Although all becomings are already molecular, including becoming-woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings. When the man of war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides as a girl, it is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide, to camouflage oneself, is a warrior function, and the line of flight attracts the enemy, traverses something and puts what it traverses to flight; the warrior arises in the infinity of a line of flight. Although the femininity of the man of war is not accidental, it should not be thought of as structural, or regulated by a correspondence of relations. It is difficult to see how the correspondence between the two relations "man-war" and "woman-marriage" could entail an equivalence between the warrior and the girl as a woman who refuses to marry. It is just as difficult to see how the general bisexuality, or even homosexuality, of military societies could explain this phenomenon, which is no more imitative than it is structural, representing instead an essential anomie of the man of war.
The rites of transvestism or female impersonation in primitive societies in which a man becomes a woman are not explainable by a social organization that places the given relations in correspondence, or by a psychic organization that makes the woman desire to become a man just as the man desires to become a woman. Social structure and psychic identification leave too many special factors unaccounted for: the linkage, unleashing, and communication of the becomings triggered by the transvestite; the power (puissance) of the resultant becoming-animal; and above all the participation of these becomings in a specific war machine.
— Deleuze & Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus, 1987
A social contagion can become cover for a strategic operation. It is a tactic that is older than the Bible.
If one can derail a man's most primal desires towards something absurd, couldn't you reroute it for a more strategic purpose?
— Deleuze & Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus, 1987
A social contagion can become cover for a strategic operation. It is a tactic that is older than the Bible.
If one can derail a man's most primal desires towards something absurd, couldn't you reroute it for a more strategic purpose?