Policies of a Rare Crowd, an Approach to the Concept of Resistant Lifestyles

Introduction

By making a distinction between ‘sovereign societies’ and ‘disciplinary societies’, Michel Foucault has already given an account on the transformation of the ways in managing power. Sovereign societies would do so through their power over death and ritualization, while disciplinary societies would deploy a myriad of mechanisms and technical strategies for calculating life in terms of population, health or national interest. At this very moment, a new distinction enters the lexicon: heterosexual and homosexual. This way, in the same line of the Radicalesbians manifest “The- Woman-Identified-Woman” [1], Atkinson TG [2] and Lorde A [3], Wittig M [4] describe heterosexuality as a political regime, that is, a way of understanding and organizing the world that manages lives and bodies in a very precise form, as part of biopolitics and, specifically, becoming biopolitical technology [5].

For the reasons above, I estimate that in contemporary capitalism, sex politics is one of the most widespread forms of biopolitical action. Through sex politics, sex1 is integrated into the calculations of power, making discourses on sexuality and normalization technologies for sexual identities an agent of control over life.

Bearing this in mind and based on Wittig M [4] characterization, it is necessary to pose the following questions: What can be understood as a ‘resistant lifestyle’? What is this lifestyle resistant to and how? To answer these questions, a series of interviews2 to the poet and transvestite activist Rodríguez M, et al. [6], known as Lola Puñales will be employed. In addition, to facilitate the understanding of

1 Understood as sexual organs, reproductive capacity and sexual roles in modern disciplines.

2 Interviews conducted between 2011 and 2015 that finally be- came the story of a life, which has not yet been published.

this topic, literature on the reflection upon biopolitics and governmentality regimes will be used.

With respect to the method used in this paper, we will focus on experience as a field of knowledge beyond a phenomenology situated in personal time and space, seeking to value its social and hermeneutic dimension. In this sense, the work Infancy and History by Agamben G [7] must be taken into account, as it reflects upon how philosophy has diminished experience by leaving it out of the realization field, separating subject and life and thereby stripping him of his inventive condition.

Currently, as pointed out by Agamben G [7], any discourse on experience should depart from the realization that experience is no longer attainable, because “disowned his biography, the contemporary man has been disowned his experience: on the contrary, the incapacity of creating and transmitting experiences may be one of the limited pieces of information he has about himself.

Agamben G [7] implicitly denounces how from the modern paradigm, the construction of knowledge has turned into some sort of second nature for the human being. This has made difficult the appearance or presence of other logics of sense that allow us to study the individual and collective experience, understanding this concept not as a diminished step in the process of knowledge construction, but as exposed or evidenced knowledge. The reflections of the author upon experience challenge the phenomenological paradigm proposed by Husserl’s work and demands rethinking and reformulating the category of experience, especially in philosophy, and its repercussions on method.

Noun, Verb, Subject and Predicate

“My name is Puñales, but they call me Lola, Lola Puñales and what it is established in this declaration is an entire existence that has conjugated a million voices and times into hypotheses, trials and errors, race, class, religion and gender stigmas. I am Lola Puñales, I am between 40 and 50 years old and I am a monster”.

“Old, damaged, ignorant, not very affectionate, horny, immoral, seditious, anarchist, indebt, masochistic, post- feminist, radical, infectious, terrorist, sinner, with dyed hair and resented, here I am, la Puñales”.

“We the transgender and transsexual, the transvestites -when we get politicized, that is, when we realized our place in history-, we conceive identity as an empty bowl that is to be filled in by the hegemony: Some days we can call ourselves Lady Godiva or Gaga or Rapunzel, other days we can be Marta la número uno or La Quintrala and at end the week, Madame Butterfly or the Mummy (…) each of the names we transiently take on define us as subjects that implicitly carry a verb, a subject and a predicate” (Lola Puñales).

We began this paper with Lola Puñales introducing herself. This presentation attempts to be accurate in terms of her political stance, giving us, in turn, some clues to understand her discourse on the existence of minorities or resistant communities as opposed to the existence of a majority or normalized community. In addition, Lola’s description is carried with action, brevity, life experience and verifiability (her body is the greatest proof of this). This description is also the affirmation of herself, her contexts and ascriptions, which impedes the reduction of her experience to merely personal events and thus makes her transcend.

Sex Politics

The concept of ‘governmentality3 allows Michel Foucault to understand the relationship between discourse, institution and subject through biopolitics, which consists of the political technologies of life aimed to control the subject and the population4 [5].

Biopolitics in societies is exerted in two modes. The first one is by discipline, which individualizes and encourages the formation of useful forces destined to productive activity. The second one consists of deploying mechanisms, techniques and strategies to enable the regulating power over society and its population. This translates into an organic institutional group focused on the discipline of the body, a biological and state group governed by the State bioregulation and a behavior regulation and modeling framework that operates outside the State as well through security mechanisms and preferably economic devices.

In another vein, the concept of sex politics was coined by Foucault M [8], who questioned the concept of politics where biopower only produces normalization disciplines and establishes forms of subjectivation. Here we propose that perhaps the bodies and identities of the ‘abnormal’ can be understood as a political potential and not simply as effects of discourse over sex. In this line, Lola Puñales expresses the following: • “At six I started going to school and everything changed.

3 The era defined by Foucault as “the modern governmentality era” begins in the 18th century. This era is characterized by the biopolitical deployment of some positive management forms for human life that work as specific power technologies and general subjectivation practices.

4 Through the concept of pastoral power work both in The Sub- ject and Power and Security, Territory, Population, Foucault shows the dis- continuous operation of the historical heritage of Christianism in pastoral power. This power is ividualizing, that is, takes care of the flock and its sheep at the same time.

Starting school meant using a uniform that basically marked you (…) mom had saved so I could have it (…) I noticed that the costume used by girls was different, and I wanted that one”.

• “At the store, I insisted on trying the girl’s uniform with the blue checkered apron, my mother kept telling me “that one is not for you, this one is for you”- and they made me try on some pants, I cried and complained, my tantrum was so big that my mom took me from the shoulders, shook me and told me -you’re not a girl, you’re a boy- and there pressured and mistreated I realized there were differences”.
• “I thought bodies were equal, I didn’t notice there were profound differences between them and that meant different treatments, girls’ things, boys’ things, things boys do, things girls do, different senses and meanings depending on the presence or absence of a penis” (Lola Puñales).

These initial experiences of Lola Puñales which tell us specific normalization actions imposed in her childhood are particularly interesting. Normalization in this case acts as a response to dissent or at least to displeasure, due to the behavior and dress code imposed to a specific sexual identity. The violence Lola commented on is not exceptional. Before the exposure of her body and her dissident reflections, violence occurs as a warning of what could come: greater abuse, vexations, rape or death.

Lola’s comments also allow us to define the scope of sex politics, which cannot be limited to the regulation of biological processes pertaining to the population, nor to the conditions for reproduction. The normal/abnormal body is the consequence of a detailed division of the work of the flesh, according to which each organ is defined by its functions. We estimate that sexuality always implies a precise territorialization of the penis, mouth, vagina and anus. In this way, the reflection upon the hetero/homosexual dyad ensures the structural link between the production of gender identity and some organs with a very specific function: production, reproduction, nutrition, and disposal. Sexual capitalism and capitalism sex equals state-neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, sex becomes a central object of politics and governance. Regarding this point, Lola says: • “They made me realize I had a body, and that body could generate conflict. And it started to get very tense for me when others made me aware of it, and that was in a very cruel way at school; my body did not fit into any model; it was like none of my organs was destined to its function” (Lola Puñales).

Violence is what causes Lola to be politicized. And once the motivations and reasons for justifying this violence have been exposed, she will have arguments to support her political stance from a position of exclusion, minoritization, negation and resistance to death. Finally, this will allow us to understand that all bodies experience different types of violence. In this sense, Lola Puñales’ body makes it political a type of violence that activates when body and consciousness are in permanent conflict with the devices and strategies for the normalization of sexual identities. In these terms, much of what we call life may only be violence at different levels. What Lola realizes is not more than the shame and stigmatization associated with a body that does not fit. Lola becomes aware of her being despicable in terms of social order, which could trigger, consequently, processes in which she analyzes her reality and context, and politicizes her reflections.

Foucault knew about sadomasochism, the leather culture, and American feminist movements. Yet he did not base his studies on any of them when analyzing the proliferation of the technologies of the sexual body in the 20th century, that is, the boom of the pornography industry which hyperbolized normative femininity and masculinity, the regulation of sex work by the State, the medicalization and surgical management of transsexuality and the treatment of intersexual children. The Foucauldian analysis of sexuality originates from an idea of the 20th-century discipline, so sex will not draw his attention as much as the relevance of sexuality to the formation of the subject. Therefore, this sex politics approach presents a clear limitation.

In the 50s we witnessed a rupture in the disciplinary regime of sex. Previously and as a continuation of the 21st century, biopolitical disciplines operated as a machine to naturalize sex [9]. Nevertheless, this machine was not legitimized by, let’s say, consciousness. This will occur when physicians like J. Money incorporate the concept of ‘gender’ and propose hormonal and surgical modification of intersexual children and transsexual people.

“The second time I got silicon injected into my tits I talked to the same street doctor that did it the first time, Dolores. The time before she had injected me half a liter of a thick product brought from Northern Chile; fifteen pricks or so, each five centimeters under my chubby nipple swollen from the hormone bombs I swallowed persistently over the years”.

“Dolores had made her own body with silicone. After a while you associated the process with her name. The ritual of that thick oil entering your flesh was as unbearable and grotesque as the rituals of her savage and living flesh. Both her hand on my skin as well as her harsh voice during the process-“you got a good base, you’re gonna end up with good tits”, “if you’re a real tranny, you gotta put up with it”-, these are the scares of transiting from what you’re not to what you really are”.

“The pain of the needle entering the skin, that thick needle used to give horses injections, and the sound when it pierces the skin, all those details make you remember Dolores- with that name and that burning sensation of anguish, as if you were raped. With time you deny what happened, ignore the details and pretend you forgot, but you never leave them behind. If you’re a real transvestite, you’ll come back to Dolores!” “After the second time, I met her again five more times. Over time, we became friends because I recommended her to other friends, as you do when a carpenter does a good job” (Lola Puñales).

Puñales’ comments and the details of the transformation she provides are key to understanding the opportunities created from the intervention of ‘abnormal’ bodies. With the advent of Money’s new medical and legal technologies, transsexual people or intersexual children who underwent surgery at birth or treated during puberty will become minorities considered abnormal to benefit the normative regulation of the body, of the straight mass [4]. This multiplicity of the abnormal is the potential that sex politics attempts to regulate devices and strategies for managing the body.

“I have tested the hypothesis that the black line on the blond dye used for European hair coloring gives me away indisputably to the sharp eyes of Chilean customers. When young people walk carelessly in downtown Santiago, they make disapproving gestures to the seduction I exert on them, because my hair roots more than my insubordination line imply their desire line. As well as their wanting to cross my lines, to play with my body lines. If that’s not political, you tell me what it is” (Lola Puñales).

Puñales describes receiving mischievous looks and a desire for submission. Men that lick their mouths slowly, are intimately fearful, and make tireless efforts to capture the attention of the monster and subordinate her to his curtness. The political aspect in Puñales will be expressed as transgression, subversion to the normalized desire derived from the attention caught by a body-her own invented body- that breaks into the normalized scenario of bodies for desire.

However, this line is weak. As soon as the abnormal body becomes an object of desire, it will be managed as an object of desire by and for the capital. From the 50s, we have witnessed the high-speed production and circulation of silicone, hormones, text, representations, surgical techniques, and flows of disciplinary procedures. Of course, not all of which is in constant circulation, and not all bodies are granted the same benefits in terms of circulation.

“We live in an instant and temporary body thanks to a copy and paste that the system has performed on us women. We don’t know what happens to the quantity of hormones we introduce into our bodies, because the intention and the need, ultimately, is being part of the center (…) they have made us hetero women and by doing so they have controlled all our subversive saying that they made us”.

“In general, I don’t see us who were gender reassigned years ago in Chile as subjects that conquered a space in society. These transvestites are made invisible and become private subjects, taking care mainly of the kitchen, food and affection, repeating a feminine heterosexual model without any criticism. I see girls get surgery, try to marry, but when their truth is uncovered, everything gets screwed. And you are left alone and go back to be the little queer that takes care of her family, mom or dad” (Lola Puñales).

With Puñales we defend that the contemporary normalization of the body is based on this differentiated circulation of sexualization flows. Sex politics will benefit some bodies at the expense of others. The other bodies, which will not have any of the guarantees offered by the capital, will vie for obtaining them, normalizing their expression and actions. Lola Puñales’ politics intends to resist normalization through the permanent expression of her intervened sexuality. She becomes a monster through her body, perfect for surgical and hormonal procedures, and goes against an implicit contract of silence. Her comments put in evidence the specific power technologies that operate in sexuality and make visible their subjectivation practices.

Rare Crowd Politics

Gender has changed from a concept used by a policy for reproduction into the symbol of a rare crowd. Gender is not the effect of a closed power system, nor idea acting upon a passive matter, but rather the denomination of a set of devices in sex politics -from medicine to pornographic representation, including family institutions—that will be re-appropriated by sexual diversities [10]. The body is not a passive datum over which biopower operates, but the force that makes the incorporation of all genders possible. Sex politics is not only a place of power, but mostly a creative space where the feminist, homosexual, transsexual, intersexual, transgender, chicano, post-colonial movements overlap… Sexual diversities become a crowd. The sexual monster called crowd becomes rare.

The body of the rare crowd appears in the center of what we could call, according to an expression by Deleuze G, et al. [11], a task of heterosexuality “deterritorialization”. This deterritorialization affects both the urban (therefore, we should talk about deterritorialization of the majority space and not of the ghetto) and corporal space. This deterritorialization process of the body entails resistance to the processes for becoming ‘normal’.

The existence of precise technologies for producing normal bodies or for normalizing genders does not imply determinism or inability to take political action. And since the rare crowd carries, as a failure or residues, the history of body normalization, it is able to intervene with biotechnological devices for sexual subjectivity.

This can be conceivable as long as the following conceptual and political traps can be avoided: a). The segregation of the political space, which would make the rare crowd a marginalized species or a transgression reserve; b). An essentialist, liberal or neoconservative reading that would make us conceive the rare crowd as opposed to identity strategies, taking the multitude as an accumulation of sovereign individuals equal before law, sexually indomitable, owners of their bodies, and who would reclaim their inherent right to pleasure. The first reading would be inclined to the appropriation of the abnormal’s political potential in view of progress, while the second one would silence the privileges of the majority and sexual normality that does not acknowledge their dominance. Bearing this in mind, bodies stop being submissive.

Delegitimization of the body, strategic identification, reconversion of the body technologies and ‘deontologization’ of the sexually political subject are some of the strategies proposed by the trans, transvestite, dykes, faggots, drag- kings, bearded women and cyborg, the rare people.

Delegitimization of the Body

The body cannot become an agent of subversion from one’s own body. First of all, awareness and acknowledgment of the powers that dominate the body are necessary. It appears that the body is nothing of what it assumes to be, as it is a category in itself, just like a tree that has lost his tree essence and is destined to urban and landscape solutions. This is not surprising at all. Were it not this way, the survival of the primate that saw more opportunities in his hips with upright walking, in addition to being a power tool would not have been possible. The transition from primate to hominid and then to Homo sapiens is marked by the belief in that artificiality.

Why is it then that we still believe in the body-skillfully made rhetoric-as a transformation agent? Perhaps because a body is necessary for transformation, as ‘transformation’ is the tool for change given by the powerful to maintain its position. What we need now, I dare say, is not transformation— that is, superficial movements that when put into discourse, sound like capitals-, but following Wallerstein IM, et al. [12], ‘unthinking’ (radically correcting) many of the assumptions that support dominant perspectives nowadays. Let’s listen to Lola Puñales on this point: • “They make us unable to love. My reading on the copy and paste done by psychiatrists is precisely that society builds bodies unable to talk about desire or pleasure. What psychology and surgery make to transsexuality is to normalize it, so they cut and paste genital mucous tissue to normalize and heterosexualize, but not to create a critical subject. In the end, they feminize you, heterosexualize you and make you a woman for your partner and family. Therefore, a body without organs is a body without mind, without chances to ask: was it what I expected? Am I the woman I dreamed to be? Am I the man I dreamed to be? Am I the subject or neoliberal subject I dreamed to be? Nobody asks herself these questions. It also happens that when there is a guy who adores you and thinks about being with you so much, you realize that guys is as castrated as we are. He is as cut and pasted in his mind as we are” (Lola Puñales).

This way, the body is not enough to ignore the power that technologies have over itself, and the actions that transcend its limitations, recognized as “castrated parts” and promotes subjectivities beyond the normalization frameworks that are necessary.

Strategic Identification

Denominations like ‘faggots’, ‘dyke’ or ‘stud’ have become places that produce subjectivities resistant to normalization, that are distrustful toward the totalitarian power of universalization. Influenced by post-colonial criticism, queer theories from the 90s have used the enormous political resources of ‘ghetto’ identification, which have taken a new political value since, for the first time, the subjects of the sentence become their own fagots, dykes and transgenders. Queer theories respond with hyper- and post- identity strategies to the ghettoization threat. They make radical use of political resources for the performative production of ‘deviated’ identities. The rare crowd will use its capacities to take the position of abject subjects (evil subjects who are infected with HIV, the dykes and fagots) and turn it into resistance, and fundamentally, exist in places to oppose the white, colonial and heterosexual history of humans.

What sex politics has defined now is re-appropriated in exuberant ways by dissident/resistant bodies and subjectivities. They are classified into monolithic categories, given content and discursivity and are the principle of constant mobility as established in response to perennial identities.

This rare crowd will not share Foucault or Deleuze G, et al. [11] distrust to identity as a political action, despite its different forms in the analysis of power and oppression. In the early 70’s, a French Foucault took distance from FHAR5 due to what he called the “ghettoization trend”. Conversely, the American Foucault seemed very fond of the new body shapes and pleasures that gay, lesbian and sadomasochist identity policies had created in San Francisco’s ghetto, the Castro neighborhood.

On his part, Deleuze G, et al. [11] criticized what he denominated a “molar homosexual” identity, because he believed it promoted the gay ghetto, but idealized the ‘molecular homosexuality’ that created ‘good’ homosexual figures, from Proust to the effeminate transvestite, which are paradigmatic examples of the process of ‘becoming a woman’ in the center of his political agenda. Deleuze G, et al. [11] would even discuss homosexuality instead of questioning his own heterosexual assumptions6.

Reconversion of the Technologies of the Body

The bodies of the rare crowd are also re-appropriations and reconversions of anatomical medicine and pornography discourses, among others, which have built the modern hetero and ‘deviated’ body. The rare crowd has nothing to do with a ‘third sex’ or ‘beyond genders approach’. Instead, it devotes itself to the appropriation of disciplines related to the knowledge of or power over the sexes, to the re-articulation and reconversion of the technologies of sex politics for producing normal and deviated bodies. Unlike feminist and homosexual politics, the politics of the rare crowd is not based on natural identity (man/woman), or in a practice- based definition (homo/heterosexual), but on a multiplicity of bodies against the regimes that construct them as normal or abnormal. What is at stake is how to resist or reconvert the subjectivation forms of sex politics.

This re-appropriation on the discourse of knowledge- power on sex is an epistemological shock. In the introduction to the famous act Recherches, was undoubtedly inspired by FHAR, Guattari describes this mutation of the resistance and political action forms as follows: • “…the object of this number –the homosexualities in France today—could not be addressed without questioning the ordinary research methods in human

5 Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action; movement founded in Paris in 1971 as a consequence of the lesbian feminists and gay activits approaching to each other.

6 For a detailed analysis of this use of homosexual concepts, see “Deleuze o el amor que no osa decir su nombre”, in Beatriz Preciado, Mani- fiesto contra sexual, Opera Prima, 2002.

science that, under the pretext of objectivity, try to establish a maximum distance between the researcher and his object (...). Institutional analysis, on the contrary, implies a radical decentralization of the scientific discourse. But it is not enough to ‘give the floor’ to the subjects involved—which sometimes is a formal, almost Jesuitical, initiative—, it is also necessary to create the conditions for a total, paroxysmal exercise of this discourse(...). May 68 has taught us to read the walls and after we started to decipher the graffiti in prisons, asylums and today in the toilets. A new scientific spirit remains to be redone” [13].

The history of the post-Money political sexual movements are the history of the creation of conditions for full enunciation, the history of a turn in the performative force of discourses and of a re-appropriation of technologies in sex politics for abnormal body production. Rare diversities taking the floor is not only a post-modern but a post-human event: a ‘transformation’ in the production and circulation of discourse in modern institutions (from school to family, and across the cinema and art), the mutation of bodies.

Deontologization of Sex Politics

In the 90s, a new generation originated from identity movements that began the redefinition of the battles and limits on the subject of feminist and homosexual politics. In the theoretical plane, this rupture initially came in the form of critical feedback on feminism from American lesbian and post-feminists, who based their ideas on Deleuze G, et al. [11]. Vindicating a post-feminist or queer movement, Teresa de Lauretis T [14], Haraway D [15], Judith B [16], Halberstam J [17] in the USA, chicano lesbians like Anzaldúa G [18] or African American feminists like Hull GA, et al. [19] criticized the naturalization of the femininity notion which had been the source of cohesion of feminist subjects, specifically toward a colonial, middle-high class, desexualized and white unitary subject of feminism. The rare crowd is not post-feminist because it wants or wishes to act without feminism. On the contrary, it is the result of a reflexive confrontation between feminism and the differences this has erased in order to favor a hegemonic, hetero-centered and female political subject.

Regarding the gay and lesbian liberation movements, their goal is to obtain equal rights. To this end, they base their notions on static sexual identity that contribute to the normalization and integration of gays and lesbians into the dominant heterosexual culture, favoring pro-family policies such as the reclaiming of marriage, adoption and inheritance rights. Some gay, lesbian, transsexual and transgender groups have reacted and continue to react against this essentialism and normalization of homosexual identity. Some voices have risen to question the validity of the concept of sexual identity as a sole fundament for political action and proposed the proliferation of differences (class, age, non-normative sexual practices, and disabilities). The medicalized concept of homosexuality that dates back to the 19th century that defines identity based on sexual practices has been abandoned in favor of a political and strategic definition of rare identities. The so efficiently controlled homosexuality produced by the Scientia sexualis of the 19th century has burst or has been overtaken by an ‘evil subject’ crowd. On this, Lola Puñales comments:

“The revolutionary element in the trans issue today could not only be a market subject but also a critical subject. We have been marked by the economic agenda (…) we weren’t born whores (…) society is composed of pimps. One of the things I can criticize any organization at this moment, whether gay, lesbian or trans, is that its claims are oriented to be part of a class-determined system formed by the oppressed and its oppressors (…) that lacks critical depth (…) they do not try to become the agency of any other type of empowerment different from the market, the heterosexual hegemony (…) in general, we talk about the victims we are and still, after so many years of organization, we haven’t made a more critical subject talk, for instance, on family types, the church, the production and reproduction of blue-collar workers, power and legitimacy, the capital, deaths due to hate crimes and so many other current topics” (Lola Puñales).

Closing Remarks

When asked what to understand of ‘resistant lifestyle’, the politics of the rare crowd arises as a critical stance to the normalizing and disciplinary effects of the formation of identity, of a deontologization of the subject of identity politics, without a natural basis (women, men, gay, lesbian, etc.) to legitimize political action.

Rare crowd politics does not aim to free women from male domination as classic feminists wanted, because it is not based on sexual difference, which is synonymous of a fundamental division of oppression (transcultural, transhistorical) that lies in a natural difference that should structure political action. The concept of rare crowd is opposite to that of ‘sexual difference’, as exposed in essentialist feminisms.

There is no sexual difference but multiple differences, a transversal nature of power relations, a multiplicity of life potentials. These differences are not identifiable as they do not fall within any traditional representation and emerge as ‘monstrous’ differences in the words of the transvestite poet and activist Claudia Rodríguez, Lola Puñales. This political stance of monstrosity challenges not only the political representation regimes but also the regimes of scientific knowledge production. In this sense, the politics of the rare crowd oppose both the traditional political institutions that introduce themselves as sovereign and universally representative and to the hetero-centered epistemologies of sex politics that dominate the production of science.

We agree with the central tenet of Sexo y Razón by Vázquez GF, et al. [20] in that we are governed not against sexuality but through the means of it. This leads to the adoption of the “productive hypothesis” suggested by Foucault and is presented as an alternative to the “repressive hypothesis”. Likewise, it is necessary to understand in historical terms the sexual culture of societies that are marked, for the Spain of the 90s and according to Vázquez GF, et al. [20] in a previous article, by “a sexological inflation of ambivalent condition, that pointed also to individual health and self- fulfillment and to the expression of collective panic” [20]. Sex and Reason is a work full of merit that took 10 years of research and in which, first, sexuality is not dealt with as an anthropological constant but as a historically constructed experience. Second, this experience is not seen as the other aspect denied and censored by power, but as the result of its exercise. The question that arises is, consequently, how we are governed by means of the construction of sexuality and whether it is possible to “de-govern us” or explain how to.

To this end, categorizing sexual behaviors and its semantic transformations historically matters less than how these respond to pragmatic changes, that is, to movements in the way of governing people, which Foucault denominates as “power-knowledge technologies”. It is then necessary to formulate approaches and create projects whose objective is to analyze the discourses of such technologies, regardless of them being confession, disciplines (“anatomopolitics”) or regulations (“biopower/biopolitics”). In other words, taking care of an intermediate area located between techniques and discourse on governance. Consequently, it is essential to establish a history of the rationality and of the formation of the knowledge and subjectivity that constitute the sexological rationale in Chile.

In order to achieve this, we need to explore the technological transformations (power-knowledge techniques), the types of subjectivity, discursive transformation and governance techniques. The material necessary to conduct such analyses can be found in the study of representations-for example, literature or specialized discourse (legal, pedagogical, demographic, psychiatric)- as well as in documents on normative systems aimed to regulate behaviors –military or boarding school norms, ministerial instructions or municipal regulations. Case studies (psychiatric clinical cases, penitentiaries and boarding schools, among others) are also required. However, to investigate resistance conditions, memories, manifests, joint actions and declarations will play a preponderant role.

As for the method, the archaeological and genealogic method proposed by Foucault should be used to explore both discourses and power-knowledge techniques in order to reveal the origin of different types of subjectivity. Based on subjectivities could be accessed from exercises of comparison or contrast, that is, taking normative or non-marked subjectivities -right and healthy- and defining their opposites based on the formation and persecution of stigmatized figures.

As mentioned above, the politics of the rare crowd will base its critical strategy by questioning the conformation of sexological rationality from binary logics of hetero- patriarchal nature. This type of politics coordinates and creates a broad network of voices that expose the inventive capacity of the governed, the resistance of erotic cultures to normalization, the underscoring and promoting awareness of the normalizing and disciplinary effects of power- knowledge technologies. Voices like Claudia Rodríguez’s make visible the tension between the governing of behavior and the resistance of its actors and show us with more clarity the relationship between subjectivation and subjection.

In this line, adding Lola Puñales’s voice to this work is not done casually. Agamben G [7] reflections upon the value of experience as a philosophical resource put philosophy in charge of examining the category of experience and reformulate its terms as contributing to philosophical reflection while addressing its implications on method. Retrieving experience could allow human beings to create a knowledge of them that acknowledges the complexity of the subjectivation process derived from such an experience.

These experiences of themselves could become the starting point of a lifestyle philosophy, which makes affirmations on the self-more than on the subject and which, by increasing the argumentative load of experience would provide the rare crowd with more roots than those offered by the majority or by normalized positions. Now, this connection between experience and the subjectivation process is partly mediated by language, which allows leaving the individual dimension of experience and transiting to the collective dimension of the same, together with its historical dimension. By verbalizing her story through the voice of Lola Puñales, Rodríguez M [6] allows us to be another7, come out of the center and situate ourselves

7 “I is another”, Rimbaud wrote Paul Demeny in a letter dated May 15, 1871: “Car Je est un autre. If the brass wakes up bugle, it’s not his fault. This is obvious to me: I witness the blossoming of my thought: I look at it, I listen to it: I bow my bow: the symphony stirs in the depths, or comes with a bound on the scene” /// “I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not in the argumentative course Lola creates in a shared present moment.

This epistemological rupture help we to connect the philosophical theorization of experience with the anthropological dimension of the subject, like someone who produces the social sense from experience. This articulation is particularly necessary in the reality of the contemporary subject, who, before the multiplication of references, has an increasingly large task of building sense [21]. This is because experience is related to its social contexts that act as frameworks for meaning. The incorporation of such experiences to the philosophical reflection would enable the identification of this collective network from a historical and political perspective that is not homogeneous like a general abstraction of the individual. The “world of life”, that is, the experiences through which subjects do (observation processes and its records), say (discourses) and document (written thoughts), allows the connection with a collective dimension of experience, without generalizing it.

Finally, another aspect to take into account is the action plane of subjects within a community as a connection between private and public, where politics and ethics meet at the action intersection8. The community should not be considered an entity that protects the subject enclosing him in a collective group that is cancelling or exchanging one identity for another, but a field where the human being makes contact until he is infected by the other [22]. The concept of community-from this perspective-allows us to recover the value of the relationship that living with others implies.

Therefore, when attempting to describe the politics of the rare crowd as a set of actions and strategic relationships that might have the merit of offering an space for articulation, impulse, protection and creation to the different diversities that form the sexological rationality in Chile, to the variety of erotic cultures –that, in turn, form a folk erotic culture, to the resistant cultures and the experiences of the dominated, we may support the idea that we are giving birth to a positive response to the effects of governmentality and on our its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage”. In: http://www.biblioteca. org.ar/libros/153514.pdf// https://issuu.com/santiagorothe/docs/rimbaud_jean_arthur_-_obra_com- pleta

8 On the concept of community, Roberto Espósito indicates: “As known, a first powerful deconstruction of this metaphyisical construct was performed by Jean-Luc Nancy. In his essay on the community, as well as in all the successive essays in which he has gone over the topic, the community is not understood as something that connects specific subjects, nor as an amplified subject, but as the being of the relationship. Quote originally in Spanish.

sexualities. There are resistant proposals to the productive nature of regulated sexualities imposed by the biopower. Yet they are not simply resistant, but also and mostly, generative; they are productive stances or disruptive orders that are always unshaped, mobile and difficult to grasp [23, 24, 25, 26]. In a recent publication, Roberto Espósito proposed with certain urge that political philosophy needs to address the following fundamental problem: “the growing political gap between politics and thought. Between them, there seems to be a mutual incomprehension. As if politics refuses the experience of thought” (Ibíd.). The rare crowd takes that concern and offers many programmatic lines that could collaborate to narrow such gaps, allowing us to perceive difficulties caused by the separation between individual and social order clearly and value the integrated understanding of social life, which in Dubet terms would indicate a discussion related to the logics of sense, articulating the experience of subjects from a symbolic and practical perspective.

“From my perspective, desire is the only thing that brings us together on earth. Without desire, we would be angels, we would only be narrative. In the archangel pictures, everyone looks at the sky, in some sort of conquer over ecstasy. That’s the way I would like to be, fascinated, with memory of everything I’ve been, all the battles I fought in this monstrous existence, as an anti-capitalist animal subject” (Lola Puñales).