‘Dissident Bodies’ and Bio-Political Control

'The powers-that-be dislike inherited forms, like the feminine woman and the masculine man, whose roles and relationships escape their control.'

From The European Conservative

By Carlos Perona Calvete

The powers-that-be dislike inherited forms, like the feminine woman and the masculine man, whose roles and relationships escape their control.

Recently, a Viking-themed festival took place in northern Spain, re-enacting the disembarking of Norsemen on Iberia’s Atlantic coast. 

Commenting on this, a government-adjacent journalist—recipient of the Rainbow Award conferred by Spain’s Ministry of Equality—tweeted to the effect that the poses, attire, behaviour and, indeed, the very bodies of those historical re-enactors (presumably because, among them, a fair number looked like they lift weights) were enough to strike fear in women and persons with contrastingly ‘dissident’ bodies, by which she means transgender and other people.

Body-positivity turns to body-negativity here, just as surely as feminism becomes explicitly anti-male.

It is worth considering the term ‘dissident body,’ however. 

Given the journalist’s targeting of shirtless men—critiquing something as innocuous as participating in a bit of historical theatre, together with her alignment with the Spanish government—we might ask who the real dissidents are, and what their bodies have to do with it.

Indeed, what channels more implicit dissidence—what challenges prevailing ideological paradigms more—than a man projecting masculinity in public spaces and a woman modestly dressed?

The powers-that-be dislike inherited forms whose vectors they do not control, and they particularly resent organic arrangements that can self-perpetuate; that is, arrangements that perpetuate themselves outside bio-political structures and without needing a large, modern medical establishment by default.

Finding one’s true gender identity by spending money on hormones and surgeries, gay couples adopting children, and the turning of fertility treatments into the norm because women prioritise their careers during their 20s and 30s, all translate into more dependence on the bureaucratic, administrative state.

The dissident body is not the transgender person, gay person, or ‘empowered’ woman.

The dissident body belongs to the masculine man and the feminine woman.