Theory, Self-Inserted: Practical Investigations of Gender and Sexuality

It’s blue and wriggling. Why is it wriggling? Turn it off, I pray, please let it die. 

“Is it freaking you out that this goes in my butt?”

“No,” a little, “that’s awesome, I’ve just never seen one for real… before.”

He presses it to my leg and I feel a trembling in my bones. 

“I’ve washed it, don’t worry.” How can I not? I’m a germophobic traditionalist. 

Silicone, especially matte silicone, is riddled with micro abrasions for bacteria to shack up and breed in. Also, you’re meant to replace these things. Often. I don’t think he ever has. 

“But it’s good, right?” he asks, the top of the thing nestled in the gap between my hip and my vulva. 

“Not bad!” I endure this for two long minutes before my prayer is answered. I welcome the silence like spring.

“I thought I charged it.” He apologises and I toss it aside.

“That’s fine.” We go analogue. 

The dildo is a troubling object. The horror second to uncleanliness is mimesis, its bizarre straddling of naturalism and abstraction. And following that, 

its destabilisation of gender and sexuality. 

In his Countersexual Manifesto (2000), Paul B. Preciado urges us to unlearn illusions of what’s “natural”, and welcome organic, inorganic, 

or techno-semiotic prostheses. To treat the body as an interface, radically un-learn sex and gender systems in our binary-genital economy, reject reproductive determinism and the “naturalist” sexual agent. 

To become countersexual. 

Countersexuality is post-industrial, global, and material: organ, flesh, flap, meat and molecule. It explores the body as a biopolitical technology with a prosthetic, symbiotic relationship to sexual instruments and apparatuses. Preciado identifies this process as “dildotectonics”. “Faced with this small object,” he posits, “the whole heterosexual gender-role system loses its meaning. When it comes to the dildo, conventional concepts and affects surrounding both heterosexual and homosexual pleasure and orgasms become obsolete”.

To the heteronormative sexual laymen, it’s a little bit of a shock when a lover asks you to perform anal sex, with an object that is charged (or apparently not) with so many implications; a silicone simulacrum that challenges collective societal norms as well as my personal preconceptions about heterosexual sex. 

If there is this thing, why do we bother with the one that comes attached? And because this thing is attached to no one, is the pleasure it gives detached from sexuality? Does it depend on the steadying hand?

Or the receiver? Is it a tool, a supplement, a prosthetic? A technology of production, power, sign systems and/or the self? If I wield the object, what becomes of my identity? Despite my callousness, the object was a blue and wriggling catalyst for deep and distressing self-reflection.

I used to wear two sports bras to school, one forwards and one backwards, to cull the generous breasts my body cultivated at fifteen. I was the only girl in my year to wear pants when they became a female uniform option (gendered school uniforms, a polyester can of worms). There were days when I’d revel in the challenge I posed in a neon-pink bra that peeked through the pattern of my shirt, but it was more about the effect than how my body felt. I still get this feeling when I wear normal bras. Like I’m in drag. 

“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” 

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)

Why does it feel like an imitation of gender when they’re the material sex characteristics I already possess? 

“Well, actually, sex and gender are two different things” was a phrase often used by my high school peers. 

We separated them for affirmational purposes, for debates about trans rights held over sliced apples and Le Snak packets; a simple slogan we could sling back at our less tolerant classmates. Our intentions were good, but oversimplification is the devil’s doorway.  

Judith Butler refutes notions of gender as purely a socio-cultural butter on a bio-sex bread. 

They go as far as to suggest that “sex” doesn’t exist at all. If sex, socially and culturally, is gender, then what is sex? The invocation of material sexual difference, i.e. your bits and boobs, is outdated, reductive and inaccurate. Currently, what isn’t binary is pathologized, despite scientific crisis in sexual difference since the 1950s. Butler argues that sex is a “regulatory ideal,” vis-a-vis Foucault, “forcibly materialised through time” through the reiteration of norms. Butler points out that their reiteration proves that they’ve never really stuck, and are thereby subject to change. 

Gender performativity is a similarly reiterative practice: the sum total of mannerisms, clothes, roles, expectations, and utterances that we repeat or distance ourselves from. “By which discourse produces the effects that it names”, language simultaneously describes and shapes reality.

Simply put, Butler argues that gender is the product of repeated, ritualised acts that uphold societal norms, and not something one is. Preciado furthers this by suggesting that gender is also partially prosthetic, “sex and gender should be considered forms of prosthetic incorporation that pass for natural but that, despite their anatomical-political ‘naturalness’, are subject to continual processes of transformation and change”. 

While this does not mean that we are fully in control or conscious of gender performativity, it does mean that doing gender differently can change its meaning over time.  

It takes him a while to say it.

“I’m nonbinary.”

“Okay.” You can’t be. 

“That was scary.” They stare into the lamp and purses their lips, the same way he does when he plays guitar. 

“I’m literally reading about post-gender stuff,” 

I offer, turning my laptop toward them and reading out a few lines of Preciado. They laugh. Later, I ask about pronouns.

“He or they, both are good.”

“Okay.”

Describing and shaping reality. I feel the couch shrink beneath me. It’s so simple, in theory. 

I’m a progressive person. In theory. My best friend’s mum said his transition felt like a funeral, as if her daughter was dying. But he was standing right next to her, as my partner sits next to me now. There’s nothing dead about this. Instead, 

a peculiar feeling, like an ugly jumper shrunk in the wash, my semantic boundaries felt wrong. We are intimately involved, and as self-centred as it is, I have to wonder: how does this impact my sexuality? 

Socially vested binary codes uphold “(hetero)sexuality” itself. The codes we know are masculine and feminine. While I understand that they’re illusory and to be dismantled, I have no idea what that looks like practically. Will he adopt more feminine codes? Are terms like “femininity” or “masculinity” even applicable? Androgyny? When these codes are broken, pushed away or made defunct, what use is sexuality? When sex, culturally and socially, 

is gender, and gender is not only the result of ritualised acts, but a construction and a prosthetic, does sexuality become similarly ephemeral? How do you orient yourself without a position? 

I try to take shelter in Preciado’s Dildonics, “the sexuality of the post-gender and post-sexually identified subject” (not to be confused with Dildotectonics, mentioned earlier), which asserts that sexuality cannot be reduced to sexual difference or gender identity. Preciado likens sexuality to language, in which we are conditioned in monolingualism, but multilingualism is learnable. Then instrument virtuosity: where some only play the piano, others treat instruments as means of music-making. It’s a communicative tool. But what exactly does it communicate? A material desire? 

Something reductively anatomical? Something pleasurably chemical? Or a preference of codes?

“You good?”

“I’m alright, this [bolognese] is helping, it’s just all getting a bit conceptual.”

“What is? The dildo essay?” 

He gestures towards the kettle, and I nod.

“Yeah. I don’t think gender and sexuality are real anymore.”

“I don’t think a dildo is a concept. I think it’s usually pretty solid. Up top.” We high five. “And so what?

 Isn’t it freeing?” They pop two mugs on the bench and sort out teabags and honey. 

“I don’t know.”

“You should read Simulacra and Simulation.”

We watch The Matrix (1999) instead. That’s what this feels like—bids at self-actualisation under an all-encompassing (but not inclusive) regime. I’m waking up, wiping the ooze from my face and taking a glimpse at the hidden structure of everything. The splinter in your mind, says Morpheus. A prison you cannot smell or taste or touch. 

Societal acceptance of nonbinary gender is only budding. But more interesting is the nonbinary “structure of feeling”, or present-tense emotions, consciousness, and affect: what is being lived today. I am a witness, and the act is infectious. Like how watching someone hold their breath makes us conscious of our own—I was now breathing manually. 

“Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.”

Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)

“Did you want to try she/they pronouns?”

“I think I have to investigate it somatically before I think about it semantically.”

I bought a binder on Wednesday. Spent a long time staring at the checkout screen. They said delivery would be low-key, using unmarked packaging and a false sender. 

I live in a student share house in the Inner West—I could order a dildo the size of a Christmas tree and we’d all politely adjust to living around it, like our pile of recycling—but it indicated my own privileges. Preciado, buying testosterone on the black market to avoid government restriction. Butler, criticised for either inventing or destroying gender. 

My lover, gazing into the Matrix and uttering their identity aloud, if only quietly. 

“Did you notice?” I gaze at our touching chests.

“Oh! It came!” He steps back and takes in my altered shape. “You look boyish.”

“Yeah?” I almost hate how excited I sound. I don’t want to be a boy. Breasts just don’t align with my self-image. 

“You look hot.”

Hm. 

Preciado treats the body as an infinitely graftable, changeable, chemical, animal thing with capabilities more complex than what binary, monosexual culture reinforces. An archive, a tangible chronicle connected to all history on a molecular level. 

The binder pushed my breasts to my ribs and my idiosyncrasies to the fore: my moustache, a permanent shadow; an unattackable, infinitely renewable thing, sponsored by PCOS, felt more intentional, and my dress sense felt less tomboyish, more just boyish. I held myself more upright and the space I commanded grew, despite physical minimisation. Worst of all, it felt indulgent. But my experiment culminated in a frantic waxing session in our broken-bulb bathroom, where, cupped in a push-up bra and candlelight, I wanted to be a “girl”. And it worked, for a few hours, until I, top lip still bleeding, dug the binder out of my laundry pile and wrestled it over my head.

I found myself at an impasse, stuck in a holding pattern. I had been doing it wrong for a while. My performance was obviously flawed. The set lights and cameras and boom mic pushed themselves into my skin and face and hair and I couldn’t ignore them anymore. I had come face-to-face with the wriggling countersexual prosthetic, the utterance, the ephemeral and illusory codes of “nature” and their undoing. 

I pontificated and ruminated until the foundations cracked open and the Matrix poured out in slime and undulating lines of green code. Maybe the dildo was my red pill/blue pill moment, but instead of choosing, 

I coughed and spilled my glass before leaving Morpheus with blue balls and a dissertation on pills. I did the theory. 

“I think I intellectualise where I should just experience.”

“Hm.”

“But I want to understand everything.”

“Yeah. I think you should stop reading and stick a finger in my butt.”

Designed by Sophie Wishart