Somatechnic disidentifications of pleasure : toward a postgender politics

Somatechnic Disidentifications of Pleasure: Toward a Postgender Politics offers not only a critical perspective on the state of techno-body-subjects in contemporary times, but also a glimpse of what bodies and pleasures of the future may matter. I argue that subjectification is thoroughly tied to a technologization of the body, and as an effect, we require new conceptual tools to analyze the power relations that form our 'somatechnic' cyborg selves. I advance a theory of disidentificatory body hacking as one potential strategy for successfully subverting normalization and repossessing control over one’s own somatechnic subject-formation. Rather than leaving the body behind, I argue that we must exploit the breaks in subjectification that allow for a re-rendering of subjectivity that resists the ways that our bodies have been socially coded, normalized, and thus constrained by gender and sexuality. Lastly, I imagine the efficacy of such disidentification strategies for forming new types of intimate relations with others in the service of a counterpublic construction that accounts for unstifled pleasures. Somatechnic Disidentification of Pleasure points us towards a politics that is postgender, a politics that pushes beyond the idea of gender and sexuality as premier relations of power that subject the body.