ABSTRACT
Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies” follows a protagonist who, as the result of a time-travel paradox, is his own mother, father, and child. After discovering that they are intersex and undergoing sexual reassignment surgery, Jane takes the name John and is recruited as a time-travelling detective. On a journey to the past, John meets Jane (his old self) and their romance brings forth a child: a baby that will be taken into the past and grow up to become Jane. The notion of one’s actions being pre-determined through such a paradox, and yet also being the result of one’s own future decisions, complicates the idea of free will, particularly in the dystopian world which John/Jane inhabits.
The philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes socio-political apparatuses as paradigms which consist of opposing elements—gender can be seen as one of these where the opposition is between male and female. As Agamben argues in The Use of Bodies, categories blur into each other and become indistinct: one such site of indifference is the human body and who makes use of it: “the . . . ‘use of the body’ represents a point of indifference not only between subjective genitive and objective genitive but also between one’s own body and that of another”. Traditionally, men make use of women’s bodies for sexual pleasure and reproduction: women are objects used by male subjects. Heinlein’s time-travelling, intersex, self-producing protagonist complicates the binary relationship between male and female by placing both categories within the same body. Ultimately, through Jane/John, the subject and the object are one and therefore the traditional relationship between user and used is complicated.
