Meta Erasure

I was reading Derrida, it made me think of my sexuality, and lesbianism, and the deep fake images of me, that in those images, are made signs, of how lesbianism will be regarded in a new, meta sexuality ie. it’s erasure as a form of genuine female sexuality.

I’ve come to regard my sexuality as essential to my humanity. As a lesbian woman, I have learnt that the constant attacks made on my right to identify as I am, a lesbian – from whatever angle, from whomever, undermines, and are an attack on my humanity.

On reading Derrida’s Differance, I came to Saussure’s idea that a sign can both represent and/or replace that which it signifies.

According to Derrida, a sign is not sufficient in itself but only makes sense in a “chain” of other signs, a kind of map, linking it into a picture, where it can be placed and pinned down as part of the human world.

It follows that if a sign can replace that which it signifies, the chain is then made up of the replacement, and not the thing signified. The chain, therefore, establishes a meta level, a human world wherein signs can be transformed to represent something other than the original.

Deep fake replaces me as a lesbian. By using my image and manipulating it into a sexual fantasy not related to my truth, it becomes a sign over me, replacing me. It pins me into that image, another person’s avatar of me. My image is presented heterosexual or deviant, locked into the meta chain of erasure.

As a sign in the landscape of significations, the lesbian in deep fake becomes her non-lesbian sign, the chain her erased voice. Lesbianism can be erased on a meta level.

Seems obvious, on an aesthetic level. But it has been the history of the replacement of goddesses by gods, and the consequences today are as huge.

In a replaced chain of significations – locked into meta sexuality – the basic power of an individual woman to identify as a lesbian is removed from her.

From removal of agency in cyberspace to the removal of truth in social spaces, we witness the public “debate” about my own sexuality. Their inhumane application and implications for the future of lesbianism.

That is, meta sexuality and the meta level, in general, are constructs combining into a chained landscape, locking out appeals to our humaneness, shaping us into a future new reality.

Deep fake takes my own sexuality and replaces it with a different sexuality. Thus removing me from my own situatedness as a lesbian in this world. And hence, my natural humanity.

The consequence of meta sexuality is that: it establishes the effacement of lesbianism from society on a meta level as an embodied, genuine form of female sexual expression.