In the past several years, the question of gender has been taken up again and again by the anarchist milieu. And still few attempts amount to much more than a rehashing of old ideas. Most positions on gender remain within the constraints of one or more of the ideologies that have failed us already, mainly Marxist feminism, a watered down eco-feminism, or some sort of liberal “queer anarchism.” Present in all of these are the same problems we’ve howled against already: identity politics, representation, gender essentialism, reformism, and reproductive futurism. While we have no interest in offering another ideology in this discourse, we imagine that an escape route could be charted by asking the question that few will ask; by setting a course straight to the secret center of gendered life which all the ideological answers take for granted. We are speaking, of course, about Civilization itself.

Such a path of inquiry is not one easily travelled. At every step of the way, stories are obscured and falsified by credentialed deceivers and revolutionary careerists. Those ideas presented as Science are separated from Myth only in that their authors claim to abolish mythology. Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, History, Economics—each faces us as another edifice built to hide a vital secret. At every step, we find more questions than answers. And yet this shadowy journey feels all the more necessary at the present moment. At the same time as technological Civilization is undergoing a renewed assault on the very experience of living beings, the horrors of gendered life continue to be inextricable from that assault. Rape, imprisonment, bashings, separations, dysmorphia, displacement, the labors of sexuality, and all the anxieties of techniques of the self—these daily miseries and plagues are only outpaced by the false solutions which strive to foreclose any possibility of escape; queer economies, cybernetic communities, legal reforms, prescription drugs, abstraction, academia, the utopias of activist soothsayers, and the diffusion of countless subcultures and niche identities—so many apparatuses of capture.

The first issue of Bædan features a rather involved exegesis of Lee Edelman’s book No Future. In it, we attempted to read Edelman against himself; to elaborate his critique of progress and futurity outside of its academic trappings and beyond the limitations of its form. To do so, we explored the traditions of queer revolt to which Edelman’s theory is indebted, particularly the thought of Guy Hocquenghem. Exploring Hocquenghem still proves particularly exciting, because his writing represents some of the earliest queer theory which explicitly rejects Civilization—as well as the families, economies, metaphysics, sexualities and genders which compose it—while also imagining a queer desire which is Civilization’s undoing. That exploration lead us to explore the bodily and spiritual underpinnings of Civilization: domestication, or “the process of the victory of our fathers over our lives; the way in which the social order laid down by the dead continues to haunt the living... the residue of accumulated memories, culture and relationships which have been transmitted to us through the linear progression of time and the fantasy of the Child... this investment of the horrors of the past into our present lives which ensures the perpetuation of civilization.” Our present inquiry begins here.

To explore the conflict of the wildness of queer desire against domestication is to take aim at an enemy who confronts us from the beginning of Time itself. While our efforts in the first issue of this journal were a refusal of the teleology which situated an end to gender at the conclusion of a linear progression of time, we’ll now address the questions of origins which hint toward an outside at the other end of this line. As we’ve denied ourselves the future, we now turn against the past. In this, we abandon any pretensions of certainty or claims to truth. Instead we have only the experiences of those who revolt against the gendered existent, as well as the stories of those whose revolt we’ve inherited. In the spirit of this revolt, we offer these fragments against gender and domestication.

I

Domestication, the integration of living beings into the civilized order, must also be the integration of life into the dualism and separation which we experience as gender. The concept is thrown about in a variety of contexts and under various names, and yet very few have attempted to thoroughly define it. It is used colloquially to discuss the vast gulf which exists between wild creatures and those tamed and clawless ones whose existence has been reduced to economic necessities. It is linguistically tied to the realm of the Domestic, and by extension to the Economic through the management of the home, oikonomia. It is the violence implied in the concept of primitive accumulation, the first (but also the originary) tearing of a being away from its self and its subsequent imprisonment in class society. It is further implied in all the theories of subjectification, the construction of all the identities and roles which populate the social order. Being so central to the world we inhabit and the subjects we have become, the concept warrants a more precise and consistent definition.

In our previous engagement with domestication, we primarily looked at the writings of Jacques Camatte. He comes to his theory of domestication through an exploration of the ways that Capital empties, transforms and colonizes human beings; in his words, Capital’s anthropomorphism. Capital dissects and analyzes the human being, ruptures the mind from the body, and reconstructs the human as a willful subject of the social order. The consequence of this rupturing and suturing of life is the recuperation of the vast range of humanist means of resistance; communities become communities of capital, and individuals become little more than consumers. Separation evolves into an image of wholeness which replaces the unity it abolished. Domestication, which limits the possibilities of what we can become, promises a future without limits, because it ties our future to an undead and all-devouring system. We are evacuated of our desires and instincts, and the vacuous space left within us is filled with all the representations of what was taken. Instead of a vast multitude of potentials and ways of relating to the world, our lives are reduced to a microcosm of the linear progression of society. Domestication does more than enslave us to the social order’s future, it creates willful slaves. As individual living beings are reduced to spectators and functions of dead things, the non-living itself becomes autonomous. All the scientific disciplines, the linguists of this autonomous non-living thing, proclaim alongside the fascists: long live death! These disciples of Capital use their methodology to prove that this is the way things always were, they naturalize Capital and demonstrate its inevitability. We are split and dominated in the same way as physicists split and dominate the atom; managed in the same way cyberneticians manage their networks and feedback loops; as above, so below. Thus for Camatte, Capital conquers our imagination both with regard to our future, and also our past.

Capital has reduced nature and human beings to a state of domestication. The imagination and the libido have been enclosed as surely as the forests, oceans, and common lands. The process of domestication is sometimes brought about violently, as happens with primitive accumulation; more often it proceeds insidiously because revolutionaries continue to think according to assumptions which are implicit in capital and the development of productive forces, and all of them share in exalting the one divinity, science. Hence domestication and repressive consciousness have left our minds fossilized more or less to the point of senility; our actions have become rigidified and our thoughts stereotyped. We have been the soulless frozen masses fixated on the post, believing all the time that we were gazing ahead into the future.

This moment of Camatte’s thought is interesting because it marks his personal shift away from Marxism and toward a critique of civilization (a shift which would be significant for a whole generation of anti-civilization thinkers). Unfortunately though, it is precisely its situation in that shift (an obsession with one particular mode of production) which creates the limit of his definition of domestication. For him, the autonomous non-life which domesticates life is Capital, and he situates this process in a specific moment of capitalism where Capital “escapes” and forms its own community. This is tied up in his esoteric, (and in its own way, exegetical) reading of Marx. He locates domestication at the point at which capitalism has developed into a representation and is thrown into crisis. He calls Capital an endpoint of the processes of democratization, individuation, and massification. He speaks of these processes as presuppositions to Capital which may go as far back as the Greek Polis and its representational break of humans from the rest of wild life, and to the “domination of men over women.” And so if we can locate Capital at the endpoint of this ancient chain of separations, how can domestication (separation itself) begin with Capital? Moreover, if gendered domination predates domestication by millennia, how can his version of domestication account for the separation and colonization of life for which gender is a euphemism? His origin myth fails at the point where it begins. His story is not enough for us, because we know this colonization of our very existence did not begin in the last century, or even the one before it. We can still hear the distant cries of those who’ve resisted since long before. Clearly, we must leave Camatte behind if we want to comprehend domestication in its totality.

II

Camatte’s critique of domestication is most clearly articulated in his essay The Wandering of Humanity, which was first published in English in 1975 by Black and Red of Detroit. At the time, the press was run by Lorraine Perlman and her husband Fredy. They self-published the text in a beautiful pamphlet after Fredy completed its first English translation. In reading Perlman’s own writing, the influence of the text is readily apparent. Perlman himself would go on to incorporate these ideas into a scathing critique of Civilization which still inspires much of the anti-civilization perspective within the anarchist milieu. His efforts would largely be motivated by seizing upon the precise limit we’ve identified in Camatte’s story: that of origins.

In her biography of Fredy, Having Little, Being Much, Lorraine narrates the way that he spent the following seven years almost single-mindedly focused on exploring the history of the domesticating monster. In particular he spent those years tearing through accounts of the European colonization of the North America, and the domestication process which they unleashed upon all of the living inhabitants of this continent. He stole from Hobbes in naming this monster Leviathan, and undertook the monumental task of telling the tale of those who’ve resisted it. He self-published his findings in 1983 in a wonderful and tragic book, released among friends at a party at his and Lorraine’s house in Detroit. The book was titled Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!

Asserting that “resistance is the only human component of the entire His-story,” Fredy suspended his in-depth study of resistance to Leviathanic incursions in the woodlands around the Great Lakes to examine the “barbarians” and untamed tribes who, in earlier times, unequivocally refused the bondage of civilization. Where His-story exults in civic and military achievements, calling them Progress, Fredy’s story views each consolidation of state power as an encroachment on the human community. He addresses the reader as one individual speaking to another and makes no claim to follow scholarly rules: “I take it for granted that resistance is the natural human response to dehumanization and, therefore, does not have to be explained or justified.” The resistance story follows the chronology of Leviathan’s destructive march, but avoids using His-storians’ conventions of dating the events. This, as well as the poetic visionary language, gives the work an epic quality.

Fredy begins his narrative by attempting to isolate the way that other available ideological positions fail to grasp the enemy in its fullness. His method is instructive in that he points to how each ideology is too narrow, and can only offer incredibly superficial solutions to the problem of domestication. In the first chapter, he writes:

Marxists point at the Capitalist mode of production, sometimes only at the Capitalist class. Anarchists point at the State. Camatte points at Capital. New Ranters point at Technology or Civilization or both... The Marxists see only the mote in the enemy’s eye. They supplant their villain with a hero, the Anti-capitalist mode of production, the Revolutionary Establishment. They fail to see that their hero is the very same “shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” They fail to see that the Anti-capitalist mode of production wants only to outrun its brother in wrecking the Biosphere. Anarchists are as varied as Mankind. There are governmental and commercial Anarchists as well as a few for hire. Some Anarchists differ from Marxists only in being less informed. They would supplant the state with a network of computer centers, factories and mines coordinated “by the workers themselves” or by an Anarchist union. They would not call this arrangement a State. The name-change would exorcize the beast. Camatte, the New Ranters and Turner treat the villains of the Marxists and Anarchists as mere attributes of the real protagonist. Camatte gives the monster a body; he names the monster Capital, borrowing the term from Marx but giving it a new content. He promises to describe the monster’s origin and trajectory but has not yet done so...

The problems that he draws out about Anarchist and Marxist politics resonate as much today as they did in 1983, and those who’ve drawn other conclusions largely have Fredy to thank for helping to rejuvenate an anarchy without an attachment to industrialism, technology or other fetishes of production. It is from this last point, the failure of Camatte to sketch the origin and trajectory of the monster, that he sketches his own. He draws on the writings of Frederick Turner to articulate the spirit of the monster, but criticizes Turner for his inability to speak of the monster’s body; the cadaverous body which tears apart wild things and incorporates them into itself. Fredy’s narrative strikes out against this body.

Fredy’s project is an important one, because it pushes the critique of domestication beyond the comfortable answers. He interrogates the beast’s machinations before late capitalism, before the colonization of the ‘new world,’ before the rise of capitalism itself. What he accomplished was to write a story about the rise of every Civilization since the first in Sumeria, and thus also of Civilization itself. Significantly, he told this tale while indicting the historians, anthropologists and economists who justify the rise of Leviathan. Instead he told the story from the perspective of those who resisted domestication at every juncture. This is one of the many stylistic and ethical reasons that make the book so genuinely beautiful to read. Whereas I can’t in good faith recommend that one reads the tedious works of Edelman or Camatte, I’d happily gift Against His-Story to any of my dearest friends. This is also the reason that it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to attempt a comprehensive paraphrasing. Trying to capture the magic of Fredy’s storytelling would be difficult, if not impossible. Rather I’d suggest that anyone who wants to experience the depth and weight of the book’s critique should simply read it themselves. That being said, we’ll identify a few themes within the story which will help us in our own. These understandings will be useful in moving further with an exploration of Domestication.

In no particular order, some useful themes about domestication which emerge through the text:

The language of the domesticated always serves to hide widely accepted lies, if barely. Clearly only those outside of the monster are free, and yet the civilized will use this word to describe themselves. Even the dictionary contains this contradiction: it describes ‘freedom’ as belonging to ‘citizens,’ yet then says that something is free if not constrained by anything other than its own being. There isn’t any way to reconcile this contradiction. Wild birds and trees and insects which are only determined by their own potential and wishes are free. Citizens are constrained by an infinity of un-freedom. The domesticated will refer to those humans who are still free as ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages,’ and yet these terms designate those very people as legitimate prey for the most barbaric atrocities at the hands of the ‘civilized.’ This meaninglessness and deception inherent to language is true of almost every word that the domesticated will use to describe themselves: that which destroys communities is named a Community, that which has a thirst for human blood beyond any reason is called Humanism and Reason. This is important when faced with the writings of those who aim, through words, to justify domestication.

Leviathan takes the form of artificial life; it has no life of its own, and thus can only function by capturing living beings within itself. Following Hobbes, Leviathan (or Commonwealth or State or Civitas) is an artificial man. A blond, masculine, crowned man bearing a sword and a scepter. This artificial man is composed of countless faceless human beings, tasked with moving the springs and wheels and levers which make the artificial beast move. Hobbes, in turn, would see these individual human beings as nothing more than a composite of strings and wheels and springs. Fredy imagines that the beast might not be an artificial human but rather a giant worm, not a living worm but a carcass of a worm, a monstrous cadaver, its body consisting of numerous segments, its skin pimpled with spears and wheels and other technological implements. He knows from his own experience that the entire carcass is brought to artificial life by the motions of the human beings trapped inside... who operate the springs and wheel... Human beings regress while the worm progresses. The worm’s greatest accomplishment is to remake the people within it into individual mechanized units. These human machines are ultimately replaced by entirely automated machines, more amenable to existence within the labor camps of leviathan. This is a haunting proposition because it implicates us as complicit in the machinery of our own nightmare: both as the living force which animates the monster, but also as having internalized that animation.

Leviathan constitutes itself through institutions of domestication; these institutions are impersonal and immortal. Immortality is found among no living creature on the earth. In being immortal, these institutions are a part of death, and death cannot die. Workers, prisoners and soldiers die; and yet factories, prisons and armies live on. As civilization grows, the domain of death grows while the individuals living within it die. No resistance movement has yet been able to deal with this contradiction. Monasteries were an early innovation in these immortal institutions. In these establishments, which are nothing but early schools, human beings are systematically broken, the way horses or oxen are broken, to bear weights and pull loads. They are separated from their own humanity, from all natural activities and sequences, and taught to perform artificial activities and identify with Leviathanic sequences. They become disciplined springs and wheels engaged in a routine that has no relation to human desires or natural cycles. The clock will be invented by monastic beings because the clock is nothing but a miniature monastery whose springs and wheels are made of metal instead of flesh and blood. No amount of institutional reform has exorcised this monstrous aspect of institutions.

Domesticated humans are defined by their adornment with masks over their faces and armor over their bodies. These masks and armors are the ways in which the individual internalizes the constraint of Leviathan and acclimates themselves to life within it. These are necessary for surviving the everyday domination and humiliation which is life in this society. They protect individuals from their own emotions, perception and estrangement from being. The armor wraps around the individual and invades their body just as all ecstatic life and freedom is evacuated from the body, save for a potential. All that’s left is the armor. This can also be understood as the formation of civilized identities.

Domestication is perpetuated through a civilized spirituality which emphasizes dominion over all living things, but more importantly, self-management and self-domination. All monotheistic religions hold in common that man must have dominion over the fish and foul and all living things. The Catholic church in particular has enforced this decree by declaring war against all living things; the same living things which constitute the autonomy and independence of free people. The church innovated upon this doctrine through the concept of sin. In response to sin, people are compelled to do to themselves what God does to all living things and what the nobles do to the peasants. They turn violence against their own urges and desires, above all the desire for freedom and escape. The war against all life continues as a war against one’s self. No previous leviathan had so thoroughly degraded its human contents. Not only do humans domesticated into the Christian civilization suffer, they suffer a self inflicted violence at their own hands and from their own minds. They enforce a slow tortuous murder upon themselves. This war on the self would be externalized as the Holy War which the Church would later wage against infidels, both domestic and abroad. Such conquest is democratized through the decree that every man should be an emperor in his own home: peasants and nobility alike are joined in this frenzy of violence and control over their subjects. At this point, even the most secular civilized society has been entrenched in this self-constraint for so many generations that such a spiritual form of domination appears also as secular and natural.

While some Leviathans could be seen as worms, others appear more as octopuses carrying out a pillaging of the earth more intense and widespread than ever before; this expansion is necessary to Leviathans’ survival, but no living being willfully submits to accumulation into these monsters. Economists and Historians will describe a natural material dialectic by which people willfully enter these beasts, because of their supposedly superior amenities. And yet at every turn, violence must be used to force people to accept these amenities. There is no ‘demand’ until people have been broken from the wild world and from their own abilities to care for themselves. European clothes are only worn by those who have lost their own. These communities of free peoples are attacked by an unprecedented chemical and biological warfare which exists nowhere outside of Civilization itself. All that exists outside of Civilization is viewed as raw materials to be accumulated. This outside is often constructed through a racialized and gendered categories. This accumulation does not happen at the hands of economists, but by lynch mobs, militaries, armies, and all the rest of Leviathan’s police. The genocide carried out by Europeans against native peoples and animals and land bases on the American continents amounts to the most unprecedented of these accumulations. Through the activity of grave diggers (known as archeologists), even the dead become commodities. All of this violence is necessary for Leviathan’s growth, the dead commodities become the seeds of the next wave of accumulation.

Those whose communities have long since been defeated will carry the banner of their lost community in an attempt to regain that lost freedom by battling an imagined enemy. The civilized humans wear the mask of something they no longer are or never were, all in an attempt to hide what they’ve become. It amounts to a frenzied rush away from ones self. Christianity, the Reformation, Marxism and Naziism are but a few examples of movements which begin by projecting an image of rejecting the industrial hell, but in fact only reproduce industrial civilization. In fact, most new Leviathans begin as resistance movements.

“By undergoing what will be called Industrial and Technological Revolutions, the Great Artifice breaches all walls, storms victoriously through every natural and human barrier, increasing its velocity at every turn. But by the time the beast really gets going like a winged rodent out of Inferno, its own soothsayers will be saying an object which approaches the speed of light loses its body and turns to smoke. Such object’s victories are, in the long run Pyrrhic.” Civilization is marked by over-extension, rapid growth, and a movement toward infinity. This movement is ultimately self-destructive, producing contradictions and break-downs which threaten the machine itself. All of history is littered with the carnage and wreckage of this hubris. This is a complex point about decomposition which warrants more attention. We will return to it later.

These points barely scratch the surface of eloquent argumentation in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, but they are worth drawing out because they help us to understand and elucidate a functioning definition of Domestication beginning with the first Civilizations. Deception, capture, domination, accumulation, annihilation, decline; we will see these themes repeating in all the stories which follow our inquiry.

III

In the years since Fredy published Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, the topic of domestication has been taken up by a whole range of anti-civilization anarchists and projects. In most of the writings emerging from this milieu, domestication is nearly tautological with civilization. (Civilization is understood as the web of power between the institutions, ideologies, and physical apparatuses which perform domestication and control; while Domestication is understood as the process by which living beings are trapped within the network that is Civilization.) This tautology is instructive, as it points to the autonomous existence of a monster which has the sole purpose of perpetuating itself by bringing all life inside. Fredy would call such a monster a world-destroyer. While different tendencies of anti-civilization thought tend to understand domestication from different angles, it remains central to the thought and practice of those who believe civilization must be destroyed.

Contemporary anti-civilization writers (many anonymous or pseudonymous) have elaborated the critique of domestication into daily life, indicting countless small operations which serve to domesticate life.

Domestication is the process that civilization uses to indoctrinate and control life according to its logic. These time-tested mechanisms of subordination include: taming, breeding, genetically modifying, schooling, caging, intimidating, coercing, extorting, promising, governing, enslaving, terrorizing, murdering...the list goes on to include almost every civilized social interaction. Their movement and effects can be examined and felt throughout society, enforced through various institutions, rituals, and customs.

Others have devoted their explorations to the conditions and events which lead to the establishment of agriculture and symbolic thought ten thousand years ago, trying to force the far past to give up its secrets. From this perspective, that originary moment of domestication inaugurated millennia of war, slavery, ecological destruction, and the annihilation of free creatures.

All of these elaborations are useful in that they explain what domestication means in various instances and phenomena, but it is still rare to find a concise and functioning definition of what it means all together. If we need to do so, we could say rather simply that domestication is capture. Further, it is the capture of living beings by a dead thing, and the integration of those beings into all the roles and institutions which comprise the dead thing. Furthermore it is all the practices which force those beings to spiritually accede to their capture. And lastly it is the discourse and ideology which justifies that capture. This capture is unending, and the dead thing can only continue its immortal reign if it continues to bring new living beings and commodities within itself.

First Mythos: Enkidu and Shamhat

Fredy begins his account of the first civilization emerging in Sumeria. He describes the rise of the first king, the Lugal, and from it all subsequent worm monsters. Sumeria is interesting to our inquiry because it is the birth of civilization, but also of the written word. From this ancient civilization, the oldest written story, that of the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, was etched into tablets of lapis lazuli. As its hero, Gilgamesh is responsible for instituting the ultimate domination of the Sumerian Leviathan over the wild world. He does this because he:

...leaves no son to his father

Day and night

endlessly

Gilgamesh

The shepherd of Uruk

The shepherd of the people

Leaves no daughter to her mother

No Warrior’s daughter

no young man’s spouse

No bride to her groom

In his endless mobilization of human beings, Gilgamesh built a human machinery which waged war against the wild earth. In response to Gilgamesh and his imposition of order, the Gods created an equal who could oppose him. His name was

Enkidu

Primeval

in the wild

Born of silence

knit by Ninurta

war

His body covered with hair

On his head as on a woman’s

thick as Nissaba

grain

Knowing neither people nor place

Dressed as Sakkan commands

as the god of animals commands

as animals do

He fed on the grass with gazelles

He drank at springs with animals

Satisfied his thirst with the herd

But the hunters and shepherds were angry and terrified of Enkidu, who sabotaged their traps and released their animals. They went to Gilgamesh and asked for his help. He devised a plan involving Shamhat, one of the sacred prostitutes of the temple. He said:

“Go

Take Shamhat with you

When the beast comes to the spring

Let her strip off her clothing

reveal her charms

He will see her and approach

And the beasts will reject him”

And so Shamhat and the hunter set out in search of Enkidu. The hunter said:

“Shamhat

Open your arms

Open your legs

let him take your charms

Don’t be afraid

Take his breath away

He will see you and approach

Open your clothes

Let him lie upon you

Do a woman’s work for the man

Caress and embrace him

As he embraces you

And the beasts will reject him”



Shamhat opened her clothes

Opened her legs

He saw her charms

She was not afraid

And he lay down on her

She did a woman’s work for the man

Six days

seven nights

Enkidu coupled with Shamhat

breathless

When he had satisfied his desire

He faced the wilderness

The gazelles shunned him and moved away

Exhausted

Enkidu’s legs would not move

As the beasts moved away

He could not run as he had before

But he had reason and broad understanding

He turned and sat at Shamhat’s feet

Looked at her face

as she looked at his

He listened to her speak

“You are handsome

Enkidu

like a god

Why wander the wild

with the beasts?

Come

let me lead you to Uruk-the-Sheepfold

To the temple

home of Anu and Ishtar”

Enkidu agreed, but for the possibility of challenging the mighty Gilgamesh, but Shamhat convinced him otherwise. Gilgamesh had already dreamt of Enkidu’s coming, and the king would take the wild one as a dearest friend, would treat him as a wife. He would domesticate Enkidu.

Shamhat disrobed and dressed him

in one of her robes...

The shepherds set bread and beer before him

Suckled on the milk

of the wild

Enkidu looked

squinted

stared

He knew nothing

of food



Shamhat spoke to Enkidu:

“Eat the bread

staff of life

Drink the beer

destiny of the land”



Enkidu ate of the bread until sated

He drank of the beer until sated

seven mugs

He became a manifestation

dressed in robes

A warrior

who took up his weapons

to fight lions

the shepherds rested at night

Enkidu fought off wolves

and lions

The elder shepherds slept

Enkidu stayed

awake.

The story of Enkidu and Shamhat is a story of domestication from within the mythology of the first civilization. It shows of the taming of Enkidu through the imposition of sex roles, the wearing of clothes, the drinking of alcohol, and his separation from the wild beasts. Shamhat is a sacred prostitute of the Sumerian temples, a spiritual practitioner of the oldest profession. She serves the goddess Ishtar through the rite of hieros gamos, the sacred marriage between the king and the goddess of the city. Ishtar is the goddess of nature, yes, but of nature within the city. Heiros gamos, the sacred prostitution, is a ritualistic submission of nature to the power of the king; the bringing of the wild within the walls of the city. In this way, the nature goddess was also the goddess of arts of civilization. These arts included the practices of government and religion, war and peace, crafts, profession, eating, drinking, clothing, bodily adornments, art, music, sex and prostitution. Theirs are the arts of living applicable to every aspect of civilized life. The goddess rules nature within the city, so her ars vivendi are the rules of civilization, of domestication. And so it was through these rules that Shamhat, a priestess of Ishtar, made Enkidu into a man. After he is torn from his world, Enkidu becomes a virile and bloodthirsty destroyer of the wild. The imposition of gender unleashes a continuum of separation which endlessly separates the city from the forest, humanity from the rest of wild life, and splits humans into genders.

Contemporary readings will of course illustrate a degree of misogyny around Shamhat, implying that women tamed the wild men. But this is incorrect and only reveals how deeply seated gendered domination is to civilization. Enkidu is domesticated by all the ars vivendi which define life in the first civilization; by women’s work and men’s work. Enkidu is made a man through these domesticating laws; he is civilized by gender itself.

IV

It could be said that perhaps no tendency has taken the question of gender further than primitivism. We say this, because the primitivists view the question through the lens offered by a critique of domestication. While there are obviously heinous examples of masculinist and misogynist theories and individuals within anti-civilization thought, the most lucid and careful writers have always located the rise of patriarchy at the very beginning of civilization. For many (Fredy Perlman and John Zerzan to name just two), Patriarchy emerges alongside domestication and the two are practically synonymous. We can even see small fragments of this perspective in Camatte’s later writing, Echoes of the Past, for example. It is also acknowledged in the 2009 editorial statement of BLOODLUST: a feminist journal against civilization. The editors articulate that their desire to publish the journal was a result of what felt like a superficial treatment of the critique of gender, and yet they still celebrate that the anti-civilization tendency is one of the few that consistently indicts Patriarchy as a central enemy. While sadly the journal only released one issue, the task of fleshing out the anti-civilization critique of Patriarchy seems like a step toward understanding domestication’s centrality to gender itself.

The primitivist perspective on gender is problematic for reasons we’ll elaborate later, but for a moment we’ll suspend our criticism so as to fairly lay out the argument. Whatever its flaws, this perspective on the rise of patriarchy is useful because it situates the emergence of gendered domination with civilization itself. In doing so, it refuses any ideology which fails to do so. By constantly demonstrating that such misery is older than most other institutions and systems of domination, it equips us with the necessary pessimism to respond to those who assure us that gendered violence will disappear after their specific reform or revolution.

Camatte (and consequently those who are influenced by his writing) is indebted, with regard to his fleeting thoughts on gender, to a French writer named Françoise d’Eaubonne. D’Eaubonne is credited as the person who coined the term eco-feminism in her 1974 book, Feminism or Death. More interestingly, she was also one of the cofounders of the organization Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire (FHAR), the same militant gay liberation group which Guy Hocquenghem joined and which shaped his later perspectives. It makes sense then, that two anti-civilization theories of gender would emerge from the same action and discussions; d’Eaubonne’s eco-feminism, and Hocquenghem’s homosexual desire. It is a tragic detriment to our inquiry that almost nothing of d’Eaubonne’s writing is translated into English. Most Anglophone primitivists and eco-feminists have only been exposed to her ideas though secondary sources (Camatte among them). We’ll cite an excerpt from Feminism or Death as it is unlikely that most readers would have access to the text:

Practically everybody knows that today the two most immediate threats to survival are overpopulation and the destruction of our resources; fewer recognize the complete responsibility of the male System, in so far as it is male (and not capitalist or socialist) in these two dangers; but even fewer still have discovered that each of the two threats is the logical outcome of one of the two parallel discoveries which gave men their power over fifty centuries ago: their ability to plant the seed in the earth as in women, and their participation in the act of reproduction. Up until then the male believed [women were] impregnated by the gods. From the moment he discovered at once his two capacities as farmer and procreator, he instituted what Lederer calls ‘the great reversal’ to his own advantage. Having taken possession of the land, thus of productivity (later of industry) and of woman’s body (thus of reproduction), it was natural that the overexploitation of both of these would end in this threatening and parallel menace: overpopulation, surplus births, and destruction of the environment, surplus production. The only change capable of saving the world today is that of the ‘great reversal’ of male power which is represented, after agricultural overproductivity, by this mortal industrial expansion. Not ‘matriarchy,’ to be sure, nor ‘power-to-the-women,’ but destruction of power by women. And finally, the end of the tunnel: a world to be reborn (and no longer ‘protected’ as is still believed by the first wave of timid ecologists)... Therefore, with a society at last in the feminine gender, meaning non-power (and not power-to-the-women), it would be proved that no other human group could have brought about the ecological revolution; because none other was so directly concerned at all levels. And the two sources of wealth which up until now have benefited only the male would once again become the expression of life and no longer the elaboration of death; and human beings would finally be treated first as persons, and not above all else as male or female. And the planet in the feminine gender would become green again for all.

While simplistic and essentialist, this line of argument stands out for its singular elaboration of the intrinsic connection between agricultural production and human reproduction. We’ll look at others who’ve expanded on this theory, but we would be hard pressed to find anything in the primitivist canon that deviates too far from this straightforward position. All of it will center the role of man as the husband to his wife and the practitioner of agriculture and animal husbandry. The argument is useful because it is an articulation of the way domestication captures both those humans assigned female and also a vast diversity of non-human life.

One can clearly see the echoes of this in a primer written by the Green Anarchy collective:

Toward the beginning in the shift to civilization, an early product of domestication is patriarchy: the formalization of male domination and the development of institutions which reinforce it. By creating false gender distinctions and divisions between men and women, civilization, again, creates an “other” that can be objectified, controlled, dominated, utilized, and commodified. This runs parallel to the domestication of plants for agriculture and animals for herding, in general dynamics, and also in specifics like the control of reproduction. As in other realms of social stratification, roles are assigned to women in order to establish a very rigid and predictable order, beneficial to hierarchy. Woman come to be seen as property, no different then the crops in the field or the sheep in the pasture. Ownership and absolute control, whether of land, plants, animals, slaves, children, or women, is part of the established dynamic of civilization. Patriarchy demands the subjugation of the feminine and the usurpation of nature, propelling us toward total annihilation. It defines power, control and dominion over wildness, freedom, and life. Patriarchal conditioning dictates all of our interactions; with ourselves, our sexuality, our relationships to each other, and our relationship to nature. It severely limits the spectrum of possible experience. The interconnected relationship between the logic of civilization and patriarchy is undeniable; for thousands of years they have shaped the human experience on every level, from the institutional to the personal, while they have devoured life. To be against civilization, one must be against patriarchy; and to question patriarchy, it seems, one must also put civilization into question.

Fredy Perlman expands on this premise in a few ways. Firstly, he consistently centers rape and the weaponization of the phallus as methods intrinsic to domestication. He connects the phallic towers at the center of early Leviathans to the weapons used by their armies. For him these institutions and apparatuses function to naturalize an unnatural form of domination and power, to subject women to men and to pretend that this arrangement is the natural order of things. At times he describes Leviathanic men as ‘women haters.’ Secondly, he believes His-story to be the process by which the men who control Leviathan narrate their own conquests and achievements. For him His-story is specific to civilized culture and only emerges as a violent annihilation both of a pre-existing matriarchy, but also through the deification of an image of militaristic, Leviathanic men as opposed to former nature goddesses. For him, the earth itself is feminine; a mother who gives birth to all life. By contrast, Leviathan gives birth to nothing but death, and as such, despises the mother Earth. In the following fragments we’ll criticize much of this theory, but it is worth acknowledging that it is rare to find another theory of His-story (especially one written by a man) which locates patriarchy as absolutely inseparable from civilization.

John Zerzan expands upon the theory from a different angle. He primarily concerns himself with studying the work of over a dozen anthropologists (all of them women) who analyze the role of women in social arrangements before domestication. Many of these anthropologists were part of the shift in Anthropology referred to as the shift from “man the hunter” to “woman the gatherer.” Based on their research, he argues that the vast majority of sustenance in most non-civilized societies was provided by gatherers, who tended to be women. He argues that as a consequence, women had significantly more social power and autonomy, because they were not reliant on patriarchal agricultural arrangements for survival. He also follows other anthropologists in claiming that hierarchies around gender were rare among American indigenous tribes, specifically noting the absence of fetishes for virginity and chastity, expectations of monogamy for women, or male control over reproduction. He argues that the sexual division of labor, imposed by domestication, was the first form of the division of labor which constitutes contemporary civilization. He also criticizes the shift from communal tribal relationships of sharing to the privatized and gendered existence of the family-form, arguing that the family is neither inevitable nor universal in human communities. Zerzan argues that the shift toward domestication is marked by the emergence of specialized labor roles, the limiting of women’s labor to reproductive efforts, and the strengthening of kinship bonds above all else. For him, the presence of a gendered division of labor by the time of the earliest recorded symbolic art indicates that it is this division which gave rise to all others. He refuses to believe that these phenomena are coincidence, instead pointing toward a causal relationship between the rise of gendered existence and that of domestication. Both are shifts away from non-separated, non-hierarchical life. He says: “nothing in nature explains the sexual division of labor, nor such institutions as marriage, conjugality or paternal filiation. All are imposed on women by constraint, all are therefore facts of civilization which must be explained, not used as explanations.” His explanation for these shifts involves both the ways that agricultural life immiserated the women it captured, but also that the introduction of patriarchy was a key strategy of colonial civilizers and missionaries around the world. He argues that any attempts to destroy civilization must also be an attempted return to “the wholeness of original genderless existence.”

Much of the primitivist perspective on gender doesn’t sit well from a queer perspective, significantly the emphasis on gender essentialism and the lack of substantive critique of compulsory heterosexuality, to say nothing of the role of Anthropology. And yet still there is something which resonates in the theory. Perhaps the appeal of the primitivist answer is that it implicates literally everything about this world in the horror of gender: the food we eat, the cities we live in, the language we speak, our families, our fetishes—all of it interwoven into the fabric of gendered existence. The implication, then, is that any break from gender would require a break from literally all the assurances and comforts which maintain our capture in it. Even more powerful, is a fiery insistence that our gendered existence is not inevitable nor laid out in the stars. Primitivism could be understood as an attempt to give words and evidence to a visceral experience of not-belonging in this world, to the feeling in our bones and muscles which cries out against the gendering of our lives and possibilities. Primitivism asserts an outside and makes claims to certainty regarding the nature of that outside. We’ll dispense with them on the point of certainty; but the outside itself calls to us.

V

One of the most lucid points that Fredy Perlman makes in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! is his critique of Anthropology. He often speaks of anthropologists and archeologists as “grave robbers,” whose intention is to enforce their own story about human existence while erasing all other stories. He pays particular attention to the efforts of anthropologists to describe the role of work in primitive societies. Many anthropologists, sympathetic to primitive societies, will claim that the people in those societies worked significantly less than domesticated people. They call them Hunters or Gatherers. They will speak of the four hours a day that are devoted to work. Fredy critiques this position by claiming that it is the operation of the managers of work camps to naturalize work into all other human and animal existence. Yes, primitive people worked less, but because they did not work at all.

Modern anthropologists who carry Gulag in their brains reduce such human communities to the motions that look most like work, and give the name Gatherers to people who pick and sometimes store their favorite foods. A bank clerk would call such communities Savings Banks! The [workers] on a coffee plantation in Guatemala are Gatherers, and the anthropologist is a Savings Bank. Their free ancestors had more important things to do. The !Kung people miraculously survived as a community of free human beings into our own exterminating age. R.E. Leakey observed them in their lush African forest homeland. They cultivated nothing except themselves. They made themselves what they wished to be. They were not determined by anything beyond their own being—not by alarm clocks, not by debts, not by orders from superiors. They feasted and celebrated and played, full-time, except when they slept. They shared everything with their communities: food, experiences, visions, songs. Great personal satisfaction, deep inner joy, came from the sharing. (In today’s world, wolves still experience the joys that come from sharing. Maybe that’s why governments pay bounties to the killers of wolves.)

The assertion is simple, but profound: those who live in a world of work can only understand the activity of others as work. Work is a historically determined institution, and yet our civilized metaphysics operates to naturalize this institution; to obscure the violence of our domestication into it. The implications of this operation is all the more sinister, as we live in a world where more and more non-waged activities are subsumed into the world of work. In a sense, domestication functions as a linear enforcement of the world of work, colonizing our past as it does our future.

S. Diamond observed other free human beings who survived into our age, also in Africa. He could see that they did no work, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it in English. Instead, he said they made no distinction between work and play. Does Diamond mean that the activity of the free people can be seen as work one moment, as play another, depending on how the anthropologist feels? Does he mean that they didn’t know if their activity was work or play? Does he mean we, you and I, Diamond’s armored contemporaries, cannot distinguish their work from their play? If the !Kung visited our offices and factories, they might think we’re playing. Why else would we be there? I think Diamond meant to say something more profound. A time-and-motion engineer watching a bear near a berry patch would not know when to punch his clock. Does the bear start working when he walks to the berry patch, when he picks the berry, when he opens his jaws? If the engineer has half a brain he might say the bear makes no distinction between work and play. If the engineer has an imagination he might say that the bear experiences joy from the moment the berries turn deep red, and that none of the bear’s motions are work.

If we are to attempt to imagine that none of the bear’s (or our distance ancestors, for that matter) activity is work, then we are forced to abandon to scientific disciplines which aim to make claims to certainty about what vanquished peoples’ activities were like. This is an important break from a primitivist orthodoxy which prioritizes the use of anthropological methods. It is understandable why one would want to make such claims as to the precise nature of an outside or a before civilization. We would assert, however, that such claims aren’t simply wrong (by virtue of their entrenchment in the scientific worldview) but that they are unnecessary to our critique. We do not need to be able to claim with certainty that our ancestors “worked less” in order to refuse the world of work that captures us. That we can point to the world of work as a historically determined institution of domination which emerged with domestication and continues to immiserate our lives is reason enough that world should burn.

This is a different orientation to the outside. There is surely comfort and peace of mind in believing the scientific answers about what is outside. There is also a dignity and certainty which comes from believing that utopia once existed on the face of the earth. But what is left to us if we abandon these certainties? What remains is the a mystery and a chaos which evades any rationalist attempt to capture and put it to use. This unknown is precisely that which drives those who speak with certainty crazy. It is the dark and magical world of mystery which all the violence of the scientific operation aims to annihilate. Our proposal is simple: instead of deceiving ourselves about the unknown with this or that Positive Evidence, the unknown itself is something to celebrate. Rather than a primitivist return to an outside that is supposedly mapped into our biology; we’ll pursue an escape into an outside which is at the same time a mystery and an uncertainty. Should we fight less to escape if we don’t know what the outside looks like? One needs only look at the world which presents itself as all too certain to know the answer.

VI

In considering this provocation in the context of our inquiry into gender and domestication, a glaring contradiction emerges: why is Fredy’s willful embrace of the unknown (with regard to work) not likewise applied to gender? It takes very little effort to extend the critique of anthropological certainty into the gendered world. We could easily parallel it in saying: Anthropologists, sympathetic to primitive societies, will view the relationships between Men and Women as more fair and desirable in these societies than in civilized societies. They are wrong in that there is no relationship between Men and Women. They live in a world of gender, and so they can only perceive the varied and ineffable existences of others as conforming to those categories. An anthropologist with half a brain will say that these gender relationships are less rigid and dominating than the ones we experience; an anthropologist with an imagination would say that these are not gender relationships in the way we understand them at all.

This critique can very easily be applied to almost all primitivist writings on gender. Perlman and d’Eaubonne are obviously implicated in this type of essentialism regarding the roles that women and men played in primitive cultures. The archetype of woman as the nurturing and pro-creative center of the universe is clearly as historically constructed by the division of labor, and yet it is all the more sinister because it operates as if natural. While Zerzan’s theory of gender is more overt in mobilizing anthropology, it opens space against essentialism by identifying gender as a socially constructed institution sutured on top of a natural sexual difference. This still warrants critique, however. One of the most worthwhile understandings offered by queer theory is the provocation that the sex/gender dichotomy referred to by feminists over the last several decades is not two systems, but actually one. Sex as a binary is no more natural than gender. It is the historical and retrospective arrangement into two categories of a vast range of organs, hormones, gestures, dispositions, body shapes, sexual capacities, etc. The efforts on the part of transgender liberationists are relevant to this shift, as they demonstrate that there is no determinacy or cohesion between any particular arrangement of the above characteristics, but rather that the arrangement of them into categories is always a coercive attack on an individual. The recent struggles of intersex people goes further to clearly undermine the certainty which naturalizes binary sex. The quiet scientific and medical mutilation and reshaping of untold infants to fit into binary sex demonstrates that it is no more natural than binary gender. This institutional capture into one or another sex is just the newest form of what is an ancient regime of diet, medicine, labor, bondage, religion and taboo which functions to shape and exaggerate two sexes out of the vast infinity of possibilities contained by the human body. Sex and Gender are the same his-storical operation of categorization and separation, they are simply different articulations.

It is not uncommon for primitivist thinkers and anthropologists to have a critique of heteronormativity, pointing to evidence of widespread homosexual practices in tribal societies before their colonization. Others will also point to the existence of ‘third genders’ in certain tribes. These stories are relevant in that they undermine the naturalized view of heteronormativity (and with it reproductive futurism), but as long as they function scientifically, they still maintain the stability of gender (even third genders). They point to a more favorable gender arrangement, but lack the imagination to understand that people may have had relationships to one’s body and sexuality outside of the gendered cages which have been built around us. Furthermore, the tendency to universalize these conclusions is a tendency of Leviathan; homogeneity is intrinsic to the domestication process.

If we follow the analogous critique of work, we must come to a place where we can say that we do not know for certain what gendered existence was like before civilization. And yet this revelation in no way alters our certainty that gender as we know it begins with civilization. If we invoke an orientation to an outside of civilized gender, then we are actually invoking another mystery, an ineffable which evades definition and capture. What would it mean to participate in life or death struggle against gender without knowing what existed before it? This would mean pursuing an outside which presents itself to us as shadows and chaos. It would mean fighting for the wild, without recourse to the natural. As we’ve intoned before: though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth. What we’ve elsewhere called queer desire is a tendency toward this primordial chaos. The task is to live it.

VII

Having unveiled this contradiction within primitivism, we are left wondering how this blindspot has remained for so long.

One of the beautiful aspects of the primitivist critique is that is provides a lens through which to explore every relation and institution that is naturalized in Leviathanic thought. Within the primitivist canon, one can readily find incisive attacks against the family, race, psychiatry, agriculture, the division of labor, specialization, militarism and countless other dimensions of civilized existence. Primitivists are perhaps at their most imaginative and insightful when they explore a world outside the more deeply embedded abstractions of Leviathanic culture: symbolic thought, numbers, art, language, even nature. Several texts even offer dreamlike attempts to imagine how free people have conceived of different shapes to time itself.

How then, has this critical onslaught missed a relation so obvious and entrenched into our being? Those who claim that Civilization inaugurated gender disparity, still maintain the naturalness of those genders. Even those (like Zerzan) who call gender into question, still hold to a natural dualism which is perverted by domestication. That this dualism is considered natural by those who would otherwise refuse any other dualism (human/animal, mind/body, etc.) as a civilized constraint is not proof of its naturalism. Rather it is proof of how deeply entrenched it is in the process of domestication—so deep that we can scarcely imagine a world before it. Zerzan, to his credit, says the divide (which varies in its form, but not its essence) is the most deeply seated dualism; giving rise to the subject/object and mind/body splits in turn. He calls it a “categorization... that may be the single cultural form of greatest significance.” It introduces and legitimizes all other dominations. This line of argument is echoed by Witch Hazel in BLOODLUST, who writes that the construction and devaluation of the feminine archetype is a parallel to the mind/body split and enables the turn toward domestication and Civilized conquest. This central underpinning of Civilization already divines, without knowing it, the enmity between Civilization and queer desire articulated by Guy Hocquenghem and others; the way that queer desire reveals what is common between the family and the automobile and every other civilized apparatus. This lens allows us to see that in gender, more than anywhere else, the enemy has projected itself throughout time in order to preclude our dreams of an outside. As Fredy narrates this dynamic of projection:

The strait that separates us from the other shore has been widening for three hundred generations, and whatever was cannibalized from the other shore is no longer a vestige of their activity but an excretion of ours: it’s shit. Reduced to blank slates by school, we cannot know what it was to grow up heirs to thousands of generations of vision, insight, experience. We cannot know what it was to learn to hear the plants grow, and to feel the growth... It becomes very important for the last Leviathan to deny the existence of an outside. The beast’s voices have to project Leviathanic traits into pre-Leviathanic past, into nature, even into the unknown universe. The post-Hobbesian artificial beast becomes conscious of itself as Leviathan and not as Temple or Heavenly Empire or Vicarate of Christ, and it simultaneously begins to suspect its own frailty, its impermanence. The beast knows itself to be a machine, and it knows that machines break down, decompose, and may even destroy themselves. A frantic search for perpetual motion machines yields no assurance to counter the suspicions, and the beast has no choice but to project itself into realms or beings which are not machines.

A telling story is that of the interaction between colonizing French Jesuits and the indigenous Montagnais-Naskapi in 17th century Canada, as recounted by Eleanor Leacock, a feminist anthropologist cited by both Zerzan and Silvia Federici. She describes how it became necessary for the Jesuits to ‘civilize’ the Montagnais-Naskapi in order to ensure they’d be disciplined trading partners. This endeavor started with the introduction of hierarchical gender roles.

As often happened when Europeans came in contact with native American populations, the French were impressed by Montagnais-Naskapi generosity, their sense of cooperation and indifference to status, but they were scandalized by their ‘lack of morals;’ they saw that the Naskapi had no conception of private property, of authority, of male superiority, and they even refused to punish their children. The Jesuits decided to change all that, setting out to teach the Indians the basic elements of civilization, convinced that this was necessary to turn them into reliable trade partners. In this spirit they first taught them that ‘man is the master,’ that ‘in France women do not rule their husbands,’ and that courting at night, divorce at either partner’s desire, and sexual freedom for both spouses, before or after marriage, had to be forbidden.

The Jesuits succeeded in convincing the newly appointed chiefs of the tribe to implement male authority over the women. Several Naskapi women fled such novel and offensive constraint, causing men (at the encouragement of the Jesuits) to chase after them and threaten to beat and/or imprison them for their disobedience. One Jesuit missionary’s journal proudly includes an account of the incident:

Such acts of justice cause no surprise in France, because it is usual there to proceed in that manner. But among these people...where everyone considers himself from birth as free as the wild animals that roam in their great forests...it is a marvel, or rather a miracle, to see a peremptory command obeyed, or any act of severity or justice performed.

Another interesting story is recounted in a brief segment from the journal Species Traitor about homosexuality outside of civilization. The segment has the humility to acknowledge that while we can indict universalized homophobia as being unique to modern society, we can know very little about the vast and divergent sexual practices of the majority of cultures that have walked the earth. The segment goes on to cite an example of two anthropologists living among the Huaorani people in the Amazon region of what is now Ecuador. The two anthropologists witnessed two Huaorani men in an intimate embrace. When the Huaorani men saw that they were being watched, one quietly whispered to the other kowudi, after which they looked embarrassed at the anthropologists and walked away. Kowudi means outsiders.

Both of these stories succinctly illustrate the truly partisan role played by those who operate under some notion of objectivity or neutrality. The journals of countless missionaries, explorers and anthropologists show that their accounts are tainted by their civilized attitudes toward gender and sexuality, but also that one of their primary operations is to force those attitudes upon the people they study. In Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans points to several of these, including a rather humorous example of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus’ disgust at the behavior of Celtic men in the first century BC:

Although they have good-looking women, they pay very little attention to them, but are really crazy about having sex with men. They are accustomed to sleep on the ground on animal skins and roll around with male bed-mates on both sides. Heedless of their own dignity, they abandon without a qualm the bloom of their bodies to others. And the most incredible thing is that they don’t think this is shameful.

All of this points to the great flaw of anthropology in regard to the question of gender. As the existence and universality of gendered categories is taken for granted, their accounts (and often their actions) will always function to enact a violence upon a wild range of human experience, severing it from its whole context and recounting that experience as an amputated and gendered one. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t read these stories. Instead it instructs us on how to read them. If we can glean any useful direction from them, it is by reading these scientists as we would read any other enemy; critically, and with attention to the secrets hidden between the lines. And even when we can distill this or that, we still only have one story, from one culture, in one moment. To universalize these stories as representations and truths about all of humanity, as is often done by primitivist anthropology, is to falsify our understanding and erase an infinity of other possibilities and stories of people beyond civilization’s snares. It is a reverence for this infinity which sets our inquiry apart from a scientific one. Science, after all, is also one myth among many. It is different only in that it refuses all stories but its own.

Some interpret these stories to mean that Patriarchy is one of the first pillars of civilization to emerge from domestication. Others glean that the gender division is the first duality, which makes domestication possible. Both versions draw circles around a third possibility:

Gender is domestication.

The two supposedly distinct phenomena appear as mutually constituting because they are one and the same phenomenon. Earlier we said that domestication is the capture of living things by something non-living. It is also the process where capture is internalized by living beings who are then shaped into pre-determined roles. The non-living thing is immortal and continues long after its captives are dead, and that it is constantly accumulating new lives in order to reproduce itself. Gender is precisely this non-living institution which tears individuals away from themselves and reconstitutes them as a pre-determined role. Gender would be an empty husk if it wasn’t for its constant capture of new bodies; bodies which in turn give it life. Isn’t the first incursion of Civilization into the life of a wild newborn always to proclaim its gender? It is the first separation which gives rise to all others. Gender is the cipher through which Leviathan categorizes and understands each and every one of the beings trapped in its entrails. A whole destiny of experience is inscribed on our bodies from it.

We should also remember that we previous identified a theme where domesticated people invoke the image of those they are not and never were to justify their own machinations and violence. In gender, we see all the ways that the gender binary is naturalized as sex and projected into pre-history as a way of explaining and rationalizing (essentializing) all of these experiences of violence. We are told those assigned female are meant to be mothers, and therefore it is in their nature to endure pain, to be caretakers, to submit to external authority. Those assigned male are virile hunters and warriors, violence and rape are supposedly intrinsic to their nature. Homosexuals are aberrations in nature, and thus they are fated for exile in their short, brutal and diseased lives. Every mask of the natural is only ever a lie told by Leviathan to justify its own activity.

An understanding of gender as domestication is supported by the inquiries of a handful of anti-colonial theorists of gender such as María Lugones, Andrea Smith and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Smith, for example, horrifyingly illustrates the use of sexual violence as strategy of Leviathan’s conquest of the Americas. More so, she argues that colonialism is itself structured by sexual violence. Lugones, as another example, argues that gender itself is violently introduced by colonial civilization. She says it is consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies and communities in order to form the building ground of the ‘civilized West.’ She argues that the colonial system produces different racialized genders, but more importantly institutes gender itself as a way of organizing relations, knowledges and cosmic understanding. This is useful because it refuses a universal or natural understanding of Patriarchy that lacks a critique of racial and heteronormative colonialism. Instead, her argument helps us to describe the gender as something that spreads, consumes and destroys. She describes this process as the Colonial/Modern Gender System. This system entails the naturalization of the sexual binary, the demonization of a racial and hermaphroditic other, and the violent eradication of everything outside civilization: third genders, homosexuality, gynocentric knowledges and non-gendered existence, etc. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí in The Invention of Women describes how gender was not an organizing principle in Yoruba society prior to colonization. She says that patriarchy only emerges when Yoruba society is “translated into english to fit the western pattern of body reasoning.” She locates the dominance of civilization’s gender system in its documentation and interpretation of the world. “Researchers always find gender when they look for it.”

Within colonialism, new subject categories were created by western Civilization and were racialized and engendered as the foundation of the new colonial state. This creation process is composed of several operations: the introduction and entrenchment of gender roles, the imposition of Male gods, the formation of Patriarchal colonial government, the displacement of people from their traditional means of subsistence and the violent institution of the Family. These operations serve as a revision which recasts and genders tribal life and spirituality. This engendering does more than create the victimized category of women, but also constructs men as collaborators in domestication. Lugones cites the British strategy of bringing indigenous men to English schools where they would be instructed in the ways of civilized gender. These men would work within the colonial state to deprive women of their previous power to declare war, bear arms and determine their own relationships. She also cites the Spanish strategy of criminalizing sodomy among colonized populations, intertwining it with racialized hatred of the Moors and other ‘primitive’ people.

These theorists employ stories and examples of ‘third genders’ not as a literal description of a three gendered system, but instead as a place holder for the infinite range of bodily possibility which exists outside the colonial system. They argue that domestication has to be imposed as gender in order to disintegrate all the communal and free relationships, rituals and overlapping means of survival. And as the civilized ideal of racial gender is naturalized, everything outside of itself is fair game for capture, domination and reshaping. Colonialism itself is often described through the racial and sexual metaphor of the white male explorer uncovering and pillaging the dark female continents, forcing her to submit and planting the seed of civilization.

From this perspective, we can recognize all the incidents of gendered and racial violence in our lives as repetitions of this first capture. Sex work, abusive relationships, body dysmorphia, marriage, sexual abuse, familial constraint, date rape, gang rape, queer bashing, psychiatry, electroshock therapy, eating disorders, domestic labor, unwanted pregnancy, fetishization, emotional labor, street harassment, pornography: each instance is a moment where we are torn from ourselves, taken by another, captured and determined as a brutal repetition of the primary rupture which denied us a life lived by and for ourselves. In this schema, the assimilation and medicalization of queer and transgendered people can be understood as a re-capture of rebellious bodies. Police murder and racist vigilantism can likewise be understood as functions of this capture.

It is worth noting here that to understand gender as domestication is crucially different from understanding patriarchy as a consequence of domestication, in that the former is a break from the trap of essentialism. None of the above is limited to one subject of the gendered world. Rape, for example, is not solely the experience of women (as is often claimed by various regurgitations of second wave feminism), but is a disgustingly widespread experience among people of all genders. The assertion that any form of gender violence is the exclusive property of one category of people would be laughable if it weren’t for the litany of horrors which serve to disprove it. More sinisterly, these type of essentialist assertions obscure and shame those experience an entire range of very real experiences of gender violence.

Situating gender as domestication is a way to understand gender violence outside of an essentialist and white framework. Without this understanding, all theories which attribute some natural dimension to sex/gender (from eco-feminist to Marxist feminist) are structurally unable to account for the violence, capture, and exclusion experienced by anyone who deviates from the gender binary or the heterosexual matrix. These ideologies will expand to pay lip-service to queer and transpeople, but they never alter the structure of their theory. This amounts to little more than the liberal politics of inclusion. If, however, we understand gender as something which captures us, rather than something natural to us (or extracted from our biological existence), we can begin to analyze all the methods of domination experienced by queer or transgender people. Brutality and exclusion come to be recognized as the policing methods by which individuals remain captured; assimilation and exploitation represent a more sophisticated capture. From here I can see the line which binds together the boys who called me faggot as a teenager and the gay men who would pay me for sex a few years later. Everything about the refusal of gender follows from this. The criticism of identity, assimilation, medicalization or any technique of the self becomes meaningful once it is placed in this continuum.

VIII

We’ve said there are some stories which can be stolen from anthropology that might help us in our understanding of gender as domestication. One such story is told by Gayle Rubin in her essay The Traffic in Women (not to be confused with the Emma Goldman piece by the same name). This piece is one of the many examples of feminist anthropology which influenced Zerzan and other primitivist writers in their theory of gender. We chose to critically engage with Rubin’s piece for a few reasons. Firstly, within her work, there is a shift from feminist anthropology to queer theory; this feels analogous to shifts within our inquiry. Secondly, she conceives of her own writing as a practice of exegesis, of reading others against themselves to draw conclusions which are opposed to the author’s intentions. Specifically, she heretically reads Levi-Strauss and Freud, (apologists and technicians of gender) for the ways their theories can be subverted. This practice aligns interestingly with our abuse of a whole range of texts. And lastly, she defines her own project as being an attempt to understand the origins of ‘the domestication of women.’ While our own inquiry is more thorough than to be interested in only the domestication of one gendered subject, we cannot help but feel intrigued by a theory of gender that directly interrogates domestication.

In her text, she aims to find the ‘systemic social apparatus’ which transforms ‘females as raw material’ and ‘fashions domesticated women as a product.’ Rubin contends that this apparatus is significant because it dominates the lives ‘of women, of sexual minorities, and of certain aspects of human personalities within individuals.’ She calls this apparatus the sex/gender system and she believes that both anthropology and psychoanalysis inadvertently describe mechanisms by which this system constructs domesticated gender out of the occurrence of biological sex. It is unfortunate that Rubin advocates the sex/gender dichotomy that we’ve critiqued above, but this oversight doesn’t prevent us from being able to use her study. After all, even without a conception of naturalized sex, we are still interested in understanding the social apparatus which transforms wild beings into domesticated gendered products.

Interestingly enough, she begins her exploration of this apparatus by first outlining the failure of Marxist feminism to account for it. She wrote Traffic at a time when Marxist feminists such as Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici were articulating a theory of ‘reproductive labor’ and specifically the labor performed by housewives as being the root of women’s oppression and exploitation. This theory stemmed from a desire on the part of these women to locate a theory of gendered oppression that was a concomitant of the capitalist mode of production.

Food must be cooked, clothes cleaned, beds made, wood chopped. Housework is therefore a key element in the process of the reproduction of the laborer from whom surplus value is taken. Since it is usually women who do housework, it has been observed that it is through the reproduction of labor power that women are articulated into the surplus-value nexus which is the sine qua non of capitalism. It can be further argued that since no wage is paid for housework, the labor of women in the home contributes to the ultimate quantity of surplus value realized by the capitalist. But to explain women’s usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another. It is precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and the oppression of women.

This limit—the conflation of the exploitation of subjects by capitalism with evidence that capitalism is the origin of those subjects—is a flaw of all self-proclaimed ‘scientific’ disciplines which aim to generalize one story into a materialist theory that locates economics as the cause of all woes. Following from this, she identifies a wide range of non-capitalist cultures which are vehemently patriarchal, including pre-capitalist feudal Europe. She then details several practices of gender domination (foot binding, chastity belts, and other fetishized indignities) which cannot be accounted for by a Marxist analysis of the reproduction of labor power. She argues that at most, Marxist Feminism can explain the way capitalism seized upon and tinkered with already existing forces of social control. ‘The analysis of the reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women rather than men who do domestic work in the home.’ She argues that economics cannot account for the moral element which determines that a wife is among the commodities needed by a man, that only men can talk to God, and that women are the ones who perform domestic labor. To her, this moral element is the massive and unexplored terrain from which gendered violence emerges and that it is the basis of the femininity and masculinity that capitalism later inherited. It is into this element that she’ll direct the rest of her study. She concludes her critique of Marxist feminism by illustrating the silliness of reducing the vastness of the sex/gender system to being simply ‘the reproductive’ sphere. For her, there is far too much excess in that system to be solely the reproductive aspect of industrial production. Not to mention that it is also productive in its own way: producing gendered subjects, for example. The origins of gender domination, she claims, must be located outside the ‘mode of production.’

Her attempt to find this outside is to first look at the writings of Levi-Strauss in his explorations of early kinship structures. His writing places gender and sexuality at the center of these structures; he develops a theory that links their essence to the exchange of women between men of various social groups. In doing so, Rubin believes he has sketched an implicit theory of gendered oppression. He primarily comes to this conclusion after studying the role of gift exchange in pre-state arrangements. He finds that the exchange of gifts was the first measure taken in the long road toward the development of ‘civil society’ and the state. For him, marriage is one of the most significant forms of gift exchange, with women themselves being the gifts given from one man to another. From here, he analyzes the incest taboo as a means of policing and enforcing this exchange of women as gifts. The taboo is less about preventing endogamous sexual relations, and much more about obliging the exchange of sisters and daughters into exogamous relations; it is an early expression of commodity society. The exchange of human beings is more powerful than other gifts because it is not simply an arrangement of reciprocity, but one of kinship. This results in a more long-lasting and expansive relationship which orders all other types of exchange through the established kinship network.

The marriage ceremonies recorded in the ethnographic literature are moments in a ceaseless and ordered procession in which women, children, shells, words, cattle, names, fish, ancestors, whale’s teeth, pigs, yams, spells, dances, mats and so on, pass from hand to hand, leaving as their tracks the ties that bind. Kinship is organization, and organization gives power.

Organization, then, is an original structure of power between those who exchange others. This difference between the exchanged and the exchangers is a primary split in the system we’ll call gender. For Rubin, the split is between men as organizers, and women as conduits to organization; men as exchange partners and women as gifts. The circulation of women provides the mystical powers of kinship to the men who exchange them; the men benefit from the subsequent social organization. The vast permutations of gendered organization today will not deviate from this unending exchange of bodies. Women are given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as tribute, traded, bought, and sold. Far from being confined to the “primitive world,” these practices seem only to become more pronounced and commercialized in more “civilized” societies. Rubin finds this concept useful because it locates gender’s emergence in social structures, rather than in biology. Further, it understands gender domination to be more rooted in the exchange of bodies than in the exchange of merchandise. Here, gender is not explained away as a function of reproduction, but is production itself. It is an entire system where individual bodies are produced as gendered subjects and exchanged in the production of kinship structures. This system does not just exchange women, but ancestry, lineage names, social power, children. The inauguration of gender violence emerges from this system within which sex and gender are organized; the economic exploitation of this or that gender is secondary to this.

This story is relevant to the larger one we’re trying to weave because it features gender as inextricably bound to a monster which is Rubin euphemistically calls social organization. We would call the monster domestication, and from this story we can determine a lot about its character and tendencies. Rubin of course, in typical academic fashion, shies away from the totality of these conclusions. She says that, since Levi-Strauss located this exchange as the beginning of the culture of civilization (“his analysis implies that the world-historical defeat of women occurred with the origin of culture, and is a prerequisite of culture”), holding to a firm interpretation of the theory would also imply that her “feminist task” would require the destruction of that culture. This destruction remains unthinkable in her system of thought. Again, we’ll choose to go where others will not. That an argument points to a necessary destruction of everything is precisely why we’d follow it.

The second story that Gayle Rubin recites is one more common: psychoanalysis and its Oedipus complex. Rubin correctly berates psychoanalysis for its tendency to become more than a theory of the mechanisms which reproduces gender and sexuality; she argues it has largely become one of those mechanisms. She follows that a revolt against the mechanisms of gender must then also be a critique of psychoanalysis. This critique isn’t new for us; Hocquenghem’s queer refusal of civilization is predicated on this very refusal of psychoanalysis. Rubin looks at the same concepts as Hocquenghem in an attempt to flesh out her theory of gender’s emergence. Primarily, she concerns herself with how psychoanalysis can hint toward the way children are forced into the categories of boys and girls. Her exegesis of psychoanalysis mostly centers around Lacan, who views his efforts as an attempt to identify the traces left in the individual’s psyche by their conscription into kinship structures, as well as the transformation of their sexuality as they are integrated into civilized culture. For Rubin this is a nice complement to Levi-Strauss; whereas the she had already examined the exchange of individuals within a gender system, she now turns to the interior realities of those exchanged. She begins from Oedipus:

Oedipal crisis occurs when a child learns of the sexual rules embedded in the terms for family and relatives. The crisis begins when the child comprehends the system and his or her place in it; Before the Oedipal phase, the sexuality of the child is... unstructured. Each child contains all the sexual possibilities available to human expression. But in any given society, only some of these possibilities will be expressed, while others will be constrained. Upon leaving the Oedipal phase, the child’s libido and gender identity have been organized in conformity with the rules of the culture which is domesticating it... Oedipal complex is an apparatus for the production of sexual personality. Societies will inculcate in their young the character traits appropriate to carry on the business of society... such as the transformation of the working class into good industrial workers. Just as the social forms of labor demand certain kinds of personality, the social forms of sex and gender demand certain kinds of people. In the most general terms, the Oedipal complex is a machine which fashions the appropriate forms of sexual individuals.

Psychoanalysis largely concerns itself with how a child can properly adapt to this machine. Rubin would say that the machine needs to be changed. We’ll assert that the machine must be destroyed. Rubin details how the machine functions along with an equally familiar concept, the phallus. She emphasizes that rather than being a biological object, the phallus is primarily a symbol of belonging to a gendered social order. The father possesses it, and so he can exchange it for a woman; if a boy behaves and is properly domesticated, he can one day have the phallus too. The girl is denied it, and thus has nothing with which to bargain for it. The phallus is transmitted through particularly gendered bodies and rests upon others. In the same way as the kinship system detailed by Levi-Strauss gives certain people the ability to exchange others as a commodity, the phallus is the mystical dimension of belonging which is traded for these bodies in turn. For Rubin, these systems cohere into a mutually reinforcing dynamic where women are dispossessed of their very being, and are possessed and exchanged by men. The linkage of these men through their exchange of the woman and phallus creates the social bonds upon which organized civilization is based.

Rubin emphasizes that any part of the body can be a site of active or passive eroticism. But by imbuing certain categories of similar anatomy with the social power of the phallus, domestication concentrates erotic power in certain geographies, tearing all other possibilities away from gendered individuals. Psychoanalysis argues that those gendered as girls are forced to accept their position within a gendered order where they’ve been separated from their access to the phallus, or to socially recognized eroticism. Traditional psychoanalysts describe this as the formation of feminine personality. Rubin breaks from them in describing it instead as a socialized enforcement of psychic brutality which forces young children to internalize a logic of submission. The normative interpretation is that one learns to accept this submission and take pleasure from it. Here the scientists of psychoanalysis allow for the triumphant return of biological essentialism—linking the pain of penetration and child birth to a now rationalized internalization of submission. Rubin will argue that this theory normatively functions to naturalize and justify the gender order, and must be attacked for this function. She proposes a more subversive reading of it as a diagnostic of exactly how this machine functions. Our reading of it should elucidate how that machine can be irreparably sabotaged.

For Rubin, a subversive reading of these two stories begins to unveil aspects of the gender system which would otherwise remain hidden. She calls them preliminary charts of the social machinery. Others today would call it a study of apparatuses. In these charts, she reads a system that is so intractable and monumental that it cannot be exorcised through miniscule reforms. For her, the neat congruity between the two stories indicates that the ancient methods of capture and exchange are still at work in the present. She calls these methods domestication. She argues that domestication will always happen and that the wild profusion of sexual possibilities in the human body will always be tamed. And so she rather cynically argues for a ‘feminist revolution’ to seize this machinery and use it to ‘liberate human personality from the straightjacket of gender.’ We don’t have any hope that this machinery will ever be destroyed on a global scale, but this does not mean that we believe in seizing it for our own use. (Just as we are not interested in seizing state power or the means of production). Our anarchy is the destruction of these machines and our escape from them. Fredy Perlman argued that Leviathan is a dead thing which only has an artificial life when living things inhabit it as captives. If we say that gender is domestication, then Leviathan is one and the same as the gendered machinery described above. Seizing the machinery will only continue the nightmare that is gender: we have to find an escape route.

Rubin argues that these disciplines, psychoanalysis and anthropology function as the most sophisticated rationalization of the sex/gender system. We can see this as parallel to the argument made earlier regarding anthropological documentation/enforcement of heteronormativity. Surveillance is always a function of policing. Those sciences which aim to analyze the world become blueprints for how the world might be structured to fit their vision of it. We believe that this is true of science in general; later we’ll contend that the same holds for the science of historical materialism. And so just as we must develop an antagonistic reading of anthropological stories, we must also develop a reading of these maps. In them we aren’t looking for how to maintain or even alter the machines. We are reading them as a prisoner might study the stolen blueprints of a prison; as an enemy operation, seeking the points at which they fail. These blueprints are of absolutely no interest for us, save for the image of the world we aim to leave; and even still, these images are two dimensional, bare lines, inscrutable symbols.

The map presented to us is not the one drawn by Marxist feminism. Economics form a dimension of our entrapment, but it is not the end all and be all of gender. The terrain is sexual, psychological, ancestral, familial, technological and moral. It may be economic and political too, but not in any privileged sense. The gender system approaches a totality of all the ways we are captured and the ways in which we internalize that position. Rubin even suggests that the state-form itself may have emerged from this shadowy web of phallic kinship. If we cannot understand and combat gender as a totality, we will never be able to break the curse of the ancient fathers.

While we disagree with Rubin on several of her (mostly political and feminist) conclusions, and are rather bored by her form and obsession with the writings of men of science, we have to appreciate her for her line of inquiry. We can draw on her both in terms of her practice of heretical reading, but also for her unwillingness to accept the simple answers. By problematizing both the conceptions of gender as natural and also as economic, she offers a way of avoiding the pitfalls of an eco-feminist or Marxist-Feminist theory. Her approach is one that is worthwhile if our intention is to locate gender at the moment of domestication; no more and no less.

Perhaps most usefully her two stories correspond to what we might identify as a twofold nature of domestication: bodily and spiritual. On the one hand, domestication takes the form of the capture and exchange of bodies within a social order. On the other, it involves the spiritual taming of those individuals; the internalization of a spirit of submission. These are not two isolated phenomena, but are mutually constituting elements of a self-reproducing dynamic of gender. Form and content. After all, a spiritual linkage is the result of the exchange of body-commodities, just as the Oedipal logic of submission accompanies the entrapment within a particular arrangement of the body. Each assault and constraint upon the body fosters the development of a docile spiritual disposition. Each alienation and dispossession from some dimension of our bodily existence leads to an analogous fragmenting of our psyche. The dualities of sex and gender can be understood as bodily form and spiritual content of the domestication process. The symbolic re-ordering of the body (as in the Phallus) has an accompanying fetish. All the victim subjectivities follow directly from this capture of the body. Equally so, our spiritual complicity with the gendered Leviathan drives us to exchange bodies in pursuit of some mythical belonging. This interplay leads to the creation of the gendered body and the domesticated spirit. This is elsewhere called identity formation. The dualities of sex and gender can be understood as bodily form and spiritual content of the domestication process.

We must take the understanding further than Rubin, by conceptualizing the duality of race as intrinsic to this bodily and spiritual dynamic. In the same way that gender splits bodies and marks them for circulation, race further elaborates this separation. Those captured as black women, for example, were circulated within the slave system and marked as hyper-sexual, perverse, and strong; justifying their rape, hard labor and forced reproduction. The children they produced were taken from them and circulated, while they themselves were forced to wet nurse the white children of their masters. The racist figures of the mammy and the sexually aggressive woman were (and still are) put to use to justify the circulation and domination of the bodies of black women.

We obviously must also take Rubin’s account to task for the latent essentialism within it. While she herself mimes some critique of them, she ends up importing far too much of a conception of naturalized gender from the men she reads. It is up to us to locate this dynamic of bodily and spiritual domestication as being the foundation of all gendered violence, and not simply of the violence against women. We’ve already said that no gendered violence belongs to any one category, but it bears repeating. This dynamic is at much at play in the systematic abuse of young boys by priests as it is in the gang rape in military barracks and fraternities, as it is in and sex slavery in prisons. The circulation of bodies is obvious in these extreme instances, but it is also more subtle: in advertising and pornography (gay and straight), in dating (of the monogamous or polyamorous varieties), in sex work and service work, in the technophilic ways we cruise, and in the ways we learn. It is present in the ‘my’ which always corresponds to boyfriend, wife, daughter, partner. It is what remains unspoken in initiatory rites of secret orders of husbands, rapists and jailers. All of it—from the most abominable to the most minute—is the unending dynamic of bodily capture, spiritual submission, and circulation.

IX

While the ecstasy of the former living