#nobody wants 2 talk 2 me abt trans monsters :( irl :(

[rollercoasterwords]

um. anyway. started thinking abt the erotics of the machine thanks 2 this andrea long chu essay where she talks abt porn and frames the gendered dynamic between screen + viewer in a completely different way than i've come across in any prior readings abt porn studies, which have usually been focused more on the content within the media and the ways in which porn acts as a site of patriarchal reification. but chu is focused on the relationship between the technology + viewer, and argues that the screen/tech itself feminizes by making the viewer dependent, needy, addicted, etc.

and that got me thinking about how anxiety towards the feminizing influence of technology underlies so much of our cultural imagination, which is particularly clear in sci-fi. ai/tech is almost always coded as feminine--i had just watched resident evil (2002) so my mind immediately went to the red queen, but there's also "mother" in alien (1979), the cyborgs in ex machina (2014), etc. it almost hearkens back to like...biblical adam-and-eve anxieties. woman is created from man's rib (scientists create tech) and then becomes more knowledgeable than him by eating the proverbial apple -> she becomes a dominating force, the active counterpart to the passive man who eats when she tells him to (tech surpasses the knowledge of its creators, begins to take control). like....how much of our anxiety about technology has these gendered dynamics underlying, this built-in fear of feminization?

also saw this game going around on tumblr which like. raises the exact questions here abt the erotics of the machine + gender and then i also read how to live safely in a science fictional universe by charles yu where the protagonist literally has a relationship with his feminine ai, so!! it's like now that the thought has been planted in my brain i'm just seeing it everywhere i go.

and then the bite + monstrous reproduction is like. something i've been interested in since i got into horror + specifically zombie studies in college; reproduction is often a central theme in horror, to the extent that there is basically an entire genre centered around pregnancy + motherhood (rosemary's baby (1968), mother! (2017), and lyle (2014) are the first examples that come to my mind). and with monsters, part of their monstrosity is often the fact that they don't reproduce as humans do, but rather reproduce violently + suddenly + in a way that breaks down gendered boundaries via The Bite. zombies, werewolves, and vampires are all monsters whose monstrosity is almost always bound up in this anxiety of the incorrectly-gendered, violent reproduction of their species. and i started thinking abt this whole topic again in part thanks to the werewolf article i shared yesterday, where bernhardt-house spends some time talking about bite-as-reproduction.

but then i've also just been thinking more broadly abt transness + monstrosity, partly bc i was reading lots of trans studies last week lol. but also more specifically bc i read this article by cassius adair talking abt animorphs + transness, and then subsequently read adair's paper on chronic transsexualism, where he talks about the medicalization of transness and the way duration is used as a measuring stick for the legitimacy of trans identity, with a lot of tie-ins to disability studies. having been diagnosed with "chronic transsexualism," he poses this question in the paper: what would "accute transsexualism" look like?

and that!!!!! just made my brain buzz!!! well the entire paper was brilliant actually but specifically i started thinking about how "acute transsexualism" is like. THE fear underlying so much transphobic rhetoric and also just a really deeply rooted cultural fear more broadly, bc the existence of "acute transsexualism" would essentially destroy the social construction of gender as we know it.

and so THAT got me thinking about how many examples of what could be read as acute transsexualism can be found in sci-fi + horror, representing this deep-rooted cultural impulse to Uphold Gender. thanks to the animorphs article my mind immediately went to yeerks, who themselves could be read as trans subjects (literally their only desire is to exist in different bodies) that forcibly + suddenly "trans" the humans whose bodies they take over. and then of course bc i had already been pondering alien (1979) in the context of feminine ai + gender anxiety my brain went straight to the xenomorph, which is perhaps one of the most salient examples of anxiety over incorrectly gendered, monstrous reproduction and would so exactly fit a horror narrative of acute transsexualism (feminine alien forcibly + violently impregnates masculine man, destroying both body + gender in the process). and of course there is my time spent with zombie studies, where zombies (genderless) forcibly + violently reproduce themselves in humans, thereby converting them to the same genderless (or, at the very least, incorrectly gendered) state of existence. AND now i've been spending half my time thinking about werewolves + transness, and the ways a werewolf transformation could be read as acute transsexualism (similarly to how adair draws connections between transness and animorphs).

anyway. truly i cannot get back 2 school fast enough all i want to do rn is think abt acute transsexualism + monsters + unfortunately. this is making me insufferable 2 be around. i need a room where everyone is trapped in there with me + forced 2 listen 2 me monologuing

yeah i've been getting really into the erotics of the machine lately. pondering the gendered dynamics of ai in sci-fi and what anxieties about masculinity underly that. also been thinking about how much monstrous reproduction is centered around the bite and of course the gender dynamics of that....plus a lot of pondering on transness + monstrosity + reproduction. yeerks. the xenomorph. werewolves. who wants me