Trans-tag

Johanna Drucker's argument on the constraining, discipline-bound and ideological nature of models finds an unlikely example in Caster Semenya. This 18-year-old South African athlete had to go through tests to prove she belonged into one of the "tags" the heterosexist model establishes: <> and <>. The results are in and Semenya is -- for lack of a third "tag" - both <> and <>. Semenya's tag inhabitability is symptomatic of the exclusionary implications of classification, how naming forces a "reading, an intervention, an interpretive act" (16). The godfathers of the heterosexist system never accounted for the possibilities that lay between <> and <>, perhaps setting multiple generations of beings into paths/tags that they wouldn't have inhabited had they been offered other tags. Semenya can, of course, bear the < hermaphrodite. > tag (a "Scarlet tag"?), but its presentation will only take proper shape if it becomes a convention. Creating your own tag out of free will or anarchic experimentation will only trigger a complete lack of visual representation (see "P.S." bellow)

This construction of facile dichotomies (male/female, democracy/terror, legal/illegal), so present in language in general is made evident in metatexts such as HTML. In terms of literacy, I suppose one could liken digital literacy (knowing how to read code) to etymological knowledge (knowing the history of words). But is that enough to circumvent their ideological constrictions? By the time a baby gets around to reading "Bodies that Matter" the damage may have already been done. Either way, it seems that this generation - ours - is in a privileged moment which will take future generations many theories to deconstruct back to. In a few dozen years the amount of layers of code may be so intricate, it will become increasingly hard see through form.

P.S. Something really interesting happened when I published this post. All of my "male" and "female" tags disappeared after being "automatically closed" with a "/" (as in < / female>). I had to leave a space between the "<" and the word to make them visible again. That strategy didn't work for the hermaphrodite tag, which needed an extra dot between the word and the ">" to make itself visible.