# The Queer Gnostic Cult
1:13

The father is the unbegotten God (not brought into the world)
The son is the self-begotten God (brings himself into the world)
Holy spirit is the begotten God  (is what moves in the world)

The undifferentiated ONE/ALL
The self-begotten is the Mind of God. God Begot his own mind.
The mental principle: the son of God. The Redeemer. God thought and the thought of God begot the Mind of God. God Begot himself.

The Undifferentiated One: Unbegotten father
The Son: The self-begotten mind
Man: The begotten form (mind into matter)

In Hermeticism, man is the third person of the Godhead. All of us.

"The I is fulfilled through the We" - Paulo Freire

The One, Mind and Man.

Elevate through the levels of spiritual ascension within the begotten universe up to the level of remember that you are able to elevate yourself back up to the 2nd person of the Godhead and become self-begetting. The distinctions are an illusion - you are not distinct. You must elevate yourself spiritually up to the point of becoming self-begotten.

Becoming your own Christ. Salvific self-knowlege. You save yourself with your Gnosis.

And when Mankind remembers/realizes that he's the third person of the Godhead, and elevates himself spiritually to realizing he's his own saviour as the second person of the Godhead, then the end of history can arrive, things become perfect and we fold back into the undifferentiated One. We enter into the first person of the Godhead adn everything is made whole again.

You hear this with the Communists: We all have to adopt socialist consciousness and accelerate the contradictions until eventually we all have one Communist mind. We become a perfect Species Being at which point we've achieved the mind of God, the Utopia begins and we fold back into the perfect Kingdom.

That's the formula of Socialism or Marxist Communism. It's hermetic - the idea that Hegel saw through the Phenomenology of Spirit describing how spirit develops and, at the end, recognizes itself. How the Vertgeist becomes the Absolute Spirit. The spirit of the world that no longer sees itself as spirit. The perfect idea (absolute) is the perfected idea - no longer the objective idea and subjective idea separated - it is the perfect idea that knows itself to be the perfect idea.

This ascension through these spiritual levels is characterized as a process of becoming. Becoming what you already are but have forgotten because you've been trapped into a mundane body, flung into the mundane world and don't realize that you are not just like God but that you are God.

That sounds profoundly crazy - an introduction to Hermeticism.

## The Corpus Hermeticum
Broken into 17 books - the magical number in Dialectical Thinking for Pythagorean mathematical reasons.
The spiral of Theodorus - 17 times around makes 1 turn and then you overlap at a higher level.
17 is a transformational number
17 contradictions of capitalism in Marxism
17 generative themes necessary to Conscientize someone to a higher level of critical consciousness
17 Sustainable Goals for the United Nations.

### The Poimandres
First book of the Corpus Hermeticum
"You have taught me these things well as I wished, oh Nous. Now teach me how the way back is found".
`Hermes is being taught by the mind of God and he is referring to him as "Nous", meaning "Mind" - Capitalized and retained in the Greek in this translation because the publishers want it to be very clear that it's what's meant by the divine holy mind of God - the second person of the Godhead.`

He knows he's trapped in a world that he is not of and he is awakened to the fact that he is the third person of the Godhead, so to speak. He asks what is the way back to God, or oneness, or wholeness. The response:

"First, in the dissolution of the material body, one gives the body itself up to change. The form you had becomes unseen and you surrender to the divine power your habitual character now inactive. The bodily senses return to their own sources, then they become parts again and rise for action while the seat of emotions and desire go to mechanical nature."

"Thus, a man starts to rise up through the harmony of the cosmos. To the first plane, he surrenders the activity of growth and diminution. To the second, the means of evil - trickery now being inactive. To the third, covetous deceit, now inactive. And to the fourth, the eminence pertaining to ruler, being now without averous. To the fifth, impious daring and reckless audacity. To the sixth, evil impulses for wealth, all these being now inactive. To the seventh plane, the falsehood which waits in ambush."

You have to elevate yourself through these 7 plans of existence. Give up on growing or shrinking, second on tricking and being evil, third on covet and deceit, fourth on greed and the power to rule, fifth you have to give up impulsiveness. Sixth, evil impulses for wealth have to go away. And then there is the seventh plane - the last falsehood which waits in ambush. How do you get rid of that, when you are a separate self?

The first step was to give up the body itself. Then you go through spiritual transformations. Finally, in the end, You have to overcome the self itself - the falsehood which waits in ambush - that you are you.

The first seven are the begotten realm, that you can ascend through, and then you can enter the self-begotten realm.

"Then, stripped of the activities of the cosmos, he enters the substance of the eighth plane with his own power and he sings praises to the father with those who are present. Those who are near rejoicing at his coming. Being made like to those who are there together, he also hears certain powers which were above the eighth sphere, singing praises to God with sweet voice. Then, in due order, they ascend to the father and they surrender themselves to the powers, and becoming the powers they are merged in God. This is the end - the supreme good - for those who have hade the higher knowledge to become God."

This is the end - the supreme good for those who have higher knowledge to become God.

Well then, why do you delay? Should you not, having received all, become the guide to those who are worthy so that the human race may be saved by God through you? You are in hermetic belief to become the saviour of humanity and yourself. You elevate yourself to the plane of the self-begotten at which point you have attained the mind of god, at which point you have the capacity to save humanity and a moral obligation to do all of this.

## Reflecting
Doesn't this sound how Woke and Marxism operate? We all have to become Socialists, we have to give up all of our stuff, we have to own nothing and be happy, we have to give up all of our inequities so that we can ascend spiritually to being our species being, at which point the Utopia can begin to emerge and we will all be saved from ourselves and the world will be sustainable.

In Hermeticism, using the magical principles, you are to renounce your body, you are to renounce to world as it is and you are to Spiritually Ascend.

Become Zarathrusta - hide in a cave and then come down and tell everyone how to be the Superman.

## Recap
First, you must realize that you are not distinct from God.
Than you must go through stages to spiritually purify yourself to transform your essence - to recollect the mind of god and to remember that you have the mind of God and are thus the mind of God which will allow you to elevate yourself to the salvific status of self-begotten which is Mind itself and then use that to save yourself and all of Mankind - this is the religious duty of Hermeticism, Marxism and Queer Theory.

It's Unity - Criticism - Unity.

First, you have to have the desire for unity, then you have to criticize, and self-criticize, and struggle out all those 7 forms of world desire to purge them out of you so you can come together into a new form of unity on a new basis, which is Socialist-Gnosis, and once you have the higher knowledge, you can become God.

But it's not you individually, it's You Plural. That's the story of Marxism. Hermeticism driven by Gnosticism. It's a religion - ac ult religion - hundreds of millions of people have suffered and died as a result of us thinking it's an economic or social theory or political program when, in fact, it is a cult religion that will always result in civilization-scale Jonestown.

Woke is not different.

The sustainability crap, ESG, sustainable development goals of Agenda 2030 and their 17 sustainable development goals - not different. Same thing.

The reason that it's like this is because Hermeticism believs that God doesn't know he's God, because he's the undifferentiated all and cannot directly know he is God, so  through Man and his place in creation, Man can realize his own divine nature and through that the illusion of all distinctions, which drive the spiritual failures that you have to ascend through. And in the mind of Man (as in the Mind of Man), so in the mind of God. Which are only distinct through illusion - the distinction isn't real anyway. Man is God. So when man realizes his true nature as God - as the undifferentiated All - God realizes that God is God and is actualized, at which point all becomes All - and All folds back into the All and all distinction is removed and thus all suffering/death etc are erased, because those things don't exist in God which is perfect and atemporal - always was and always is and always will be.

Man, therefore, makes God realize that God is God (in Hermeticism) and by realizing that God is God, and that all distinction is an illusion, the world is perfected - Man gets to go home to his spiritual origins / birthright.

Hegel, thus Marx, appropriated all of this machinery. Hegel was a hermeticist and he called his hermetic alchemy the dialectic. That's not particularly in doubt - it's worth checking out The Hermetic tradition. Hegel's big initiatory project is the phenomenology of spirit which is literally geared towards the idea that the spirit of the world - the socially constructed holy geist which is the point at which history unfolds through a dialectical process, until it finally realizes itself as the absolute spirit at teh end of history - the spirit that recognizes itself as itself. The Spirit that knows it's complete.

Man's role in this, for hermeticism and Hegel, is to be the philosopher who thinks and makes the opposites collide through the principle of polarity, in order to force a synthesis - the removal of distinctions in the Hermetic project.

The thing: Thesis
The other: Antithesis

The thing and its other - the divine and the mundane - have to be seen not as opposed but as parts of the same whole from a higher perspective. In other words, aufheben - this is the dialectic. This is also the expression of principle of polarity in hermeticism. So man, therefore, moves the dialectic through his thought, his reflection and intentional conflict using the Hegelian system in the mirror through which it should be reflected so you can understand it correctly.

In other words, Hegel's system is the Vernunft - the higher level reason - that leads you to be able to understand what you're dealing with so that it all continues to point in the direction that it should go which is to the full understanding and actualization of spirit when all distinctions are removed.

Hermeticism retooled in modern-era language. The idea, then, becomes the Gnostic demiurge for him, and when the idea realizes itself and awakens, it becomes the absolute idea or the absolute spirit. The world spirit becomes this vehicle by which this is happening (Vertgeist) and the phenomenology of spirit is talking about the evolution of the Vertgeist and it becoems the absolute spirit when it completes itself and realizes that it has completed itself.

But what is the world spirit? It is the socially and culturally constructed phenomena around us. It's how we understand ourselves in the world as socially and culturally contingent beings. It's the spirit of the people of the world (what is the world? everything with all the conflicts contained within).

This Hegelian system is modern era spiritualism. The new age of middle ages, finally codified for the modern period by looking scientific. What we have, then, is that the Spirit (like by the Fetzer Institute) is social-spiritual. What is meant here is that what Hegel is saying is that the thing we consider to be the Holy Spirit is actually the World Spirit - he continues it in the dialectical hermetic way as a process-oriented thing. The collective manifestation of man and his social and cultural aspects. What he thinks and thinks about himself and what it manifests into the spirit of teh different cultures of the world. The spiritual is no longer a spooky transcendental thing, but is cultural - it's socially constructed, as was taken from Rousseau (concept of Social Contract theory - we are in chains through the social contract that binds us - perfect the social contract to free ourselves from the social strictures).

Hegel created Hermeticism, its Wizardry, but also takes from Rousseau and codifies the idea that the spiritual realm is socio-spiritual. Sociality of the universe of Man - what we would call social reality or cultural reality - to describe what's meant. That's where the spirit actually lives. Your soul - what you mean - is a piece of the undifferentiated Spirit - but that's the social constructions of social reality - so you're just a piece of social reality which is unfolding historically.

Marx took this and retooled it and stuck it in economic conditions. He relocated Hegel's project - made it more violent and more angrily gnostic. Gnosticism becomes the motivation to rebel against an unjust world in Hermeticism. The Dialectical Materialism becomes his method - and it should be strongly suspected that Marx heavily plagiarized the Corpus Hermeticum or through an intermediary. His Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are the Religious or Theological basis for a lot of his thought. In other words, all this crap about Hermeticism and Gnosticism turns out to be relevant because Queer Theory is a derivative of Marxist thought and Marx got it from Hegel and Hegel is a -Hermeticist.

Obvious in Queer Theory if we're honest about what's going on, especially with the trans aspects that are dealing not just with Gnostic - oh my god i'm trapped in my body and I have to escape the prison of my body - but we're also dealing with Hermetic aspects - my secret gender knowledge saves me - that's the Gnostic side. Hermetic aspects - taking on self-knowledge that will save yourself from Death, because your gender-Soul will actualize.

You are learning to ascend through layers of socially-constructed imprisonment of Gender until you can divorce Gender from your body. Gender and Sex become wholly fluid and wholly dependant on Mind - mental phenomenon - and also on phenomenal and experiential knowing. Then you can understand yourself as you truly are outside the social constructions and you get to self-beget. And with transition-stuff - transgender stuff - you get to transform yourself as a sexual being and physically. Undergoing a process of discovering who you really are - your true Soul absent the social conditioning of the social-spiritual world, and then ou are becoming who you truly are as you slowly uncover and start to realize what you are. This is a process of becoming Divine and aware that you are Divine, like the "I, Joan" performance at a Shakespeare Globe Theater with a little hairy-potter looking girl with a little haircut saying "trans-people are sacred!" - because you are actually becoming divine - awakening your gender soul and overcoming the strictures. Your sexual soul is undergoing a social and gender liberation. Overcoming the socialization that has confined you in the prison of being, but you are doing so by transforming the prison and yourself through Hermetic means.

The principle of correspondence is key to this - for Marx, what his cleverness was is the principle of correspondence, being "As above so below, as below so above" - Marx took it and said it was stated backwards - "We are the below. The proletariat, the worker, the everyman - these are below. Hegel was in the ideas -> above
Marx said we have to take Hegel and stand him on his head - turn him upside down. Not "As Above so Below" but "As Below so Above" - that's what comes first. You start where we are - below - do activism (Praxis) to change society - that will, in turn:
As Below -> Do Activism (Praxis) -> So Above (Society).

The point is not to understand the world, the point is to change it.

## Change from the Bottom
Hitherto the philosophers have sought to understand the world - the point is to change it. To do Praxis. If you start below in the mundane fallen world, you do Praxis to change the world so the world that's bigger than you changes - that in turn causes society to get new norms (because you've done social activism to accept the new socialist norms, queer norms, critical race antiracist norms) and then people will be socialized into those new norms - Marx called this the Inversion of Praxis.

The state of society, the existing Geist, the state of the social-spiritual is conditioning people - the world soul is conditioning the individual source - through the Inversion of Praxis. That's as above so below.

If you grab the snake by the tail, starting at the bottom, and do activism to change society - the new society will change the next generation of men in the next turn of the screw.

You get to condition everybody by doing activism which changes society which leads to the inversion of Praxis which leads to the Snake eating its own tail in an endless cycle of transformation until you get to the final point where there's no need for change because everything's undifferentiated species being - Communism.

Transform society through Praxis - seize the means of production -> he doesn't mean economic production, he means production of human kind and society. Because you transform society through praxis to transform man in the next turn and then you repeat ad infinitum until liberation or Utopia from the bourgeois demiurge is at hand.

## Queer Demiurge
Queer theory does the same thing -> liberation from normalcy and normativity as a demiurgic force. You're going to change yourself through transition by making yourself ugly, getting purple hair, blue hair, getting fat, demanding people want you, etc. Then you will are going to do moral extortion to force society to accept people for "who you are".

Why are so many leftist women intentionally sloppy and dirty and armpit hair and stinky and all this? Because it's a shit-test. You have to like the "real them". Why don't they dress up? Ask them - they'll tell you:

"You only like the socially-imposed images of femininity - you don't like the real me. If you don't like me at my worst, you can't have me at my best". Sorry, their goal is for their to be no best. There is no best. It's a shit test.

The goal of Praxis, in Queer Theory, is to change yourself so that you can force society into accepting you in your changed form. The new society that accepts those standards and obliterated standards will socialize people on the basis of inclusion and belonging and all of that. And then you do it again - pushing the envelope further - and eventually, through repetition, you land in Queer Liberation.

The same program the same project - Hermeticism done in the Marxist/Gnostic form.

This is done, as below, by positioning yourself as the Other to Normal Society. The Other enables the Thing to come to know itself.

### Program Summary
The program works by changing yourself and forcing society to affirm and celebrate and participate in you and your transformation. When society affirms your, ultimately, gnostic-spiritualist claim - what's happening is the social spirit (the socio-spiritual realm) has transformed and now you have a new level of Queer understanding. A new Queer Horizon has been reached. The Prison of the "Here and Now" has been broken free of.

For Marx, you're becoming the Species Being or Communist Man or Social Man. In Queer Theory, Gender becomes a social construct - it becomes irrelevant, it becomes fluid - and eventually there is no gender and nobody's imprisoned by expectations about gender because there are no. Affirmation, acceptance, celebration, participation, and all of these things reify the cult belief and make it real. When society believes it in this gnostic nonsense it's "true" because that's what truth is for them: it's a socially-constructed concept. It's what society believes is true is what is true. So if you can convince society to believe that it's true - Queer Activism is to convince people that the abnormal has to subvert the normal until there is no exclusion by normalcy. Abolish the normal, as Bourgeois Private Property in Marxism.

We see this in some of the big players: Marcuse (Eros in Civilization), Wilhelm Reich (Sexual Liberation), John Money (Introduction of Gender Identity - maybe no as deeply boiled in theory, but was a creeper with a gnostic/dualistic idea of gender being divorced from sex where it exists on a spiritual realm and impose itself on the body - this informed people like Judith Butler).

# Queer Theory
In some sense, the first Queer Theorist is not Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick. It's kind of Michel Foucault (who is maybe the progenitor of Queer Theory), but the first person who really points in the Queer Theory is the feminist Simone de Beauvoir.

This is why the feminists can't defend against Queer Theory or Trans. The gender constructivism as the heart of their project leads to Trans. They're just espousing a conservative political point - it's all they're doing - they can't stop at "Women are Biologically Women", because that's just a political point. Biology is just another form of politics (and this is what follows once you accept that gender is socially-constructed, as opposed to a statistically-varied derivative of sex / tertiary sex characteristic).

It is primarily Simone de Beauvoir's concept of the "Other" in a very hermetic way which becomes the key to the development of Queer Theory. Her most famous song is "The Second Sex" with women as the second sex.

## Simone
Women are incomprehensible except as a dialectical other to men. In turn, men are incomprehensible without the other by which they define themselves. Everybody would otherwise simply be human - but we have men and women. Men understand themselves in terms of women, and women are the second sex because they're subordinated - they're the "fallen other" mundane where Man sets himself up to be divine.

### Stanford Encyclopedia
Phenomenological account of womanhood - of what it means to become a woman and to enact womanhood. "One is not born but becomes woman".

This inaugurates a sex-gender distinction and the social constructivism of gender and its criticism.

*Critical constructivism (woke) is inaugurated with regard to sex and gender (The Second Sex).* What it says about her is:

"What is not a matter of dispute is that the second sex gives us a vocabulary for analyzing how societal notions of femininity are lived and a method for critiquing them (critical constructivism). In this sense, Beauvoir offers a critical phenomenological analysis of the socially-constituted meanings of woman, and how one comes to assume and negotiate those meanings experientially."

"For Beauvoir, one becomes a woman not just because others say so, but because she actively assumes her bodily existence in such a way."

The social constructions of what it means to be female are being imposed on you by the doctor and society, but you have to seize the bull by its horns - one way or the other, by rejecting or accepting those characterizations, you have to become a woman - you can do so on the terms set by society (reify the construction of Gender), or you can reject those and try to do so with true agency.

And, so, a person becomes his or her sex in the same way that one becomes a spiritual being. One realizes that one's nature is ultimately spiritual, but in this case it's one's sex that defines the relevant spiritual category. One's piece of the social spirit, or the social-spiritual realm of Hegel - and so you get to choose: are you going to go along with it, or reject it? Are you going to go along with it, or try to find true agency outside of those constructions?

This is the Critical Constructivist approach - Woke Feminism, 1949-style.

"Beauvoir's account of becoming is crucial to understanding how human beings called women come into existence. Beauvoir's target here is essentialist arguments that view woman as a biological fact."

What's happening, then, is that "mundane" biological reality, and its consequences, are the target - because she's angry at it - she's gnostic - she's angry that she was born into a body as a woman and that there are patriarchal demiurgic forces that force her to be a woman in a certain way. Being a woman must be understood in this social spiritual way. You must free that realm through the completion of that social spirit and that results in the process of intentionally becoming a woman.

"Beauvoir believes it to be faulty to accept the common sense idea that to be born with certain genitalia or reproductive capacities is to be born a woman. In rejecting this position, asserted in the most famous line of the second sex, she pursues the first rule of phenomenology: Identify your assumptions, treat them as prejudices and put them aside."

So everything you take for granted is a prejudice -> probably wrong and something that can be ignored. You can see how stupidly one would think based on this line of reasoning.

"Do not bring them back into play until and unless they have been validated by experience". (Universalized social-spiritual experience. Lived experience)

"Accordingly, she offers a descriptive account of how some human beings become women as a matter of living an imposed social identity routed in and generated by particular historical, economic and political conditions, as well as social and moral conventions." (in other words, Hegel's and Marx's social-spiritual gnosticism is the framing in which she's understanding the becoming of a woman. Queer Theory is Queer Gnosticism).

"On this view, "woman is an invention, but also a lived, embodied reality"". (Gnosis of what it means to be and become a woman is the experiential bridge between the material world and they social-spiritual world in which womanhood has true higher understanding and meaning")

"For Beauvoir, the social destiny - those who become women - are expected and often coerced to assume as bound up with heterosexism. Such that to become a woman is to be made and make oneself an object for men."

`You're not being forced - you're being tricked into a false spirituality - a false consciousness - of what it means to be who you are - and, thus, you are actually becoming the puppet of the social spirit that's trapping you - the demiurge of society which, in this case, is Patriarchy. You're internalizing the misogyny/PAtriarchy and doing it to yourself. You're becoming a plaything for men because you're being conditioned by men to want to become the plaything for men - an object.`

"The detriment of such self-making (self-begetting),Beauvoir shows, is that a woman comes to live in an existence relative to men. In doing so, a woman becomes the other (the lower subordinated and mundane form - In Hermeticism thats the way that the higher form can come to know what it is and realize that they're not different). Mother are usually accomplice to the self-making as being made the other, although a condition of oppression, also bestows recognition and self-justification in a Patriarchal milieu."

Women are fallen by accepting their status as the other to the divine male, which gives the whole binary and dynamic meaning, but they can be made conscious/gnostic to this fact and save themselves by intentionally reversing it - by resisting it and gaining one's own agency - in other words, saving yourself from the demiurge by becoming a woman on your own terms absent the patriarchy, which then becomes the puzzle.

"Beauvoir also sees becoming woman in accepting womanhood, though absent patriarchal constraint upon it."

`Become a woman in a liberated fashion yb avoiding all of the subtleties of Patriarchy. Womanhood being liberated from its defining binary absent the patriarchal demiurge's influence is the true nature of womanhood, so you're going to self-beget as a woman. Knowing and pursuing this is the gnosticism.`

The feminists's views on virtually everything follow from this, as does all of Queer Theory.

### Abortion
The feminist view on abortion - that they have to be absolutely free from the reproductive capacities of the body they were born into by whatever technological intervention they can have. - is a gnostic position. They were flung into a woman's body and can be flung into a pregnancy by accident that they didn't choose - that means motherhood is forced upon them, forced birth, forced puberty, forced being into the world the flungness of being. This is how they think about abortion. There are 3 positions on abortion:
- One trying to understand it
- One that's socially conservative and completely against it
- One that believes it's an imprisoning imposition upon a woman's existence to possibly have been born with a uterus so they can possibly become pregnant.

If you think there are just 2 positions, you have nothing to add to that conversation. You understand the Right wing side and probably understand the middle side, but you have absolutely no idea what's going on with the radical left side, which is actually driving most of the dynamic between he Far Right and Far Left.

"Embodiment is central for Beauvoir. The body may imprison the soul unless we figure out how to liberate the soul through the fulfillment of it actually means to be embodied as such, but absent social expectation and patriarchal socialization."

Women are liberated by being able to become women as women, not as dialectical other to men. (This is literally a description of esoteric religion).

"This sets up Foucault for his contention that the soul actually, therefore, imprisons the body (thus Butler and all the rest later, even as at direction which necessarily refutes Beauvoir's intention)".

Foucault becomes the progenitor of Queer Theory, more so than Beauvoir, because she was so distinctly Feminist.

## Foucault
David Halperin is a hagiographer of Foucault. He gave the first authoritative definition for "Queer", which is at the center of Queer Theory. Queer Theory got its name a few years earlier from Theresa De La Retis (branding of the new radical sexual theory -> Radical Politics of Sex by Gayle Rubin, for example).

Halperin wrote a book in 1995 called "St Foucault" where he defines "Queer". He answers what queer is in that book and uses Foucault as the lense (the canonization of Foucault as a Queer Saint). His answer is:
- It is an identity of pure resistance
- An identity of pure becoming
- An identity without an essence (he uses this phrase more than once)

For example, "Self-fashioning" (self-begetting).

Recommended reading by the Gospel Coalition.

We will skip the part of his book where he talks about anal yoga (anal fisting) as a transformative practice. Instead, we talk about the concept of Queer in his treatment of Foucault.

"To shift the position of the homosexual from that of object to subject is therefore to make available to Lesbians and Gay men a new kind of sexual identity - one that is characterized by its lack of a clear definitional content. The homosexual subject can now claim an identity without an essence. To do so is to reverse the logic of the supplement and to make use of the vacancy left by the evacuation of the contradictory and incoherent definitional content of the homosexual, in order to take up instead a position that is and always had been defined wholly relationally by its distance to and difference from the normative."

Queer means it's something defined in terms of its distance to and difference from the normative. In other words, we have that same other phenomenon we've just heard from Beauvoir, where woman is Other now Homosexual is Other, and it's being assumed within the concept of homosexuality as being other to heterosexuality. And Halperin says that what Queer does is shift outside/sidestep that dynamic, leaving a vacuum while doing so. By defining Queer absent the concept that gives it its meaning, its difference from heterosexuality, you sidestep the dynamic. Like defining woman absent Patriarchy on her own terms. That heterosexuality sets the standard for what heterosexuality means and now heterosexuality can be defined absent that demiurgic heteronormative force.

And so Gnosis would be the perception of this dynamic and the understanding that it is imposed and inscribed upon people so that you can sidestep it by being queer and thus being liberated from it by rejecting the hegemony of the binary itself.

"Homosexuality can now be constituted not substantively but oppositionally. Not by what it is, but by where it is and how it operates. Those who knowingly operate such a marginal location (intentional marginalization) to assume a de-essentialized identity that is purely positional in character (that which is outside of heterosexuality) are properly speaking not gay but queer".

So that's your first real definition of Queer in Queer Theory. Queer means knowingly opposing the so-called essentializing or demiurgic power of normativity that happens through sex/gender sexuality as a result of biology in society. It's literally defined in terms of a salvific knowledge, or gnosis, about the truly esoteric nature (not the exoteric nature of sex, gender and sexuality that we all understand and see and talk about, but an esoteric nature of what it really means to be that that's hidden - isn't availale within the prevailing oppressi and, thus, carceral framework).

#### Foucault
He thought everything was a Prison. Everything functions in terms of how it becomes a prison for Being. His decontruction was meant to expand the potentialities of Being, because you're breaking down the bars and walls of the prison of Being. The demiurge doesn't just build the wall - he builds the world as a prison - he's your prison warden. That's a carceral framework (like going to jail). You're incarcerated in your Beingness.

The goal here is to position yourself as the dissolver of the prison walls.

Queer oppositionalism, then, is precisely what a Queer Gnostic would do with themselves - to affect that social-spiritual jailbreak from heteronormativity (a prison of Being) built out of social norms and constructions around issues of sex gender and sexuality (the Closet).

Unlike gay identity which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object choice, Queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth, or in any stable reality.

You don't have to affirm yourself as queer, you just have to stop being "not queer". Gay identity affirms this demiurgic system. Gays against groomers? You're actually affirming the system (this is why gays are under attack by the Queer Theory. Why the T and the Q don't get along with the LGB). Because you are just occupying yourself as the Other in the same way as the woman who affirms herself as the plaything of men.

It's dead from a Gnostic or Activist perspective - it's not useful for you to be doing that. If you're coming out and affirming yourself as Gay or Lesbian - you're just saying "I'm imprisoned and I know it, and I love the bars. I love my prison warden". Queer, however, rejects the concept of the prison entirely (along with truth and stable reality, which is what those bars are).

Think for a moment about how destructive that is for a child. It'll destroy adult minds as well, but pause to imagine how destructive it is for a child to encounter.

"As the very word implies, Queer does not name some natural kind, or refer to some determinate object. It acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is, by definition, whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers - it is an identity without an essence."

In other words, Queer means you've gnostically awoken to the fact that you are in imprisoned by the realities of sex and sexuality, and you're in gnostic angry defiance of that prison and the facts of human sex and sexuality, because you see and resent those things as a demonic constructor that's portraying itself as good and natural. It is a rebellion against reality for the crime of being in a body that is inherently sexed and sexual.

"Queer, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative. A positionality that is not restricted to Lesbians and Gay men but is, in fact, available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices".

In other words, perverts. To pull people, especially kids, into this cult, they will sell it as though anyone who has specialist or different or peculiar sexual practices, interests or desires. And they can convince kids and teenagers that that's anyone: you're demisexual, you're graysexual, you're amorphous asexual, whatever. A million different sexualities, romantic identities, gender identities, etc and whatever the QUIRKS of your personality are, as a teenager just starting to see this stuff and figure this stuff out - they can convince you that that's YOU! There's an identity for that! and it has a FLAG!! and All of these cool symbols and a secret language to go along with it. They can convince kids that everyone is queer because tehy have marginalized sexual practices - because they can take the finest details of a personality and say "that's a sexuality that the world doesn't yet recognize!" And convince them they're queer and pull them into the cult.

He gives some examples: "It could include some married couples without children, for example. Or even, who knows, some married couples with children. With, perhaps, very naughty children"

"Queer, in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions. Rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise content and heterogenous scope cannot, in principle, be delimited in advance".

Queer theory has no bottom point. THere is no end to how perverse it can be, how far it can twist, how much it can destroy. Anything that becomes normative has to become Queer and destroyed. Anything accepted has to be challenged with queer theory further.

"Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizone imbued with potentiality. We have nevr been Queer, yet Queerness exists as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and is used to imagine a future. The future is Queerness' domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house."

Esteban Munoz 2009 Cruising Utopia as quoted by Dragqueen Pedagogy paper.

"It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviours, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, modes of self-constitution in practices of community for restructuring, that is, the relation among power, truth and desire."

What he's saying is that Queer Gnosis becomes a platform from which Queer transformation can be launched - designed to change the social-spiritual dimension, as Hegel had it, of human existence with regard to sex, gender and sexuality under the auspices of modern and postmodern esotericism. This is a perverse pagan religion visited on your kids and being called liberation.

How does he bring Foucault into this?

"Homosexuality, for Foucault, is a spiritual exercise, insofar as it consists in an art or style of life in which individuals transform their modes of existence and ultimately themselves."

In other words, Foucault is a Queer Hermeticist in practice. He is motivated by a raw, deconstructive, Queer, gnostic belief. Gnosticism is the motivation, hermeticism is the means, and what we're dealing with in Queer Theory is Queer Gnosticism.

"Homosexuality is not a psychological condition that we discover but a way of Being that we practice in order to redefine the meaning of who we are and what we do, in order to make ourselves and our world more gay! As such, it constitutes a modern form of ascesis."

Exactly like you saw with the Hermeticist and Gnostics 2000 years ago. Pulling intentionally away from the existing world. Being gay, as ascesis, according to Foucault. Here you're not physically pulling out by meditating in a cave. You're doing it morally by adopting Queer morals - Queer ways of being and living, etc, as a spiritual awakening. But not just as a spiritual awakening for yourself, but for the purposes of transforming yourself and the world around you. For Queer hermetic alchemy, the quote is:

Why do you become homosexual? To make ourselves and the world more Gay.

Ascetics, like Buddhists, often believe that they can go off and withdraw into a cave and meditate on the spiritual advancement of humanity overall, and that makes the whole world advance spiritually - making it more peaceful, and so on. This is the same thing, but you're doing it by being Queer.

"By withdrawing from sexual norms in society, you thus therefore can make the world more gay."

It's undeniably a social spiritual practice, then. It's undeniably a cult religion. Put it into your head that we're reading a Buddhist tract - talking about a bodhisattva that's been enlightened and remains in the world so he can transform the world and save others from the cycle of samsara.

"Foucault proposes to us, then, instead of treating homosexuality as an occasion to articulate the secret truth of our own desires, we might ask ourselves: “What sorts of relations can be established, invented, multiplied, modulated through our homosexuality. The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but rather to use, from now on, one's sexuality to achieve a multiplicity of types of relations”"

Homosexuality is not about saving yourself from the gnostic prison of being, alone, but it's actually about saving the world from its own suffering through that same set of social relations. So we can transform and end all the suffering caused through the demiurge's power of establishing norms that are built around the physical realities of sex and sexuality that they deny. (They deny biology, btw).

"Expanding on this theme, Foucault expressed himself as follows:
It's up to us to advance into a homosexual aesthesis, a transformative Queer Practice of the Self. We might be able to define and develop a way of life that, in turn, can yield a culture and an ethics and "new forms of relationship, new forms of knowledge, new modes of creativity and new possibilities of love"."

"Foucault insisted that homosexuality did not name an already existing form of desire but was rather something to be desired. Our task is therefore to become homosexual, not to persist in acknowledging that we are."

One is not born but becomes (woman/homosexual/queer).

"To put it more precisely, what Foucault meant was that our task is to become Queer.".

Having achieved spiritual awakening and gnosis - a saving self-knowledge that allows you to break jail in a prison of Being in a world that functions like a prison full of unnecessary suffering through norms and expectations about sex and sexuality. it is religious awakening to become Queer, so you can transform teh world and end that situation.

"For his remarks make sense only if he understood his term homosexuality according to my definition of Queer. As an identity without an essence not a given condition but a horizon of possibility, an opportunity for self-transformation, a Queer potential."

Just like Beauvoir - you become queer increasingly by rejecting the "Demiurge's" power of expectations, norms, normativity or, for her, patriarchy, and defining what it means to Be. So, defining Queer as the Other set against an illegitimate standard as the necessary step to be able to break the idea of the illegitimate standard in the first place.

Queer Hermetic alchemy happens just like with Beauvoir's alchemical feminism. You deliberately occupy a self-begotten identity. You ascend through levels of rejection of what's given and socially-expected in the world to arrive at your self-begotten position that is actually the 2nd person of the Queer Hermetic Godhead (Trans people are sacred). There, you have agency, because your mind, your nous, is fully gnostically awakened and, only then, you have agency.

You're not becoming a woman according to men, you're not becoming homosexual according to straight, you are just becoming Queer, as Halperin says, because "One can't become homosexual, strictly speaking, either one is or one isn't, but one can marginalize oneself, one can transform onself, one can become Queer. Indeed, Queer marks the very site of gay-becoming."

What we are dealing with, yet again, is Queer alchemy which is Queer Hermeticism, which is the actionable form of Queer Gnosticism, and this is the cult religion of Queer Theory.

"I think it is politically important that sexuality be able to function the way it functions in the saunas. Where, without having to submit to the condition of being imprisoned in one's own identity, in one's own past, in one's own face. One can meet people who are, to you, what one is to them: nothing else but bodies with which combinations, fabrications of pleasure, will be possible. These places afford an exceptional possibility of de-subjectivization, or de-subjection. Perhaps not the most radical but, in any case, sufficiently intense to be worth taking note of. Anonymity is important because of the intensity of the pleasure that follows from it. It's not the affirmation of identity that is important. It's the affirmation of non-identity. It's an important experience in which one invents, for as long as one wants, pleasure which one fabricated together with others."

And what Halperin says is Foucault's treatment of homosexuality is a strategic position, instead of as a psychological essence, opens up the possibility of a gay science without objects. Of a Queer Studies founded not on the positive fact of homosexuality, and therefore not possessed of conventional claim to legitimate authority grounded in a privileged access to truth, but in an ongoing process of self gay knowing and self formation (self-begetting). Foucault's approach also opens up, correspondingly, the possibility of a Queer politics defined not only bt he struggle to liberate a common, repressed, pre-existing nature, but by an ongoing process of self-constitution and self-transformation. A queer politics anchored in the perilous and shifting sands of non-identity, positionality, discursive reversibility, and collective self-invention."

If asked to explain the anonymity in the saunas where we chase pleasure can be explained like so:

You have to throw off all the layers of Being. It's not who you are, it's what you're doing and how you're being. It's chasing those pleasures that you fabricate together with other people. You're throwing off that which differentiates you from the Other so you can have collective self-invention under the auspices of "Queer'.

Self-invention is queer self-begetting which is the goal of Queer Hermetic Gnosticism. This is a religious cult - Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult.

## Judith Butler
In Gender Trouble (1990), her most famous book, she lays this connection out. You need to understand that this book is about Drag. The thesis can be summarized in the following sentence:
"Life is Drag. Drag is Life".

We're always doing drag all the time.

A gnostic social-spiritual belief about gender, including how the social-spiritual realm is inscribed onto the mundane aspects of ourselves (onto our bodies). Gender and Sex are being inscribed onto the body - we're not imprisoned in a body or by a body - the body is being imprisoned by the inscription on it.

This defines a bridge between the spiritual/noumenal world and the physical/phenomenal world.

"If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication, and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse - of primary and stable identity."

Genders aren't real, and if they're not real, they're the result of that social-spiritual milieu as it gets inscribed onto bodies. This kind of gives birth to something which operates as a Gender Soul, and those souls are trapped not specifically in the bodies that they inhabit, but in the prevailing social-spiritual world, and the social-spiritual prison of the incomplete dialectical world that we inhabit which will stay incomplete until we have complete Queer awakening.

"In mother camp, "Female Impersonators in America", anthropologist Esther Newton suggests that the structure of impersonation reveals one of the key fabricating mechanisms through which the social construction of gender takes place."

We are all impersonating gendered beings (life is drag) and through this mass impersonation/gender performance, a social structure is defined which creates this social-spiritual world which makes gender seem real in the first place.

"I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between the inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity."

So, drag is the tool by which you can initiate the process of your queer awakening. She quotes Newton again:

"At its most complex, drag is a double inversion - this has appearances in illusion. Drag says "my outside appearance is feminine, but my essence inside the body is masculine", so I look feminine but I'm a man. But at the same time, it symbolizes the opposite inversion: my appearance outside (my body) is masculine, but my essence (who I feel like I am inside - myself) is feminine." Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender ignificatnions from the discourse of truth and falsity."

Gender isn't a matter of false or real or fantasy - it's this kind of murky, social-spiritual milieu. You can be Male in true body and portray as Female so the world perceives you as female. But in so doing, what you're actually doing is that you know that you're still male, but you feel female inside. So, female on the deepest inside portrayed through a male body performing as female comes out, and you have a double inversion of gender which reveals that gender has nothing to do with truth and falsity - hermetic wizardry - playing off the principles of gender and correspondence.

The result is the confusion of any distinction about what is male and female or masculine and feminine and what they might mean. The removal of distinction - distinction becomes too confusing to engage. So, rather than occupying a higher position where you understand them both to be a part of the same thing, you're now occupying a position where they're so confused that they're incoherent. This is a negative dialectic instead of a positive dialectic.

Here's where this gets deeper:

"In Foucault's terms, the soul is not imprisoned by or within the body, as some Christian imagery might suggest, but the soul is the prison of the body".

It's not that I have a gender soul trapped in my wrong body. It's the other way around: the Soul is imprisoning the body. The body is imprisoned by the Soul. This is hard to get and until you get this, you don't get Queer Theory.

It seems very mysterious and opposite to the construction given earlier, but remember what she said about drag: it's doing both inversions at once and that's what Queering is all about. The soul is imprisoned by the body and the body is imprisoned by the soul.

This is the queer ouroboros - as above (the soul) so below (the body) - and vice versa. There's your hermetic principle of correspondence. What she's saying that Foucault is saying - and she agrees - is that the soul, which is the social spiritual realm Hegel laid out - is what imprisons the body and makes it take on the various forms that it inscribes upon them.

In other words, the Social Constructions are making you become a male or female. The Social Constructions are telling you that you have to make your body come out a certain way. You have to trap your body into male forms or female forms - male modes of dress or female modes of dress - presentation, etc. You have to trap your body because of the social constructions of gender around you.

The soul - the spiritual soul of the whole world about gender and sex and sexuality - is forcing and inscribing upon bodies how they have to be and present themselves. They're forcing them to become male or female - the soul is the plaything of the social-spiritual environment. All of the people's ideas about themselves and each other in a big milieu - the spirit of everything - of all the world together. The soul is the plaything of that. One tiny piece of the world-soul of gender sex and sexuality.

In other words, the social constructions around sex, gender and sexuality are the social spiritual environment and that conditions the sou. The soul, therefore, makes you present the body and do things with your body (don't have carnal relations with that kind of person, etc). Your body gets inscribed upon by the social constructions and expectations of being male or female - or straight or gay - etc. That's what Foucault is saying.

So the soul, as Hegel lays it out, becomes the incarcerating thing which traps the body and the body, then, entraps the soul which might feel otherwise - your double inversion in reverse. Double trapment as opposed to double inversion.

Queer Theory is to resist this by doing the double inversion - by intentionally occupying the evacuating state that does the double inversion and attacking it hermetically from both sides in a single stroke - that's what Queer Theory is actually all about - that's why it's so complicated and ugly and nasty.

This is such an important idea to Butler that she brings it up in her next-most famous book called "Bodies that Matter":

"Considering the science of prison reform, Foucault writes: "The man described for us whom we are invited to free is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A soul inhabits him and brings him to existence which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy. The soul is the prison of the body."."

And so what he is saying, there, is that the prison conditions - the soul - is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy. The soul is the prison of the body. And this is the key: The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy. This is how they think and this is how it works.

The soul is your view of yourself and others' view of you in that social-spiritual space, as described by Hegel's geist, which is his hermetic formulation of reality. So rather than God and spirits and ghosts and everything as the spiritual realm, it's not that. It's not transcendental. It's cultural and social - that's the social-spiritual space that Hegel lays out. And it creates social constructions that condition man and condition his life - the Inversion of Praxis, for Marx - that condition people and their ideas, for Hegel. Their ideas condition what they actually have and are in the material world.

Your soul is your view of yourself combined with how everybody else views yourself through the social constructions and, for Queer Theory, it's sex, gender and sexuality that are the relevant things. That's the social-spiritual space.

The social constructions of society become the prison of the body - they force you to do things with your body that you might not otherwise do. That, in turns, imprisons the individual soul that inhabits your body. It's a double-imprisonment.

Queer resitance defies this with that raging, gnostic motivation to throw off the prison of being and it uses hermetic, transformational, dialectical, deconstructive methodology. Queer liberation means escaping the realm of the social-spiritual suffering by rendering it nonsensical.

If we were Buddhist we'd say escaping the realm of Samsara by enlightening ourselves to Queer Oppositionality and rendering, therefore, the entire system of suffering non-sensical. Rather than non-attachment to overcome suffering, it's now that suffering is nonsense and therefore there is no suffering. But the suffering is being in a body that has a social construction and assignment of sex laid upon it or inscribed upon it.

"It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists as a reality. It is produced in, permanently around, on, within the body, by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those that are punished."

Foucault is saying here that the soul is produced by the demiurgic power of society - whatever the demiurge happens to be. He's literally talking about prisons that are literally carceral, but these constructions of sex, gender, sexuality, etc are also something he has in mind, and through the relentless punishments you experience (microaggressions, discriminations, norms, expectations, being called a power) - being visited upon you - your soul is actually formed. Your soul ends up imprisoning the body and you are imprisoned within that. In this case (the Queer Gnostic case), it's normalcy that has that power - the idea that there are normal things and that people who are outside of that are abnormal or perverted, or whatever.

The people who are normal, and who get to define normal and enforce that and who act as the demiurge - that's who you have to reject and rebel against, because they're punishing everybody who is not within their range of normal, kind of constantly. Judith Butler referred to the result of this situation as a "violence of categorization". Society, with its norms and expectations and social constructions of sex and sexuality categorizes people: they're male, female, straight, bi, gay, feminine, masculine, and so on. And that does a violence to them on the level of their soul because it limits their potentialities of Being. If your'e a girl you have to be girly, a boy has to be boyish, men have to be manly, etc. Butch Feminist Judith Butler didn't like that so much.

When there's a mismatch, that's a violence being done to you, and when there isn't a mismatch, there's also a violence being done to you because it's forcing you to conform so that you don't even know if there's a mismatch.

In the locking of a person into a particular path of becoming (man, woman, straight, gay) they don't have free, liberated potentialities of being. They have to become what they think they are.

Foulcault is saying that that system of punishments is actually what defines their soul. The soul is socially constructed on other people's terms. The gnosis and the gnostic goal is going to be to liberate yourself from the construction - escape the demonic demiurge and understand yourself on your own terms - you're own free, liberated self-knowledge. Your soul should be what you see yourself as - not who you have to see yourself as on normal people's terms, which you might have internalized unjustly through relentless social conditioning, and don't even realize - hence needing a Queer Awakening or Queer Initiation - and it gets defined in terms of how you get punished for failing to conform to normalcy.

Gnosticism as Queer Gnosticism would say: "Knowing all of this offers a glimpse at salvation (through opposition)."

In bodies that matter, Butler expands on this:

"We can understand Foucault's references to the soul as an implicit reworking of the Aristotelian formula. Foucault argues in discipline and punish that the soul becomes a normative and normalizing ideal, according to which the body is trained, shaped, cultivated and invested. It is a historically-specific imaginary ideal under which the body is effectively materialized. Power operates Foucault in the constitution of the very materiality of the subject, in the principle which simultaneously forms and regulates the subject of subjectivation. Foucault refers not only to the materiality of the body of the prisoner, but the materiality of the body of the prison."

See, you are doubly imprisoned. The soul, the social constructions, imprison the body, and the body then imprisons the soul.

"The materiality of the prison, he writes, is established to the extent that it is a vector in instrument of power. Hence, the prison is materialized to the extent it is invested with power."

The more powerful norms are, the more powerful the prison is. There is no prison power to its materialization.

"Its materialization is co-extensive with its investiture with power relations, and materiality is the effect and gauge of this investment. The prison comes to be only within the field of power relations but, more specifically, only to the extent that it is invested or saturated with such relations that such a saturation itself is formative of its very being. Here, the body is not an independent materiality - it is invested by power relations external to it, but it is that for which materialization and investiture are co-extensive."

In Gender Trouble she touches on the same thing. She says:

"The figure of the interior soul, understood as "within the body", is signified through its inscription on the body."

It gets its meaning through what's being inscribed on the body. Social constructions are inscribing what it means to be a woman on the body and then your interior soul, the thing hidden within you, gets its meaning through what has been inscripted on you by those social constructions. The inversion of Praxis has defined what you think you are inside.

"Even though its primary motive of signification is through its very absence, its potent invisibility."

In other words, the real mode of signification of who you really are is that nobody knows. It's inside you. You are the only one who knows - you are the expert on you. And this is how Queer Theory defines and connects the soul in the social spiritual realm to the body. How it connects the noetic to the physical. It's inscribed socially on the body and then internalized, and that's where the significance comes in. And what makes it truly spiritual is that it's actually invisible to the body. Who you are isn't actually comprehensible in terms of your body, but it's signified on your body because the social constructions tell you how to present your body and then that signifies it. It's really just the inversion of praxis using two steps.

"The effect of a structuring inner space is produced through the signification of a body as a vital and sacred enclosure. The soul is precisely what the body lacks, hence the body presents itself as a signifying lack."

The body is the fallen and mundane non-spiritual aspect of being that craves a divine spiritual element to fill it.

"That lack, which is the body, signifies the soul as that which cannot show, and the lack of the soul in the body is what signifies that."

The body, in some snse, is preventing your gender soul from being truly and fully understood and expressed, even to yourself.

"In this sense, then, the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner-outer distinction itself. A figure of interior psychic space, inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such."

The soul is social-spiritual and your possibly liberated true soul is not that. That just shows in reflection on a surface signification through the body. BEcause, who you think you are and have to be gets inscribed on you by that social-spiritual environment that you internalize. And then you perform that so that it seems real - it becomes a false reality that you impose on yourself and impose on others by doing it. And that creates the social constructions which imprison other people in their bodies and imprisons everybody's souls in their bodies.

"In Foucault's terms, the soul is not imprisoned by or within the body, as some Christian imagery would suggest, but the soul is the prison of the body".

What we are discovering here is that the spirit or noetic realm for queer theorists (and all of post modernists / modern Marxists as well) is that the spiritual realm is socially-constructed power as understood through postmodern theory. The body is not a prison; the body becomes a prison through the materialization or actualization of the social constructions of gender and sex and sexuality around you. The assignment of sex and thus sex and gender roles at birth, for example. Those social constructions materialize on the body and imprison the body into a constraint range of what it's supposed to be. The social constructions become the target and have to be destroyed by queering them.

The soul (The social constructions and what they impress upon the body) imprisons the body. The body, thus, materializes as a prison for the true spiritual being inside (who you really are). The body isn't the thing imprisoning you - the social constructions that are telling the body what it has to be are imprisoning you. Spiritual imprisonment of your spirit using your body as a mediator through inscribing beliefs, images, practices, performances, etc onto it. That's what'sg oing on with Judith Butler interpreting Foucault.

Elaborating on this, the objective isn't the liberation of the spirit from the body; it's the liberation of the body from the spirit or the soul. The socially constructed beliefs about your body in time and space have to be rejected. Biology isn't so much to cnquered as it's to be rendered irrelevant. Biological reality is an illusion of the fallen world. Social reality is the true reality - the imposed reality that we have to live - lived experience. Social reality needs to be defeated so that biological reality can be liberated into the full realm of play and transformation - the extension of imagination into embodied actuality.

In other words, the body is but clay that you can play with and mould and remould at will if we actually had a liberated spirit - no social constructions of sex and gender. You rbody is a mediator, therefore, to gnosis about what it really means to be and to be trapped by social constructions. If you want to be autonomous, it's also the vehicle to knowing that -> gain gnosis.

We can understand how we can actualize ourselves through how we can come to see ourselves as though we are seen through the adopted mind of god, by bucking the social constructions which are the actual demiurge. That's what queer theory is about.

Gnosis, through the body, not of the body.
Gnosis through what can be done with the body - the illusions of limits to its transmutability so that the true spirit - gender soul - within can be set free frm the social constructions created by the demiurge of normalcy.

Normalcy is the demands placed upon you to script your body into the prison of the fallen, mundane, limited form that we have to have. Trans people are sacred because they are literally somebody who is bucking this idea.

## Performativity
Judith Butler's Gender Performativity.

It all comes back to Life is Drag, Drag is Life.

Everything we do is actually drag, and drag is actually what it means to live.

Everything we do, in some sense, is performance of gender - consciously or unconsciously. It's absurd - drag is intentionally absurd. When we are unconscious of it, we are not Queer Gnostics, and we are absurdly living out our gender and continuing to contribute to the demiurgic power of social constructions of gender and sexuality that constrain, imprison and do violence to people - especially those who are aware that they're having violence done to them.

If are conscious of the fact that we are all performing drag all the time, then we have queer gnosis. Then can become queer, as Halperin put it, in an oppositional way that ambiguously queers the whole system through these double inversions.

### James' Description
Imagine a dramatic skill at Christmastime - Tiny Tim Scrooge etc. The actors can't just do whatever they want to do. They are scripted into the drama, they have to do what the script says - and someone else wrote the lines, arranged the scenes etc. There's some flexibility in the performance, but it's ultimately heavily constrained by the characters the setting the plot, the director, the lines, the set, the playwright, the producer all become demiurges over the production of the, the actors are the characters in the play, and thus their performances are limited by those demiurgic forces that are imposed on them.

They cease being their true selves, and become the characters. Through performing those roles, for a time, they become the role - they become the character if they play it well. But we know it's a performance, and so do they.

Imagine if nobody knew it was a performance. That's life as drag. That's what Judith Butler says is going on with Gender.

Only the gender gnostics realize that everything gender is performance and, thus, they don't necessarily become what they're being inscribed to become. They know the're performing so they can act, they can ham it up and go crazy. Even right around the edges of the boundaries of the script and the director. If they didn't know, they would have to do exactly what the script said or what the intention of playwright indicated.

Gender gnostics, by being queer, can invert the system and achieve self-begetting. To achieve true agency and autonomy, so they can be fully human.

#### JL Austin
Outlined the idea of performativity. When someone dons professional garb and manner, the person becomes their professional role. A little bit of performance associated with having that role - say certain lines (by the power invested in me), make use of certain presentations and do certain activities - those things communicate

...

Just like a cop - he puts on his uniform and becomes a jackass or a tough guy. When people ask "waht do you do" he says "I am a cop!". He thinks and speaks and adopts a language and manner - same thing with sex and gender.

You are told you have to act a certain way to be that thing - to signify that thing - to tell people that you're taht thing that gets inscribed on your body with the expectations of what it means to be that thing and you accept that and become that. Or, you wake up and become a gender-fucking queer. Someone who si intentionally fucking with gender (technical term).

You become these thigns - you get to pick - just like Simone de Beauvoir. Are you going to become a woman on patriarchal male terms as an object to men, or are you going to become a woman as a woman. Same thing.

By becoming those things you reify the spirit or oppose the spirit in that social-spiritual way - the social constructions which define the role in the first place. So either you perpetuate the carceral, demiurgic cycle - the demiurgic power flows through you and is enforced by you accepting it, or you decide to queer it to reject it.

That's what queer theory is about.

And that's why they value these stupid transgressive performances all the time, like a black velma Lesbian in Scooby Doo.It pains a picture that there's so much more that one could be than what the stupid demiurgic playwrights actually wrote. This is why everything has to be queered. This is why trans people must be sacred. Because everything must transgress the script that has to be destroyed to set people free. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler explains some more:

Where feminist analysis takes the category of sex and, thus, according to him, the binary restriction on gender, as its part of departure, Foucault understands his project to be an inquiry into how the category of sex and sexual difference are constructed within discourse as necessary features of bodily identity. The juridical model of law which structures the feminist emancipatory model presumes, in his view, that the subject of emancipation, the "sexed body", in some sense is not itself in need of critical deconstruction.

As Foucault reminds about some humanist efforts at prison reform, the criminal subject who gets emancipated may be even more deeply shackled than the humanist originally thought.

"To be sexed, for Foucault, is to be subjected to a set of social regulations.

To have the law that directs those regulations reside both as the formative principle of one's sex gender pleasure and desires and as the hermeneutical principle of self-interpretation.

The category of sex is, thus, inevitably regulative and any analysis which makes that category pre-suppositional uncritically extends and further legitimizes that regulative strategy as a power-knowledge regime."

THis is why feminists can't stop Queer Theory. They accept that hermeneutical principle of self-interpretation in genders being a social construct and, thus, once you accept sex as a category, it is inevitably regulatory. If you accept it uncritically, you're already accepting the regime that's scripting bodies and imprisoning them.

What this results in is that queer theory is an awakening to an explicitly hermetic transformation program that starts with and is motived by understanding a queer gnostic

## Reification
You change yourself (as below) and you force society to accept you (as above) through moral extortion rackets, blackmail, bullying, threatening to kill yourself, etc. You force society to accept you and, when it does, you've changed the social constructions that will now inscribe on bodies differently.

## Inversion of Praxis
Now, the social constructions change so as above we have a new view of sexuality, gender and sex which is liberated of the previous constraints that will inscribe differently on bodies of people who will be more liberated.

Trans becomes real when people accept that trans is real and reify it. You never finish transition really.

No matter how many surgeries, how many hormones, no matter how many puberty blockers, no matter how much sterilization damage, mutilation and wahtever you do to yourself, you will never change sex.

Your goal isn't to change sex - the body doesn't matter - the goal is to change society so it accepts that you have transitioned and if everybody lies to themselves and believes that you transitioned - then you did.

Transition completes not through more intervention, btu through forcing society to affirm you.

## Judith echoing back to Gayle
Thinking sex said something similar in 1984.

"A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing, critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution. Several persistent features of thought about sex inhibit the development of such a theory. These assumptions are so pervasive in western culture that they are rarely questioned, thus they tend to re-appear in different political contexts, acquiring new rhetorical expressions but reproducing fundamental axioms.

One such axiom is sexual essentialism - the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to social life and shapes institutions."

Nature is the basis for concepts about sex - that's the thing that has to be brought to accusation. That you believe that sex precedes social forces, and that there is something essential about being male or female (sex).

"Sexual essentialism is embedded in the folk wisdoms of western societies which considers sex to be eternally unchanging, asocial, transhistorical."

She is locating sex-essentialism and humanities wrong beliefs about nature as she sees it in what nature implies. She's treating nature in the same way as the gnostics treated nature as the creation of evil demiurgic forces. Biological science is downstream from social forces so when somebody says they are biologist and that they understand science, they're discredited by Queer theory already - they have bought into the system and are using these tools that they consider scientific to re-assert the system.

"Dominated for over a century by medicine, psychiatry and psychology, the academic study of sex has reproduced essentialism".

There is nothing essential to your sex it doesn't come from your body, it comes from society telling your body what it has to be. We've got it all backwards and all the so-called sciences that claim to study nature are just power-laden tools that the people who have access to power use to justify their claims. The claim to scientific authority is just a claim to maintain power and the queer theorists are seeing through that lie. Science is just politics by other means. Truth is not a real thing - there's only strategy and power. What people call truth is only a function of power and that power is wittingly or unwittingly demiurgic, carceral and desiring control over that which it sees as inferior in teh other and is external to itself.

If you were to combine gnosticism and hermeticism, the hermetic god creates the material world in order to know itself but then it doesn't want to know itself. It represses that, in some sense.

"These fields classify sex as a property of individuals. It may reside in their hormones or their psyches. It may be construed as physiological or psychological. But within these ethno-scientific categories, sexuality has no history and no significant historical determinants."

It's a social phenomenon and she cites Foucault as the person who breaks us free from that.

"Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality from 1978 has been the most influential and emblematic text of this new scholarship on sex."

Foucault named as the grand wizard breaking us free of the prison of being with his queer gnosticism (the new scholarship on sex). Scholarship means scholars have hte secret knowloedge that's higher than the boring scientific truth.

"Foucault criticizes the traditional understanding of sexuality as natural libido yearning to break free of social constraint. He argues that desires are not pre-existing biological entities (you're not born tht way, kids), but rather that tyhey are constituted in the course of historically-specific social practices."

This is the modernist and postmodernist gnostic view of that social-spiritual realm. The progression of historically-specific social practices. That includes, through the revolutions that transform and sublate them over time (history progressing through the hermetic process). Queer consciousness, then, includes the idea that sex and the underlying desires are only comprehensible as a social-spiritual phenomenon that are subjec tto dialectic evolution through hermetic alchemy - people discovering the greaetr higher truth through the dialectical process - by removing distinctions. They are something that is becomnig - progressing toward what it always should have been. They are thus cut free of the connection to physical reality entirely and queer gnosis is coming to understand this belief. Biology doesn't matter to what or who you actually are - just like you see on the ground. Furthermore, queer gnosis is realizing yourself to be a historical agent. That's so important with Marxism part of adopting a critical consciousness is awakening to the fact that you are a historical agent that changes history. You are a being wo is a sexual subject. Which is to say, some