Becoming-Liminal

Abstract

The distinction between becoming-woman and becoming-liminal is at once significant (the former specifically addressing gender binaries, the latter being indicative of a central quality of the more general becoming) and negligible in that one implies the other; they both presuppose the deterritorialization of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “molar” as opposed to a molecular “entity” (1987, 275). One shifts from a normative point into the space and time of the marginal, the opposed. “It is this central Point,” they argue, that “moves across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition” that “has the property of organizing binary distributions within the dualism machines, and of reproducing itself in the principal term of the opposition” which “resonates in the central point” (292). But not all space is commandeered. Nor is every opposition predicated on binarism or dualism. Hence a becoming-woman that has nothing to do with “imitating or assuming the female form” and “[emits] particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman” (275). “Movement and rest,” the flux of a self-in-process— molecularity opposes the centrality of the “Point” that defines itself and its position in contrast to all that is other, but it does so without the constraints of a self-imposed codification.