“Neutrality is the final disguise of power. The penultimate was common sense.”
— An unauthorised author

“This is not a pipe. This is a moustache.”
— Anonymous non-binary figure

Opening Note (or Advance Warning with a Crooked Smile)

This text does not intend to please, correct, preach or reconcile.
Much less to be neutral. Neutrality, in fact, is precisely what this text disassembles — with a smile and a stroke of metaphysical mascara.

If you’re looking for a statement of intent, perhaps you can settle for this:
the only thing respected here is thought that bites — even if it bites the hand that writes it.

The Pink Panther, the Little Man and the Ghost of Patriarchy is a small philosophical fable animated by desire, irony and discomfort.
It is written with the body — and with the suspicion that all bodies are, ultimately, temporary devices of language.

If at any point you feel offended, it’s not personal.
It’s structural.

This text is queer, but not militant.
It is antinormative, but not purist.
It is filthy, tender, jittery — and perhaps it longs for the very thing patriarchy pretends to fear: to be penetrated by what it cannot understand.

If you smile halfway through, good.
If you laugh at yourself, even better.
If you can’t decide how you feel — then the text has done its job.

Welcome.

Scene One: Silence and the Folder

On the flat screen where nothing is real but everything is obvious, the Pink Panther walks with the elegance of someone who never asked for permission. She does not speak, does not explain, does not represent anyone. She moves between categories like someone changing silk shirts. Today she’s masculine, tomorrow she’s an animal, the next day — nothing at all. She isn’t queer because she doesn’t need to be — she’s simply too incorrect for any prefix.

Enter the Little Man. Hat, moustache, and a folder full of normative paperwork. He brings manuals, codes, didactic regulations and a kind of symbolic authority inherited from centuries of pale pedagogy. He has good manners, good intentions, and a certain air of someone unaware of being comical. He asks the Panther to stop. To state her name. To identify herself. To normalise her disruptive behaviour in the name of productive coexistence.

The Panther removes his hat, juggles it, and disappears through a trapdoor. She returns, dressed as a substitute teacher.

* 

It’s always the same: the Little Man embodies the neutral professor — that mythological being who, allegedly, still believes in objectivity, horizontal pedagogy, and ethical clarity in the times of post-everything. He is white, male, heterosexual and… kind. He’s never offended anyone. But for some reason, his mere presence causes hives in students from geographies where authority already smells like tear gas. Is it his fault? No.
Is it not his fault? Entirely.

Perhaps because the Little Man believes himself to be a reasonable man. And as Roland Barthes has shown us, the reasonable man is the greatest symbolic threat of the 20th century — and all signs suggest he remains so in the 21st. He is the one who, even after death, persists. He speaks with the voice of neutrality, but it’s always the echo of a code: I speak this way because this is how one should speak. He teaches because it’s always been done this way. He corrects with gentleness. He accepts difference — as long as it doesn’t challenge him.

*

The Panther, of course, challenges. Not because she’s militant — but because she insists on existing outside the code. For Judith Butler, that is more dangerous than armed revolution: it is radical performativity, parody of the norm. A body that does not explain itself, but persists, is more scandalous than any fiery speech.

And perhaps that’s why non-binary students recognise her as a silent ally. The Panther doesn’t demand space — she occupies it, with insolent elegance. She does not demand recognition — she disfigures the very place where authority tries to settle.

The Little Man, poor thing, doesn’t know how to react. He’s read Foucault, watched Judith Butler documentaries, has a Mastodon account, and has corrected pronouns in public. But something in his body, in his voice, in the way he enters the classroom with a folder… betrays the ghost he carries: the old patriarchy, now disguised as an “empathetic educator”.

It’s not him — it’s what he represents.
And that is unforgivable.

The Didactics of Deviance

Class should have started ten minutes ago. The Little Man adjusts his papers, wipes his glasses, prepares the slides. He’s organised the session meticulously: clear objectives, up-to-date references, openness to discussion. Everything is ready for teaching — and, who knows, for learning too, since he is a modern man.

But something feels off. The room doesn’t listen. There is no hostility — only a subtle indifference. A kind of surplus silence, as if the code of authority had already been broken, but no one bothered to inform him.

At the back of the room, the Panther sharpens her claws with a compass. She now wears a lilac blazer and thick-rimmed glasses. She does not speak. She does not protest. She simply exists — and that’s enough to interrupt the spectacle of normalcy.

The Little Man tries to regain the thread. He speaks of critical design, of relational pedagogy, of Donna Haraway. He quotes Mark Fisher with reverence. But the Panther, with the smallest of gestures, turns everything into farce. A pencil spinning between fingers, a leg crossed at an inappropriate angle, a gaze that is neither confrontation nor acceptance — just pure performative refusal.

That’s when we realise: the Panther’s gesture is useless — and therefore unbearable.

Jack Halberstam would call it the queer art of failure: failing as a refusal of normativity, as aesthetic sabotage. Vilém Flusser, perhaps, would see in her the pure technical gesture — separated from function, returned to its absurd dance.
The Panther does not want to change the system.
She wants to bore it to exhaustion.

*

The Little Man tries to be inclusive. He opens space for questions. He smiles with effort. He uses gender-neutral language with near-clinical caution. But his body speaks louder than his pronouns. He is the structure — even if it is collapsing from within.

He’s what David Graeber might call an “affective bureaucrat”: someone managing emotions in a dead system, trying to appear alive.
His carefully constructed neutrality no longer convinces.
He’s a pleasant statue in a garden where only panthers grow.

*

At that moment, the Panther rises. She picks up a sign-in sheet and folds it into origami. Hands it to the Little Man with an ambiguous bow. Leaves the room walking backwards, gliding. No confrontation, no drama. Just a gesture that cancels the logic of evaluation, productivity, and progressive pedagogy.

The Little Man is left there. Alone. Surrounded by good intentions and empty chairs.

The Displaced Observer

I was there.

Not in the centre of the room — not even to the side. A bit removed, maybe leaning against an imaginary wall, where the projected figures were already losing their sharpness. I watched the scene like someone observing the theatre of a civilisation in intimate collapse. I didn’t applaud. I didn’t protest. I simply took note — with a certain fascination and a certain fatigue — of what was unfolding before me.

I didn’t identify with the Little Man, although I know the weight of his folder by heart. I’m not, and don’t intend to be, the Panther either. I lack the body. Or worse: I have too much awareness.
And awareness, as we know, destroys any gesture before it happens.

There, in the midst of the impasse, I realised that what was being contested wasn’t a lesson, nor a symbolic territory, nor even a model of coexistence. What was at stake was the very idea of potency — what Giorgio Agamben defines as “the capacity to not-act.” The Panther, by refusing to represent, to teach, to be translated, was not failing: she was preserving her potency.
The Little Man, by contrast, sacrificed everything in the name of form. He is the man who only knows how to exist by fulfilling what is expected of him.

But I — I was in-between. Between gesture and suspension. Between authority and its evaporation. A man who no longer believes in neutrality, but is not seduced by any new morality either. A ghost drifting among the ruins of progressive pedagogy, with traces of chalk still on his fingers, waiting for someone to finally say:
“there’s nothing left to teach.”

*

Agamben says that “every apparatus is that which separates human beings from their potential.” The classroom, perhaps, is the last great modern apparatus — the one where people still believe something can be taught, transmitted, regulated.

But what happens when potency no longer wishes to be actualised?
When the most radical act is simply not stepping onto the stage?

The Panther understands this. She does not oppose power — she renders it irrelevant.
The Little Man doesn’t understand this. And so he stumbles, again and again, on an empty stage.

And me?
I take notes.
I write these lines not as someone who tries to explain, but as someone who collects the remains of an extinct form.
The form of the teacher.
Of the man.
Of the neutral.

*

If there is any hope left, it is not in overcoming — but in shared failure.
In the uselessness that insists.
In the potency that refuses to be morally castrated by either side — the old or the new.

Post-Credit Scene: The Desire of the Rule

Fade in.
Empty room.
In the centre, the Little Man’s folder lies open, filled with papers that no longer say anything. In the background, a voice — maybe offscreen, maybe mine, maybe yours — murmurs as if confessing or fabricating:

“What if the norm no longer knows who it’s speaking to?
What if it can’t conjugate the right pronoun —
not out of disrespect, but vertigo?
What if the norm, tired of being a norm, longs to be violated?
What if patriarchy, instead of dominating, simply asks —
with unbearable humility — to be tied up and spat upon with rules?”

Pause.

Or, to put it with the precision of a legitimate provocation:
What if patriarchy likes getting fucked in the ass?

Not as grotesque metaphor, but as a libidinal, philosophical, and perfectly plausible hypothesis.
Perhaps the empire of form secretly longs to be penetrated by what it cannot name.

Silence.

“What if power is no longer hard, but soft?
If authority is passive,
and begs, with a trembling voice:
‘Make me feel what it’s like not to know who I am.’”

The Panther listens, but doesn’t respond.
She’s painting her nails with invisible polish.

*

The provocation is necessary — and wildly fertile.
We enter a terrain that many avoid: the internal contradiction of normativity, where rules no longer guarantee recognition, and where patriarchy itself may crave being transgressed from within.
This is not just inversion. It’s libido-collapse.

It’s a proper theoretical orgy: Barthes, Preciado, Bataille and Lacan dancing in a brothel of saturated semantics, where power no longer knows whether it’s fucking or being fucked, whether it governs or begs for discipline.
And maybe, in the background, Cesariny is laughing, as Pessoa’s heteronyms penetrate one another with metaphysical indignation and paper-hard lust.

After all, what is the norm if not a masochistic apparatus awaiting subversion?
And what is the transgressive gesture if not the staging of a rule that secretly desires it?

*

Normativity no longer imposes.
It pleads.

“Tell me I am nothing.
Give me a name I can’t pronounce.
Twist me until I come laughing at my own structure.”

Cut to black.
Fade to pink.

THE END.