is the change that occurs in the nature of the Man-Standard: it enters a postnormative phase. "Postnormative" does not mean that the normative ceases to apply. It continues to apply itself, with a vengeance. What it means is that there is room in that ill-fit application for a body performing fealty to the Man-Standard to deviate from it without inviting opprobrium.^[xii] A body can play between categories so as to enjoy the relative advantages in terms of social recognition and reward that adjoining itself Man-Standard yields, while at the same time partaking of a certain elbow room to orient otherwise. The service to the Man-Standard functions as a diversion from the looseness of the fit.

With respect to the sub-category of Woman, this takes the form of what in feminist sociology has been called "hybrid femininity."^[xiii] MAGA-land, worship as it may at the skirts of the trad-wife, is populated by high-profile, highly professionalized women media commentators, online influencers, and politicians who militate for the traditional gender and family roles they do not embody, as a condition of their very ability to militate for them. They extol male dominance over women, even as they partake in the male privileges of rightwing public life.^[xiv] They indulge in hard-line rhetoric and gestures worthy of their most toxic male colleagues (Kristi "I am Proud I Shot My Dog Because He Annoyed Me" Noem is an adept at this) and relish demonizing even lesser valued categories than Woman, with a particular animus toward trans people. Trump himself exemplifies the prerogative of gender creep with respect to the top category of Man. His cattiness, wound-licking vulnerability, and obsession with decorative flourishes have been interpreted as stereotypically feminine character traits, leading boisterous supporter Roseanne Barr to call him "the first female president of the United States," while others not so enamored of him (e.g. Jimmy Kimmel) have taunted him as a "Karen." This slippage to the feminine pole is compensated for by exaggerated masculine posing, coupled with widespread popular imagery portraying him as a cartoon action-hero. This asserts the extreme of the Man-Standard on the one hand, while kitchifying it on the other hand. Together, these gestures perform a wink that says, to use a favorite MAGA saying, that this is all to be taken "seriously, but not literally." The slippage can go a step further, with the masculine-feminine overlap moving toward stereotypes of gayness. Both white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos and MAGA stalwart Tucker Carslon have called Trump "Daddy" in accents that, when combined with Trump's overuse of the adjective "beautiful," his florid professions of "love" for autocrats upholding the more traditional strongman version of the Man-Standard such as Kim Jong U and Vladimir Putin, and his public obsession with the size of close friend and fellow-golfer Arnold Palmer's penis, evoke versions of the Daddy figure in gay culture.^[xv] Yiannopoulos is in fact gay, to no detriment to his status as a public paragon of Man-Standardly toxic masculinity.^[xvi]

What postnormative means in this context is that the bodies to which the Man-Standard are applied need not actually embody it to the letter. They need not live up to it. The norm continues to be applied punitively and exclusionarily to those ascribed the status of enemy of the Man-Standard and its inveterate Whiteness, while its declared friends are given a pass that allows them to be taken seriously but not literally as its representatives. This is in keeping with the post-truth tenor of the times, where true-false is no longer the operative question. More to the point is participation in a punishing affective regime of reaction bringing the Man-Standard to bear on others through performative gestures, increasingly backed up with autocratic governance and germinating police-state tactics, that aggressively apply its norm with very real consequences for those targeted. It is maintained in force, if not in truth.

This creates a situation of structural cynicism where, once again, the power function of gender comes to the fore, although in a less absolute way than it does in Fuentes's oxymoronic staking-out of the limit-case of his gender as a sexuality without one. Gender as the truth of a body's essential being is still invoked, but the emphasis is not there. The notion of truth in gender operates as a trigger and rationale for the operation of purifying the social field of nonconforming modes of life that unabashedly affirm their dissidence from the Man-Standard. It is on that reactive power operation that the emphasis is placed. Trump's own strategic gender slippage smears the Man-Standard and its reactive attack across a spectrum from (action-)hero to catty man(-child), and from Strong Man to Karen. This licenses a range of variation, enabling a greater variety of lives more readily to adjoin themselves to the affective regime of reaction that Trump preeminently personifies. There is no need for stoicism and self-sacrifice. There is no need to live up to exacting standards of behavior when the Standard is self-rescinding. In fact, breaking the norm in its name gains cachet, emboldening self-indulgence, abusive humor, in-your-face truculence, and organized cruelty, and even exalting them as patriotic deeds.^[xvii]"Normies" be damned! Trad-Man, he of the modern model of self-disciplined moral uprightness and gender honor, is rolling in its grave.

The Man-Standard in the age of Trump is no longer composed of clearly contrasting, effectively boundaried, truthfully definable terms (or, more precisely, by the appearance of such). It draws a spectrum. In other words, the opposing terms of the structure, on top of ex-inscribing each other, smear into a field of variation with no explicit acknowledgement of that fact. The contamination native to the structure comes out in the form, acceptable under MAGAnified conditions, of hybrid masculinities and femininities. The field is limited, running from the extremist pole of asexual heterosexuality purely deploying gender as violence, to the outer edge of forms of hybridization that are capable of passing, under MAGA conditions. The softening around the edges of the norm that comes with hybrid gender is in no way a liberation. It is not a gain in freedom. It is part and parcel of a power of induction, and comes at the price of a body becoming reactive. There is no way in which it can be construed as queer. The singularity of bodies's desirings is still curtailed. For a gay MAGA-Man like Yiannopoulos, the privilege accorded him to pass the Man-Standard is like being in the closet out in the open (he felt obliged to demote his husband to "roommate" while remaining married to him). Of what singularities of gayness might he be a carrier, that might not pass in the glare of the Man-Standard? What residual affirmative desires might subsist in his body, racked by reaction? By the same token, what affirmative powers of blackness might fellow male supremacist, the biracial Andrew Tate, have otherwise been of a body to express, were reaction not the attractor Trumpily governing his orbit?

For there are always underorientations, negatively prehended and incapable of being excised. They murmur in the background. They continue to teem. They are legion. Their name is potential. They are the potential for other forms of life, not yet fully emerged. They inhabit a body. No body is without them. Each body's infestation of them defines its singularity, counter-current to its dominant identification, and in a continual challenge to its particular take on the general model in force – bearing in mind once again that identification is to be identified. These are the forces of "contamination," pulling a body in directions oriented away from the assigned Standard category onto whose spectrum it has been inducted. They are powers of queering.

A spectrum is a tricky thing. One of the most evident yet mysterious characteristics of a spectrum is that although there are bands of clear expression, there is strictly no dividing line between them. On the spectrum of color, major hues stand out. But between them there is only an imperceptible transition that cannot be grasped. The closer you look into the cracks between colors, the more color tones appear. The transitions are not boundaries but gradients, teeming with nuances. The rainbow has innumerably more than seven colors. In the interstices between colors, any number of nuances come together and overlap. Between every two major colors lies an infinity of potential color expressions, mutually included. It is their imperceptible overlap that makes the spectrum a spectrum, because it constitutes the continuity that holds the standout colors that effortlessly self-display aloft in the same gradient field, against the background of the legion of interstitial minor tones and undercolors that embody the potential the spectrum holds. The transition between two colors is not a third color, nor the lack of color, but a chromatism that has no particular color, because it is overfull with too many of them. It is like the spectrum melding into white light, except imperceptibly, recessively, in the teeming underfill of the cracks between: virtual white light; the mutually included potential for all color expression.

The same logic applies not only to vision with respect to color, but to the "separate" senses. When we see an object and reach our hand to touch it, our perception segues from one sense modality to another while continuing the same experience of the same percept, in what is called a cross-modal transfer. Is there a boundary between the sight and the touch? What sense modality is the in-between in? None in particular. It is amodal, by the same token that the transition between colors is achromatic: achromatic in chromatic continuity; amodal in modal continuity. If the imperceptibility in the in-between of colors is not the simple lack of color but the fullness of the spectrum with chromatism, then the amodal in-between of sense modes is likewise a fullness of experience with sense modality, the senses's modalism. This is the continuity of experience defining its field of potential.

Now consider a synesthetic experience, where sense modalities "mix." For example, a texture, which is when we feel a quality of touch in vision. It is as if an overlap in the interstitial continuity of experience has surfaced in a new stand-out modality, which can be named hapticity. This is not a simple mix, but a fusion. Hapticity is not decomposable into separate ingredients. Its ingredient modalites fuse into a new quality of experience that is all its own, and only itself, in its singular quality. That quality is a unitary resultant of the difference between its ingredient modalities, "resultant" defined as the joint result of two or more vectors acting at the same point, to integral effect. If this is not a mix, neither is it a hybrid. It is a singular emergence, occurring between the major modalities's standing for themselves in their putative discreteness, as one as opposed to the other. The vectoring toward the emergence is the working out of a force of expression immanent to the spectrum of the senses, and one with its continuity.

Chromatism, amodality, emergence, immanent force of expression. How does this figure into gender?

With the suggestion that there is an understory to gender: movements of emergence that rise from the amodal field of emergence of life's chromatic potential to disturb the surface of the categorizing Man-Standard overstory and its normative channeling, policing, and curtailing. There are vectorings afoot on an infra-level to the categories. Their resultants surface into novel fusions. These bring to expression new integrations of potentials whose conatus – their self-affirmation and desire to persevere along the orientation they set for themselves – invents newly minted existential territories that assert their place in the social landscape.

These emergences are to gender categories what synthesthetic fusions are to the "normal" perceptual modalities that overshadow them to take center stage in our thinking. Unlike hybrids, they do not define themselves in terms of the Standard structure of categories whose surface they ruffle, as they come up from between their cracks. They self-define, with the emphasis on their own novelty and the self-consistency of their orientation. If they reference anything other than themselves, it is not in the first instance the cut-and-dried categories they come between, but rather the radiant fullness of the spectrum of which those categories are a sorely limited expression. They point to the creative potential carried in the spectrum's chromatism, as a positive power of variation, not a "contamination." They resolve the amodal complexity of the broader formative field of process, which the police procedures of the Man-Standard strive to hold in check, into the emergence of a new form of life representing a novel mode of existence. That emergent mode of existence is also limited – no body can bear the full spectrum without being refracted into a million unlivable glimmers. But it is a limited addition, as opposed to a curtailment. "Selective" is a more positive way of saying it. It affirms the selection of potentials it draws to the surface into an integral expression. The very event of its emergence stands as a warranty that the potential it arose from was real. If potential was selectively drawn upon in this way, in this instance, there is no reason it does not abide as an enablement for a next inventive expression.

If, as was suggested earlier, sexuality can be defined as a self-selecting orientation toward the terminus of a sensual object that operates as a lure for a set of repeated bodily connections, relational postures, gestures, calls-and-responses and associated intensities whose cyclic refrain constitutes a self-constructing existential territory expressing immanent forces of self-formation – then each "synesthetic" variation on what a desiring body can be can be considered a sex. N sexes, as Deleuze and Guattari liked to say, to underline the multipliclity populating this bubbling field of germinal modes of life.^[xviii]

This is where the concepts of gender and sex must be re-distinguished. There is only one gender, and its name is Man. Gender is a power operation. Sexes are expressions of forces of emergence. Although it is necessary to distinguish gender from sex, it will not do to separate them, reducing them to a simple binary opposition. The arising emergences collide with the power operations of the Man-Standard as they come down upon them in normative application so as to insinuate themselves into the flesh. The relation of sexes to gender is, to use a phrase Moten and Harney apply to the relation between the forces of the "undercommons" and dominant structures of being, a general antagonism.^[xix] The term conveys their fundamental processual difference at the same time as the fateful fact that they cannot but come-together in conflict, liberal tolerance and accommodation notwithstanding. The processual difference can be signaled using the distinction between Major and minor, with Major deployed as an overall designation of the Man-Standard, extending it beyond the sense of the age-based hierarchy that is one of the constitutive contrasts of the Man-Standard, as well as beyond its more general connotation of greater and lesser importance.^[xx] The sense is closer to the distinction between Major and minor keys in music (which, as was the case here, together require supplementation by a notion of chromatism to embrace the full spectrum of musical potential).

The movement of minor variation always troubling the surface of gender is exemplified in the relatively recent varietal addition of "two-spirited" to the n sexes of the world. A confluence of vectors of indigeneity and gender nonconformity surfaced into the contemporary landscape as a new (or reminted and resurgent) existential territory. Its singularity was such that it required an addition to the acronymic soup of gender, joining L, G, B, T, Q and others. But there's the rub: its success at self-affirming and persisting in expressing the self-consistency of its orientation forced a recognition. It not only added itself to the social landscape, it was added to the categorical schema of gender. Under a liberal regime valorizing (if not always practicing) tolerance and inclusion) the categorical schema can stretch to accommodate the addition of a category as a particular instance of the general rule. This inducts the bodies living that reality into the official purview of a Man-Standard with a human face (to use a problematic phrase): a softer-power version of it. Rights and protections are extended to the added sub-category. With them come civic and legal responsibilities: norms, standards, and limits as well as rights of expression. The mode of life is channeled, but with a greater margin of maneuver, and with a recognized right to exist.

The problem is that the chromatism of modes of life will not only abide in potential, but will press again for new expression in further n sexes. There is no endpoint to the process. The self-inventive, self-affirmation of one mode of life enables and emboldens others, often variations on itself, to move toward the threshold of appearance to fashion a sustainable existential territory for itself. The categories are rendered friable and fissile, under pressure of potential. The generation of variations generates ever more variation, never ceasing to complicate the map. Each category, by virtue of its warranting of potential, harbors others, in germ. The category shimmers with a differential bundle of infra-orientations vying for expression.^[xxi] What appeared as a singularity, and was accommodated as a particular, proves itself a seething multiplicity. This is illustrated by the multiplying internal distinctions with which categories like "lesbian" and "gay" have nuanced themselves over the past last fifty years. The liberal regime that offered accommodation to some of these insurgent sexes is now under possibly terminal stress, as the reactionary usages of the Man-Standard with which it has always shared the social field take their revenge – raising the question of where the self-pressure toward the invention of modes of life, which will never cease stirring the soup, might go after as the balance of powers lurches rightward.

There is a duplicity in all of this. To the extent that a mode of life accepts recognition and avails itself of the rights and protections that come with it, it is inviting the Man-Standard, in its liberal bent, into its process as a factor in its survival, in other words as a formative factor in its future formations. To the extent that a mode of life is plugged into by the Man-Standard in its reactive bent – of which it can never be cleansed and is arguably the base state to which it always owes itself to return (as the hard-core alt-right masculinist qualifier "based" implies) – the Man-Standard is a determinative factor in a body's life dynamic. Standardization soft or hard. Normalization flexible or punitively rigid. Channeling broad or narrow. Every body is subject to both bents, to varying degrees, in different ways, synchronously or at different times. This produces a doubleness: a lived duplicity. On the one side, the Man-Standard soft and hard, and on the other the field of potential and its immanent chromatic spectrum. A life is pulled in two directions at once, splayed between the two dimensions, the body's being is the living suspension bridge trussing their difference. How a body navigates this tension is definitive of its overall mode of life, or what manner of being it effectively is.

Hybrid feminities and masculinities are one way, the way most acquiescent to the based Man-Standard and remaining steadfastly within its orbit. Recognized categories that try to hold the line of variation at their own boundary – such as exclusionary feminisms that say thus far and no farther to transgender people they cast beyond the pale – re-rigidify the categorical scheme, police boundaries, separate into opposing terms, and impose prescribed norms. In short, they do the work of the Man-Standard, reiterating its structure with different content, in homology with it at a remove from its base state, in a side-channel to its mainstream. They are ancillaries to the Man-Standard, falling squarely on the side of the Major.

Transgender people who assume the category to which they transition and seek recognition as a member of that category might at first glance to be similarly in acquiescence to, or even in the service of, the Man-Standard. This presupposition has to be revised in light of the complexity of the mode of life they invent, and its many variations. There is always at least an infrathin difference that remains vis-à-vis bodies-lives living according to the categories assigned them at birth. This is often creatively played upon and embraced, and helps cement the elective communities of mutual aid and self-defense so necessary to trans survival. There remains a qualititative difference that is affirmed in and through the coincident affirmation of membership in the transitioned-to category. That qualitative difference relates to the singular history and manner of each body's transition as it continues to inform its life, infra- to its life changes. In short, the official category is worked from within to accommodate lived difference. This immanent difference makes transgender life not an acquiescence to the Man-Standard, but a queering of it, if queering can be defined as a creative duplicity toward gender categories inventive of a qualitatively different mode of life and its corresponding existential territories. The many and multiplying nonbinary and nonconforming ways of living gender that are coming to expression today – and are being violently reacted against by partisans of the Man-Standard – are also phenomena of queering (associated here with the concept of the force of the minor). The "non-" is the mark of creative duplicity. It retains the reference to the general categories being problematized, precisely in order to problematize them. Creative gender duplicity involves a "double consciousness" not unlike the double consciousness W.E.B Du Bois theorized in relation to that other domineering category of the Man-Standard, race: a strategic straddling, a living the difference-between, for a more to life.

Living between gender categories raises the question posed earlier in relation to color. If the transgender transition between gender modes is cross-modal, in what mode is the transition as such? If nonbinary problematizations of gender categories move in the interstices between them, and open that space of the between to the invention of difference, in what mode is the problematization? If emergent variations on gendered modes of life invent analogues to synesthesic fusions in perception, in what category does the fusioning itself fall? In other words, how can these becomings be classified, as distinct from the existentially territoried modes of being become?

Short answer: they cannot be classified. They are amodal. They are the chromatism holding the potential for the emergence of gender and sexes. They are the field of emergence for the structure of gender, and all forms of creative duplicity towards it. Becomings with respect to gender are of an entirely different nature, in an entirely different dimension of process, out of which arise, in different keys, both the gender categories and the sexes that come-together with them in general antagonism. Just as the chromatism of the color spectrum is not itself color, so too the spectrum of potential of which every sex and gendering is a selective expression itself has no particular sex or gender. This is in keeping with one of the key insights of process-oriented thought, articulated forcefully by Gilbert Simondon and shared by such thinkers as C.S. Peirce, William James, A.N. Whitehead, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: the field of emergence is without resemblance or correspondence with what emerges from it. What comes to be is a self-composing, self-differing product. It is evident in art, for example, that the work does not resemble the art-working. A painting does not resemble painting, and neither does its content correspond to the ingredient factors of that process. A form does not resemble its formation (just ask the chicken of the egg). Form and formation, being (sex/gender in their general antagonism, intersecting with other general antagonisms related to other categories, such as race) and becoming – these belong to different orders. They are different, imbricated dimensions of process.

The product of an emergence is often said to "annul" its formative process in its own appearance.^[xxii]By this is meant that the stand-out modal characteristics of what emerges stand for the process. The emergence cedes the stage to the emerged, which outshines it in its visibility, out-solidifies it in its touchability, drowns it out with its soundings, and blurs its dynamic with its movement patterns. The commotion of the general antagonism of sexes and gender can produce a second-order annulment, diverting attention from these modal characteristics native to the emergences to their tension and conflict with the categories. This diverts from the fact that every skirmish is an expression of emergence, in its inevitable confrontation with the Man-Standard, which bears witness to the emergence having occurred. It further diverts from the fact that every emergence carries traces of the potentials of which it availed itself, fused into its arising form, still shining in its glints and shimmers. The emerged stands for emergence. The product stands out from the process, while at the same time standing for it: expressing it in determinate form. The form expresses process – and the process expresses itself in the ways in which the form always ultimately proves to be in excess of its determination. For there is always overspill. There are always underdeterminations, attaching to errant tendencies signaling embryonic orientations toward parts unknown. There are always singularities in the make-up of the life of a body that are not fit to type. These are what glint and shimmer excess. They are discounted as irrelevant details in the categorical accounting of the body. They are considered little misses, or worse, aberrations, and can only be understood from the point of view of categorical logic as a negative, a non-being exactly what one is, by categorical definition. Which they are. But the most consequential point is that these errrancies betoken the survival of the process in the product. They are a remainder of emergence in the emerged. An abiding of potential to become-other than what is recognized as being. The tenor of a life in errancy represents the coefficient of becoming remaining in the being that it has settled into, of formation in its form, and of indeterminacy in its determination. It is a degree of chromatism tinting the color of a life.

The singularity of each body's way of carrying the chromatism, the share of amodality it keeps alive, makes every body, in the final analysis, a category of one. Every life is sui generis: a self-invention of a mode of existence that, when taken out from under normative frames like those of the Man-Standard, is unique. At the chromatic limit, the field of emergence of gender is not gendered, nor is it sexed. It is the immanent other of sexes' and gender's becoming.

How can we name this, for itself and in its own right? Following the suggestion of Erin Manning, we can call it speciation: the becoming of a one of a kind that is a kind of one.^[xxiii] Out from under the HuMan: an inimitable more-than of becoming(-human), otherwise than being.

Speciation is carried, under annulment, in every being of any given type. But it can also break out into the open, transiting between sexes and genders. The transiting is not so much in transgender mode, as amodally trans-to-gender.^[xxiv] These breakouts can be experienced as peak experiences or flow experiences, enacting what Étienne Souriau's calls an "enthusiasm of the body" (a more fitting appelation for this account, for its connotation of overflow).^[xxv] They may also be lived as crises, listing toward breakdown. They are always a rupture or an irruption.

My next Substack post will try to present an example. It will tell the fable of a speciation out-from-under gender and its combattant sexes that is of the first type: an experience of intensity experienced as an enlivening hiatus from categorical existence, bringing out the in-between of terms, in and for itself. It might be titled "When Boys are Not HuMan." It will look into the paradox that the "one" of a kind of speciation can only come out for itself in the dynamism of a group subject: for the potential of the singular is always multiple. Always more than one, as Manning says. Always an integral, composed of differentials. The only way to construe this in terms of being is to think of it as the being of relation.^[xxvi] If speciation, as being of relation, has an existential territory, there would be no better way to think about it than in terms of the temporary autonomous zone that is "play."^[xxvii]

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^[i] Mark Caputo, "The Inside Story of Trump's Explosive Dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes," NBC News, November 29, 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/story-trumps-explosive-dinner-ye-nick-fuentes-rcna59010; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/25/trump-nick-fuentes-kanye-west.

^[ii] Claire Goforth, " 'Wannabe incel': Nick Fuentes Fans Revolt over Admission He’s Voluntarily Celibate," The Daily Dot, February 14, 2022

https://www.dailydot.com/news/nick-fuentues-mocked-kiss-incel/.

^[iii] Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nick_Fuentes, accessed August 1, 2025.

^[iv] "The terms homosexual/heterosexual and transsexual as well as other markers like man/woman, masculine/feminine, whiteness/blackness/brownness are all historically variable terms, untethered in fixed or for that matter natural or inevitable ways to bodies and populations,” Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Diversity (Berkely: University of California Press, 2018), 8.

^[v] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 176.

^[vi] Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women Floods Bodies History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

^[vii] Asexualities that are not of this reactive cast deserve their own account to do them justice. This is beyond the purview of the present essay.

^[viii] For Deleuze and Guattari on the Man-Standard, or Standard Man, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105–6, 178, 292–93, 554n82. On the idea that there is only one gender (modeled on Deleuze and Guattari's assertion that there is only one class in capitalism), see my discussion in The Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life (Durham: NC, 2025), 44-45, 150-151. The concept of the Man-Standard was central to my first book, User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

^[ix] The Animal is a constitutive subcategory of Man not only because it is most cruelly ex-inscribed from the traditional image of Man, but also because it later comes to be recognized as intimately participating in it, without for that ceasing to be ex-inscribed in it. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the category of Animal grounds definitions of human as a biological species. The recognition of a condition of animality written into the evolutionary process of becoming human becomes the fulcrum for its extension beyond its moral/political definitions (associated with Man1 in Sylvia Wyner's schema) to biopolitical operations (co-emergent with Wynter's Man2, or Economic Man). The Animal category's plural functioning (on the one hand, moral other of Man ejected from the polis in its founding gesture; on the other, biological ground for the HuMan) is typical of all Man-Standard categories. Every category is subject to a plurality of definitions and angles of approach, sometimes originating in different eras, which accumulate in overlay but do not entirely overlap. The tension between them gives the category a margin of play, authorizes differing takes on it, and condition its own evolution. The built-in variation gives the Man-Standard an adaptive power that must always be kept in mind. In this essay, the Man-Standard is spoken of as a "structure." This term can be misunderstood to mean that it is fixed in form. To avoid this, Deleuze and Guattari'a term "assemblage" (agencement) is useful. Each iteration of the Man-Standard crystallizes it into a structure, for that particular exercise. The Man-Standard assemblage moves from one structured expression to the next, following the operations of power applying it to different situations. The assemblage is the variational power running through the series of structurations. On Man1 and Man2, see Sylvia Wynter, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

^[x] The term "species-being" is used here in a different sense than in the early work of Marx, where it refers to the self-actualization of the human as living labor attaining its freedom. Here, it is used to make a distinction between becoming and the being become (the determinate form that emerges from becoming), as different dimensions of process.

^[xi] Kadji Amin, "We are All Nonbinary: A Brief History of Accidents," Representations 158 (2022), 114, 117. Amin quotes Judith Butler: "The line is supposed to differentiate straight from lesbian, but the line is contaminated by precisely that which it seeks to ward off: it bounds identity through the very same gesture by which it differentiates itself; the gesture by which it differentiates itself becomes the border through which contamination travels, undermining differentiation itself." Judith Butler, "Afterword," in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, ed. Sally Munt and Cherry Smith (London: A&C Black, 1998), 228.

^[xii] The postnormative performance of fealty to the Man-Standard often takes the form of rightwing "vice-signaling" to counter liberals' alleged penchant for "virtue-signaling." One demonstrates one's MAGA bona fides by signaling a willingness to break the traditional norms in the service of reaction. The alt-right epithet "normie" thrown at those upholding liberal values is another postnormative signal. On vice-signaling, see Michelle Goldberg, "Killing Dogs. Taunting the Homeless. Praising Al Capone. This Is Trump’s Party," Washington Post, May 13, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/opinion/kristi-noem-vice-signaling-maga.html

^[xiii] For an account of contemporary "female anti-feminism" that can connect to theories of hybrid feminity, see Robyn Marasco, “Reconsidering the Sexual Politics of Fascism,” Historical Materialism, June 25, 2021, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/reconsidering-sexual-politics-fascism. On hybrid masculinity, see Debbie Ging, “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere,” Men and Masculinities, vol. 22, no. 4 (2019): 638–57.

^[xiv] The phenomenon was already prominent enough by the mid-1970s for Andrea Dworkin to feel the need to dedicate a book to it. Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (New York: Perigree, 1978). A proliferation occurred in the 2010s, as if a tipping point had been passed.

^[xv] "Whose Your Daddy? These Days, Who Isn't," Maura Judkis, Washington Post, July 7, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/ 2025/07/07/daddy-trump/

^[xvi] The Personality of Power, 32-46, provides a more fleshed-out analysis of Trump's "ornamental masculinity," various forms hybrid masculinity and femininity, and the political force of these gender slippages.

^[xvii] See note 11 on "vice-signaling." See also Roddey Reid on the prominence of bullying and "thuggery" in Trump world: Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying. A Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond, second edition (forthcoming on IngramSpark.com, Kobo.com and Amazon.com, September 2025).

^[xviii] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 296. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 277-278. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, trans. Ann Hodges and Mark Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 92-95. For a related account of race as a multiplicitous field of becomings, see Amit S. Rai, "Race Racing: Four Theses on Race and Intensity," Women's Studies Quarterly, vol 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2012), 64-75.

^[xix] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (Colchester/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions: 2021), in particular pp. 124-125, where the general antagonism is discussed in terms of "complicity," resonating with what is called creative "duplicity" later in this essay.

^[xx] On this conception of the minor, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105-106, 291-293, 469-473.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "What is a Minor Literature?," Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16-27.

^[xxi] Eliza Steinbock analyzes "shimmer" as the manner in which emergent change appears in film with respect to sex and gender: Shimmering Images Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham, NC: Duke Universtiy Press, 2019). The term made its way into affect theory from Roland Barthes as a way of expressing the excess of changeability that affect carries. See Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20.

^[xxii] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 223-240.

^[xxiii] Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013ß), 204-222. On trans becoming as the deterritorialization of race and speciation in their major sense, as formations of species-being, see Jasbir K. Puar, “Bodies with New Organs Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled.” Social Text, vol. 33, no. 3 (September 2015): 45–73.

^[xxiv] This is the term Calvin Warren uses (271) for black trans, "not as an ontological formation (i.e., nonnormative human subjects) but as a speculative or philosophical enterprise—one designed to devastate ontological humanism" (267); Calvin Warren, "Calling into Being: Tranifestation, Black Trans and the Problem of Ontology," TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2 (May 2017): 266-274. The term trans-to-gender is taken up here – as a necessarily speculatively pragmatic enterprise of process itself – for its resonances with theories of blackness as paraontological in authors such as Nahum Chandler and Fred Moten. These are in confluence with the present account of the Man-Standard vis-à-vis its infra-field and underorientations, although coming from a different philosophical direction (more deconstructive than processual). Marquis Bey draws on both currents to develop a paraontological take on blackness and "transness" (akin to Warren's trans-to-gender) in Black Trans Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022): "Black trans feminism theorizes power, and, more important, the subversion of it, in excess of wholesale notions of immediately discernible 'identities.' … Transness’s radicality functions differently than, but not to the exclusion of, 'transgender'," 5, 13.

^[xxv] Étienne Souriau, Le sens artistique des animaux (Paris: Hachette, 1965), 35.

^[xxvi] Erin Manning, The Being of Relation (Bristol: Intellect, forthcoming 2025).

^[xxvii] See my theory of play as the expression of a "supernormal tendency" in What Animals Teach us About Politics(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).