late post on Deleuze: gender roles and naturalization in the society of control

At one point last weekend, over dinner, I found myself chatting with friends and one boyfriend about his decidedly negative reaction to the vagina dentata––the toothed vagina, which is active rather than passive (I promise I have a point). This ultimately led to a discussion on whether or not the modern woman’s gender role––particularly the vagina’s passive engagement in sex––could change, or whether or not it was innate. On the subject of the possibility of changing gender roles, one friend offered, “I once read something about them being more complex now than they were even in the middle ages,” by which she meant (I found upon a cross examination) that because they were more complex, the modern gender roles (both) are more confining and controlling––the greater complexity, I took this to mean, leaves less leeway. These complexities, I thought, must be a result of the fact that we are simply less conscious of the gender roles.

Which brings me right back to Deleuze’s society of control vs. Foucault’s society of discipline).

Firstly, we are controlled by protocol, rather than rules, which in the end means that we have to figure it out for ourselves, so, as with the segments of our life, we don’t know where modern society’s “rules” begin and end. Which complicates things. The society of control is controlling because, as we’ve discussed, we aren’t really aware that we are being controlled––just as Deleuze’s aspiring young men brag about their enthusiasm for joining the competitive forces of Wall Street.

[Also, to comment on Alice/Zach’s post, they provided and excellent example of being forced to conform when thinking consciously that they were pursuing freedom and opportunities (in other words, “America”). I think the paradox they describe in the beginning is fascinating––that in order to be a part of the free self-expressing society’s of cyberspace in which you can be a dolphin or have “blue eyes… suggestive… of untamed eroticism,” or present yourself as being awesome and having a ton of friends while skirting the label “MySpace whore,” you still are forced to define and present your identity (and certainly, defining yourself curtails a certain amount of freedom that we typically have to express different parts of our personality), and you have to do it in accordance with social protocol. Furthermore, rather than being truly free no, you have to behave in accordance with protocol, for fear of being toaded.]

And we aren’t aware that we are being controlled because we are controlling ourselves. It’s what Boyd describes as “impression management” (she’s quoting Goffman), as teens do on MySpace. She describes this (or Goffman does, I’m not sure which) as a natural development. But I’m not entirely sure that defining your identity in text form is natural, rather, it seems to take on the guise of the natural.

And now I come to the end of my rather convoluted tangent to make my rather convoluted original point: modern women tend to think that their gender role in modern society is innate, is natural, is something that they are born with and therefore don’t examine quite as closely as they might (unless of course that woman is exposed to the Brown community for 24 hrs). Their role is something they absorb from the world (and its media) around them, and that role has been naturalized by that world. They are not taught it, it simply is that way. The ambiguity of the society of control lies in the fact that its protocol has become naturalized, and we consider ours to be the natural state of society/the world.

Consider (for the fiftieth time) the Matrix: its power lay in the fact that people thought it was real, and so they never questioned it––though really, it was just in their heads.