My essay on gender and OOO is almost done, and Michael O' Rourke wrote me yesterday with news of his very fine essay on gender, OOO and speculative realism more generally, forthcoming in Speculations II.
I find this turn of events very pleasing for a number of reasons. Chief among them:
(1) Levi Bryant's exploration of OOO through Lacan's graphs of sexuation was one of the first things I read carefully while I was thinking about OOO last year, figuring out the affinities with my work. To say this post is seminal is not to do it sufficient justice and I'm happy that it's made its way into The Democracy of Objects. The graphs are above; I'll point you to Levi's post because he does such a fine job of explaining them.
Levi argues that OOO objects comprise a “female” not-all set that is not subject to phallocentric totalization. There is no master signifier outside the set of all objects and there is no top or bottom object anywhere to be found.
(2) My work on lifeforms (the strange stranger part of my argument in The Ecological Thought) had led me to conclude that they were well explained through queer theory. It's just empirically the case that heterosexual reproduction is a small cork floating on a giant ocean of transgender switching, homosexual behavior and cloning. It's also the case more generally that life is performativity: if you look and quack like a duck, or like DNA, then that's what you are. This led me to write my “Queer Ecology” essay, which O'Rourke cites.
To get to queer objects you simply extend strange strangeness to everything.
Rather than hampering a theory of withdrawn objects, this performativity positively guarantees it. Nothing is as it seems; there is always an excess of “essence” not exhausted in manifestation.