Ideology is Kintsugi and Gender is Ideology

Preserve the structure while looking FABULOUS

Kintsugi is a traditional Japanese process of repairing ceramics with lacquer and gold, leaving a gold seam where the cracks were. In my view, it is a perfect metaphor for what ideology is intended to be, a fluid used to mend real, material cracks in the imperial-capitalist structure. It isn’t invisible; often it’s very obvious. But rather than simply repairing the cracks in the base, it celebrates them.

Gender is one of those cracks. Capitalism and the previous social orders set it up as an inevitability by mapping restrictive ideology onto sex characteristics. When groups of people began fracturing, capitalism slowly worked on creating ways to “celebrate” those cracks, remaining rigid in its base conceits.

To demystify gender is to break down one of the most complex ideological categories. To understand gender-as-ideology is to understand the purpose of ideology on an intimate level. To see “LGBTQIA+” as a detriment and a limitation to sexual and gender minorities (SGM) rather than as support is to see the same for “traditional” gender ideology.

The point should not be to abolish familial ties, nor should it be to create dozens of new words to uniquely describe one’s “true gender,” it should be to identify the coercion present in ideology so people may have true choices in their lives (where there is no dictated way to live, “left” or “right”), rather than consumer market choices that lead back to the reproduction of the capitalist base.

This is neoliberalism, the fetishization of the market to the extent that all aspects of life should operate as such.

Gold

I’ve said elsewhere that I believe both “traditional” and “LGBTQIA+” gender ideologies serve the same purpose: to justify the ruling order. Traditional gender ideology comes down from authority, while “LGBTQIA+” gender ideology comes in the form of anti-authority. Both ultimately function as lifestyle consumption in today’s paradigm and play into a dynamic of competitive consumption.

One of the goals of my critique of ideology is to separate the needs and concerns of SGM from “LGBTQIA+” ideology. I believe this is necessary to maintain a genuinely dialectical materialist critique, as the ideology that people rebel against (“traditional”) is as bourgeois as the one that’s been created in its place. People’s heads are in the right place; they know that ideology is alienating and doesn’t encompass their own experiences, wants, and needs.

That the ideology is alienating is something we can easily trace back to Marx and Engels, who extensively critiqued “the family” ideology as one which specifically upholds capitalistic relations and helps maintain the division of labor (particularly productive/reproductive, but in other ways as well). However, their proposal for an alternative was basically non-existent; it is utopian to impose an idea “from without by propaganda” (what liberals call “normalizing”). They speculated about genuine monogamy between the sexes, but gender was not a figure in their formulation, because roles and norms, in their critique, were simply part of ideology.

This is, more or less, why I consider gender to be a category of ideology: it assigns roles and norms to people by sex characteristics, but not dependent on them, thus creating a “thing” (reification, treating something immaterial or abstract as a material thing, particularly as an “inherent” characteristic) for them to be in our social makeup.

Yes, there are clearly things the “female” physiology can do the “male” can’t (and vice versa), but that is a material difference rather than an ideological one. While some ideology might be rooted in that difference (“maternity leave,” derived from lactation, also longer duration associated with better health outcomes), some are more of a stretch (“women should be raising kids while men provide). I do not see this as a deviation from Marx’s and Engels’s critique, but I do see it as a development of it.

So, to see “gender” as ideology and to see “traditional” and “LGBTQIA+” as variants (within both there are further variants), we must see the cracks for what they are: contradictions. The veneration of gender, whether it be “men are strong, women are weak,” “women are all around better than men,” or “gender is a social construct with fluidity and diversity” is a means to acknowledge a contradiction and quickly bond it with the base using gold.

Cracks

In The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and The State, Engels argues that the bourgeois family serves as a means to secure and transmit private property within the capitalist system. By upholding the institution of marriage and inheritance, the bourgeois family ensures the passing down of property from one generation to another, consolidating wealth and perpetuating class divisions.

“Traditional” gender roles assign women the primary responsibility for domestic and care work, including raising children. By relegating women to unpaid household labor, capitalism can rely on a cheap/free source of labor for the reproduction and maintenance of the workforce. Further, jobs in sectors such as caregiving, cleaning, and service industries tend to be lower paid and undervalued. This gendered division of labor allows capitalism to exploit the labor of women more, as this labor is seen as less of a paid enterprise (if one at all).

These contradictions are questions that require an answer. However, the answers provided are ideological and thus simply reified thoughts. What we would call “gender essentialism” is the belief that the ideological assertions assigned to sex characteristics are inherent in them. This is basically what “gender” actually is: people believing they are inherently something based on (or in contradiction with) their sex characteristics.

The answers that have been slowly produced over the years have a shelf life because they ultimately provide norms and roles with a shelf life. “Woman as a caregiver” had a shelf-life because women were eventually used to reduce the average price of labor, which produced the “girl boss,” fighting to be on top to mitigate that. These roles are outmoded as the rate of profit falls and the subordinate group (here, women) is more incorporated into class divisions. The gendered difference between employees becomes minimal as labor becomes more and more devalued, and the line itself is used to excuse why things get worse.

Eventually, however, people do figure out that their pay isn’t actually low because they have different genitals. They see that it is based in contrivance, a decision, rather than a material reality. When this happens, capitalism needs new lines that are not based on material relationship to means of production (read: ownership), thus, they are produced.

SGM are not new; people do not uniformly express sexuality and role as the power structure would want. Some are quieter about it and some are loud. However, “LGBTQIA+” ideology is the reification of that expression, giving us many new lines to divide on. To demonstrate, I use the term “SGM” because I think it is unifying – same for the rainbow-only Pride Flag; what is more inclusive than a rainbow?

“LGBTQIA+” and the “New” Pride Flag are both constantly updated with new letters and lines and that is the point of them; these are not unifying ideas, they are ideas of separation, made distinct and official. When another identity is canonized, it has not been “liberated.” It has been sanctioned as a valid part of the gender lifestyle market and cleared for competition. When “SGM” is a descriptor, “LGBTQIA+” is a menu for new explanations for contradictions, deteriorating conditions, and alienation that the “traditional” ideology fails to explain for someone who has opted out of it.

Pick one and compete! It’s a zero-sum game and your group must win!

It’s not just Gender, it’s Everything

It's not just gender; various aspects of identity and social relations within capitalist societies act exactly the same way. The cracks in the capitalist structure are continually identified and “celebrated” through the creation of new ideological categories, identities, and even fandoms – often in response to emerging forms of resistance necessitating new markets.

For instance, race and ethnicity are also subjected to the reifying process within capitalism. The dominant ideology constructs racial and ethnic identities with fixed characteristics and assigns certain roles, expectations, and privileges to each category. Similarly, the commodification and fetishization of cultures and traditions through cultural appropriation and exoticization are mechanisms employed to expand market opportunities. Capitalism thrives on the consumption of "otherness," as diverse cultures and identities are commodified and sold as marketable products, detached from their original contexts and meanings.

Over time, these ideological conceits may have physiological effects, producing predispositions for varying biological outcomes, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, certain cancers, low birth weight, preterm delivery, and others. It is important to see this as an effect of ideological policy, however, and not as an inherent reality.

Further, it should not be seen as unique that concepts like sexual orientation or non-standard presentation and roles have been reified and fragmented within capitalist ideology. The LGBTQIA+ spectrum is commodified through the creation of targeted products and services, catering to specific consumer niches and reinforcing competitive consumption patterns.

There are many who think simply “doing the opposite” (here, rejecting “LGBTQIA+” people and culture) constitutes opting out of the paradigm. However, this is simply a consumer choice; the “traditional” ideology is justifying the same stuff.

If we come to, “this thing is invalid, that means the opposite is valid, so we should do that,” we’ve fallen for neoliberal market ideology. Even the “communists” who are presenting with a conservative aesthetic, simply rejecting “LGBTQIA+” are simply another market demographic competing with their consumption to be “the mainstream culture.”

It’s all mainstream culture. Heartbreaking, I’m sure.

Whether Star Wars or feminism, veganism or paleo, gender or fashion, as aspects of a neoliberal subject’s “identity,” they all function to build one’s sense of self relative to a consumer profile. These modes of consumption are expressed and advocated for in corporate-owned public spaces (forums, feeds, networks, channels, etc.) in a battle of preference-as-supremacy that no one can win.

The game is supposed to go on forever while the ruling class continues to rule.

Conclusion

Ultimately, these cracks and divisions perpetuate the capitalist system by redirecting and fragmenting resistance and dissent. Instead of challenging the fundamental structures of capitalism, the focus is shifted to identity politics, lifestyle choices, and market-driven solutions. These diversionary tactics impede the development of a comprehensive critique of the capitalist base and inhibit the formation of collective consensus and movements that aren’t competing with each other in a lifestyle market.

Kintsugi is a great metaphor in all ways but one: without the gold, the fragments aren’t superseded with a new structure. However, this is the problem we face without a critique of ideology: by showing the gold to be false in the case of capitalist society, we are left only with fragments. This isn’t a desirable outcome, either (further, Kintsugi is often beautiful and a legitimately interesting form of art, while ideology is falsely so at best).

We will not transcend this metaphor without understanding the thing I am attempting to explain with it. SGM get a lot of ire specifically because “LGBTQIA+” ideology is aligned with the preservation of the current relations. This is undeserved; everyone who is not class-conscious has an ideology telling them the same thing. This includes every group one would normally contrast with SGM.

We must be ruthless to ideology, but we should not be so quick to throw each other away.