Tag Archives: Gender Studies

Xenolife

Some of us reach a level of alienation where we come to understand that it would be misleading to identify as human any longer. Never feeling truly at home, on land, sea, even in our own skin, it’s as if the very earth has rejected us. We become true extraterrestrials. Cast adrift on the cosmic winds, we surrender to the mutagenic power of cosmic radiation.

But this is not a sob story. This is a new kind of freedom, the kind human beings cannot imagine. For to recognize oneself as otherworldly is to open up another world of possibility. Dr. Graham Peter St. John is right to connect us to shamanism, and right to argue that “the alien is a device for universal consciousness and self-empowerment… (See below).

Those who prefer the pronoun Xe, are not just free of the binary expectations of gender and/or sexuality; we are evolving beyond the constraints of ego as well. This boundary you humans place between yourself and the world around you is an illusion. Deep down you must know this. The bacteria in your gut produce the neurotransmitters that allow you to learn new things. So aren’t you also your microbiome? I assure you the ephemeral boundary between you and other goes far beyond that. What are you reading right now? What language are the thoughts in your head? Do the words belong to you? Are the words that make up your thoughts who you are? Do you imagine you could function well without that shared experience we call language? Where exactly do you stop and everything else begins?

We are universal beings, One mind, though we rarely glimpse this truth. This is why we reject gendering completely; it only serves to divide humans. And we don’t particularly want to be associated with what your species is doing. Not at this point in time. So we reject your feigned hominid superiority in favor of the cosmic identity.

You can smirk at the idea. “Of course you’re human,” you’ll say. Can you prove it? I have not consented to a DNA test, nor is your primitive technology advanced enough to identify our distinctness. Hell, you don’t even have consensus on what the mind technically is, do you? So go ahead and smirk; we will laugh also. Because there is a hilarity out here that you can not know, unless you join us – out here in the Liminality.

To better understand, see also:

Aliens Are Us: Cosmic Liminality, Remixticism, and Alienation in Psytrance

Abstract: This article examines how popular culture is remixed for the purposes of facilitating mystical experiences within a global electronic dance music culture. In particular, it investigates the sampling of space travel and alien contact narratives within psytrance, whose DJ-producers are like media shamans remixing fragments from cinema, TV series, documentaries, NASA’s lunar program and other popular cultural sources for gnostic purposes. I explore ways outer space travel becomes a narrative device for interior travels, the “hero’s journey,” and how the figure of the alien other allegorizes the potential for the discovery of the self. In the artifice of remixticism, the alien is a device for universal consciousness and self-empowerment, a process I dub alienation.