How to threaten power

Shall we read a little of that oh so edgy paper?

This paper suggests that a purposeful political embodiment of threat opens up and revisits a trans* politics of monstrosity and virality that not only questions but threatens power. Taking seriously the transphobic notion of transness as an endemic threat to feminism, gender, and rights, I present ‘trans* endemics’ as a political and scholarly strategy that asks, what does an embodiment of threat, indeed, being a threat, do as a possible site of survival and resistance for trans* bodies?

With a hey nonnie nonnie and a hotchacha.

But picking our way through the obligatory theory-speak, we find that he’s saying it’s cool for trans people (male ones, he means but doesn’t spell out) to be threatening because by being threatening they threaten power. Yes that’s right, a guy with a knife to the throat of a feminist woman is threatening power. It all makes sense now. The knife to the throat is a site of resistance for trans bodies. What else would it be?

When you see me walk down the street with my long blonde hair, heeled  combat boots, and make up to die for, are you scared? 

No. One, I don’t generally examine people walking down the street that closely. I’m usually thinking about other things, or looking at the view, or both. Two, you sound more ridiculous than scary. Three, get over yourself.

When I walk down the street, I see people who hate me and admire me; want  to kill me, and want to fuck me. They see a threat, and I see a weakness.  

You see people who don’t give two shits about you, that’s what you see.

I am both threat and threatened. I am the monster in your nightmares, I am  the lamb for the slaughter, I am the butcher. Watch me take my knife to your  throat.  

You’re not the butcher, you’re a very silly boy.

TERFs see transness as an endemic threat to feminism, a ‘social contagion’, the  frontier on which they’re going to defeat patriarchy. They don their JK  Rowling masks and shout bloody murder about ‘female erasure’.

Yeah, stupid women, why do they object to the erasure of women? Let’s all put knives to their throats.

Let us harness this parasitic imaginary and suck the cis out of feminism. Let  us be the endemic. Let us exist as the evil twin to queer theory, and let us bleed it dry for all it can offer us. Chu is wrong: trans* is more than ancillary  notion to queer. But do we have to depart from queer entirely? Is trans* even fucking here yet?

If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to  feminism. We are the endemic, the viral, the toxic onslaught of ideology that  attacks the very core of what you hold dear. We go unnoticed, right up until  the moment they scream for mercy.  

Dude fantasizes about making women scream for mercy, and that’s a “paper” in “gender studies.”

Am I a threat to you? Do I send chills down your spine?  

Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear.  Does that turn you on? Are you scared?  

I sure fucking hope so. 

Those are the final paragraphs of the paper. Scholarly stuff I’m sure you’ll agree.

27 Responses to “How to threaten power”