Doom Patrols  

"Anne Fausto-Sterling counts at least five anatomical genders: herms, merms, and ferms, as well as females and males. But she adds that this is still a reductive classification; our bodies embrace "a vast, infinitely malleable continuum that defies the constraints of even five categories." Nonstandard or intermediate genders are far more common than you might think: indeed, Fausto-Sterling says, they "may constitute as many as 4 percent of all births." But most often the othergendered are immediately "entered into a program of hormonal and surgical management so that they can slip quietly into society as 'normal' heterosexual males or females." Such is the actual effect of the supposed autonomy of language and culture. If your flesh doesn't obey Lacan's Law of binary difference, then your compliance will be enforced with drugs and the surgeon's scalpel."--Doom Patrols (1997) by Steven Shaviro

"Foucault thus proposes the sexuo-linguistic theory of Jean-Pierre Brisset as an antidote to the anthropocentric structuralisms of Saussure, Lacan, and Chomsky. Brisset maintains that human beings are immediately descended from frogs. He supports his claim with exhaustive linguistic analyses. Our speech, he shows, is a hypostasis of frogs' croaking in the mudflats; our writing conserves the traces of their obscure hatreds, jealousies, and battles. Brisset, much like McLuhan, affirms the tactility of language, its oral and aural density, its rich, viscous materiality. He "puts words back in the mouth and around the sexual organs." Language arises out of orgasmic screams and bodily spasms. There's no clear dividing line between body and thought, or nature and culture, just as there is none between the water and the land. Language and sexuality are not the clean, abstract structures the so-called "human sciences" have long imagined them to be. Rather, they are forces in continual agitation in the depths of our bodies."--Doom Patrols (1997) by Steven Shaviro