Goetzke, Louka

“Are you a man or a woman?”

“No”

Trans activist Alok Vaid-Menon in an interview with the Archer Magazine

Gender transitions and associated legitimising and normalising practices as well as their creative potential are at the centre of research project. Following theorist Susan Stryker1, gender transitions are understood as a non-linear movement across a socially imposed boundary, away from an unchosen starting place: the gender assigned at birth. These movements challenge gender boundaries and share the desire for movement away from gender as a subjugating apparatus. They require imagination, go to unknown places and liminal spaces. With Deleuze, I understand these movements as “creative flights”2.

In my presentation, I will explicate the value of approaching movements away from the gender assigned at birth with Deleuzian modes of thinking. These modes provide us with tools to further understand gender transitions and examine their creative potential to become (otherwise other). The Deleuze conceptualization of difference-in-itself allows the affirmation of internal difference to destabilize the frames of gendered categories. I argue with Deleuze that these movements away from the gender assigned at birth are not conceptualised as realising the possible, but rather as an actualisation of the virtual. This means that they don’t follow binary rules and thus limited reproduction in one direction but instead emerge rhizomatically, through divergences in all directions. This perspective invites us to understand the liminal as a marginal space of possibilities, a staging ground for pre-figuring a new world.

Louka Maju Goetzke is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Frankfurt (Main) in Germany. Prior to joining Goethe University Frankfurt, they studied cultural sciences at Leuphana University Lüneburg, then completed an MA in Sociocultural Studies at the European University Viadrina, an MA in Critical and Creative Analysis at the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in European Studies and International Studies at Université Paris 8. They then worked as an editor for the print magazine Neue Narrative in Berlin for the past two years.

Their doctoral thesis explores gender transitions as a movement away from the gender assigned at birth, within the social order of gender. It seeks to understand which transitions take place within the movement away from the gender assigned at birth and how these are shaped by the given normative and discursive frames as well as material and institutional conditions.

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