A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics

TLDR: The Body without Organs (BwO) project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus as discussed by the authors is an attempt to denaturalize the human body and to place it in direct relations with the flows or particles of other bodies or entities.

Abstract: This chapter deals with critical feminist judgment in order to "enter into" the project articulated in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. It explores how this text might possibly be used by and for feminist theoretical projects, which involves some commitment to their overarching framework, basic presuppositions, and central concepts. Deleuze and Guattari's work raises a number of crucial questions about the political investments of specific positions within feminism—liberal, Marxist, and socialist forms—which can be seen to participate in a molarization, a process of reterritorialization, a sedimentation of women's possibilities of becoming. The chapter focuses on a relatively small cluster of concepts that may overlap with feminist interests: the notions of rhizome, assemblage, machine, desire, multiplicity, becoming, and the Body without Organs (BwO). Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the BwO constitutes their attempt both to denaturalize the human body and to place it in direct relations with the flows or particles of other bodies or entities.