Chapter Two: Permeable Boundaries

PERMEABLE BOUNDARIES

The fluid body is tucked within a cutaneous mass of skin. A concealed elastic wrapping that covers the sinewy and watery internal body. The skin is an orifice surrounding our matter, breathing, perspiring, secreting fluids from its hole and pores, coating the corporeal surface in oily lipids and salty liquids. The tactile sense organ is an ‘amorphous cement’40 of stratified layers, folding and sealing our insides in. Closed yet penetrable, a ‘vulnerable, unreliable boundary between inner and outer conditions,’41 a corpulent paradox. The skin is the border to the external world, the scaley edge of the body. The fleshy film is not fixed but in a constant process of becoming. A milieu, a microcosm of life, alive and multiple. It moves and lives, shifts and regenerates, cells decay, split and renew. Carnal matter is not a congealed monolithic mass but plastic and malleable, subject to mutability. Skin is fluid. We discard several whole bodies of ourselves within our lifetime. To shed skin is to evolve beyond the body’s current physical state. The transformative properties of skin as metamorphic material is incarnated by the serpent, which maintains complex symbology in Western epistemology and beyond. The snake represents both good and evil, wisdom and deception, castration and phallus, devourment and nourishment, death and rebirth. Its ability to tear and slither out of its expired proteinous scaley sheath conceives it a creature of potent duality, multiplicity, an animal of multiple signs with layered and conflicting meaning. Its connotations do not simply rest on one definition but operate within a doubling of significance. The serpent evades solid and determined identity, always in a process of becoming.

Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming requires the crossing of thresholds and it is within these boundary infractions that transformation occurs.42 Becoming is a practice of psychic and somatic evolution ‘that allows one to break into new fields of perception, affectivity, becoming; nothing short of a metamorphosis.’43 Abjection and becoming are both ‘intermediary states,’44 germinating within potent boundary collapses and the dissolution of limits. Braidotti cites Tzvetan Todorov when she writes, ‘the blurring of boundaries or distinctions is often perceived as threatening or dangerous.’45 As we know from Mary Douglas’ teachings on purity and danger, bodies undergoing a process of growth or change, and the bodies of those residing outside of social margins, like criminals or sorcerers, are at the center of such structural disintegration. Proximity to these boundary disobeyers can cause weakness, sickness and misfortune.46 Boundaries must be impenetrable. A body’s edge must be maintained rigorously to remain within social form. Danger erupts within states of inbetweenness.

Western philosophy rests on a dualist structure that ‘value(s) hierarchical thinking, and logic of domination that together characterize the ideological framework of Western culture.’47 The splitting of mind/body, male/female, nature/culture into separate columns act as a blueprint for ‘otherness and negation’ according to Val Plumwood.48 This dichotomy extends to how bodies, identity and sexuality are governed. To become one must contaminate fixed thresholds and rupture the binary codes that promote stagnation, thus remaining suspended in-between, always in a process of intermediate unfolding.

From Monique Wittig’s corporeal spillages, I move towards an example of bodily permeability where somatic edges become sites for transgression. Paul B. Preciado’s Testo-junkie is a ‘body essay’, an intimate documentation of corporeal experimentation and an autobiographical account of bodily subversion. Preciado, a transgender man, formerly known as Beatriz (or BP within the text), begins administering testosterone gel to his biologically female body, outside of the medical protocol.49 The synthetic hormone is consumed, ‘incorporated’, through the skin as a mode of resistance to the bio-political control of the state and the binary systems of understanding gender, sexuality and the body. For Preciado, ‘it’s not a matter of going from woman to man, from man to woman, but of contaminating the molecular bases of the production of sexual difference, with the understanding that these two states of being, male and female, exist only as “political fictions.”’50

As Preciado writes, the body’s ‘limits do not coincide with the skin capsule that surrounds it.’51 He details the application of the gelatinous substance to his skin allowing the soluble molecules to descend beneath his epidermis. A subcutaneous penetration slowly rewrites the ‘materiality of gender.’52 His physicality morphs under the influence of the drug - muscles strengthen, his libido spikes and additional hair grows on his arms and face. As the transparent hormone infiltrates his matter it recodes his body’s fluids, altering the smell of his sweat. His odour takes on a sickly sweet scent as the hormone emanates from his glands and pores. A series of metaphysical shape-shifts occur as the drug courses through his cells and blood, inciting an evolution beyond the limitations of the ‘natural’. My reading of Preciado’s personal and political foiling of the fabric of matter reflects both Donna Harway’s cyborg feminism and new materialist processes of bodies being embroiled within their surroundings. His experimentation echoes the subversive, frictious meshing of both organic and inorganic substances resulting in the ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities’ that Haraway speaks of in her Cyborg Manifesto. 53 His absorption of the hormone through the epidermis is a trans-corporeal54 exchange with the techno-capitalist, pharmacopornographic environment from which he is the ‘illegitimate offspring.’55 Preciado’s documentation of ‘gender hacking’ is a textual, physical and philosophical erosion of the veneer of perceived boundaries. The skin becomes a site for re-embodiment, for ‘trans-materialisation.’56 And ‘why should our bodies end at the skin?’ asks Haraway.57 We are not a singular sealed corpus. Our bodies are not linear or static but rather in a fluid process of materialisation. The skin itself contains multitudes of living life; cells, bacteria, microbes, viruses. ‘Bodies are not only beings but intra-active becomings.’58 Preciado’s absorption of Testogel is an act of bodily regeneration, a ‘re-working and re-folding’59 of matter. The porous body is fluid with permeable edges and elastic flesh.

I’ve consumed approximately three thousand birth control pills in my lifetime.60 My pill contains 150 milligrams of Desogestrel and 30 milligrams of Ethinylestradiol, which work to keep me momentarily sterile, in addition to 80 milligrams of lactose, which helps my gut digest the drugs. The Pill changes the course of the fluids within my body, making my blood thinner and suppressing

sebum production on my skin and scalp. It works by thickening the mucus in the neck (or necks in my case) of my womb(s) so it’s harder for the sperm to reach my eggs. Each day on the pill when urinating I leak these hormones into the water. They become a part of the hydrological system and will eventually be ingested by another body. These hormones have been linked to the feminsation of male fish in British rivers and to the sterility of human male sperm also.61 My fluid body carries these drugs and leeches them into the land and water, absorbed by humans and animals alike. ‘As bodies of porosity, we are constantly interpermeating our surroundings.’62 Corporeal contamination links bodies, human and non-human, through organic and inorganic systems, dissolving boundaries between natural and artificial. Liquid seepage leaks chemicals of sexual difference, gestated by the pharmacopornographic era, from my body into the larger fluid systems within the bio and techno sphere.

The normalcy of synthetic hormone use among cis-females and also cis-males with erectile disfunction and male pattern baldness is used by Preciado as an argument to push for a democratisation of artificial hormones regardless of gender.63 Preciado maintains that testosterone could achieve the Pill’s function of temporary infertilisation, but counteract some of the side effects, such as the common symptom of a diminished libido.64 But before prescribing a healthy, cis female body testosterone, the medical regime requires an admission that one feels ‘trapped inside the body of the wrong sex’ and is suffering with ‘gender dysphoria’, which is categorised as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).65 The transgender body is pathologised as a split self within psychiatry, an unresolved mirror phase ‘based on anatomical incompleteness,’66 hence Preciado’s consumption of the hormone outside of medical authority. Lacan’s theory of the split subject rests on the ego being ‘ruptured or split in its identity, divided between a body it claims as its own, and another it strives to be like.’67 Psychoanalysis insists that bodies maintain their borders to resist dissolving into psychosis. For Merleau-Ponty, madness ensues when ‘the boundaries of the skin which ‘normally’ outline the subject’s spatial corporeal limits have become permeable.’68 Preciado presses against this polarized view of trans-identity by maintaining his plural and amorphous gender expression. He writes, ‘[w]hat is most urgent is not to defend what we are (men or women) but to reject it, to disidentify ourselves from the political coercion which forces us to desire the norm and reproduce it.’69 Paul B. Preciado is not split, he is both Beatriz and Paul, as a unified whole, which is reflected in his decision to keep the B in his title. ‘Understand that Paul absorbs and assumes all that was once BP.’70