Existential Dysphoria, Gender, and Extinction: An Infrapolitical Reflection on 20.000 especies de abejas

Abstract

What is the relationship between gender difference, its dysphorias, and the growing threat of human extinction? The film 20.000 especies de abejas (20,000 Species of Bees) by the Spanish-Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren (2023) dwells into this overwhelming question by portraying the life of Aitor-Cocó-Lucía, an 8-year-old whose coming of age gravitates between 1) the politics of gender (of identity, convention, tradition, and the phallologocentrism of the subject) and 2) the desistance, distance, and infrapolitical inscription that they (Cocó-Aitor-Lucía) are experiencing in their gender transition as they face the politics of binarism and subject identity. Through a filmic analysis of the child’s unease in an era of decontainment and turmoil, this article argues that their gender transition, in its secret and everyday unfolding, constitutes an existential decision. This existential decision to transform themselves through re-naming affirms the untamable diversity of the human condition: it presents the human as a species that is not above other species. Beneath all the above, however, there is an infrapolitical register signing at an ominous truth: that no identity, human inclusion, nor sheer multi-species affect can save the human from the mass extinction announced by the Anthropocene–and it is coming at us at full speed.