Ann Pellegrini

“Oh, what a beautiful mornin’! / Oh, what a beautiful day! / I’ve got a beautiful feelin’ / Ev’rythin’s goin’ my way.” These lines are from the opening moments of Oklahoma, the 1943 musical that is widely credited as the founding example of the complete “book musical.” Now, I would like to focus my entire blog post on this musical and its liberal fable of democratic harmony bursting forth amidst social differences. Can the cowman and the farmer be friends? Yes, they can! Alas, we cannot always get or do what we want, whether in the classroom, blogs, or elsewhere. So, instead I will focus my brief remarks on something else, albeit something not unrelated to a certain fable of democratic belonging: namely, the fantasy of beautiful feelings and everything goin’ my way. This fantasy is foundational to neoliberalism and its immiserations. Speaking and, perhaps, singing along with Lauren Berlant, I would even suggest that Oklahoma, although it pre-dates neoliberalism, is one of the soundtracks of “cruel optimism.”

Trigger warnings are alarm codes of neoliberalism. Right now the demand for trigger warnings is a student-led movement that has prompted impassioned debates at numerous colleges and universities (not to mention across the blogosphere) as well as exasperated, and predictably cherchez la feministe, coverage in The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets. To date, no U.S. university has mandated trigger warnings as a matter of university policy. In her contribution to this forum, Lisa Duggan importantly distinguishes between politics and policy and cautions about what happens when the former get taken up by university administrations and turned into enforcement measures disconnected from original on-the-ground debates and animating politics. Trigger warnings may promise students safety, but, as an administrative and enforceable policy, they will in fact serve to indemnify universities while putting some faculty at heightened risk for sanction and, even, firing.

As has been pointed out by Elizabeth Freeman, Brian Herrera, Nat Hurley, Homay King, Dana Luciano, Dana Seitler, and Patricia White, in a jointly written essay on “Why Trigger Warnings Are Flawed”:

Faculty of color, queer faculty, and faculty teaching in gender/sexuality studies, critical race theory, and the visual/performing arts will likely be disproportionate targets of student complaints about triggering, as the material these faculty members teach is by its nature unsettling and often feels immediate.

Untenured and non-tenure-track faculty will feel the least freedom to include complex, potentially disturbing materials on their syllabuses even when these materials may well serve good pedagogical aims, and will be most vulnerable to institutional censure for doing so.

Ironically, then, an unintended but entirely predictable effect of trigger warnings is to intensify the precariousness of precisely those faculty who are most likely to empathize with student concerns about the violence and traumatic afterlife of homophobia, misogyny, racism, transphobia, and the like.

The admirable goal behind student initiatives for trigger warnings is to create more breathing room in the classroom and minimize students’ pain. In practice, though, trigger warnings too easily become yet another disciplinary mechanism that the corporate university can use to promote consumer (and donor) satisfaction as the highest good. Forms of neoliberal value$ ultimately do little to nothing to look after the well-being of individual students or make structural changes that would ameliorate, let alone prevent, suffering. Instead, we get a rhetoric of “zero tolerance” for rape and sexual assault (which sure makes me feel better) and calls for “civility,” “tolerance,” and “respect” as the conditions of possibility for the flourishing of a university community. That word “community” makes me wanna run for the hills, but not in a Sound of Music kinda way.

We’ve seen a version of this discipline and punish in the highly publicized “un-hiring” of Professor Steven Salaita by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a decision made at the highest level of the Illinois system. The U of I Chancellor Phyllis Wise justified her decision to rescind the offer of tenure made to Salaita in the name of protecting students from “personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. We have a particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but that also respects their rights as individuals.”

As John K. Wilson points out on The Academe Blog, this is a bizarre statement: do viewpoints have feelings or some inner personality that can be demeaned? Chancellor Wise’s last name would be risible if the joke weren’t so serious for Salaita and his family first and foremost, but for educators and students across the country as well. The bright line the Chancellor wants to draw between classroom content that challenges a students’ assumptions and “respect” for students’ “rights as individuals” cannot hold. By Chancellor Wise’s un-wise logic, an Evangelical student who objected on religious grounds to the teaching of evolution could cry foul in a biology class. For such a student, the teaching of evolution might be experienced as profoundly “disrespectful” to his or her rights as an individual. And that student could even appeal to a rights-based discourse – religious liberty — to legitimate the grievance.

There is a dangerous collapse going on here, and one that refortifies feelings as facts and reduces education and politics, as well, to a matter of feelings. Hurt feelings are to be avoided; good feelings (and satisfied consumer-citizens) are to be maximized. The good feelings of some citizens, that is. U.S. history is replete with examples of laws and policies arranged to optimize the comfort of the majority, at the expense of minoritized subjects.

But disagreement and difference are not obstacles to our ability to share the world with others; they are its necessary conditions, even its psychic and, perhaps even, physio-psychic starting points. Thus, we might do well to distinguish, as the Chancellor does not, between feeling personally “abused” and being personally demeaned and abused. Personally, I think exposing students to quote unquote objectionable viewpoints — and being exposed to them myself, as a teacher — may be one of the goals of a university education.

In calling for the classroom to be a “safe space,” the movement for trigger warnings ends up closing down one of the crucial places where students (and teachers, too) can experiment having and surviving the hurt feelings that may result from differences in viewpoints and differences in moral values. Learning that disagreement does not kill you — and that you need not kill someone who disagrees with you — could even be considered a kind of laboratory in democratic social relations. How do we make the classroom a place simultaneously of safety and risk? Call it the “safe-enough” classroom, a place where — as Audre Lorde once wrote about the “uses of anger” — we can “listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying.”

This distinction between content and manner of saying and hearing (what we could also call affective delivery and affective uptake) is crucial if we are to avoid the collapse of feelings and facts. When feelings become facts, it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish between, say, feelings of unfairness and practices of unfairness. If you belong to a group that has traditionally enjoyed unquestioned social dominance, any expansion of fairness for historically marginalized groups — such as people of color, LGBT people, and non-Christians — might feel like a loss, might feel “unfair,” when your taken-for-granted social privileges and legal position are suddenly challenged. In contrast, legally protected discrimination not only feels unfair; it is.

Distinguishing feelings from facts — even as we also see how they become braided together — requires stepping back from the personal or, put another way, stepping differently in relation to it. When someone says something racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic, let’s put some air in the room and say: what you said is racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic, not you are. What a world of difference exists between these two formulations. I suggest this rewording not simply because it might make it easier for people to take the risk of not-knowing with each other and with themselves, but because the capacity to analyze and alter the embedded structures that reproduce social inequalities and sometimes murderous violence require precisely this separation. Let me also make clear that this proposed shift away from criticizing who someone “is” to what someone said or did (and saying is a powerful form of doing) is not a call to spare the anger or avoid hurt feelings. Both are an unavoidable feature of our lives with others.

It may be that part of what drives the movement for “trigger warnings” on college campuses is a desire for some place safe and beautifully secure from the multiple precarities of our age as well as from the internal contradictions that ever haunt the self. That the campus is imagined as a safe zone is a painful paradox given the astonishing debt load so many of our students are taking on – are mortgaging their futures to – in order to be in our classrooms in the first place.

In a context of precarity, many students ask, not unreasonably, for care. What does a pedagogy of care look and, crucially, feel like? I do not have a settled answer to this question, but I want to raise it both as shared challenge and as call to listen between the lines to what some (many? most?) students are asking for when they ask for advanced notice about texts or other class content that might upset them. I do not provide such warnings in my own classrooms, but I do try to take care. Offer care. Practices of care and caring are not strangers to the classroom, even as such practices will not and cannot feel like the practices of care on offer in a therapy session.

I will leave it to Avgi Saketopoulou, in her forthcoming addition to this forum, to say more about these crucial differences between classroom and consulting room. I’ll say only this: All the participants in this BullyBlogger forum on trigger warnings teach classes and/or do research that frontally engage questions of social injustice and suffering, the ravages of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Our students care about these issues, and so do we. Their political concerns and their personal histories inform how they read a given text or interpret a given image. This is part of the back-story of our academic passions, too. Maybe reading always begins from the standpoint of a certain “coloniality of the present,” to use Jack Halberstam’s phrase, in which we project ourselves and our desires backwards in time or into a particular text or film. Nevertheless, even if engagement starts from such self-interested projections, it cannot stop there. Texts are not our mirrors, and, arguably, one of the critical pedagogic tasks is to widen the circle of care beyond the self as origin or destination. “One writes,” Foucault once said, “in order to become other than what one is.” This seems a good model for reading and teaching, too. Who knows, but becoming other to oneself or, at least, to the self you thought you were and had to be is something the classroom might even share with the therapist’s consulting room. And that truly might be worth singing about.

Avgi Saketopoulou

Let me start by situating myself. My background is in the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, not in the academy. Much of my work revolves around the treatment of trauma. Over the years I have seen traumatized patients in outpatient and inpatient settings and I have worked with political asylum seekers in the court and immigration systems. In my private practice I regularly treat patients who have suffered from systemic and non-systemic forms of neglect as well as from physical, sexual and emotional violence. While I work with academics and students –and as such, the debate and range of feelings about trigger warnings have inevitably poured into my office- I do not have direct experience with how these matters play out in the classroom per se.

What I can offer, however, is a set of psychoanalytically informed reflections on traumatic experience, memory and safety. Highlighting trauma’s intrapsychic and unconscious dimensions I discuss how our relationships to trauma, our own and others’, are vexed and conflicted, underwritten by both horrified fascination and excited repulsion. Further, I suggest that when the particular kind of anxiety that gets aroused to protect from further traumatization (signal anxiety) is responded to by avoidance, trauma becomes ossified. This ossification runs the risk of short-circuiting the process by which a political and social consciousness is formed. Last, I propose that the hope that one can be spared from traumatic recollection draws heavily on the fantasy of a receptive and caring other who is capable of offering this kind of protection. And I explain how that fantasy entails the unintended erasure of that person’s complex subjectivity.

Trauma both compromises and constitutes us

As a psychoanalyst I am trained to attend not only to what people say about their experience, but also to how they act and what they do with their affect. So this summer, when Jack Halberstam’s post originally hit the web and the avalanche of responses to it started appearing on my facebook newsfeed, what drove home for me that we were in the territory of trauma was less the content of what was being talked about than the nature and pace of the discourse. Its affective tone was heated, it sizzled with an excited agitation as more and more bloggers joined in to defend, to vilify, to call for recognition, to critique, to amplify, to apologize, to acknowledge, to condemn. With each voice added to the chorus came the thrill of highly charged affect states, the flow of manic intensity and phobic excitement that is fueled by the vitality of pain and of anguish. Issuing from the maelstrom of this un-metabolizable affective excess the back and forth of the exchange escalated into a state of contagious urgency. This is the territory of trauma: it comes with a certain kind of high-voltage jouissance, a frightening and vertiginous bliss that is painful yet irresistible.

Trauma has an adhesive quality that furnishes it with its tenacious complexity. That it both makes us and breaks us is one of its most potent mindfucks: against our consent and despite our protests trauma does more than compromise us. It also constitutes us. And in doing both, it also further rattles and perturbs us. This is one of the most tragic but also poignant dimensions of traumatic experience: it enters and instantly colonizes us such that what has invaded us from the outside mates with who we are, with the past and with memory, ultimately becoming part of our very subjectivity. Even when it materializes in the highly permeable, unsteady border between the intrapsychic and the social -as, for example, when it arises from structural systems of injustice and oppression- trauma becomes an internal dictator. We don’t live trauma. Trauma lives us. Trauma lives us ardently and against our consent. And however much we work through it, trauma always marks us. Of course the degree to which we are marked by it varies as does the extent to which we are able to manage its affective and embodied residues. Indeed, it is thus that we may become capable of living, actually of even living well. But even in the best of cases, our traumata never quite leave us alone.

Trauma and signal anxiety

As an actual experience of helplessness, trauma is that which overwhelms the ego’s capacity to cope. For Freud, a traumatic situation arises when a subject estimates how her ‘own strength compare[s] to the magnitude of the danger and [when it culminates] in [her] admission of helplessness in the face of it’ (1926, p. 166). That ‘admission’ is tormenting, laced with anguish. For someone who has already been traumatized there is an advantage in being able to ‘foresee and expect a traumatic situation … instead of simply waiting for it to happen [again]’ (Freud 1926, p. 166).

This frightened anticipation of a danger-situation produces a particular kind of anxiety that Freud called signal anxiety. Signal anxiety is a very complicated phenomenon because inasmuch as it is preoccupied with expectation, it concerns itself with the future. It draws on memory and on the recollection of an event that has occurred out there in the past and it aims to prepare us in here for the future by mobilizing us right now, in the present. If trauma is injury, signal anxiety is the state of preparedness anticipating that more injury is to come (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1987).

The term signal, however, can be misleading: the phenomenology of signal anxiety is not that of a benign warning sign but it is, oftentimes, a paralyzing, overwhelming cascade of emotional and physiological responses commensurate not with the anticipation of danger but with the experience of the danger itself. It can lead to symptom formation (e.g. anxiety attacks, phobias, psychosomatic phenomena) whose links to the traumatic experience are neither linear nor easily detectable because by nature signal anxiety is unconscious. We experience and observe its effects but its causes and ties to history are not always discernible or even expectable. Because of that, we are often surprised by what it is that arouses our traumatic response. Because of that, we become jarringly and unexpectedly flooded with overwhelming mnemic traces. Paradoxically then, in the attempt to protect from further trauma signal anxiety may birth symptoms that are tormenting in their own right and which may even reproduce some of trauma’s effects. In that sense, signal anxiety can do more than warn: it can re-traumatize.

Signal anxiety is one of the traumatic sequelae from which one seeks immunity when anticipating being exposed to triggering material. Of course what will be triggering or not is impossible to predict because the particular mnemonic ties established between the traumatic event and its registration are quite unforeseeable: a song playing in the background, a visual pattern on the ceiling, the odor of sizzling onions in the kitchen. Not only can these signals not be anticipated and reliably protected against but also, to the extent that protective measures may ironically themselves endanger traumatic reactions, re-traumatization may at times be inevitable. The degree and depth of re-traumatization varies across situations and individuals but, the more widespread the original source of trauma is, as in structural inequalities that generate traumatic experience, the more likely it is to be encountered often and unexpectedly. And, as such, the more vigilant the ego needs to become in order to anticipate sources of traumatic re-activation and repetition. This process is nothing short of emotionally exhausting. It requires the subject to remain always on alert, a kind of harsh, watchful posture that ravishes internal resources.

Trigger warnings in that sense aspire not to insulation from trauma itself but from the associated affects linked to its recollection. The classroom is obviously an infinitely complex space within which to negotiate such challenges. It is not a setting that can provide a traumatized subject with the individual attention of having the trauma tended to in the way that it deserves. Professors do not, nor should they be expected to, have the clinical tools with which to help hold some of the epiphenomenal effects of traumatic reactivations. But more importantly, I am feeling skeptical that the kinds of protections trigger warnings might be thought to provide are of the sort that any human being is able to fully extend to a traumatized other. Even in the consulting room when trauma can be explored in a carefully and thoughtfully crafted intersubjective space and worked with in depth, the unbidden is always upon us and traumatic reactivations occur in the most unexpected and unpredictable of ways.

Amidst all this complexity we cannot lose track of the fact that inherent in the call for trigger warnings is the understandable wish to avoid pain. Pain is not always the de facto villain it’s made out to be. Counterintuitive though it may sound, the avoidance of pain oftentimes encysts and calcifies trauma. Think of it as trauma in formaldehyde. Avoidance reinforces and buttresses the experience of helplessness that originates in the traumatic event and which may or not necessarily continue to apply in the present. Avoidance can then generalize to a more overall phobic and timid approach to the world. Even in cases where current conditions are not that different from those of the traumatizing past (think here, for example, of racial trauma) possibilities as to how to respond to traumatic events may fan out into a wider range if one is freer to think and respond in the present. Under the aegis of fear, anxiety does what it’s supposed to do: it can send the traumatized into a state of hyper-arousal.

It is precisely at this point that working with pain rather than against it becomes crucial. Wrestling with that which one cannot manage is how growth happens. It’s not where we feel comfortable and it’s not where we feel safe but it is where we grow. It is in this very activation of signal anxiety that one can become acquainted with trauma, so that they may work through, own, and at times even enlist it.

Art and political activism are the examples par excellence of how pain and trauma can be productively enlisted. Contact with pain can be generative not only on the individual but on the collective level as well because it can become the paradigmatic site for the formation of political consciousness. Pain and disturbance are necessary conditions if we are to exist ethically in a world plagued with injustices and crowded by inequalities. The experience of pain is where one learns that hurt may be experienced internally but it is, oftentimes, not the exclusive property of the person who has been captured and scarred by it. The inadvertent shock of recognition that one’s pain may be the single person manifest of larger social and structural problems may be jarring and disorienting but it is ultimately a critical ingredient to developing a social consciousness. I am not arguing that trauma should not also be respected as perimetered, individual space-but I am saying that the very registration of trauma’s injuries and the ability to reflect through its paralyzing effects, may make it possible for the subject to recognize that trauma is both intimate and, at times, social, emanating from large-scale inequalities and structural coercions. It may make it possible for us to become alert to how the social is always implicated in the sphere of the seemingly private and internal. This recognition can usher in the vital role of collectivity, making community building and activism imaginable. In its best iterations, political consciousness builds its density by borrowing from our most deeply personal experiences. That disturbance is more than a purely cognitive exercise, it is one of veritable and deep pain. To put it differently, anesthetizing oneself to one’s pain is both an individual and social liability.

Safety, idealization and the illusion of a trauma-free zone.

Signal anxiety and traumatic recollection is the affective topography the call for trigger warnings seeks to evade. What is the psychic environment, though, that trigger warnings may be trying to establish? The hope, it seems to me, inherent in the call to trigger warnings is that a safe perimeter may be instituted where the traumatized subject does not have to be constantly on watch, where the rigidity of one’s defensive vigilance may be relaxed so that internal resources may become oriented –in the case of the classroom- towards learning.

There are some important parallels between this wish for safety in the classroom and the kind of safety that patients envision when coming for treatment to a psychoanalyst. So I will start with speaking from my experience of the latter first.

Patients routinely seek psychoanalysis in the hope of finding a safe space. I understand that request in two ways: one is a very particular wish for privacy and confidentiality, for me to not deliberately abuse the power of my position, and to be thoughtfully engaged in how I listen and speak to those who seek my help. There is also, I think, another -oftentimes unconscious- dimension to that request. The plea, as I hear it, is: ‘as I am about to make myself vulnerable to you, promise me you won’t hurt me.’ This is a plea that reverberates across all human relationships but which we don’t often articulate to each other except in the most intimate of circumstances. When patients bring up the idea of a safe space, I can promise to do my best as far as the former is concerned. When it comes to promising that I will not hurt those in my care, however, the matter is infinitely more complicated. Even within the protections of a relationship that is conducted in small doses and with the benefit of reflective intentionality, the establishment of a safe space is, under the best of circumstances, highly dubious. This is not because I would want my patients to feel hurt or because I want to be careless but because any encounter between two human beings carries the potential for injury. If, in fact, the relationship sustains itself long enough, the potential for injury becomes an unintended inevitability. Where trauma has pre-existed, new injuries carry the potential to activate the past by stumbling upon its remnants, and to thus evoke signal anxiety and risk re-traumatization.

In that sense, I find the term safe space problematic. An analyst’s consulting room is never a safe space. It is, in fact, one of the most terrifying places one can find oneself in—sharing with another being our most intimate relationships. Which is why patients are oftentimes terrified to come to treatment in the first place, as well they should be. The most terrible things get (re)visited in an analyst’s office. And yet it is only under the false truth and necessary illusion of safety that patients may make themselves vulnerable in the first place. With time also comes the mourning of the notion that any intersubjective space can ever be fully safe–and eventually the begrudging, always incomplete acceptance of the fact that placing ourselves among others always carries the risk of wound and injury. Knowing that is not merely an intellectual exercise–most of us, after all, ‘know’ that others will hurt us. Knowing it on an emotional level is a hard-won and painful truth.

But there is also another reason why the provision of a safe environment is ultimately an unrealistic goal. There is an unrecognized and thus uncontested premise underlying the idea that a caring and competent caretaking other can ensure our safety. That is the belief that it is within the other’s power to provide the experience of security if only they so decide. And yet, the subject to whom the call for safety is addressed–the analyst and, in the case of the classroom perhaps the professor as well–may also have been impacted by trauma. They, too, would then be subject to its defensive operations and may also be assailed by its unconscious effects. As my own lengthy analysis has revealed to me, I too have my own unconscious, I too act outside of my awareness and, at times, despite my best intentions. My own traumata and anxieties do at times exceed me. Ideally my personal psychoanalysis and my rigorous training help ensure that this happens less frequently to me than it does to my patients and yet it is to some degree inevitable. It is, of course, not my patients’ job or responsibility to bear my trauma or to examine my unconscious. But to the extent that analysis–as in fact, is true of all interpersonal interactions–consists of two subjects with their respective unconscious lives reciprocally impacting each other, it does inevitably become a problem lived out in the dyad. In the consulting room, my patients and I do not bear equal responsibility for that of course. As an analyst, I am ultimately responsible for myself and for my patient. But we do inevitably both have to bear its impact.

While clinical psychoanalysis has taken up this problem and has even come up with ways to address some of it in the treatment room, I suspect that this issue may be far more challenging in the classroom setting. Take, for instance, the example of a trigger warning request issued to a professor who is herself scorched by trauma and whose body may have been breached by violence. To the extent that she is fractured by her own traumatic experience, this professor is subject to the range of defensive maneuvers all subjects unconsciously deploy to manage pain. Defenses of this sort, like dissociation, denial, reaction formation, manic reversals, and so on operate outside awareness and may, despite her best intentions, interfere with her capacity to attend to her students’ requests. What happens to the trigger warnings discourse if we imagine a professor who is constrained by her own traumatic experience? A professor who may be compromised by blindspots unconsciously installed by trauma’s unwavering impact and which will, in turn, curtail her ability to issue a trigger warning?

This may be especially true of the very kind of professor to whom the call for trigger warnings is most routinely addressed. The professor who teaches courses related to social inequalities and institutional oppressions–race, sexuality, ability, gender, class–is perhaps herself more intimately familiar with their impact on her personal life. What are the limits then to how she can respond to the student’s plea for care? What are her duties in communicating those limits to her student after she becomes aware of the scotomas of dissociation? Should space be made for privacy, for the dignity of personal space? Would it be appropriate or even desirable to confess a history of trauma as a way of indicating that it is not for lack of care that the student’s concern could not have been met? And if so, would that not risk reproducing in the student the kind of caretaker/caretakee reversal that is endemic to so much of trauma to begin with?

There is an additional function served by the construal of the other as fully psychically available for this kind of protective work. Imagining an un-traumatized other affectively subsidizes the notion that a trauma-free zone exists. It dreams up, we might say, a caretaking figure that can omnipotently and omnisciently anticipate, attune and respond to the traumatized individual’s needs. I am reminded here of Melanie Klein’s (1940) remarkable insight that, in fact, the more injurious our early experiences with our caretakers have been (and I would add culture here as the ambient traumatizing parent) and the more protracted the trauma experienced in their hands, the more tenaciously one develops the belief that there is indeed out there a receptive mind who can be available to us as a reparative object. As traumatologists have been insisting for a while now, the most deleterious effects of trauma have to do not only with the event itself but, primarily, with the relational failure that permitted the event’s occurrence in the first place. It is the absence of witnessing, the absence of recognizing and acknowledging the injustice that has occurred, that renders trauma impossible to metabolize. This imaginary other can restore both the damage done to us and to our injured belief in humanity. The more hurt we are the more desperately and persistently we look for that idealized object who can attend to and witness our pain.

Fantasies of reparation, especially when underwritten by the fiery synergy of past and present emergencies, can operate with a force that may be experienced as coercive. In their inadvertent erasure of the helper’s subjectivity, the person to whom the call for safety is addressed may begin to feel a sense of discomfort or even of resentment in how the other’s demands for safety obfuscates one’s own complex humanity. Since much of trauma is underwritten, to begin with, by the erasure of the trauma survivor’s subjectivity, the inadvertent reproduction of this erasure may itself activate a cascade of traumatic responses. This may, in turn, ignite in the subject to whom the request for safety is made a defensive attempt to protectively distance oneself from the source of traumatic recollection/reliving. In following the dizzying back and forth of the trigger debate online this summer I, in fact, often wondered whether a dynamic of this sort was at play. Could posts that were read as shaming students for trigger warning requests, as urging them to ‘stop complaining’ or as being ‘overly sensitive, have, on some deeper level, been attempts to distance their authors from the pangs of memory and to wrestle some personal space? Could we construe the conflict that ultimately came to be framed along the lines of ‘academic freedom’ versus ‘safe environment’ as a struggle for autonomy that, in both directions, also ultimately felt negating to both parties’ needs and subjectivities?

Even if my hypothesis is correct, it is important to keep in mind that the request for safety and for recognition is ultimately issued to those who are believed to be most able to bear and witness injury and pain, the ones to whom the traumatized is most intimately attached. Whether this need is or is not possible to meet in the academic setting, it seems important that we do not lose track of the fact that, even from within the maelstrom of the powerful doer-done to dynamics (Benjamin, 2004) which get activated in the course of this debate, students come to the table asking the most of those they trust the most, the ones with whom they feel–and with whom they want to feel–safer. How does one keep in mind the tension between the fact that the most powerful transference magnet for the materialization of those reparative wishes, might after all be subjects who may themselves be the most highly permeable to trauma–the professor whose intellectual commitments lie in areas that take note of and speak back to structural and social inequalities?

Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a NYC based psychoanalyst trained at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. 

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston ON. McKittrick is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006) and the co-editor with 

the late Clyde Woods of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (South End Press, 2007). McKittrick is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology titled Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke UP, 2014). In addition, she is completing a monograph titled Dear Science And/Rejoicing the Black Creative Sciences which is on the promise of science in Black poetry, music and visual art.

In an interview with Peter James Hudson titled “Canada and the Question of Black Geographies,” McKittrick comments on the privilege of presuming or even demanding that the classroom be a safe space. We asked McKittrick if we could post this section of the interview on Bullybloggers as part of our ongoing series on the politics of Trigger Warnings.

The full interview appears in The CLR James Journal Volume 20, Number 1, Fall 2014.

TOWARDS THE END OF THE INTERVIEW, HUDSON ASKS:

PJH: On twitter, you (depressingly, brilliantly) wrote, “I’ve never glimpsed safe teaching (and learning) space. It is a white fantasy that harms.” I’m wonder­ing if you could expand on that as it pertains to the Black student in Canada? How does such a vexed space inform your own pedagogical practice?

KM: Yes. I wonder a lot about why the classroom should be safe. It isn’t safe. I am not sure what safe learning looks like because the kinds of questions that need to be (and are) asked, across a range of disciplines and interdisci­plines, necessarily attend to violence and sadness and the struggle for life. How could teaching narratives of sadness ever, under any circumstances, be safe!? And doubled onto this: which black or other marginalized fac­ulty is safe in the academy, ever? Who are these safe people? Where are they? But there is also, on top of this all, an underlying discourse, one that emerges out of feminism and other “identity” discourses, that assumes that the classroom should be safe. This kind of “safe space” thinking sometimes includes statements on course outlines about respect for diversity and how the class (faculty? students?) will not tolerate inappropriate behavior: rac­ism, homophobia, sexism, ableism. This kind of hate-prevention is a fantasy to me. It is a fantasy that replicates, rather than undoes, systems of injus­tice because it assumes, first, that teaching about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia can be safe (which is an injustice to those who have lived and live injustice!), second, that learning about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia is safe, easy, comfortable, and, third, that silencing and/or removing ‘bad’ and ‘intolerant’ students dismantles systems of injustice. Privileged students leave these safe spaces with transparently knowable op­pressed identities safely tucked in their back pockets and a lesson on how to be aggressively and benevolently silent. The only people harmed in this pro­cess are students of colour, faculty of colour, and those who are the victims of potential yet unspoken intolerance. I call this a white fantasy because, at least for me, only someone with racial privilege would assume that the classroom could be a site of safety! This kind of privileged person sees the classroom as, a priori, safe, and a space that is tainted by dangerous subject matters (race) and unruly (intolerant) students. But the classroom is, as I see it, a colonial site that was, and always has been, engendered by and through violent exclusion! Remember Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy?! How wretched are those daffodils!?! I am not suggesting that the classroom be a location that welcomes violence and hatefulness and racism; I am suggesting that learning and teaching and classrooms are, already, sites of pain. We cannot protect or save ourselves or our students by demanding silence or shaming ignorance or ‘warning’ the class that difficult knowledge is around the corner (as with “trigger” moments—the moment when the course director or teaching as­sistant says: “look out, I need to acknowledge a trigger moment that will make you uncomfortable: we are going to talk about whiteness!”) All of this, too, also recalls the long history of silencing—subalterns not speaking and all of that. Why is silencing, now, something that protects or enables safety? Who does silence protect and who does silence make safe and who does silence erase? Who has the privilege to demand tolerance?

In my teaching, although this is a day-to-day skirmish for me because the site where we begin to teach is already white supremacist, I try very hard to create class­room conversations that work out how knowledge is linked to an ongoing struggle to end violence and that, while racist or homophobic practices are certainly not encouraged or welcome, when they do emerge (because they always do!) we need to situate these practices within the wider context of colonialism and anti-blackness. This is a pedagogy wherein the brutalities of racial violence are not descriptively rehearsed, but always already demand practical activities of resistance, encounter, and anti-colonial thinking.

I was willing to go with the non-trans casting of the excellent Jeffrey Tambor for the role of the father who comes out to his children as a woman later in life. I was willing to overlook the stereotypes of lesbians as domestic snuggle bunnies blissed out on home improvement and less interested in hardcore fucking; I was even willing to tolerate the dweeby brother who, despite being a deeply irritating human being, manages to pick up one interesting lady after another. But the final straw for me, late one night, deep into a binge watching cycle of Transparent, was when Dale, a transman, struggles to get his sex toy out of its child proof packaging in anticipation of hot sex with his fem date, Ali, and then drops his dildo on the floor. In that moment, I felt my faith in the series slipping away as fast as Ali’s desire, and when she turns to leave, giving up for now on the potential of a heated and sexy exchange, turning her back on the fallen Sparkle Unicorn tool, I was ready to go with her. But, like any good binge watcher, I continued watching, being lifted by its high notes, disappointed by its low blows, and somewhat entertained by everything in between.

Transparent, created and directed by Jill Soloway, received much acclaim for its first season. Rolling Stone credited it with “making the world safer for trans people”; Out dubbed it as the first show to properly handle not only transgenderism but also bisexuality; and, The Advocate called Transparent, simply, “great television.” Telling the story of a dysfunctional Jewish family in Los Angeles that falls apart and regroups around the patriarch’s revelation of her desire to live as a woman, Transparent covers a lot of new ground for television. The acting is uniformly great in this show, and its refusal to trade only in positive images of trans people–never mind Jews, lesbians, female rabbis, and butch security guards–makes it a unique media event in the history of queer representation. In a nutshell, the show gets a lot right, but as a footnote, it also makes some rookie mistakes. Now, some four months after its release, after allowing the dust it kicked up to settle a little, let’s reassess the highs and the lows of Transparent.

The Highs

• The Writing – “No one has ever seen me except me” (Maura). The challenge with Transparent lies in its ability to represent a specific trans experience without making it representative of all trans experience. The show manages to convey, with some subtlety, the relief of coming out, the stress of feeling exposed, the sadness of being late to the table. Maura is a multifaceted character and a uniformly talented cast backs her up.With a writing team that includes the great Ali Liebegott and a consultant team that includes Zachary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Transparent made the wise decision to work with trans people’s own narratives rather than to cleave faithfully to Jill Soloway’s autobiographical story. Soloway’s experience with her father’s transition still forms the spine of the piece but it is well rounded out with a clutch of other stories about aging, sexual experimentation, addiction, sibling tension and so on
• The Humor – “Four out of Five Pfeffermans Now Prefer Pussy.” When Ali (Gaby Hoffman) explains to her siblings Josh (Jay Duplass) and Sarah (Amy Landecker) that her date for the “Trans Talent Show” is the handsome trans man across the room (played by Ian Harvie), Josh first struggles to incorporate more new information about gender flexibility and then blurts out the line of the season: “Four out of Five Pfeffermans Now Prefer Pussy.” It is a great line and like much of the humor in the show, perfectly delivered. Eschewing the sit-com laugh-line humor for a more self-deprecating style that mixes defeat and disappointment in healthy doses with wry self-awareness, Transparent actually hits a few new notes for comedy.

• The Acting – Jeffrey Tambor really draws out the fine shading of his character and while the siblings perform their hysteria (Amy Landecker as Sarah), paranoia (Jay Duplass as Josh) and neurosis (Ali) to the tee, some of the best acting falls to the minor characters like Ian Harvie, Judith Light and Carrie Brownstein. Brownstein’s show stealing turn as Ali’s best friend in love with both Ali and embroiled sexually with her brother, was magnificent. And both Harvie and Light are totally convincing and more in their roles.

• The Brutally Realistic Appraisal of the Fucked Up Family: Davina to Maura: “In five years you are gonna look up and none of your family are gonna be there. Not one.” Resisting the Hollywood-ready narrative of the ever-expansive family network that bends and bows to embrace the good and the bad of its flawed members, Transparent is willing to dig into the fragility of family ties. Family, the show reveals, hangs too much upon the pathetic alibi of blood bonds and longevity and these connections, dependent as they are upon custom and routine, cannot incorporate new information well. Family, more often than not, is convenience, parasitism and laziness, a group of people stuck in hell and too idle to leave. And queer community, at least prior to the installation of gay marriage, offered one important alternative to biological bonds. One of the greatest contributions made by Transparent, indeed, lies in its willingness to expose the rotten core of American family life and offer alternatives even if they come in the form of bad sex, infidelity and addiction!

The Lows

The Writing – while mostly I loved the writing, there are numerous missteps. In one episode, for instance, Syd tells Ali she is a “vaginal learner” (huh?), “you have to stick stuff in there to see what it feels like…” And, in another, Sarah asks her ex husband, Len, whether her tits were “too overwhelming” for him. Later, in much telegraphed post-breakup sex, Len tells Sarah that, since she is now with a woman, she must be missing his cock. And so on. These interactions seem to be playing to another audience, a straight audience perhaps, an audience who often has to be instructed in what Len calls “dildo-ology” or in the variations within the category of transsexual. Who can argue with a little pedagogical push, but when push comes to shove, the show seems to orient too much to a straight audience, the one most identified with sleazebag Josh, and most invested in familial stability.

The Pathos – I am all for a little pathos. Hell, I am all for a lot of pathos especially when it is used judiciously to spring a coming out narrative out of the mine field of clichés and to place it in the all too human terrain of loss. But sometimes, Transparent divvies up and distributes the pathos in ways that make it seem like simply part of the terrain of transgenderism. Pathos, we all know, is the foundation of heterosexuality, maybe of all sexuality, but in the show, sometimes, especially in the trans-talent episode, pathos seems to be the hallmark of trans life and this despite the deep and wide and magical archive of queer performance scenes that the producers all participate in and could have drawn upon. Given the incredible contributions to art, film and performance made by Drucker and Ernst and considering the eclectic writing career of Ali Liebegott, there is just no reason that the drag show had to be so bad, so sad, so pitiful.

The Trans Sex Scene

And so, we circle back around to the Sparkle Unicorn in the room, the dildo on the floor, the trans sex scene that never happened. Ian Harvie has answered questions about this scene in various interviews and has insisted, rightly, that the scene must be considered in context. The scene is intercut with a failed sexual interaction between Josh and the female rabbi, Raquel and so the theme of the episode is detumescence. This is all well and good but while Josh simply fails to get it up, Dale cannot handle his dildo, and the banter between Ali and Dale leading up to the failed sex scene is kind of cringe worthy. The “shave-your-pussy” scene just seems like one major buzz kill.

 Ultimately

So, in between the highs, the lows and the lousy, there is much to admire in this new series and while I am still waiting for a dildo-sex scene to rival the one that Kim Peirce shot for The L Word back in 2006, I have faith that the Sparkle Unicorn will survive its fall from grace and return to offer a real lesson in sex, gender creativity and magic.

By Eng-Beng Lim

If only the queer value of a traditional saying, “one man’s trash is another’s treasure” could substitute for the over-earnest, self-same search of gay looking, the online vernacular on m4m ads and dating apps that goes roughly like this, “Good looking masculine guy looking for the same,” might have a different referent. “Trashy looking for the same” just seems so much more interesting. But until then, the erotic prerogatives of this libidinal economy need no justification as a tradition of looking with an established visual vocabulary around what counts as “the look,” who gets to look, and who is put on display.

For the uninitiated, this is the planetary vulgate of white Gaytriarchy-speak with all the contours of liberal consciousness. The search is also a call for a common experience based on the visual logics of the market, private sexual preferences, and swipe-able “likes.” Tinder right, or tinder left, among other interfaces, is its new, fingering practice. What is there not to like? Who doesn’t like stories of beautiful white gay men looking for other beautiful white gay men? Well, such rhetorical questions as a starting point are precisely one of its many problems.

HBO’s original series, Looking, isn’t nearly as completely narcissistic but its romantic conceits navigate the same self-same terrain with the privileged “I” struggling with familiar racial phobias, liberal guilt, and the all-too-human foibles of gay men in San Francisco. There is a certain level of purity about its hegemonic gay vision that expresses itself ever so earnestly in the show, and its singular achievement is the dramatic makeover of white Gaytriarchy-speak into the dulcet tones of homonormative je ne sais quoi. This is perfectly played by lead character, Patrick Murray (Jonathan Groff) whose nerdy sense of wonder at everything, renders a sweet, boyish affect as unthreatening as a bowl of noodles, or a kind of modern day, Castro district Peter Pan.

But Patrick’s day job as a video game designer puts him squarely in the conversation about the city’s “ruthless gentrification” by tech companies, an issue that is heavily sugar-coated by his inter-racial romance with Richie Ventura (Raul Castillo). The gay bar, Esta Noche, in the Mission District, a dive-y latino institution for drag queens, which inaugurated their romance is closed in real life to make way for “another swanky cocktail bar geared toward 20-somethings with disposable income.” The uncanny semblance of Patrick as a representative of that demographic, and his subsequent phobic reactions to Richie’s working class background are all part of the emotional fissures of gentrification.

But the show misses the opportunity to deepen an exploration of their tumultuous relationship through the lens of economic and racial violence. Generating an inter-racial encounter between Patrick and Richie appears to be the limit of its commentary. It turns the story instead into Patrick’s emotional histories involving his privileged upbringing, and his relationship with a persnickety mother. We know, in contrast, nothing about Richie’s background, or for that matter, any of the other characters. If there was any doubt Patrick is the central character of the show, the focus on his family, albeit short, puts that to rest. The show could well be retitled, Looking for Patrick, Looking with Patrick, or Looking like Patrick. He is, shall we say, the new poster child of gaytriarchy’s troubles.

Richie is, in this regard, no more than an emotive emollient or an exotic cipher for Patrick’s superficial psychic pain and class anxieties. His love for Patrick is poignant for its indescribable yearning to enter a world he has uneven or no access, and the show is both frank and brutal about this negative treatment. This makes the normative romantic contrivances of their extended date, lovingly captured in one episode where they become “tourists” in their own city, deeply problematic. It depicts Patrick’s openness to dating someone outside of his race and class as heroic while designating Richie as the good latino boyfriend. But as the show progresses, it is evident Patrick is not even really looking at Richie as a viable option.

In contrast to this slum dating, Patrick and his boss Kevin Matheson (Russell Tovey) have an affair with all the conventional markings of shiny gay desire, including brief sex scenes that invite our pornographic gaze on their bodies of ecstasy amidst material wealth.

The illicit dimensions of professional and emotional crossing in this case (Kevin has a boyfriend) are celebrated as dangerous and exciting, a version of the “good looking, masculine guy looking for the same.” But like the other sex scenes in the show, they are tantalizing snippets that draw on more mainstream imaginations of gay sex. In other words, they are discreet peepholes into gay sex acts, invoking what is deemed improper, including inter-racial threesomes, as a form of excitement. If they also seem readily consumable, it’s for a reason: they show nothing!

Looking is the product of our homonormative times with a sweet, blue-eyed, white gaytriarch bottom as a leading character. If Patrick’s gaze, a throwback to the 90s, is a way of looking, what does this mean for contemporary queer looks in the U.S.? How is it possible we are seeing a lot of different races and cultures but what is solely visible is the pink race of the gay middle class? Is diversity merely a front for the gay’geoisie-mode of living and looking? While Patrick is pondering on his next moves with his set of gay friends on the lookout (also an actual bar in Castro), we might turn to the avenger website, Grindr douchebag, to address the banality of gaytriarchal racism and class entitlement so painfully obvious to everyone except its perpetrators, including those smiling je ne sais quoi lookers so caught up with their own foibles to see what they are doing to their neighbors.

By Lisa Duggan

I’m teaching an introductory undergraduate course in LGBT history and politics this spring, encountering anew the alternating confusion, resistance and delight of students as they start to take in the full implications of the simple claim that gender and sexuality are historically constructed. As they arrive in my classroom, most understand LGBT “identities” as inborn or otherwise fixed; they bring with them an understanding of politics shaped by the marriage equality movement (though some come with versions of radical, genderqueer politics already well developed). They take the ride with me through Freud and Foucault, reading history, anthropology and queer theory texts with eyes wide open, questions flooding the room. It’s always fun to hear them work through ideas that challenge their working assumptions.

But eventually we arrive at an impasse. Having shed notions of biological or psychic fixity, having worked through ideas about historically embedded social and cultural construction, many feel frustrated. They want to know how some of us come to embrace dissident gender and sexual practices, while others do not. They want to know how gender and sexual identities come to feel so real, and for some so innate and fixed. Something is missing: how do we link the historical forces that shape genders and sexualities with lived subjectivities? Queering psychoanalysis goes some way toward addressing these questions, but for students with a keen awareness of transnational and temporal variation, those theories can be too universalizing.

I struggle with ways of addressing these questions, this frustration. Dissident gender and sexual practices and modes of living emerge in specific contexts, there is no way to generalize, to abstract any “cause” beyond local conditions and meanings. For myself, I have come to understand my own “difference” as an exit strategy, more about making an alternative world than about abstract sexual desire or gender identity.

I grew up in the Vortex of Hell, located in the spaces in and between Richmond and Virginia Beach, Virginia. Born in 1954, I first learned about family and the bonds of intimacy from my alcoholic Irish Catholic father and reserved, caustic lapsed southern Baptist mother in a ticky tacky suburban tract house, and from the gleefully sadistic nuns at Star of the Sea elementary school.   My father was intermittently violent, and my mother clinically depressed. The nuns provided a model of alternative, non-family living so horrifying in its manifest meanness that Sister Miriam Patrice effectively controlled us by threatening to make us live with them if we misbehaved. Both settings taught me more about the stoic endurance of church and state approved long-term commitments and the twisted paths of confined desire, than about the vicissitudes of human interdependence and intimacy.

Under the circumstances it was hard to know what to want.

By high school, heterosexual dating looked like a viable exit plan. Though I announced to all assembled in any setting that I would never marry (that path had not worked out well for my mother), I plunged into sex and romance with gusto. My mother interfered at every turn, restricting my choice of boyfriends, policing my attire, telling me my “emotional dependence” on boys was pathetic. Her ambivalence about the actively heterosexual life was palpable. She wanted me to be Mary Tyler Moore of the TV show, a respectably straight and ladylike but largely celibate professional.

Clearly this was the unlived life for which she yearned. Born on a Mississippi dirt farm, raised in poverty and partly in an orphanage, she aspired. Her mother, Golden, shot and killed her own father at the age of eleven to stop him from raping her. She married Claude Green, becoming Golden Green, and considered naming my mother Olive. They settled instead on a made up southern name composed of two aunts’ names, Marinelle. Divorced, remarried, and repeatedly violent toward her step children, Golden was treated with electroshock therapy. My mother and her sister were sent to live with their grandmother on the farm, then left at a southern orphanage (that she referred to as a “boarding school”) for a number of years.

Marinelle Green honed her focused aspirations and planned her escape. With steely determination she put herself through Louisiana State University working as a police reporter on the night beat. But after World War II options for women contracted, she married a Catholic and popped out two infants in quick succession, then found herself trapped by her own adherence to the rules of gendered respectability. Her class aspirations drove her forward then stopped her dead in her tracks, tied to an alcoholic who sold concrete for the mobbed up real estate industry in Virginia Beach. She began to use abstinence as birth control and withdrew into depression. She was personally offended when a highway near her house was named the Powhite Expressway.

Marinelle wanted me to escape. Her plan: I should have no feelings. Because she believed feelings led to heterosexual marriage and childbearing, this plan would keep me from ending up like her. The problem: I wouldn’t cooperate. I was passionate—angry, rebellious, sexual. She was disgusted. A pitched battle raged through my teenage years. She wanted me to stay home, read Victorian novels, and aspire as she had. Instead I hiked my skirt hems and dated a football player. I fucked my boyfriend in the living room and left the condom under the rug—risky behavior before Roe v. Wade in a Catholic household. In hindsight I realized my mother wasn’t all wrong to be worried. I moved out just after high school graduation, and borrowed the money to go to UVa.

There were other people in my childhood world, though I barely noticed. My father had his own backstory of misery and near escape. Born into a long line of Irish alcoholics, his brother poured gasoline on him and set him on fire when he was seven. The charity hospital saved his life with experimental skin grafting techniques. His father beat and humiliated him. His mother died with the delirium tremens in the state mental hospital. He joined the army, natch. My biggest fight with him as a teenager, after a childhood filled with his attacks and creepy sexualized efforts to make up after, featured my sitting in the living room reading The Communist Manifesto and his angry claim to have fought the communists in World War II. I calmly pointed out, as he stood over me swinging his belt, that he had fought with the communists in World War II. This further enraged him, as a historian was born.

After military service and marriage David Duggan went to college on the GI Bill, a psychology major. He then got the job selling concrete and went into and out of employed status with the rhythms of the local real estate economy and his drinking. My mother ridiculed him, he raged. When I engage in a favored practice I call Diagnose That Relative, I label him a narcissist with borderline tendencies. My mother I see as a depressive schizoid. The whole scene was later described by my brother’s social work professor as a “maximally distant” family constellation. That’s one way of putting it. I certainly didn’t learn much about close connection. I learned a lot about how to escape, something everyone in my family set out to do at some point, with disappointing results.

At UVa from 1972 to 1976 I joined a reading group at Black Flag anarchist press and co-founded the Radical Feminist Union. I listened to Joni Mitchell sing “we don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall.” But when my mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 1974, I married my political theory instructor in blue jeans and work shirt in front of a Justice of the Peace who told us the story of Adam’s rib. It wasn’t that I was close to my mother. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a year. But I panicked, unmoored and suspended at the point of free fall. I didn’t yet understand why. I had no clue then that even the most abusive relationships of childhood form our internal worlds and patterns of intimate connection. I knew nothing of complicated grieving. I was a political theory major, though my new husband was training to be a psychoanalyst. I fled into marriage as into a bomb shelter during an air raid.

It lasted longer than one would think—three years. Enough time for the claustrophobia to set in. My husband Richard was a nice guy, fundamentally egalitarian, not in any way a patriarch. But we socialized with other married couples, mostly leftist male grad student instructors and their wives who divided up by gender for conversation and chores, who expected the wives to care for future offspring. A few of the guys cheated and lied to their wives. The other guys knew and kept their secrets. I needed an exit strategy. I followed a butch lesbian librarian named Purple home and crashed her parties. I got stoned and had sex with the bisexual co-founder of the Radical Feminist Union and her girlfriend.

I didn’t come to lesbianism via the standard 1970s coming out narrative. I never experienced a suppressed inner desire for women that finally found expression, both personal and political. I hit on lesbianism as an exit strategy, an escape narrative, a way not to repeat my mother’s life, my own childhood domestic confinement. I experienced gender dysphoria in that femininity felt like a trap, but I liked the clothes a lot. At first I tried the then currently fashionable androgyny, in flannel shirts and boots. But I left my flannel shirts unbuttoned below the décolletage, and felt desire for creatures with many so-called masculine features. I was thrilled to discover that I could find thrillingly sexy masculine partners who could not, or would not, reproduce the gendered norms of domesticity and sociality. I could wear skirts without regrets. In that time and place, queer life appeared to me as a free zone, a place for experimentation and innovation in the forms of gender, intimacy and social life, a landscape for desire as yet uncolonized by the lifelong monogamy of the couple form legally enshrined in wedlock.

Of course this vision was largely a mirage in the desert of my marital confinement. It took me awhile to make a transition to a more complex and less utopian world than I imagined. But still. It was worth the effort. I went to graduate school and followed the first butch I found down the street into a world of ecstasy, possibility and trouble. I never made a monogamous commitment (though I often practiced de facto monogamy) and I never learned to cook. My bonds with friends and comrades defined my life more fundamentally than my sexual or romantic partnerships.

But this is not a story of simple escape from suburban domestic confinement to a utopia of radical politics and queer nirvana. The social and political worlds I inhabited marked my existence with conflict, loss, pain, confusion and profound hurt as fully as with connection and engagement. Any history of this period will elaborate. I understand my own path, not as a kind of pilgrim’s progress, but as a trajectory shaped by my childhood, my race, gender and class, and the time and places that I lived.   For many others, families and/or religious communities have provided the intimate context and foundation for progressive politics. Kinship, domesticity, religious faith and reproduction have widely varying meanings across time and space.

My own story leads me think of gender and sexual desire as always deeply embedded and context dependent—generating strategies rather than identities. For me, a queer life generated the escape velocity I needed to break intergenerational continuities, and attach to the other worlds and ways of the kind that my beloved friend José Muñoz both lived and wrote into being.

1.

attente / waiting

Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being,

subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns).

–Roland Barthes

Last Monday, my blasé sorting through the day’s mail turned to femme giddiness. Tearing open a cardboard book box, I caught a flash of the black and red: Bridge had finally re-made its way home. Since 2008, when the book last fell out of print, the hunger for its reappearance had been collective and collecting. Such is the staying power of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, co-edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981). Its comings and goings and returns across 34 years and 5 presses:

• 1981, Persephone Press
• 1983, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (2^nd edition)
• 1988, ism press (adapted Spanish edition, co-edited by Moraga & Ana Castillo, translated by Castillo and Norma Alarcón)
• 2002, Third Woman Press (expanded 3^rd edition)
• 2015, SUNY Press (4^th edition)

Easy to type up that matter-of-fact list. And comforting to finally be able to type the last the most recent entry with certainty. But the listing feels stagnant, not beginning to capture the moods, the attente / waiting, the uncertain periods of betweenness, what Moraga called in a radio interview earlier this month, “the pause.”

For many of us, those pauses between editions held anticipation:

• Will it come back again?
• And, if so, what changes will have been made to the Table of Contents? And why?
• What is Anzaldúa’s relationship to the book now [before her death in 2004]? Moraga’s?
• What about Moraga and Anzaldúa’s own relationship to each other?
• The original contributors’ relationships to their own now-dated writings and to their former selves?
• Do younger generations have an investment in “women of color feminism” / “U.S. Third World Feminism”? And, if so, how would that politics differ from what was imaginable during the 1970s feminist scene that helped shape the first edition?
• Will I ever be able to put the book on a syllabus again? And, if not, how to teach photocopied selections from Bridge in a way that captures the sheer power of the book in all of its complicated and wonderful physicality, its cover-to-cover wholeness, its assembling through/across/within difference, rather than in spite of it?
• If it finally is republished, will my own interest in it still be as alive as it once was?

2.

Souveinir / remembrance

Happy and/or tormenting remembrance of an object, a gesture, a scene, linked to the loved being and marked by the intrusion of the imperfect tense into the grammar of the lover’s discourse.

–Roland Barthes

The anticipation and unknowingness generated in and by the pauses, for me, is part of the pleasure of relating to Bridge as a living process. Each return, if and when it does come, adding yet another layer of texture. If you were to count the number of unique prefaces, forewords, introductions, and afterwords written or co-written by Moraga and Anzaldúa—never mind Kate Rushin’s introductory “The Bridge Poem,” or the translators’ notes and publishers’ notes—you’d easily get to a dozen. That’s a lot of situating. And that material in and of itself tells a particular story about Moraga and Anzaldúa—their changing political views over time and even their implicit disagreements with one another about the bounds and strategies of women of color feminism.

But what’s been most interesting for me as a follower is to think about the unsituated changes, trying to guess at and learn from the reasons for the quiet alterations. (My sleuth-love of the small detail is a topic for a very different kind of confessional post.)

• How/why did Anzaldúa’s name go missing as co-editor on the Spanish edition?
• In Moraga’s new Introduction, “Catching Fire,” how does her editorial bracketed insertion of “Indigenous” change the meaning of the Combahee River Collective’s self-naming?

“‘If Black [Indigenous] women were free…everyone else would have to be since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression'” (xix).

Moraga attaches this endnote to “[Indigenous]”:

“Black women are Indigenous women, once forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland. If not in the specifics, the major ideological tenets of the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement can serve today as a treatise for Indigenous women’s rights movements globally” (n. 6, xxv).

• And, on the 4^th edition’s Table of Contents, how/why did Max Wolf Valerio’s name get reverted back to the 1^st edition’s “Anita Valerio” when the 3^rd edition allows him to be listed on the TOC as who he is: “Max Wolf Valerio”? If the answer to that question is that Max was Anita in 1981 and that “It’s In My Blood, My Face—My Mother’s Voice, the Way I Sweat” somehow reflects Anitaness and not Maxness, was that Valerio’s own understanding and decision? SUNY’s? Moraga’s? Some happy combination? Who gets to decide? And/or, if Moraga wanted the 4^th edition to be more loyal/faithful to the 1^st edition than was the 3^rd, then why are the other changes not disloyal (Donna Kate Rushin is now Kate Rushin; 3 additional poems by Rushin are included in the 4^th edition; new artwork on the cover and between the covers; etc.)?

3.

These are actually not such “small detail” kinds of questions, after all. They go to the heart of the politics of representation, difference, self-naming, agency—to name just a few of the bricks that give Bridge its force. We can’t know what Anzaldúa would have thought about these questions or about the 4th edition, even if the statement provided by the her literary trust (presumably written by AnaLouise Keating) notes that she “would be pleased with the additional possibilities this publication promises” (xxvii). We can count on Moraga to be characteristically open about her process. One thing that I’ll always love about her style is its raw honesty, her generous willingness to put herself out there.

But I’d also love to keep learning from and knowing about the other contributors to Bridge. In relation to the many introductions, prefaces, forewords and afterwords that give Moraga and Anzaldúa the power and freedom to grow, move, change, and reflect over time, we have such little access to the changes/thoughts/reflections of Valerio, Genny Lim, Jo Carillo, and doris davenport, to name just a few.

And I encourage those of us who are readers/fans/teachers/followers of Bridge to do more than celebrate it! It deserves to be celebrated, for sure. But it also deserves good solid readings and re-readings. For if Bridge is truly a living process, it belongs to all of us, doesn’t it?

By Lisa Duggan

Parts of this blog post have been adapted from my 2014 American Studies Association Presidential Address, forthcoming in American Quarterly.

Have you noticed? The way that so many left academic couples divide up the intellectual and political world in their scholarship and institutional alliances? So many of the straight-identified men analyze the dynamics of class, and sometimes race, but leave gender and sexuality out. As a set-aside agenda of sorts for the women and queers to undertake. The female partners of these men often (not always) address gender and sexuality, usually along with class and race (though again, not always). It’s kind of like the primary responsibility for housework—there’s a double day for the feminized, who also legitimate the guys. Who can say he’s not a feminist, not a queer ally, if his consort and/or close comrades take care of that for him?

Of course it’s the scholars of color who do the yeoman’s labor to analyze race, and there is plenty of default white feminist and queer scholarship floating around out there! But in my primary field of American Studies, serious inroads have been made in putting empire, colonialism, diaspora and migration, and the historical dynamics of racialization on the central intellectual agenda along with the history of capitalism in left scholarship. A lot more progress than in, say, geography or sociology—the precincts surrounding the work of David Harvey, for instance. In those quarters capitalism too often seems to float free of colonialism and the racial state. Race appears as a topic, or a population, but not as a central historical dynamic.

In American Studies, the progress has not been easy or automatic. In her 1997 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Mary Helen Washington pointed out that relationship between the fields of African American Studies and American Studies had been distant and troubled. In that address, Washington is especially determined to outline the significant difference between simply including African Americans as a population or a topic, and the more challenging task of reconstructing the field with Black Studies as an integral optic and approach. The task is to reimagine the history of capitalism, for instance, as the history of racial capitalism, as Cedric Robinson pointed out so persuasively in 1983.

The challenges from the fields of Latino Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies have all made waves, and all have encountered similar barriers when making the crucial argument for distinguishing between pleas for simple inclusion as populations or topics, and the fundamental call to reimagine the field of American Studies from top to bottom–the call that always meets with the most resistance.

In the most recent issue of Social Text devoted to the legacy of José Muñoz, Kandice Chuh formulates this issue as the problem of “aboutness” that is central to what she calls the “field coverage” model of knowledge production. She argues that questions like “What is Asian American Studies about?” or “What is Asian American about this book, music, or performance?” lead us into a “silo mentality” that cordons off critical challenges. Rather than engage the challenge of Asian Americanist critique in the quest to open new avenues of inquiry and raise reorienting or disorienting questions, the field coverage model allows the persistence of the patterns of ignorance that sustain hierarchies of knowledge in the academy.

When I was on the job market in the early 1990s, a faculty member on a search committee at Wellesley College piped up to say “People like you don’t even know who the presidents were!” I replied that I not only knew the presidents, but could describe their wives’ inaugural ball gowns. This weird exchange illustrates the reversal/projection whereby someone who knew nothing about the field of sexuality studies assumed I would know nothing about mainstream historiography—in which I had earned a PhD! Ignorance in this context, as Eve Sedgwick pointed out some time ago, is a mark of privilege.

Chuh presses for intellectual anti-parochialism that refuses “aboutness” and its practices—the adding of populations to classrooms and topics to syllabi without any fundamental reconstruction of our knowledge projects. She frames Asian Americanness as a problem space for the consideration of everything, from the onto-epistemology of modernity to the circulation of capital.

Gender and sexuality studies joins American Studies with this kind of refusal of identitarian logics, engaged with historical political economic forces and political aesthetic questions via a feminist lens, or what José Muñoz has called a “queer optic.” This is not simply Women’s or LGBT studies, aiming for inclusion in the classroom and on the syllabus.

One of the most important books establishing this broad ground of critique for queer studies within American Studies is Licia Fiol-Matta’s A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (2002). This book does not frame queerness as the site of identity and oppression, joined with a plea for inclusion. Fiol-Matta’s account of the work of the figure of poet Gabriela Mistral traces the uses of this representation of queerness for the project of racial nationalism in Latin America. Queerness in this analysis is not the subversive outside of normativity, but is rather incorporated within the colonial imaginary as a site of racial and gender pedagogy. There is no way to overstate the importance of this book for the kind of queer studies centered in American Studies over the past decade.

Fiol-Matta’s book was followed by Roderick Ferguson’s groundbreaking Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2003). From the perspective of transgender sex workers (and drawing from Marlon Riggs’ 1989 film Tongues Untied), Ferguson launches a sharp and thorough insider’s critique of Marxism and sociology.   Jasbir Puar’s 2007 book, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, analyzes the work of queerness within post 9/11 imperial politics, as integrated within the “civilizational” discourse designed to demonize the Arab and Muslim world. In 2011, Dean Spade published a trenchant critique of the limits of law reform from a transgender perspective in his Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. Also in this spirit of queer transformation, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s 2013 poetic masterpiece The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study enjoins us to regard Black Study in the same anti-identitarian spirit of transformative insurrection from within and outside the university.

The impact of this groundbreaking work is substantially diminished when it is included, even welcomed, but understood as “about” LGBT populations and the topic of sexuality and gender. Such modes of categorization fence out the deep critical challenge of queer studies, adding in some scholars and texts, but leaving the overall project of American Studies relatively untouched. These strategies of inclusion leave intact conventional presumptions about who needs to know what, who should read whom, and where a given critical lens is relevant.

Which brings us back to that academic couple. Recently on Facebook, I asked the hive mind to post the authors and titles of work by straight-identified men that fully integrates gender and sexuality as an analytic. As I expected, there were some excellent books on that list—Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, Curtis Marez’s Drug Wars, and many others. But they could be listed, there was no avalanche, even drawing on every field of scholarship that my 1500+ friends represent (and quite a few of those authors were pretty queer, not exactly straight-identified even if heterosexually involved). It’s worth asking—does the deployment of gender and sexual analysis marginalize or ghettoize work by straight-identified male scholars? In order to become one of the Big Men, is it in fact advisable to avoid gender or sexual analysis? It sometimes seems that white guys gain cred/privilege/status by undertaking scholarship on race (in a way that many scholars of color find problematic). But that kind of crossover does not seem to work for the field of gender and sexuality studies. The cred can come from the partner and comrades, right?

I hope I’m overstating the current situation, in angry dyke mode (my favorite)! I hope the intellectual ghettos, minority set-aside programs, and political marginalizations are ending more quickly than I can see.

It’s a strange thing to find yourself as a character in the book you just wrote, especially when the book is neither fiction nor autobiography. Those of you who have read The Reorder of Things will recall that I began with a collage by Adrian Piper called “Self-Portrait 2000.” The collage in part “depicts” Piper as a downed airplane. But it also contains a sharp letter to Wellesley’s then president for allegedly violating the terms of Piper’s hire. And the collage is further intensified by presenting a poem to God that rails at God for producing a botched-up version of humanity. In The Reorder of Things, I use the collage as a way to open the book’s interrogation of how state and capital have followed the academy’s example in relation to the management of diversity. Like the academy, the state and the financial institutions it refuses to regulate, abandon the visions of equitable distribution and social justice fostered by the student movements of the 1960’s—especially in terms of their promotion of interdisciplinary scholarship and faculty and student diversity. Instead, all three institutions have actively worked to sabotage projects of intellectual and demographic redistribution while all the while promoting a love for diversity.

Enter the “Chancellor’s Cluster Initiative to Increase Diversity and the Interdisciplinary Culture at UIC.” As the name suggests, the initiative was intended to be a way to transform the University of Illinois at Chicago by hiring twenty-five junior and senior faculty who would be distributed among five research clusters—the Racialized Body, Middle East and Muslim Societies, Social Justice and Human Rights, Diaspora Studies, and Global Urban Immigration. While the official name of the cluster initiative implies that it was a mandate from on high, the categories that came to define the clusters were designed by the faculty and were the result of two competitive proposal phases that involved the entire campus, not just the faculty in Liberal Arts and Sciences. The faculty who wrote the proposals talked of meeting in coffee shops and in department conference rooms to hammer out what would be a truly historic dream if realized.

It would have been the first time in the history of the American academy that an institution—public or private—would reinvent itself based on interdisciplinary categories, categories produced in fields such as ethnic, cultural, gender, postcolonial, disability, and queer studies. It would have also been an epic achievement for a university with a working-class student body. This vision of what could have been, and indeed, what should have been, attracted those of us recently recruited from other institutions to the exciting but now short-lived UIC experiment.

The university insists that it is only “delaying” rather than canceling the clusters. This distinction is telling as it exemplifies a university administration attempting to establish itself as the rational arbiter and enforcer of hires around diversity while it strips those hires of any real substance. Our collective letter to Chancellor Michael Amiridis provides necessary context:

In addition to stopping the current searches, the Interim Provost and Dean explained that the entire cluster program was being delayed, and that before it could restart, the substance of the positions required recalibration that would supersede both the agreed to conditions of the cluster proposals (all applications were signed by Executive Officers and Deans) and the extensive internal peer review process that selected these clusters over others. Such an abrupt cancelation of four high-profile searches (not delay as recent communications have indicated), and a drastic change to the peer review process, fundamentally endangers this major diversity initiative at our public urban university and threatens to tarnish our national reputation and ability to recruit in the future.

It is important to note, as the above paragraph attests, that the prior agreement authorizing the clusters has been voided. The new conditions call for a reappraisal by the Deans of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. As the letter states, “Over the course of the first three years, the PIs made requests for meetings with Dean Tantillo to discuss search processes; we never received a positive response and instead were re-directed to meet with Associate Deans who were not authorized to make decisions on the hiring process.” In other words, after the searches were authorized, we are now told that the searches can only be re-authorized by the very administrative players that abandoned them in the first place.

If not “cancellation,” perhaps we should call it an “indefinite or permanent delay?” That would, of course, allow us to continue with the fiction that UIC’S diversity initiative has not been cancelled, and its commitment to diversity will march on, one day reactivated by people who never meant it to survive in the first place. As one of the persons hired to realize this initiative, there’s no way for the administration’s actions not to be dismaying, but as a theorist, I can’t help but be intrigued—even by the maneuvers that have undermined what my colleagues and I have tried to accomplish. This part might be a lesson to us all.

The discourse that has caught my eye is the university’s use of “student demand.” In addition to the looming shadow of anticipated budget cuts, the dean at the April 16th meeting said that the clusters had to be delayed because of a lack of “student demand” for those areas articulated by the clusters—intersectional feminism, social justice, Middle-East and Muslim, political economy and globalization, and urban diaspora, in particular. This is an especially astonishing claim on a campus with a growing Latino, Asian, Asian American, Arab, Arab-American, Middle-Eastern and Muslim student body. What is even more interesting is that many of the students from these groups have for years demanded areas of study like the ones that have been cancelled. If these students’ demands are not the ones that the university acknowledges, who and what are the interests behind the administration’s deployment of “student demand?”

Think back to the moment of the sixties and seventies student movements and how large the word “demand” loomed in radical manifestos, manifestos that called for widespread social change. In 1968, the Third World Liberation Front of San Francisco State issued their “TWLF SF State College Demands,” listing the establishment of a “School for Ethnic Studies” as their number one demand. In 1969 the Lumumba-Zapata student movement at the University of California at San Diego, upon hearing of the institution’s plans to build a new—“Third”—college responded by writing, “We demand a Third College be devoted to relevant education for minority youth and to the study of the contemporary social problems of all people.” In that same year, African American and Puerto Rican students at City College in New York would issue their “Five Demands” intended to change the university’s institutional and intellectual structure to speak to the histories and realities of students at that institution. The sixties and seventies saw the emergence of the category “demand” as the keyword of student militancy directed at university administrations, directed at them so that knowledge might be reorganized rather than diminished.

As they vie for control of that category, university administrations attempt to absorb and neutralize the possibility of radical change on college campuses; those administrations are increasingly doing so by laying claim to the idea of “student demands.” Instead of using the discourse of “student demand” to promote the progressive reorganization of knowledge for the good of faculty and student development, the administration uses the category to arrogate power unto itself. In this way, the figure of the student becomes the ethical motivation and justification for expulsion rather than redistribution, determining what forms of knowledge and critique can be expelled from intellectual space and livelihood. Steven Salaita’s firing is a case in point. In her justification for terminating him, the Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise implicitly invoked “student demand” as the rationale for that decision, stating “We have a particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but that also respects their rights as individuals.” As an institutional discourse, student demand, thus, provides a handy justification for a diverse array of administrative expulsions, ones that could conceivably involve courses, people, hiring initiatives, and so on.

With the rise of the administrative control of student demand, the student is turned into an absolutely serviceable abstraction, the evidence of which can be seen in the simple fact that the administrators who deploy the figure of the student are actually not the ones—for the most part—who teach them, listen to them, or learn from them. In the end though, a move like the one that we just saw at UIC is not only an attack on diversity and interdisciplinarity; it is also an assault on academic freedom. The classical definition of academic freedom means that the faculty controls the curriculum and therefore presides over the hiring of those persons who will execute it. As the new enforcer of student demand, the administration can then say it is best positioned to manage the curriculum and hiring. The result of this is the overturning of academic freedom. If neoliberalism, as Lisa Duggan has argued, is the upward redistribution of resources—in this instance toward the administration, the administrative seizure of student demand is neoliberalism par excellence.

It has only recently occurred to me that anti-intellectualism might be something more than “anti-intellectual,” more than the description that so many of us use when we find ourselves in the throes of institutional distress, more than a grievance or an annoyance. I have only now begun to think about how anti-intellectualism might seriously be the “mature” and defensive expression of academic institutions, an expression that retaliates against past and present campus uprisings and a formation worthy of serious theorization. Consider all the meetings with and speeches by administrators in which intellection is turned into the clumsiness of prima donnas, and bureaucratic thinking is taken to be the privileged capacity of reasoned individuals to properly run the university, individuals whose intelligence is measured by how much can they dilate over the bottom line, people who—by some bureaucratic clairvoyance—can determine which undergraduate fields will yield jobs, profits, and a future, a clairvoyance that allows them to judge which forms of knowledge are worthy of life or death.

In the hands of the administration, “student demand” becomes the reason to discourage speculative thought, producing a situation in which the most extreme forms of anti-intellectualism are found among an institution’s elites. As an institutional discourse, anti-intellectualism is necessary to make the administration the center of university authority, allowing it to impose administrative control over all intellectual activity, activities that should be the province of students and teachers. In the days of the sixties and seventies, the student—no longer content to be defined by external forces but self-marked by gender, sexual, ethnic and racial particularities—was the catalyst for the multiplication of forms of knowledge within the academy. In our moment and through a backlash against the prior one, the figure of the student—cynically—becomes the administration’s alibi for the degeneration of knowledge. I began this piece with Adrian Piper’s “Self-Portrait 2000.” I’ll end with two other “portraits” that bear upon this discussion. Ai Weiwei’s “A Study in Perspective” is a series of photographs in which the artist gives the middle finger to structures of power in Paris, Berlin, Washington, D.C., Beijing, and Hong Kong. The series is designed to critique governments’ dismissal of everyday people’s freedoms. Commenting on it, Ai said, “I think there is a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression.”

On April 29th UIC students mounted a demonstration in support of the Chancellor’s Cluster Initiative and demanded that the cancelled searches be fully reinstated. A group of protesters who were inspired by Ai’s “A Study of Perspective” staged their own version of the series. In the photo from the UIC demonstration, we see three fingers shot upwards at University Hall, the building that houses the UIC administration. Similar to Ai’s critique of governmental abuses, the UIC photo contests the administration’s disregard of faculty members and students’ freedoms to set their own agendas for intellectual expression, particularly around curricular development, interdisciplinary hiring, and diversity. Moreover, we might read the three fingers as a sign that challenging structures of power is a collective rather than individual endeavor, one that demands that we counter the necessarily anti-intellectual nature of neoliberal practices by returning to the boldness of intellection. Indeed, the UIC photograph suggests that a finger, rather than being an apolitical symbol of vulgarity, might—to quote Audre Lorde—be “loaded with information and energy.”

The recent vote in favor of marriage equality in Ireland raises many interesting questions about the implications of broadening public support for “same sex” marriage.  Does this support corral LGBT and queer populations into a normalizing, conservatizing state institution as many on the queer left in the U.S. have argued for years?  Or might a victory for marriage “equality” like the one in Ireland open up some possibilities for organizing for broader social and economic justice, as many on the queer left in Ireland now argue?  Bully Bloggers is beginning a series on marriage ambivalence with this toast from University of Utah queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton from 2014, at a moment when the rising possibility of legal gay marriage in a state run by homophobic Mormon Republicans created considerable euphoria across the progressive political spectrum.  The similarities between Utah and Ireland seem illuminating right now–a gay marriage victory against all odds in a conservative religious environment can feel dramatically empowering from the center leftward.  Below, Stockton plays with the ambivalence of the moment for her, a long time queer opponent of the emphasis on marriage in LGBT politics.  Next up:  a post from Irish queer theorist and activist Anne Mulhall, analyzing the context for and implications of the recent Irish vote.

–Lisa Duggan

How I Toast Marriage While Being Against It

by Kathryn Bond Stockton

What follows is a speech I was asked to give for our annual Gayla during Pride Week, October 2014, at the University of Utah, where I teach queer theory and raced sexualities. The assigned theme for my talk was “beyond marriage equality”—to be given to an audience largely excited that Utah had been granted marriage equality for about two weeks in 2013, albeit before it was halted again. Indeed, three days after my speech, and by the time Laverne Cox closed our Pride festivities, we had been granted marriage equality, to the great delight of so many in my state

TOAST: To our period of marriage equality—and the remarkable people who were part of it

Do I have your attention? Hear me say: don’t listen to me. Whatever you do, don’t attend to me. Turn away in your minds. Why? I may provoke you. (I’m a professor, that’s what we do.) Oh, I’ll do it sweetly, gently, warmly—I love so many of you. But you’re about to witness one of the weirdest talks embracing marriage equality that you’ve yet encountered.

Here’s what I’m guessing is true of you tonight. You have a lively, liquid idea of the word “gay,” or the word “trans,” or the word “queer,” and what it means to wed it to “marriage.” So let me be straight with you. As you know, weddings are Camp, no matter how sincerely enacted. (Think of the weddings you have attended, maybe your own: the excessive clothes, the unnatural settings, the stupendous cakes, the bad family photos, or the waiting in line at City Hall, all for the state to tell you you can love the person you’ve been loving—and that you can wed yourself to their stuff. You marry their house, their mountain bike, their benefits, more than you marry an actual person, and that’s a little odd.)   Weddings fit the definition of Camp—they’re like drag queens—they are “artifice”; “love of the unnatural”; “excruciation”; “relish for exaggeration”; “a good taste of bad taste.” And my fellow campy queers, Camp, you’ll recall, is a form of generosity. Camp embraces what it knows is out of date, tacky, embarrassing: namely, marriage. We queer folk are being generous to marriage. How delightfully démodé of us, how supremely retro we are being.

Not all of us, of course. And this is important. We’re so clever that some of us are marrying and some of us are not. That’s so brilliant. In that brief little window of time in Utah last winter, I had a chance to say no to marriage. That was deeply thrilling. With my partner of twenty-four years—I’m still deadly attracted to her (don’t look at me, I’ve told her, don’t look my way tonight; I’ll lose my place, I’ll drop my lines—she’s that cute)—I volunteered to refuse the right to marry. Someone’s gotta do it. Someone’s gotta say: “marriage shall not get the credit for our love.” We queer folk spent so many centuries crafting lifestyles the world so greenly envied. That is why we were hated, in part. A huge part of homophobic thinking has resented us for the lives we’ve led, viewing queer life as a form of hedonism. I take that as a compliment. Thus, as I’m rather fond of saying: no one—not even right-wing wing nuts—has been deeming queerness unnatural. They’ve deemed it hyper-natural—everybody’s going gay, if we let them—because it has seemed like seductive cheating to live our lives (marriage-free, child-free, soaked in pleasure).

And, indeed, queer folk have had the good sense to decouple sex from nesting: have your sexing outside your nesting; nesting kills sexing! or at least it can. We’ve had the sense to split “orientation” (the kind of person I try to sleep with) from the key question of sexual subjectivity (who I want to be, how I want to be gendered, when I sleep with that kind of person), leading, for example, someone who was male-assigned at birth to present as a woman so as to be a lesbian. We’ve had the sense to raise kissing to an art form (some of us making orgasm the prelude to kissing, what we do to get to kiss, so profound is the contact just at the surface, at the lip of surface—catching your lover’s breath just so, making an intercourse at the hint of skin). And we’ve had the sense not to fetishize longevity. Give me two hot years of relating over thirty years of worn-out loving. Divorce, for this reason, can be heroic. Feminists have known this for a long time. And queers before gay-marriage came along tended to thematize the bravery of leaving, in some cases (not in all, of course). We’ve had a way of reminding the world that it takes guts to extract oneself from marriage—and it takes privilege, good old money, since many women especially have had to stay in relationships if they would keep their standard of living, or their children.

So we’ve been telling a few white lies (we don’t call lies “white” for nothing) when it comes to “marriage equality.” We keep saying we won’t change marriage. Newsflash: marriage has always been changing. Is marriage now what it was in the U.S. in the 1950’s when my parents married? Thankfully, no. (See Mad Men.) Is marriage here, in the U.S., what it is in many other parts of the world? Marriage never was, never is one thing. If there were time, I would tell you that in order to trace the evolution of “marriage equality” as we now envision it, we would need at minimum to discuss Jane Austen, in whose novels people marry houses, though they have to think they marry and mate strictly for love. We would have to examine the invention of “the homosexual” in 1891, along with the development (also in the nineteenth century) of vulcanized rubber (you know why that’s important), never mind the changes of the twentieth century that change marriage: two world wars (what in the world were those soldiers up to?), the birth of birth control, Stonewall drag queens, people “transitioning,” and a little something—don’t get me started on more white lies—about the thing called “mixed-race” marriages. And let’s remember, conservative straight folks put gay people at the heart of straight marriage, thus changing marriage. The definition “one man, one woman” effectively means “no gay marriage”; every time it’s said, “gays” are the ghost that is conjured by the phrase, leading us to hear, leading all to hear: “one man, one woman, no gays.” We’re a threesome, in a legal sense.

Will we change marriage, we queer folk? Will we insert our beyond inside it? (“Come here, marriage….   Come to Daddy….”) Of course we’ll change marriage. If we’re lucky! If the queers I so respect, I so adore, I so celebrate for their new marriages—thank you for marrying, someone had to do it, someone had to grasp the equality we’re asking for—if these folks have their marriages upheld, marriage overall has the chance to become more sex variant, more trans-rich, more divorce-friendly, and, dare I say, more replete with kissing (or is that my obsession? I can’t tell; my partner looked at me). Speaking of my partner looking at me…. I’m throwing down the gauntlet of challenge to the lovers, the many lovers, here. Un-nest yourselves, from inside your nests, while you build your nests. Keep desire alive! (May I queer Jesse Jackson?) Celebrate your partner when she most annoys you. It proves she isn’t you. And that’s a good thing. She’s a sexy stranger you can have sex with. And whatever you do, don’t “share” your day—not with each other. Nothing is more deadening. Nothing’s less creative. Nothing’s more routine. She spews on you, while you’re not listening; you spew on her, while she’s not listening. Don’t share your day. Just “make out” at the point of contact. Cruise her, don’t abuse her with your day.

But where are we headed on the matter of equality? That’s the hard question.   Marriage, as you know, is not a good way to get crucial benefits delivered to people; to make lives secure; to break up dyads; to end the grip of racism; and marriage perhaps is not a good way to redistribute wealth (unless you divorce).

I really hope that while there’s time, while we don’t have rights (at least this right) inside red states, we queer folk (and queer straight folks) can show that we care about things beyond our rights, beyond the rights that dangerously make us resemble white, straight, middle-class men of means, who, for a long time, had the rights and benefits of marriage to themselves, making a onesome inside their twosome. Imagine our becoming vibrant champions of anti-poverty, anti-racism, anti-xenophobia, while we don’t have rights. Take that, blue states! Wouldn’t we be modeling something even grander than coalition-making? Wouldn’t we be modeling trans-categorical-political-focus, or at least binocular focus, tri-nocular focus, showing our focus on issues not solely tied to our rights, which would have the benefit of honoring queer folk who have felt excluded in queer life (poor queer folk, queer folks with disabilities, many queers of color)?

We have earned the right to be cleverly contradictory. Say yes to marriage!; say no to it, too. There’s no such thing as homosexuality—but of course I’m going to Pride!  Let’s have a red-state political strategy, but let’s show the blue states it’s more radical to live here—to think here, to learn here. The queerest thing about me? I love Utah. We must be a hive of ideas.

And lucky for you, or maybe not, you can hear me spout off on my queer approach to the practice of income redistribution in a talk I’ll give to Student Affairs this coming January. It is entitled “Sameness, Underwear, Pleasure, and Need.” But I’m warning you: don’t listen to me.

Here’s my colleague, Cliff Rosky….

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English and Interim Associate Vice President of Equity and Diversity at the University of Utah

By Anne Mulhall

On the complex achievement of the same sex marriage referendum in Ireland

The importance of the political mobilization of working-class communities in Dublin in the process of building a self-organized and powerful anti-austerity movement cannot be overstated, and this was a decisive factor in the marriage referendum passing. Voters in Jobstown and young emigrants coming #hometovote were not voting in solidarity with the government and the State, but in defiance of the multiple impoverishments and oppressions that the State has enacted on the majority of those who live here. The political and relational texture and hopefulness of these and other mobilizations, disruptions, acts of citizenship against the State, produced in excess of the managed marriage campaign, are perhaps occluded when the Irish marriage referendum is viewed solely through the lens of the established radical queer critique.

Almost a month has passed since the verdict of ‘Yes For Love’ was returned in the same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland. For the people who drove the campaign; for those who canvassed during the hard emotional slog of its last month in particular; for all those who told their stories of hurt, of lives lived in closeted fear and repression in newspapers, on TV, across social media, to family and friends; for the LGBTQ young people who had not before witnessed the extent and depth of homophobia written in to longstanding norms as to what and who constitutes the ‘nation’; for those who had to face the harsh truth of homophobic discursive violence enacted under the guise of ‘democracy’ and ‘balanced debate’ and smile and thank the homophobes for their consideration; for the thousands of recent young Irish emigrants who came #hometovote on the eve of the referendum; and especially for all those personally invested by way of their own positioning as ‘queer’ in the resounding victory, the outcome catalyzed a confusion of raw emotional responses. There was of course joy – the joy that was broadcast across a transnational stage, an unfettered jubilation. But the tears of joy were complicated. They communicated emotional and physical relief and exhaustion, a kind of system-wide collapse into elation. They articulated – for many, not for all – gratitude and vindication at the ‘majority’ acceptance that the vote represented. As time passes, the more difficult constituents of those tears becomes more clear, perhaps – anger that the rights of a minority were the gift of a majority to bestow; anger at the emotional and political costs exacted by the campaign itself; anger and sorrow for personal and collective histories mired in pain and exclusion that cannot be recuperated. The referendum result sent a message back to the past, a friend who unlike me has been in the queer trenches for many decades said to me recently, reflecting on the meaning of this long and at times ugly road – a message back to the past that all of the hurt, the neglect, the violence, the lives lost were not entirely in vain. That this vindication is in part for all of those who did not live to see it.

Messages to the past, and a promise, perhaps to the future. For many, the result has opened out potentials for a different way of being for young and future generations of LGBTQ people (and as always, the homogenizing this entails is deeply problematic). Given the majority vote, given that the grounds of the vote exceeded the ‘marriage equality’ remit, but also given the centrality of marriage and the family to the Nation’s symbolic image of itself, and how that symbolic image operates within the State’s machinery of inclusion and exclusion, it is difficult to see how some other forms of institutional homophobic exclusion can continue unchanged. The most immediate of these is the legislative sanction of discrimination on grounds of ‘ethos’ that persists in the Irish school system. A legacy of the organization of education under late colonial rule and of the theocratic nature of the Irish state for many decades after its inception, 96% of primary and 51% of post-primary schools in Ireland are under the patronage of religious orders. While discrimination on grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, disability, and marital status are prohibited by equality legislation, Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act includes exemptions on the grounds of ‘religious ethos’. This exempts schools from anti-discrimination legislation in both staff recruitment and student enrolment, and it also allows in the law for dismissal of staff if they are deemed to undermine the ‘ethos’ of the institution. This has in the past been used to sack women ‘living in sin’ so to speak, and it continues to provide a mechanism to exclude children from racialized, migrant and religious minorities from State-funded schools, though this racial ‘filtering’ is of course vehemently denied. The main lobby for striking Section 37 from the Act has been the LGBT lobby, and it is difficult to see how the Department of Education can continue to stall on this given the political and ‘moral’ force that the referendum vote represents.

Those most invested in retaining these religious exemptions within the State’s public education system are, of course, the same interest groups who were the bulwark of the ‘No’ campaign in the referendum. But while the interventions of Catholic clergy were muted and by no means unanimous, the No campaign was driven by a small but ubiquitous collection of right-wing lay Catholic fundamentalists, many of whom are associated with the Iona Institute, a ‘think-tank’ established in 2008 as self-appointed guardian of the ‘traditional family’ and Ireland’s system of compulsory reproduction. There is a direct genealogy between the No campaign and those US-funded and inspired groups that first formed in Ireland in the late 70s with the express purpose of fully embedding coerced reproduction in Ireland via the now notorious 8^th amendment to the constitution that gave “equal regard” to the life of the woman and the fetus. The defeat of the No campaign struck a serious blow to Iona and its fellow-travelers. While commentators such as Katha Pollitt have highlighted the rapid gains made by the gay marriage lobby in the US at the same time as women’s reproductive freedoms are being severely undermined and curtailed (and one could make similar observations in the Irish case), a defeat in the same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland would have been a devastating set-back for the abortion rights campaign here, perhaps primarily because of the strong endorsement the ‘direct democracy’ of a referendum defeat would have given to the vanguard of what is a much wider anti-abortion lobby. The media presence of Iona and co is far in excess of their representativeness in contemporary Ireland, yet their complaints of ‘silencing’ and media bias are almost as frequent as their appearances in major national newspapers (Breda O’Brien has a regular column in newspaper of public record the Irish Times while John Waters and David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, write for the Irish Independent), on radio and on television, with the State broadcaster RTÉ being particularly culpable of unfailingly providing them with a platform whenever The Family and its cognates hove into view.

[Courtesy of Oireachtas Retort https://twitter.com/Oireachtas_RX]

These protestations of ‘silencing’ are perverse if familiar given the strategies adopted in advance of the referendum. The lines were drawn in January of last year, following the appearance of Panti Bliss (Rory O’Neill), drag artist and long-standing community activist and public face of Dublin’s queer scene, on Saturday Night Live, a chat show on RTÉ hosted by Brendan O’Connor. On the show, in response to O’Connor’s questioning, O’Neill named O’Brien, Quinn, Waters and the Iona Institute as homophobes. Quite reasonably so, as it is difficult to know what else one should call people who suggest that queers should abstain from sex (because “intrinsically disordered”), oppose programmes to combat homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools, call for the continuing enforced closeting of teachers, declare LGBT people to be unfit to parent children, regard same-sex relationships as inherently inferior to the great gold standard of hetero coupling, and so forth. Iona and Waters promptly slapped a small avalanche of lawsuits for defamation on O’Neill and on the national broadcaster. In a particularly craven performance, RTÉ removed the video of O’Neill’s interview, issued a public apology the following week via O’Connor’s show, and agreed to a payout of 80,000 to the aggrieved parties. This, of course, was not silencing or censorship of the most egregious kind, but was, the national broadcaster agreed, in the interests of ‘democratic debate’. The deployment of ‘hate speech’ frameworks in the service of regimes of subjugation was abundantly clear. As Panti herself said from the stage of the Abbey Theatre in a performance that went viral, the people who wield hate speech as a form of power are now enabled to deploy the frame of ‘hate speech’ to silence the resistance of the subjugated. It is as Panti said “a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick, because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia – homophobes are the victims of homophobia.”

RTÉ’s immediate capitulation in Pantigate encouraged a number of complaints of ‘bias’ in relation to programmes featuring The Gays. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland upheld a complaint made just a couple of weeks after O’Neill’s interview, about a lifestyle feature on RTÉ Radio One’s The Mooney Show. The broadcaster Derek Mooney (himself a gay man) remarked to his guests, who were discussing their relationship in a personal rather than political capacity: “I hope you do get married. I hope it comes in.” This was ruled by the BAI as constituting bias, and a breach of “fairness, objectivity and impartiality.” Effectively, well before the announcement of the referendum date, any discussion about or involving LGBTQ people was ruled inherently ‘controversial’, ‘political’, and as many commentators observed the BAI ruling(s) made the inclusion of at least one bigot compulsory in any such discussion in the interests of ‘balance’. As a consequence the quest for ‘balance’ took on a near-pathological aspect during the referendum campaign proper as radio and television broadcasters timed contributions to the ‘debate’ down to the second in fear of litigation.

The fulcrum of the No campaign was the argument that including same-sex marriage in the constitution would catastrophically change the nature of the institution (which is, of course, about producing children) and fatally damage children’s ‘right’ to a mother and a father. Groups such as Mothers and Fathers Matter and First Families First emerged to flank the usual suspects. Lurid fantasies populated the mediascape and seeped out into the general populace, suddenly abuzz with the spectres of mothers marrying daughters, gay men stalking the streets in search of vulnerable women from whom to harvest eggs and/or rent wombs, small armies of fatherless children wandering the streets of Copenhagen in search of their ‘donor Daddy’. And so on.

By dint of ever more high pitched repetition, the No campaign and the media apparatus that accommodated it succeeded in making freedom to express homophobic bigotry appear as not just normal and right, but pretty much a duty in the service of democracy. So it was that rantings about, for instance, the prospect of predatory gay men buying children to satisfy their paedophilic desires could be framed as legitimate fears to be answered with a concerned tilt of the head and even-handed discussion – not just on the canvass, but in everyday interactions with total strangers.

The volume and intensity of such constant assaults were turned up when the campaign posters appeared a month before the vote, urging people to Vote No for the sake of the children. Reactions to these posters crystallized certain underlying conflicts within the LGBTQ ‘community’, ideological fissures and demands that were by and large contained for the sake of ‘unity’ in the service of the bigger picture – intense homophobic violence now with the considerable pay-off of less homophobic violence in the future. Pictures and videos circulated on social media of mostly young people, left activists among them, defacing and removing the offending posters. Demands from Yes Equality core organisers were issued on Twitter and elsewhere asking the poster guerrillas to desist from ‘undemocratic’ actions. Twitter exchanges went beyond demands for compliance, and veered into familiar ‘democracy talk’. Poster defacing was an “anti-democratic act”; the poster-removers didn’t “represent civilised YES voters” and were also needless to say “fascists”. Threats to report people to the police were made. “No to poster removal!” declared one passionate democracy-lover; not a battle-cry to kick-start a love revolution, but reflective of the ‘liberal’ attachment to a politics of respectability and hostility to political action outside the parameters of an NGO-led campaign.

The Marriage Equality movement in Ireland and elsewhere has been rooted in the kind of neoliberal marriage politics that has migrated from its origins in the assimilative, conservative drive toward respectability in a putatively ‘post-queer’, ‘post-AIDS’ American LGBT ‘rights’ discourse, whereby marriage has somehow become the apotheosis of LGBT struggle, and does the State some pinkwashing service.

The appropriation of this discourse by political and market interests in Ireland was in motion well before the event of the referendum. The campaign has done much to humanise Minister for Health Leo Varadker (who oversees a collapsing health system and who came out in January), great white hope of Fine Gael, the major party of government and right-wing cheerleaders for permanent austerity. Varadker posted not one but two rainbow twitpics from the campaign trail:

Tourism Ireland lost no time in capitalizing from the new markets in destination wedding tourism that ‘Yes for Love’ opened up, releasing this video with indecent haste the morning after the count:

Later that week, Fine Gael had its very own meme released on Twitter, circulated by the Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald (who is as I write at a meeting of the EU Commission that is deciding on how best to ‘manage’ the criminalisation and letting die of migrants at and inside the borders of Fortress Europe). Similar painfully transparent efforts were made by Labour TD and Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Joan Burton – a much-reviled figure in the Irish political landscape, most recently notable for overseeing the slashing of lone parent payments and access to third-level education for some of the most deprived families in the country. In a radio interview the day after the referendum, Burton proclaimed that “We are now a rainbow nation, and that means a nation of inclusion and diversity”.

The attempt to leverage the referendum result for PR purposes has been somewhat inept then, and adapts for Irish vested interests the strategic weaponization of LGBT rights that has happened elsewhere (LINKS). The utility of ‘gay marriage’ for political interests keen on the appearance of ‘equality’ while busily decimating what little remains of the economic, social and democratic ground that is the starting point for redistributive justice has, however, been clear since former Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore’s salvo in 2012 that “the right of gay couples to marry is, quite simply, the civil rights issue of this generation”.

The architects of the Marriage Equality campaign in Ireland carefully fostered the allegiance of these and other politicians. Established in 2008 as a single-issue grassroots campaigning organization, resistance to the top-down approach weakened once preparation for the referendum began in earnest with the establishment of Yes Equality, a coalition campaign set up between Marriage Equality, GLEN (Gay and Lesbian Equality Network), and the ICCL (Irish Council for Civil Liberties) in 2013. LGBT Noise, an unfunded grassroots organization of mostly young LGBTQ people that focused on actions, including several large ‘marches for marriage’, was important in the longer campaign, though hardly mentioned in post-Referendum reflections. The Yes Equality campaign coordinated canvassing in constituencies across the country for the two months prior to the referendum. However, at the community level campaigning took on a more autonomous cast, as local people organized the canvassing of their communities and shaped their approach to local factors. Approaches designed to appeal to ‘the middle ground’ would not, after all, hold much water in the working class communities of Dublin. To this extent, organizing on the community level produced something in excess of Yes Equality HQ.

The political and discursive terrain of the Yes Equality ‘core’ borrows heavily from an established North American lexicon of same-sex marriage as an instrument of neoliberal governance. For instance (with thanks to Aidan Rowe for pointing out this leaflet; you can read their writing about the Referendum here. Also see these pieces by Jen O’Leary and Ariel Silvera.

“Research shows that marriage is good for people: married people are healthier, happier and earn more. Marriage is also a commitment device, it keeps couples together and families together. It is accepted by the majority of people as good for society e.g. the family unit looks after itself, takes on a caring role for the members of that family and therefore is less dependent on the State for support…. On top of this, introducing civil marriage equality is austerity proof. It won’t cost the State anything but will improve the lives of thousands of people and arguably improve Irish society in general.” (Five Reasons to Support Marriage Equality, 2014)

This is all to say that up to a certain point, the official campaign for ‘marriage equality’ in Ireland did not diverge in any substantial way from the familiar white middle-class neoliberal register. Once the heavily and cleverly strategized referendum campaign proper got under way a few months before the vote (involving many LGBT and other organizations and advisers beyond the core Yes Equality coalition), the pitch shifted. The focus was on the personal, on family ties and friendship circles, on the ‘positive story’, on self-revelation and emotional truth. And the address was, of course, to the straight population. The straight citizen-public had to be persuaded not primarily of the economic logic involved in welding queer couples together with ‘commitment devices’ and ‘forever love’ (to quote Zappone), but of the ‘sameness’ of lesbian and gay love and family-making. From a particular perspective, this normativizing drive is a corollary of the argument for marriage as neoliberal devolution of State and collective social responsibilities to the family, both being held in position by the marriage contract. If lesbian and gay people are ‘just like us’ (the ‘B’, the ‘T’ and needless to say the ‘Q’ were consigned to unspeakability for the duration), then they deserve what ‘we’ have – equality granted on the basis of sameness, on a shared humanity – but a humanity that does not diverge in any alarming way from what ‘we’ recognise as ‘just like us’, a fellow ‘citizen’ who does not disturb the established image the nation has of itself, but makes of it, as Burton had it, the ‘rainbow nation’. The ‘republic of love’.

To return to ‘Postergate’ – responses to this crystallised an important if difficult aspect of the Yes Equality campaign: the urge on the part of some of its managers to a disciplinary and totalizing control of the field of political action. However carceral and, to use Panti’s word, oppressive that insistence on uniformity and control was for some, the Yes Equality campaign did the job of winning the referendum that could not be lost. But the terms in which that disciplinary demand was made were too often suggestive of something in excess of pragmatism. The skirmish about the No posters exposed this excess of vigilance; one could feel the communicative ether vibrating at times with the pleasures extracted from the policing of dissent. In addition to its generally liberal complexion, among the campaign management were well-known right-wing conservatives such as Noel Whelan, former Fianna Fáil politician and adviser. Whelan had magnetised a considerable portion of snark when, during Pantigate, he published an article in the Irish Times mildly rebuking ‘liberals’ for calling homophobes homophobes, and advised that this was not the way to win over ‘middle Ireland’. Clearly people came around to his way of seeing things, though; Whelan was in fact invited in to the core coordinating group two months before the referendum, and he was clearly central to the management of the last crucial weeks of Yes Equality’s campaign. In his contribution to the GCN (Gay Community News, the main LGBTQ publication in Ireland) post-referendum special issue, Whelan noted that he was brought on board to advise on strategy to win over “the middle ground older audience”, the main focus of the campaign according to him. This entailed “maintaining discipline and keep[ing] everyone on message.”

There is no doubt that Whelan’s advice and Yes Equality’s strategy was a phenomenal success. At the same time, the strategy, while pragmatic, was for some at least coextensive with their ideological position on what constitutes legitimate political action and what actors are accepted as legitimate political subjects. In other words, in retrospect the campaign touched on fundamental conflicts about what constitutes politics as such, a question that includes but goes beyond the normativizing mystification of love and marriage that most partook of, with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm and ‘sincerity’, for the sake of winning the referendum that could not be lost. Despite Whelan’s and others’ focus on ‘middle Ireland’, the Yes vote was highest not in ‘the middle ground older audience’, in fact, but in the working class communities of Dublin. This took many by surprise, given that the urban working class have never been the ‘target audience’ for the marriage equality lobbyists. Working class communities (and of course the rural population en masse) have long been derided by a Dublin-centric middle class consensus as regressive and socially conservative forces, ‘failed’ citizens whose conservatism is assumed to manifest itself in part in an unreconstructed misogyny and homophobia. Junior Minister for Equality Aodhán Ó Riordáin attempted to play this supposed inherent conflict when he fretted publicaly about the possibility of anti-austerity activists – solidly based in Dublin’s working class communities – voting against the referendum in order to register their hostility toward the government.

The tensions involved in the pursuit of single-issue agendas to the neglect of all other struggles for social and economic justice was manifested in an online battle of the Facebook comments that followed a visit by the unpopular Taoiseach Enda Kenny to Panti’s bar in Dublin – Pantibar – last December. Panti posted a picture of Kenny with some other Fine Gael TDs to social media to a mostly outraged response. Kenny’s visit to Ireland’s best-known gay bar happened at a highly charged moment for the anti-water charges movement – the largest social movement that the country has seen since the inception of the State. A couple of weeks previously, the Tánaiste Joan Burton had attended a graduation ceremony for a community education project in Jobstown in Dublin, one of the most inter-generationally deprived communities in Ireland. Emerging from the ceremony, Burton (along with key marriage equality campaigner Senator Katherine Zappone) was met by over 1000 protestors who were vocal in articulating their rage at the Labour minister. A single brick was thrown but hit no-one; Burton caught a water balloon to the side of the head and went to her car, which the protesters surrounded for some hours before dispersing. Reactions to the protest were astonishing. The protesters, mostly people from the local community, were described in the media as a ‘baying mob’, a ‘frenzied mob’ engaged in ‘thuggery’, stirring up ‘fear and menace’ with their ‘ugly antics’. Burton herself wrote that ”The whole affair was sinister and it was disgusting. The shouting I could deal with, but the spitting, the virulent sexed-up language, the homophobia was disgusting. You could only wonder what kind of minds could think up such language.” This is of course the same ‘homophobia’ that Ó Riordáin imputed in a less explicit way to politicized working class communities that was supposedly endangering the marriage referendum’s safe passage. The incident was narrated in almost hallucinatory terms across the national media as foreboding the end of democracy, the rise of fascism, the spectre of mob rule and ‘demophobia’ orchestrated by the ‘sinister fringes’. Comparisons were made in all seriousness with ISIS and the worst atrocities of the Russian Revolution.

This was the prevailing political atmosphere into which Panti released the photo of Kenny at the gay bar. While Kenny’s photo op reflects the middle-ground strategy of the marriage equality campaign, responses to it suggest again that ideological fissure that opened very briefly during ‘postergate’. Broadly responses were divided between celebration of the perceived momentous occasion of the head of government – up until the previous year opposed to same-sex marriage – being photographed in the best-known gay bar in the country, and on the other hand an avalanche of rage at Kenny and his government, architects of the State regime of deepening and permanent ‘austerity’, its systematic disenfranchisement and dereliction of the most impoverished and vulnerable communities, and its relentless attacks on the under 30s through an implicit policy of forced emigration or dependency on, yes, Family, the result of extensive welfare cuts to those under 25, high unemployment, compulsory labour schemes, cuts to third level grants accompanied by hikes in tuition fees, and soaring rents. These are, of course, the very ‘targeted populations’ who made the referendum win such a resounding one, transforming the vote from a close-run gamble to a resounding victory. While the Union of Students in Ireland and BelongTo, an LGBT youth advocacy NGO, made a concerted and successful effort to mobilize the youth vote, neither the mobilization of recent emigrants in the #hometovote push nor the powerful Yes majority returned by working class communities were part of the Yes Equality strategy. Whelan, for instance, passes over the working class vote in silence, while more than one journalist insisted that it was ‘middle Ireland’ what did it.

“Coolock 88% Jobstown 85% Ballyfermot 90% Stoneybatter 86% Liberties 82% Darndale 80% Ringsend; 85%. 6% of people from Coolock progress to 3rd level. 88% voted yes, we meet attacks on our dignity with an understanding of exclusion. There was no fanfare or celebration of how we had ‘allowed’ the same rights, the implications of having that power over your fellow human beings have been made all too clear. Its time to break down the barriers,” says Dara Quigley, a young woman from Coolock in Dublin. The importance of the political mobilization of working-class communities in Dublin in the process of building a self-organized and powerful anti-austerity movement cannot be overstated, and this was a decisive factor in the marriage referendum passing. Voters in Jobstown and young emigrants coming #hometovote were not voting in solidarity with the government and the State, but in defiance of the multiple impoverishments and oppressions that the State has enacted on the majority of those who live here. The political and relational texture and hopefulness of these and other mobilizations, disruptions, acts of citizenship against the State, produced in excess of the managed marriage campaign, are perhaps occluded when the Irish marriage referendum is viewed solely through the lens of the established radical queer critique.

The functions that marriage and family perform within the machinery of the State are nowhere so apparent as in the migration apparatus. One of the repeated arguments for marriage equality was that it would for the first time grant ‘full and equal citizenship’ to lesbian and gay people in Ireland. In other words, ‘same-sex’ couples will no longer be excluded from the protections afforded by the State through the institution of marriage. ‘Citizenship’ here carries other connotations: acceptance, belonging, inclusion; dignity, propriety, respectability, maturity. Within the idealising and normative terms of the marriage equality campaign, marriage equality is also about love – about the ‘forever love’ that is supposedly deserving of full State recognition, and also the love extended from one citizen to another in the act of voting Yes to Love. A couple of weeks after the marriage referendum, the Immigrant Council of Ireland publicised a meeting in Dublin with its partners in HESTIA, a project that is investigating ‘Trafficking for Sham Marriage’ between Eastern Europe and Ireland. The timing is I’m sure coincidental, but the juxtaposition articulates the function of marriage as a filtering device for inclusion in and exclusion from the protections of the State. There’s the kind of marriage that grants ‘full and equal citizenship’ on the one hand, and then there’s another kind that is held under suspicion, subject to racial profiling, interviews with immigration officers, the kind of marriage that words like ‘sham’, ‘bogus’, ‘illegal’ and ‘deportation’ stick to. Marriages of convenience are not, in fact, illegal in Ireland. Unlike other EU countries, there is no legislative or constitutional differentiation in Irish law between ‘genuine’ marriages for love and marriages for more pragmatic purposes (although of course marriage is not grounds in itself for residency in the State). The same constitutional enshrinement of marriage and the family that made it necessary to hold a referendum on ‘same-sex’ marriage is one reason why it has proven difficult to introduce legislation on marriages of convenience in Ireland. But nonetheless all marriages involving certain categories of ‘non-citizens’ are suspect; all are potentially ‘abusing’ the State and its mechanisms. ‘Marriage for Love’ in a form recognisable to the State’s norms becomes the filtering device here, acknowledgement of its presence being one determinant of the right to remain. For people in the asylum system, access to civil marriage for same-sex couples could even add an additional barrier to family reunification, as the legislation stipulates that there must be proof of State recognition of relationship equivalent to that available for LGBT couples in the Irish State. This can be nothing other than a deliberate instrument of exclusion given the status of queer relationships in the states that most people have traveled from.

The complexities of race and migration in relation to marriage equality had no place, of course, in a campaign like Yes Equality, which appealed to the familiar, the homely, to reassuring sameness and the norm in all respects. The whiteness of the campaign was striking, though not surprising given that the target ‘audience’ was, as Noel Whelan says, ‘middle Ireland’. The campaign managers and strategists who featured in GCN’s special issue were likewise uniformly white. Similarly, on posters, leaflets and in campaign videos, whiteness predominated. Part of the persuasive strategy of the campaign was to create points of identification, showing the ‘audience’ people like themselves, families like their own. The failure to address migrant communities or to include LGBT migrants and people of colour in the Yes Equality campaign compounded the alienation, marginalisation and exclusion that are the experience of minority communities in a white nation. The invisibility of LGBT migrants, in particular, indicates the border politics at play.

This kind of erasure has serious effects on LGBT people in minority communities. It legitimates the belief that being queer is ‘a white thing, it has nothing to do with us’. It confirms the lived experience of structural racism, to see the nation’s ideal image of itself and find that you have no place in it. It helps breathe life into the dogwhistle politics that stir up racist, anti-migrant scapegoating.

The video below, made by Anti Racism Network Ireland (ARN), a radical grassroots activist organisation based in Dublin, attempted to make an intervention when these dynamics became clear in the last few weeks of the referendum campaign. It was addressed not so much to the ‘majority’ community, but to migrant communities: to provide a message of acceptance and belonging to LGBT people in those communities; to underline the need for solidarity across communities and identifications; to show that there is no homogenous ‘migrant’, ‘African’, ‘Muslim’, as some newspaper reports drumming up fears of an orchestrated No vote from the so-called ‘New Irish’ had speculated. The short video conforms to the Yes Equality aesthetic and is ‘on message’, but the quiet radicalism of many of those who spoke to camera and of people from various ‘migrant communities’ who shared ARN’s message in their networks again produced something in excess of the marriage referendum itself – a step toward transformative change rather than an end-point.

Ann Mulhall teaches in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is an activist with Anti Racism Network Ireland (ARN).

By Tav Nyong’o

One of my favorite albums growing up was the soundtrack to the reggae classic The Harder They Come, and I loved in particular the song “By The Rivers of Babylon” by the Melodians. It’s lyrics adapt Psalms 19 and 137, which lament the bondage of the Israelites, and issue an ethical challenge that continues to haunt makers, documenters, and critics of black performance to this day:

For the wicked carried us away captivity
Require from us a song
How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?

In words a seven year old can understand, this sung lyric performatively stages the constitutive ambivalence of coerced performance. How can we sing when we are oppressed? How can we sing when that singing is required by our oppressors? How can we sing without somehow colluding in our oppression in a strange and hostile land?

One might think this question is paradoxical or beside the point: if you don’t want to, or can’t, sing for in a strange land, then why are you? But if you dwell on the question a little, if you let the song settle into you, I think you will see that the question only makes sense if you are singing it. It only resonates when couched in the very idiom it challenges. It is a question about complicity that is immanent to the scene of complicity. Singing or not, we remain strangers in a strange land.

Paris is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s classic work of new queer cinema, screened at Prospect Park over Pride weekend, before a crowd through which the day’s news of gay marriage for all was rippling. Sometimes one is lucky enough to be in the right place and time to hear the hinge of history turn. There in the heart of gentrified Brooklyn, on the day the president eulogized the slain in Charleston, all kinds of queers and othered gathered in a park, and there was an opportunity to wrestle with the ways we are and aren’t one community. Park Slope lesbians and Bushwick hipsters, socialists and liberals, homeless youth and homeownersexuals. Black, Asian, Jewish, Latino, and possibly a transracial or two. The defiantly and the demurely gender nonconformist. Transgender and not, people of color and people of pallor, all gathered to watch a film that is now 24 years old (in one more year, it will be able to legally rent a car).

When this public screening was announced earlier this spring, a vehement internet campaign arose against the program, which featured no living members of the ball community. It quickly extended to screenings of the film itself, which are seen by some as furthering exploitation and catering to a white gaze. Why should the filmmakers continue to be lauded, critics demanded, and continue to profit off the lives and creativity of the film’s subjects, many of whom died in poverty of HIV/AIDS-related causes? In response to criticism, the original opening act for the film backed out, and, after several days of impassioned and sometimes vituperative exchanges on social media, Celebrate Brooklyn announced it was going back to the drawing board.

Paris is Burning is a film that, over the years, has remained a flashpoint of the very issues it sought to document and explore: racism and self-worth; transphobia and transgender worldmaking; families of origin and families of choice. The dreamworlds of work and ambition, opulence and violence, in New York City, circa 1987. It has drawn its share of detractors over the years, most famously in an impassioned but problematic takedown by bell hooks. Not stopping at faulting director Livingstone for exploiting her subjects, hooks criticized the ball children for embracing aspirational class, racial, and gender status in a white heterosexual capitalist patriarchal society. I was unpersuaded by this critique when I first read it over twenty years ago. It seemed to me elevate hooks’ personal reaction to the status of a representative feminist of color reaction, but this failed to account for the incredible thrill the film gave me and so many queers of color around me, despite our ambivalence. It also completely shortchanged the aesthetic merits of the film itself, which are substantial.

I came away from this and other critical reactions to the film thinking that it is always best to try to walk a mile in someone else’s pumps before you criticize how they choose to survive oppressive conditions. A more useful, if unfortunately less circulated, analysis came from Phillip Brian Harper, who pointed out that the real problem lay neither with the filmmaker nor her subjects, but with the economic and racial conditions that precluded working class people of color from making their own films, and thereby realizing the full benefits of creative control over their own community and art forms.

Harper’s critique has grown newly relevant in the intervening decades, as a technological revolution in communication has brought the means of representation into the hands of a wider and wider population of producers (albeit under highly problematic terms, as any student of new media knows). It has also changed our expectations of documentaries like Paris if Burning. Webcams and Reality TV have increasingly inured us to the idea that broadcasting our daily lives is a potential revenue stream, if only we make that life interesting/outrageous/abject enough. In this new environment, I suggest, in which performance is almost a default setting for everyone, a film like Paris is Burning just feels different than it once did. Octavia St. Laurent’s and Venus Extravaganza’s expectations of celebrity, that once seemed tinged with pathos, now seem like viable career ambitions. Dorian Corey’s world-wise wisdom about the illusions of fame seem to come from a vanished queer world now lost in the glare of mass media visibility. Everyone these days, it seems, is trying to serve executive realness, even actual executives. And to that extent its increasingly hard nowadays to understand the degree to which the film once gripped us as a powerful critique of wealth and fame, and as exemplifying the cultivation of queer and trans worlds as viable alternative modes of sociality. It is one of the many costs of our new incorporation into official national culture that what once looked like radical outsiderhood is now fodder for the latest crop of internet memes and reality show catch-phrases.

The Internet uproar that followed the initial announcement of the Celebrate Brooklyn had at least one positive outcome: the organizers did the outreach they should have done in the first place, brought the ball children to the table, and let their planned evening be upstaged by a Houses United ball. Watching the ball, I did feel the contradiction in having the solution to this performative dilemma be … more performance. Vogueing and walking on the Celebrate Brooklyn stage — welcome as it was — does nothing to transform the real conditions of poverty, racism, and transphobia. Understanding this, some activists are increasingly reluctant to countenance performance for the public in any setting, castigating all circulation of vogueing beyond the ball scene themselves as cultural appropriation. Even a pop star like FKA Twigs, who assiduously credits her dancers, acknowledges herself as a dancer who is learning the form, comes under fire for not being an authentic participant in the culture.

If the Houses United brought to public attention the ongoing vitality of the balls and the houses — reminding us that although many stars of the film have died, their houses are still going strong — it always did so under terms that José Muñoz once termed “the burden of liveness.” This is the burden under which queers of color are expected to perform liveness and vitality under conditions of temporary visibility that erase our histories and futures. This burden need not always weight us down entirely, it need not preclude us from ever singing in a strange land. But I do think a hint of it is always there on even the most glorious and celebratory occasions.

Perhaps it is by understanding Paris is Burning as part of our history that we can shirk the burden of liveness and come to a new appreciation of the film. The film wouldn’t still be controversial, after all, if it weren’t such an enduring classic. It is a testament to the achievement of both Livingston and her subjects that thousands of people would show up, a quarter of a century later, to watch and cheer, many of us having memorized every line. Rather than standing in for ball culture — an unfair expectation of any single film, no matter how amazing — the film could be understand as part of queer history, and specifically part of the ball culture’s history, and even part of its futurity as well.

After all, the widespread success of the original release led to the spread of ball culture beyond its New York City origins. My own first contact was with houses in green leafed Connecticut. Marlon Bailey’s prizewinning study Butch Queen Up in Pumps documents another such regional scene, in Detroit, Michigan. The circulation of ball videos online has led to the dance and culture spreading so far and wide globally that one choreographer, Rashaad Newsome, has called the culture “open source.” The idea that ball culture can and does circulate through open source modes of sharing, exchange, adaptation, and transformation will not please those who feel it to be the exclusive property of the ball children. And certainly, recognizing the open source basis of culture should also not be license to pillage, to take work without credit or compensation, or to only focus on minority culture when it is in the white glare of media hype. But shutting down screenings of the film, or shutting the culture off from outsiders, seems counterproductive in the long run, and overprotective of a culture that thrives precisely due to its own internal strengths.

Its all the more quixotic to seek to protect ball culture from commercial exploitation given how successful the ball scene has been at maintaining itself as a viable underground movement long after many other “subcultures” have burnt out or turned mainstream. Not even as powerfully a commercial force as RuPaul has managed to denature the art form, or alter the terms under which it sustains the communities to which it belongs. Watching the Houses United ball, I was reminded again why that is: while the form is very presentational and solicits the onlooking gaze, it possesses its own internal logic and aesthetic standards, and rarely stops to educate its audience about. To walk a ball is the only real way into the performative logic of vogue and runway, and that seems both right and just. Just because the ball is on display, just because a dancer is in your video or at your concert, it doesn’t mean that everything is on display. The right to opacity, as the poet Edouard Glissant put it, is still maintained (Teju Cole discusses Glissant’s theory of opacity here.)

The status of the ball as a rite of opacity was underlined to me at one point when the commentator told the audience: “If you don’t get the secret, well then, that’s the secret!” I knew what they meant, and I was okay with not knowing entirely what they meant. I knew the children were not walking for me, even if I was there and privileged to watch. If the wish to be in on the secret is part of what keeps the cool hunters forever sniffing around the ball scene, trying to break off and cash in on an iota of its glamor, the public performance and dramatic display of the openness of the secret is what keeps them clueless and forever guessing.

While as recently as a decade ago, many butches could still be found in their natural habitats – dyke bars and softball teams – and while some could even be spotted in the wild, in recent years, their numbers have declined leading some scientists to predict their eventual disappearance. Indeed, like the passenger pigeon or Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island tortoise that died in 2012, the butch seemed like a category whose time had passed – a relic, a fossil, a victim of cultural climate change and an irredeemable symbol of past times that a new generation was eager to forget. But, in a kind of miraculous adaptation, the butch, like the Eurasian beaver or the Dalmatian Pelican, seems to have trembled on the brink of extinction and…made a remarkable recovery!

From the Broadway musical based on Alison Bechdel’s memoir of growing up butch with a closeted gay father, Fun Home, to Lea Delaria and the consortium of butches (what is the word for a group of butches? A Charm? A Pace? A Kennel? A Brace? A Barren? A Murder? A Parliament? Or, my favorite – a Bale? I am going with bale of butches) in Orange is the New Black, from Charlize Theron’s turn as Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max to the hockey playing tomboy in Inside Out, we would seem to have a bale of butches in popular culture right at the very moment that the category has supposedly gone out of style.

Are the new representations of butches ghostly after-images of a recent past that has come and gone and taken its place within a pantheon of gay and lesbian histories relegated to the past by the recent triumphalism of the gay marriage era? Or, conversely, are they harbingers of a new future of gender variability that has expanded beyond man and woman into a wide ranging set of expressions of the gendered body? Is butch back or was it never gone? Has butch been around long enough to become trendy? Or, in an era of unprecedented visibility for transgender embodiment, does butch represent an obstinate fragment of an older paradigm, still capable of generating both fascination and fear?

It was less than a decade ago at Wimbledon that French tennis player, Amelie Mauresmo was accused by Lindsay Davenport of “playing like a guy” and then described by Martina Hingis of being “half a man.” Now Mauresmo is the super effective coach for a male top ten player – Andy Murray. And, only six years ago, South African runner, Caster Semenya was subjected to a clearly racist “gender test” when her unapologetically athletic appearance led to suspicions about her masculinity, drug use and so on. Now, on the current world cup winning women’s soccer squad there are several visibly butch players and plenty that are openly queer. How, then, did we leap, in the last year or so, from uniform expressions of disgust, suspicion and dismay directed at the masculine female form to empathy, recognition and even acceptance?

In an interview in The New York Times Magazine in May of this year, Alison Bechdel, who appeared in the photograph accompanying the piece dressed in a very smart tailored suit, was asked:

“In “Fun Home,” you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered?”

Well, first of all, great question!! Second, wow, in The New York Times? Really? Third, well, is the butch endangered? Bechdel answers adroitly:

“I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I’m a man trapped in a female body. I would’ve just gone down that road if it had been there. But I’m so glad it wasn’t, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world.

So, is butch the designation of a new space or an old space? The article is ambivalent and implies both that butch is an old-fashioned form of identification that is in danger of being eclipsed by transgenderism and that it is a “new space in the world.” And maybe that captures perfectly what shall hereafter be known as “the temporal paradox of the butch” – it is out of time and ahead of its time and behind the times all at once. Butch is simultaneously a marker of what Elizabeth Freeman calls “temporal drag” or “the visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present” and of certain forms of what Juana Maria Rodriguez terms “sexual futures.” The uncanny, uncertain, dislocated and indefinable terrain of the butch competes with our sense of the stubborn, recalcitrant, unmoving and unmoved essence of the butch. Butch was supposed to fade away as a category precisely because it encapsulated the ugly, the dowdy, the backward and the tragic (Stone Butch Blues not Stone Butch Ecstasy), but its calcified intransigence may actually have equipped the category for survival!

NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 07: Sydney Lucas performs onstage with the cast of ‘Fun Home’ at the 2015 Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall on June 7, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)

A close friend sent me the clip of young Sydney Lucas singing “Ring of Keys” from Fun Home (thanks GG!). The show-stopping song, penned by the incomparable Lisa Kron, that has thrilled audiences on Broadway found an even larger audience when Lucas performed it at the Tony’s awards this year. While singing children are nothing new and generally kind of irritating, lesbian-themed Broadway shows and songs about youthful identifications with butch women are as rare as gay men on football teams or straight ladies in the power tools section at Home Depot. So, this song and this musical had few cultural traditions upon which to draw. Amazing then that the song is so effective, so moving, so…emotional!

“Ring of Keys” tells the story of an encounter between the young Alison and the adult butch who walked into the diner where Alison and her closeted father were eating. Sydney sings:

Someone just walked in the door, like no one I ever saw before, I feel…I feel…

I don’t know where you came from, I wish I did, I feel so dumb… I feel…I feel.

Your swagger and your bearing and the just right clothes you’re wearing.

Your short hair and your dungarees, and your lace up boots and your keys, ohhh, your ring of keys!

“I know you,” she sings, “you’re beautiful…no, you’re handsome”! This song is just so…it’s…I feel…I feel…Ellipsis in the song conveys the unspeakability of this articulation of butch cross-generational identification. There are no words for such affect, no precedents for generations of butches past who may also have seen strong, gender-queer female-bodied women and who may have wanted to claim them. As novelistic descriptions by Leslie Feinberg and others of just such ghostly encounters between adult, abject butches and the young proto-butches who want to find their likenesses in the world demonstrate, in the past, the butch adult would have been more likely to spark terror and fear in the young queer’s heart than adoration, acceptance and identification.

What the young Alison feels for the anonymous butch who crosses her path has no words, cannot be culled from any archive of feelings, gay or straight, and so is captured in that open mouthed, soundless wonder that punctuates the song. The mouth, open and silent, mimics the ring of keys that say everything without speaking, that jangle a noisy song of their own without words, that say butch in a way that ordinary language could not.

The success of Alison Bechdel’s work, long overdue and so well deserved, both exemplifies and contributes to the evolution and repopulation of butches. Butches can now be found in sports and in the arts, on the soccer field and on Broadway, on TV (Orange is the New Black) and in movies. Only 7 years ago, we had an entire TV series, The L Word, that represented butchness as “the B word” that dare not speak its name. Despite the fact that the character of Shane (Katherine Moennig) drew heavily on the history of butch sexiness, she never could claim that history, name it or own it. And when a butch character was introduced, Moira played by masculine of center actor Daniela Sea, they quickly transitioned to trans leaving the category of butch stranded like a missing link, like a bad memory to be expunged from queer representation.

But now, in Orange is the New Black, Lea Delaria’s character “Big Boo,” has the letters B-U-T-C-H tattooed on her arm and is not the only butch on the prison block either. Black butches on the show, including Janae Watson (Vicky Jeudy) and Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley) represent a much longer history of non-traditional Black genders that may or may not be captured by the term “butch” at all.

Game of Thrones has its own bale of butches including Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) who represents a tall, strapping, princess-saving heroic knightly butch, and Arya Stark (Massie Williams) a renegade princess turned sword fighter and monk. For more comic butches, think Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) of Glee who plays a gloriously mean, bully butch athletic coach competing with the Glee club for school funds.

The butch is, to continue our wildlife conceit, neither fish nor fowl. But to introduce another rhetorical device, the butch is neither cis-gender nor simply transgender, the butch is a bodily catachresis. The Greek word, catachresis, means the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words (I feel I got this formulation from bullyblogger pal Tavia Nyong’o but not sure from where). Butch is always a misnomer – not male, not female, masculine but not male, female but not feminine, the term serves as a placeholder for the unassimilable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim. For Derrida, catachresis captures the inherent linguistic instability in all signifying practices and for Spivak it names the inherent colonial violence lurking in the practice of naming and identifying, systematizing and translating. And so, in this era of LGBT rights and recognition, let the butch stand as all that cannot be absorbed into systems of signification, legitimation, legibility, recognition and legality.

Even as the butch seems to be back in circulation, I do not think this representational presence is a marker of social acceptance, rather, the butch, like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, survives or fades away depending upon the levels of toxicity in the air. Unlike the canary however, and now I wish I had never introduced said bird in the first place, the butch thrives in toxic conditions and fades away in the clear air of apparent freedom. The butch is back, in other words, and here the butch is not canary like at all, in fact forget the damn canary, because we need a reminder that recognition is NOT freedom, that the absorption of the few at the expense of many others is not liberation and that the illegible, the unassimilable, the inconsolable, the illegitimate multitudes still await a coming emancipation. The society that embraces the butch will be ordered in a way that we cannot yet imagine. Our current social order, after all, with or without gay marriage, with or without mainstream images of transgender bodies, is the one that rendered the butch as the anachronistic, useless, dowdy misfit in the first place.

To quote a smart rapper, don’t call it a come back, we’ve been here before. Butches have flickered in and out of cultural visibility for at least the last hundred years. They have survived wars, economic depressions, homophobic panics, gentrification, petrification, Andrea Dworkin and Camille Paglia, stupefaction, French cinema, the 80’s, and both film versions of Sex in the City. Despite flannel shirt shortages, shifting fashion trends towards androgynous looks, the trendiness of transgenderism, a severe height disadvantage in relation to many femmes, and new levels of emotional sensitivity in queer communities, the butch has survived and lives to wear another ring of keys.

Whether, in the future, the butch will hit a rough patch in the evolution of sexual ecologies and die out like the Golden Toad, or whether the butch has the capacity to replicate under precarious conditions remains to be seen. But one thing is certain, live or die, the butch, represents a piece of queer history that remains unspeakable and unspoken and all the more resilient for it.

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston ON. McKittrick is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006) and the co-editor with 

the late Clyde Woods of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (South End Press, 2007). McKittrick is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology titled Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke UP, 2014). In addition, she is completing a monograph titled Dear Science And/Rejoicing the Black Creative Sciences which is on the promise of science in Black poetry, music and visual art.

In an interview with Peter James Hudson titled “Canada and the Question of Black Geographies,” McKittrick comments on the privilege of presuming or even demanding that the classroom be a safe space. We asked McKittrick if we could post this section of the interview on Bullybloggers as part of our ongoing series on the politics of Trigger Warnings.

The full interview appears in The CLR James Journal Volume 20, Number 1, Fall 2014.

TOWARDS THE END OF THE INTERVIEW, HUDSON ASKS:

PJH: On twitter, you (depressingly, brilliantly) wrote, “I’ve never glimpsed safe teaching (and learning) space. It is a white fantasy that harms.” I’m wonder­ing if you could expand on that as it pertains to the Black student in Canada? How does such a vexed space inform your own pedagogical practice?

KM: Yes. I wonder a lot about why the classroom should be safe. It isn’t safe. I am not sure what safe learning looks like because the kinds of questions that need to be (and are) asked, across a range of disciplines and interdisci­plines, necessarily attend to violence and sadness and the struggle for life. How could teaching narratives of sadness ever, under any circumstances, be safe!? And doubled onto this: which black or other marginalized fac­ulty is safe in the academy, ever? Who are these safe people? Where are they? But there is also, on top of this all, an underlying discourse, one that emerges out of feminism and other “identity” discourses, that assumes that the classroom should be safe. This kind of “safe space” thinking sometimes includes statements on course outlines about respect for diversity and how the class (faculty? students?) will not tolerate inappropriate behavior: rac­ism, homophobia, sexism, ableism. This kind of hate-prevention is a fantasy to me. It is a fantasy that replicates, rather than undoes, systems of injus­tice because it assumes, first, that teaching about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia can be safe (which is an injustice to those who have lived and live injustice!), second, that learning about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia is safe, easy, comfortable, and, third, that silencing and/or removing ‘bad’ and ‘intolerant’ students dismantles systems of injustice. Privileged students leave these safe spaces with transparently knowable op­pressed identities safely tucked in their back pockets and a lesson on how to be aggressively and benevolently silent. The only people harmed in this pro­cess are students of colour, faculty of colour, and those who are the victims of potential yet unspoken intolerance. I call this a white fantasy because, at least for me, only someone with racial privilege would assume that the classroom could be a site of safety! This kind of privileged person sees the classroom as, a priori, safe, and a space that is tainted by dangerous subject matters (race) and unruly (intolerant) students. But the classroom is, as I see it, a colonial site that was, and always has been, engendered by and through violent exclusion! Remember Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy?! How wretched are those daffodils!?! I am not suggesting that the classroom be a location that welcomes violence and hatefulness and racism; I am suggesting that learning and teaching and classrooms are, already, sites of pain. We cannot protect or save ourselves or our students by demanding silence or shaming ignorance or ‘warning’ the class that difficult knowledge is around the corner (as with “trigger” moments—the moment when the course director or teaching as­sistant says: “look out, I need to acknowledge a trigger moment that will make you uncomfortable: we are going to talk about whiteness!”) All of this, too, also recalls the long history of silencing—subalterns not speaking and all of that. Why is silencing, now, something that protects or enables safety? Who does silence protect and who does silence make safe and who does silence erase? Who has the privilege to demand tolerance?

In my teaching, although this is a day-to-day skirmish for me because the site where we begin to teach is already white supremacist, I try very hard to create class­room conversations that work out how knowledge is linked to an ongoing struggle to end violence and that, while racist or homophobic practices are certainly not encouraged or welcome, when they do emerge (because they always do!) we need to situate these practices within the wider context of colonialism and anti-blackness. This is a pedagogy wherein the brutalities of racial violence are not descriptively rehearsed, but always already demand practical activities of resistance, encounter, and anti-colonial thinking.

By Eng-Beng Lim

If there was any doubt about the virulence of colonial machismo or its inoculation in U.S.-American white, supremacist masculinity, one need only look at how recent murders rely on three of its most recognizable tropes – the hunter, the gunsman, the police – that have turned decidedly murderous and terroristic against animals, women, kids, and people of color, particularly African Americans.

To say there is an epidemic of toxic masculinity in U.S.A, the world’s leading gun phallocracy, is to say the least. Week after week, we read about police officers as the lawless hitmen of Order (Ray Tensing, Brian Encinia, Darren Wilson et al), the rampage killer (Dylann Roof, John Russell Houser), and the animal torturer and killer (Walter Palmer). These men are getting their fifteen minutes of shame as they are caught in flagrante delicto but their capture or release only begins to tell many stories yet untold. The news isn’t so much that these murders are happening or would continue to happen. It isn’t even that the system is corrupt. We already know that. What is striking about their recent social media exposé is the sense of public outrage at discovering them, and learning how widespread they are.

That is to say, while the willful and anonymous execution of disposable lives is an everyday occurrence by the police state, racial capitalism and colonial violence, a history of the present well documented by thinkers and activists, bodycam, dashcam and videocam recordings of a few incidents are helping to generate a collective consternation: “We didn’t know, actually didn’t want to know, just how bad it is but here is murder staring at our faces.”

To murder is to end another’s life or the conditions of possibility for life. It is to force the other to die, whether instantly or slowly and unbearably, by force or self-destruction, and then to perversely care that that death is justified in rational, economic or procedural terms. It is to disregard life itself and to strip away everything that constitutes a person’s humanity. For those whose lives are severely disenfranchised by systemic racism, compulsory heterosexuality, and cisgender privilege, historic and quotidian versions of this murder are all too common.

But to see through the eyes of the dead, the eyes of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland and Sam Dubose, is to see these murders (literally and figuratively) as simultaneously uncontrollable and targeted. It is to see the workings of a toxic, supremacist white masculinity as ordinary and terrifying, self-centered and godlike in complex, cowardly and frightful in constitution. There is a silver lining even in this extreme violence. That these murderers would now grab the headlines as murderers indicates that the seemingly unimpeachable white masculinist complex is finally losing its absolute legitimacy, and subject to public scrutiny and judgment.

The much bigger problem about the gun phallocracy is the internalization of colonial machismo in U.S.-American psychic, institutional, regulatory and relational structures. There is more to do than catching or shaming a few of its murderers – U.S. gun violence is the worst in the world. The militarization of the police as an apparatus of the neoliberal state is making things worse as cops turn their rifles even at students and kids, inspiring counter-movements on the street like Copwatch. While social media is a kinetic platform for swift public justice, so effective in the performance of public outrage that Walter Palmer has gone into hiding, the thrill of digital vigilantism has its limits. Predictably, the phallocracy’s pullback against the public’s pushback has rendered Palmer a sympathetic figure who has to “endure [the] latest onslaught from the social media mob.” The hunter, as many observe, has become “the hunted.”

The indistinguishable “social media mob” vis-à-vis the singular Walter Palmer only reinscribes the narrative of the white man as exceptional and blameless, which Palmer himself tried to invoke in a statement released by a PR firm he hired. (All PR firms have since distanced themselves from this case.) His defense is a form of colonial oblivion or high delusion – he has “legal” paperwork obtained with an expensive bribe ($50,000), he is unaware that Cecil is important, and besides it is all just game in the Safari. His fellow Great White Hunters have come to his defense saying the man is in fact protecting and preserving the “trophy” species: “Nobody is going to spend $50,000 to $75,000 on a photographic safari. All the parks in Zimbabwe are run on hunting dollars.”

Why won’t the rich use their wealth to fund research and sustainability projects rather than posing with their $50k exotic kills in Africa? The manner of Cecil’s killing provides some answers. Palmer shot the animal with a crossbow and tortured it for 40 hours before shooting, beheading and skinning it. He also tried to hide the GPS collar that a team of researchers from Oxford University had attached to Cecil, effectively destroying years of research and a local tourist attraction. A Zimbabwean law professor based in the UK notes that Palmer is part of a “lucrative hunting industry,” a “horrible blood industry” that operates like a “cartel” and “Mafioso.”

Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Walter Palmer with their exotic, trophy kills in Africa.

Cecil the lion may be anthropormophised and even Disneyfied. But “the mob” are responding to the vileness of a cavalier machismo so ordinary and godlike, so violent in its method of killing and capitalist entitlement that there is little distinction between the hunters’s “We pay to kill” and the police officers’s “We get paid to kill.” These kills are allegories of colonial violence in the transnational present.

To go after Palmer as a lone ranger is therefore to miss how the colonial hunting of African animals is part of a triumvirate of self- and system-justifying U.S. hunters, mass killers and police on the prowl for blood. These men are duly weaponized and ever ready to boost their frightened manhoods by hunting, hurting and hitting. For who would kill for sport, be triggered by imagined racial assault, and assert the law to shore up the schizophrenia of this unholy trinity? Who else but those threatened by the disappearance of their own relevance and entitlement, their bitterness at the myriad failures of compulsory heterosexuality, and structural inequities biting them back in their asses?

No law will change colonial machismo or the imperial white, male ego purchased with blood. For every Palmer, Roof and Tensing caught in the act, many others like them will continue to roam the streets under the radar. What, then, is to be done? Do we need more bodycams, more surveillance, and even more overwhelming evidence of excessive force to indict the bad apples of the state apparatus? Do we need more laws that are enforced by the lawless? Or do we need to dismantle the gun phallocracy by incinerating those damn guns and all macho b.s?

*

“Why are you trying to argue with crooks,” my dad asked me as the rogue movers from New Jersey held my things in hostage, and demanded twice, three times and finally quadruple the price of the original quote. Each phone call from the company sent me to the nearest town on my drive to Michigan where I had to wire them the money through Western Union. A few weeks later, as they dropped off my things, much of them broken, the movers acted like nothing bad had happened. I kicked myself for going with the lowest bidder but money was tight and the contract seemed binding. There was apparently no legal recourse because the move crossed several state lines, and all I could do was file a complaint with Better Business Bureau and write a really bad Yelp review. As with all good scams, the moving company staged such a flawless execution that fooled even my ex-boyfriend, an attorney in New York City who negotiated on my behalf only to turn on me for not paying them enough as if their quote was my fault. His indictment – “how could you? why didn’t you” – reverberated in my ear with resonances of our recent break-up.

Months later, an exposé news team did a segment on moving scams and shamed this rogue company on national television. It was unreal to see the company on TV. I felt vindicated though not much better. I was reminded of being attached to broken things. Besides, the corrective justice focused on one company out of thousands that used predatory and extortionist practices. For instance, over 8500 complaints were filed in 2012, and many more hoaxes go unreported. What does it take for institutions to take action? What the news segment did was to confirm my account all along but the power of televisual validation turned the tide against the rogue mover, which closed down. A year later, it morphed into another company.

Are the recent exposés of U.S.-American policing doing something similar or different? Are the cams making visible what has been concealed or are we simply refusing to see the actuality of lived violations?

The eyes of Sam Dubose, and the dash-cam video of the Dallas police force.

What are the eyes looking through the camera apertures – the eyes of the dead or the colonial gaze?

Is the camera a form of deterrent or deferment of justice? Is it an imagined corrective for bad behavior with no transformative effect on the culture of policing? As much as we think we know what we see, the Rodney King video in 1991 indicates that a visual economy of proof does not get at the “truth” of the matter. Like documentaries, surveillance cameras tend to promote empathetic responses about the verisimilitude of representation. They assume the seamless merging of the viewer and the viewed, or the character and the subject. We could understand this through Brecht’s account of the street scene, a cornerstone of epic theater. The demonstrator in the street scene is the one who “acts the behavior of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident.” But rather than being stuck in the “he did that, he said that” element of performance, the charge is to generate consciousness about difference by demonstrating through performative documentation, the “social function of the whole apparatus.”

As a window to the street scene of policing, the cam’s realistic frame is entrapped in the engendering of illusion, and its interlocutors have used its recordings as a matter of representation, or the truth, rather than as a resource for a direct changeover from representation to commentary. What the camera is demonstrating is the method of murderous policing coming undone because its agents are unable to contain the virulence of the racist and misogynist state. They are acting on its deadly colonial machismo as if its labile affects are beyond control. And they are out of control.

In the latest murder case, University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing moved from monotonous flatness one moment to compulsive rage the next before blowing the face off Sam Dubose with one shot. Dubose is the 534th person shot dead by the police in the U.S. this year. Tensing joins a long line of angry white men who “lost their temper” at being disobeyed or disrespected, and then immediately pulled out their guns for self-protection.

If ever there was a need for trigger warning, this is it.

It does not take much for these guys to snap. While they may seem “senseless and asinine,” the pathology of pride and fear, panic and rage is the racial complex of colonial machismo trying to suppress its own terror by shooting away every schizophrenic episode involving an imagined, unarmed black assailant looming large like a criminal, a monster, a wild man. This paranoia and its hallucinogenic references have a long, colonial history, and they are deep symptoms of colonial guilt. As Alfred Métraux notes in his classic study, Haitian Voodoo:

“Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity: the anxiety which grows in the minds of those who abuse power often takes the form of imaginary terrors and demented obsessions. The master maltreated his slave, but feared his hatred. He treated him like a beast of burden but dreaded the occult powers which he imputed to him. And the greater the subjugation of the Black, the more he inspired fear; the ubiquitous fear which shows in the records of the period and which solidified in the obsessions with poison, which throughout the eighteenth century, was the cause of so many atrocities.” (New York: Schocken, 1972), p15.

The U.S. obsession with guns in the twenty first century substitutes for the colonial obsession with poison of the eighteenth century, and both are tied to the “anxiety… of those who abuse power.” Each murder in the U.S. gun phallocracy continues the atrocities of colonial violence. The falsehoods and fabrications of the police in their reports of murder echo the “imaginary terrors and demented obsessions” of the slave master. Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, for instance, characterized Michael Brown as a “demon,” and said he “felt like a five-year-old holding Hulk Hogan” even though both men were 6 ft 4. Perhaps Wilson is articulating a nation’s anxiety at being coddled by a black President or perhaps he is so shaken by the broken spell of colonial machismo that he has to murder to make the spell work again. Either way, the toxicity of white, supremacist masculinity has become an extremely dangerous contagion, and is in desperate need of medical, social and rehabilitative treatment.

“Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity”

May the ghosts of the dead rise up to forever haunt all deadly white men and their imitators with their smoking guns in hand every minute of their waking days.

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston ON. McKittrick is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006) and the co-editor with 

the late Clyde Woods of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (South End Press, 2007). McKittrick is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology titled Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke UP, 2014). In addition, she is completing a monograph titled Dear Science And/Rejoicing the Black Creative Sciences which is on the promise of science in Black poetry, music and visual art.

In an interview with Peter James Hudson titled “Canada and the Question of Black Geographies,” McKittrick comments on the privilege of presuming or even demanding that the classroom be a safe space. We asked McKittrick if we could post this section of the interview on Bullybloggers as part of our ongoing series on the politics of Trigger Warnings.

The full interview appears in The CLR James Journal Volume 20, Number 1, Fall 2014.

TOWARDS THE END OF THE INTERVIEW, HUDSON ASKS:

PJH: On twitter, you (depressingly, brilliantly) wrote, “I’ve never glimpsed safe teaching (and learning) space. It is a white fantasy that harms.” I’m wonder­ing if you could expand on that as it pertains to the Black student in Canada? How does such a vexed space inform your own pedagogical practice?

KM: Yes. I wonder a lot about why the classroom should be safe. It isn’t safe. I am not sure what safe learning looks like because the kinds of questions that need to be (and are) asked, across a range of disciplines and interdisci­plines, necessarily attend to violence and sadness and the struggle for life. How could teaching narratives of sadness ever, under any circumstances, be safe!? And doubled onto this: which black or other marginalized fac­ulty is safe in the academy, ever? Who are these safe people? Where are they? But there is also, on top of this all, an underlying discourse, one that emerges out of feminism and other “identity” discourses, that assumes that the classroom should be safe. This kind of “safe space” thinking sometimes includes statements on course outlines about respect for diversity and how the class (faculty? students?) will not tolerate inappropriate behavior: rac­ism, homophobia, sexism, ableism. This kind of hate-prevention is a fantasy to me. It is a fantasy that replicates, rather than undoes, systems of injus­tice because it assumes, first, that teaching about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia can be safe (which is an injustice to those who have lived and live injustice!), second, that learning about anti-colonialism or sexism or homophobia is safe, easy, comfortable, and, third, that silencing and/or removing ‘bad’ and ‘intolerant’ students dismantles systems of injustice. Privileged students leave these safe spaces with transparently knowable op­pressed identities safely tucked in their back pockets and a lesson on how to be aggressively and benevolently silent. The only people harmed in this pro­cess are students of colour, faculty of colour, and those who are the victims of potential yet unspoken intolerance. I call this a white fantasy because, at least for me, only someone with racial privilege would assume that the classroom could be a site of safety! This kind of privileged person sees the classroom as, a priori, safe, and a space that is tainted by dangerous subject matters (race) and unruly (intolerant) students. But the classroom is, as I see it, a colonial site that was, and always has been, engendered by and through violent exclusion! Remember Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy?! How wretched are those daffodils!?! I am not suggesting that the classroom be a location that welcomes violence and hatefulness and racism; I am suggesting that learning and teaching and classrooms are, already, sites of pain. We cannot protect or save ourselves or our students by demanding silence or shaming ignorance or ‘warning’ the class that difficult knowledge is around the corner (as with “trigger” moments—the moment when the course director or teaching as­sistant says: “look out, I need to acknowledge a trigger moment that will make you uncomfortable: we are going to talk about whiteness!”) All of this, too, also recalls the long history of silencing—subalterns not speaking and all of that. Why is silencing, now, something that protects or enables safety? Who does silence protect and who does silence make safe and who does silence erase? Who has the privilege to demand tolerance?

In my teaching, although this is a day-to-day skirmish for me because the site where we begin to teach is already white supremacist, I try very hard to create class­room conversations that work out how knowledge is linked to an ongoing struggle to end violence and that, while racist or homophobic practices are certainly not encouraged or welcome, when they do emerge (because they always do!) we need to situate these practices within the wider context of colonialism and anti-blackness. This is a pedagogy wherein the brutalities of racial violence are not descriptively rehearsed, but always already demand practical activities of resistance, encounter, and anti-colonial thinking.

Stuart Chase’s 1956 Guide to Straight Thinking is sometimes credited with the first use of the term “straw man.” He used the term to describe the rhetorical practice of basing a strong argument on the misrepresentation of another position. The straw man/person represents a figure without depth or dynamism that is easily knocked down. And so if one represents feminism in terms of a unified group of man-hating, chainsaw wielding, separatist lesbians, rather than as a wide array of positions held by many different groups with or without chainsaws, then it is relatively easy to persuade a neutral audience that feminism is dangerous. Straw men, or in this case straw womyn, stand in for the complexity of a flesh and blood opponent. The term draws upon the image of the scarecrow on the one hand and on fairground games on the other – the term “Aunt Sally,” for example, is often used as a synonym for Straw Man and comes from the fairground game where a target (often an “ugly” woman or racialized in someway) is set up for others to knock down.

A recent issue of the journal differences engages in the production of straw people and does an Aunt Sally on queer theory. The issue, differences Volume 26 #1 (May 2015), edited by Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson, and titled, “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity” asks the question: “What might queer theory do if its allegiance to antinormativity was rendered less secure?” The answer goes something like this: if its allegiance to antinormativity were rendered less secure, queer theory would be…more complicated, more dynamic, and, broader because other important and pressing concerns that have been obscured by this singular focus would come to the fore. What are those concerns? What does this new, shiny, more complicated (queer) theory look like? We never find out. More interested in critique than in outlining new methodologies, archives or theories, this volume is content to say, repeatedly, that oppositionality is not all its cracked up to be; that the humanities orientation of queer theory has concealed the fact that the social sciences are important too; and that queerness as a category has an increasingly elusive relationship to activism, political change and social transformation. None of this is controversial, and it could even be the basis of some interesting new directions in the study of sexuality and gender. But this issue does not lead us there.

What is queer theory without antinormativity, we may ask with the editors of this special issue? Without a critique of normativity, queer theory may well look a lot like straight thinking. And, without these clear alternatives, that is what this volume threatens to become.

Inexplicably sharon wasn’t interested in a second date.

It draws sexy energy from a title that proposes a new kind of queer theory namely, a queer theory without antinormativity but, like a date with a lover who promised hot sex but falls asleep by 9pm, or like an iphone update that claimed it would transform your gadget but actually just ate up all the battery, the issue titillates only by virtue of nestling up to titillation, it thrills only by offering to declaw what is thrilling, it excites by promising to name the fugitive source of an entire genre’s critical excitement. But when push comes to shove, and there is a lot of shoving in this issue despite its seemingly civil tone, queer theory without antinormativity might just be…well, theory, theory about theory.

What’s the basic argument? Queer theory has been characterized by an antinormative stance that has gone unquestioned (until now) and that is the basis for the claims that queer theory lays to a radical political project. This commitment to antinormativity, Wiegman and Wilson say, characterizes the work of all kinds of queer theorists who might otherwise disagree. The problem with antinormativity, as far as Wiegman and Wilson are concerned, is that it derives from a fundamental misreading of Foucault’s theory or norms; it makes certain positions seem inevitable – a critique of disciplinarity for example; and, antinormativity’s uncontested rightness eliminates the possibility of taking up any other relations to norms or normativity. Furthermore, antinormativity, they propose, has become “canonical” in the field and therefore has acquired, ironically, the status of a norm, proving once and for all that norms are unavoidable and cannot be opposed.

Let’s take the first point in Wiegman and Wilson’s critique – the idea that antinormativity emerges from a misreading of the norm in Foucault. They write: “Even as it allies itself with Foucault, queer theory has maintained an attachment to the politics of oppositionality (against, against, against) that form the infrastructure of the repressive hypothesis” (12). By contrast, Wiegman and Wilson propose to offer a different methodology for reading the norm and they will do so through a return to the idea of the norm as it is found in Foucault “in order to revivify what is galvanizing (indeed what is queer) about its operations” (12). This is an odd claim at best – first, is it even possible to “revivify” what is not dead but is in fact “galvanizing”? Just asking. But, second, I cannot find this mythic other methodology anywhere in their text. Their anti antinormative methodology seems to amount to the claim that we are all subject to norms. Norms, they remind us, neither restrict nor ostracize, they are neither “controlling” nor are they “tyrannical,” and we are all equally subject to their powers (“we question the political common sense that claims that norms ostracize, or that some of us are more intimate with their operations than others…”). This claim is then followed by a series of quotes from Berlant, Edelman, myself, Sedgwick all clustered under the leaky umbrella of “queer theoretical ambitions” and organized by the common belief that norms are bad.

Few of the theorists mentioned in this essay, if any, have advanced the theory that norms single out certain people or that they target only certain bodies and then tyrannically restrict their capabilities or legitimacy. Instead, the rather impressive group of theorists gathered under this capacious and yet nonsensical heading of antinormative queer theory (Berlant, Butler, Duggan, Edelman, Eng, Ferguson, Halberstam, Halperin, McRuer, Muñoz, Puar, Reddy, Sedgwick, Warner) have all published extremely complex accounts of the relations between nationalism and norms, sexuality and terror, identity and repetition, race and disidentification, sexuality and death, pessimism and optimism, negativity and utopia, recognition and failure. No single theory of norms unites these works either through their embrace of the antinormative or through their understanding of the political. They have no single object, they do not share a goal, they follow multiple methodologies and none of these theorists unambiguously embraces a singular, critical stance from which it unfairly draws energy and through which it proposes to change the world. The antinormative position is, I will say it again, a straw queer, an Aunt Sally, a rag and bone target for any straight thinkers who want to score points in an academic marketplace of diminishing returns.

Like the bad critical theory essay in which everyone is wrong because the author is right, or in which the author notices something that everyone else in the history of critical thinking has ignored, or in which an intrepid and insightful author uncovers a fallacy upon which an entire area of study has depended, this journal issue requires big targets, thinkers united in their false assumptions who can finally be revealed for what they are – naïve, blind, simple folk who see tyranny where there is only discourse, who confirm the status quo through opposition, and who create a new canon while claiming to bring the house down.

What, I ask you, do Wiegman and Wilson want? They tell us they want to “channel the energies of queer inquiry otherwise.” Ok – point us in the direction of “otherwise.” And I really mean that  – I want to understand the project here, but it feels elusive. They tell us they will promote scholarship that moves “athwart” rather than “against” (although they are clearly against antinormative queer theory, not athwart it…what is athwart, critically speaking?). And they offer to “rethink the meaning of norms, normalization, and the normal” while imagining “other ways to approach the politics of queer criticism altogether.” Let me translate dear reader: we critics, who read athwart not against, who offer critique without solutions, who know something is wrong but cannot offer to replace it, will keep thinking about this in the hopes of generating something that is not more of the same.

Ok, that sounds harsh so let me break it down:

1. Most of the theorists assembled under the heading of the anti-normative produce the very scholarship that Wiegman and Wilson call for – namely a critique of simple notions of the political as oppositional . Consider Lauren Berlant’s idea of a relation of “cruel optimism” that “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Or think of Lee Edelman’s reminder that the impulse to call for a politics around the figure of the child ensures the reproduction of the status quo. Or look again at Rod Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black and his analysis of the way that canonical sociology requires the Black body as a foil for the production of the truth of statistical norms.

2. If you don’t want to commit to some kind of critique of norms you may be doomed to “straight

Normal and Strange directions. Opposite traffic sign.

thinking.” Straight thinking is characterized by a matrix of rhetorical operations that support the common sense of the moment, commit to foreclosing on critiques of the status quo and reinvest in the ordinary, the good and the true. Such rhetorical operations have propped up the very distinctions between straight and gay/lesbian/trans or between abled and disabled or between whiteness and of color that have allowed for legal, social and political benefits to accrue to one group at the expense of the other. Abandon antinormativity and you slip quickly into acquiescence.

3. Antinormative thinking, as represented in this issue, simply means scholarship with an urgent, complex, politically explicit agenda. It is the opposite of the seemingly objective “deviance studies” scholarship that Heather Love writes about in this issue but it is in line with some of the writings by Evelyn Hooker, Mary Macintosh and others that she claims queer studies has rejected. Like other essays in the issue, Love’s piece works around a false claim and a false dichotomy. She claims from the start that there are “ongoing conflicts between humanists and social scientists” within the field of queer studies and that these conflicts turn on “the question of whether the empirical study of sexuality should be understood as social recognition or as epistemological violence” (77). Such conflicts were very common in the 1990’s but disciplinary skirmishes have long since diminished under the pressure of new insights about the arbitrary nature of disciplinary boundaries (Latour). Critiques of the social sciences from within queer studies by Rod Ferguson and others are not disciplinary quarrels so much as they are historically situated accounts of how non-heteronormativity gets located firmly at the heart of U.S. racial formations and links the “multiplication of racialized discourses of sexuality and gender” to the “multiplication of labor under capital” (12). By separating an account of sexual deviance from its imbrication in the production of knowledge on racial deviance in her essay, Love straightens the lines between sexuality and race in a way that literally undoes the work of queer of color critique. What Ferguson had intricately described as meshed, Love unties and analyzes separately.

And later in Love’s essay, she takes aim at the romanticism of The Undercommons to reveal how attached humanities scholars can be to their own subversive potential. What Moten and Harney describe as the role of the “subversive academic” in The Undercommons, Love rejects as a kind of unconscious political violence: “if we are in, we are also of” she writes. Championing the “queer ordinary” and describing the queer academic as a “professional knowledge worker,” Love settles into and accepts her role as observer of ordinary life. Her stakes are clear: the antinormative queer scholar or the fugitive scholar of the undercommons are just engaged in a “romantic disavowal of our position as scholars.” With no account of the activist worlds that informed early queer studies research, no recognition of the disciplinary violence that goes into establishing a definitive split between the “truth seeking” missions of the social sciences and the “civilizing” goal of the humanities in the first place, with no references to the difference that race makes to either professional knowledge production or the definition of deviance, this is an essay that refuses to grapple with its own site of enunciation – for whom is the ordinary smooth and even? For whom is it absolutely unattainable? For whom is it unacceptable?

And so it goes, the straw person argument allows for the wholesale ransacking of several decades of exceptional work from a range of positions and disciplinary locations, emerging from different activist histories and focused upon various political and even utopian horizons. This issue claims to re-evaluate but it comes to eradicate; it claims to survey a field but it creates a position to lambast; it claims to speak for the ordinary but it colludes with the status quo. So, to clarify the argument here: if you still believe in the socially engaged academic and if, like them, your work continues to circle back to performativity, cruel optimism, intersectionality, queer of color critique, queer negativity, critiques of homonormativity, disciplinary critique and the undercommons, this mini-movement is not for you. And for those of you who are still wondering what the answer is to the question posed by this volume of differences in the first place, namely “what is queer studies without antinormativity,” I think I have an answer for you – it is disciplinary, neoliberal, no stakes, straight thinking. You’re welcome!

Lisa Duggan

When I teach undergraduate Queer Studies, we begin by listing all the meanings that students can generate for the term queer. Then we group them into three categories: (1) Identity, or queer as a synonym for LGBT populations; (2) Practice, or queer as a broad umbrella term for dissenting sexual practices and gender expressions, and (3) Politics, or queer as a designation similar to feminist that appears quite independently of an advocate’s identity or sexual/gender practices. Our discussion of these divergent meanings usually leads us to understand that they all exist simultaneously, often used by the same individual at different moments. Though I prefer the third usage, I often find myself unselfconsciously using the first two. In the context of Queer Studies, it’s important to sort these meanings out in our readings and conversations. Each has different resonances and implications.

The most recent special issue of differences, “Queer Theory without Antinormativity,” volume 26, number 2 (May 2015) edited by Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson, runs through all these meanings without much attention to the distinctions among them. In the introduction to the volume, Wiegman and Wilson alternatively refer to queer theory, queer studies, queer inquiry and queer critique, also without any noted distinctions. But perhaps most fatally for this issue’s project, they use the terms norm, normalizing and normativity also with little effort to map the historically shifting and overlapping meanings of the terms.

It’s not that they make no effort to historicize. They do point out, via Foucault and others, that the juridical meaning of norms as rules that order and restrict shifts to a biopolitical, statistical meaning of norms as averages at the beginning of the 19^th century. Their critique of queer theory (or studies, critique, inquiry etc) rests on the arguments that (1) queer theory is universally underpinned by a foundational antinormativity, and that (2) this antinormativity is dyadic and oppositional, based on the earlier notion of norms as rules, rather than on the more generative, expansive, individualizing concept of norms as averages that require variation.

What is wrong with these arguments? Everything. Though the editors’ introduction provides a wide-ranging and inclusive survey of work in queer theory, their grasp of what underlies the scholarship published after 2000, especially in the field of queer of color critique, is faulty. They seem deeply familiar with work published in the 1990s, but when they extend their critique of that work forward in time they run rapidly off the rails. For instance, beginning with Licia Fiol-Matta’s Queer Mother for the Nation, published in 2002, much new work in queer studies abandoned the notion that queer identities or practices are somehow inherently radical, or that queer politics is necessarily oppositional to historical forms of political and economic power.

Fiol-Matta’s study of the deployment of the queer figure of Gabriela Mistral as a support for the dominant forms of racial capitalism and nationalism in Latin America decimated those assumptions of inherent queer subversiveness, and deeply influenced the flood of work to come in queer of color critique and transnational queer and feminist studies. Wiegman and Wilson’s readings of that post 2000 work are flattening and distorting; in describing it all as underpinned by a dyadic antinormativity they are blind to the major developments in queer thinking that emerged with this work over the past 15 years.

But that isn’t the only stream of queer publication that they get wrong. They also search out instances of dyadic oppositional antinormativity in work that they otherwise acknowledge does not fit that frame. In discussing Lee Edelman’s NoFuture, after acknowledging that he generally evades the oppositional framing they argue underpins the whole field, they find one footnote where he appears to fall into that trap. Via that footnote they include him in their survey of the field united in their version of antinormative error.

In addition to misdescribing “the field” that they variously name as queer something, Wiegman and Wilson also offer a narrow and ahistorical definition of norms and normativity by which to measure the adequacy of those terms in the work of queer writers. They hew to the Foucauldian definition, and chide queer authors for using a “wrong” notion of norms as restrictive rules. In this they are wrong on two counts: (1) There is no historical supersession of statistical norms over rule based norms, both are in wide current use in the social and political world, and (2) They totally neglect the civilizational, imperial history of norms as racial ideals used to measure the “development” of inferior races. Developmental norms are pervasive in the history of empire and settler colonialism, and they appear in psychology also as “developmental” norms drawn from the highest racial “achievements” of prosperous male Europeans. Queer work that engages with racial capitalism, empire, transnationalism, and decolonial movements invokes these kinds of norms as ideals—the nuclear monogamous family, the “democratic” capitalist state, the rise of rationalist science, etc. These of course include sexual ideals as norms, appearing as the very logic of racial, class, gender and religious hierarchies. This work does not propose any simple, dyadic form of queer antinormativity as opposition. Nayan Shah, Roderick Ferguson and so many others map complex forms of aspiration for inclusion as well as modes of exclusion in a constantly shifting historical political economy.

(My own use of the term homonormativity does not focus on dyadic opposition to dominant norms, but rather maps a complex set of changing historical relations to an unstable political economy—homonormativity only becomes possible during the 1990s in the capitalist “democracies.” It takes an unsympathetic, even hostile reading to reduce this term to one pole in the abstract dyad norm/antinorm.)

So far I have concentrated on the introduction to the special issue. (For more, see Jack Halberstam’s previous Bully Bloggers post.)  Only a few of the other essays in the issue actually echo or support the framing offered there. Essays by Annamarie Jagose on Judith Butler and Wiegman on Eve Sedgwick continue the stuck-in-time 1990s focus of the issue. Heather Love provides a historical frame, offering post WWII sociology of sexual deviance literature as a site for productive excavation for queer scholars. She seems to be addressing scholars in the literary humanities only, as those of us trained in history, anthropology, sociology or the interdisciplinary fields are generally quite familiar with this literature—and perhaps more critical of it than Love? Rod Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black draws from his PhD training in sociology to offer a critical framing that brings together sociology of racial and sexual deviance to produce a wide ranging critique of the normalizing work of sociological knowledge production—normalizing in the racial imperialist, developmental sense, not the dyadic rule bound or statistical sense. Anthropologist David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender provides an observational, empirically based ethnographic study that probes the racial and class meanings of language shifts in political context. Love’s isolation of the work on sexual deviance, and her largely uncritical observational stance, give her article an unintended overall tone of political, especially racial complacency compared to the vigorous critical lens provided by Ferguson. And when she cites Sharon Marcus to critique the “dominant” deviance paradigm in queer studies, and argues that the field is invested in the idea of an impossible absolute withdrawal from the social (p. 89), I honestly have no idea what work she could be talking about? That paradigm went out by 2002 (in the queer studies “field” that I read), and the withdrawal from the social characterizes only a tiny archive at this point.

The last three essays, by Madhavi Menon, Erica Edwards and Elizabeth Povinelli, seem not to belong in this issue at all. These three essays are confined to the section on “Case Studies” in the issue, perhaps because they bring in the political economy and the state? They position their discussions of normativity within a complex historical, racial and imperial frame that cannot be reduced to the abstract framing norm/antinorm. In “Sex After the Black Normal,” Erica Edwards draws upon and extends the long bibliography in black feminism and queer of color critique to make an important contribution from within those fields. In her richly documented article, she argues that black women’s sexuality has been used to facilitate neoliberalism in the U.S., and also to support collective alternatives that expose its instabilities. This is precisely in line with the arguments that Rod Ferguson and others make, and does not flatten those contributions, or elevate her own as somehow so much more complex as to be different in foundation.

Elizabeth Povinelli’s article “Transgender Creeks and the Three Figures of Power in Late Liberalism,” is in my humble opinion outright brilliant—original, provocative and important. Drawing on new work on the nonhuman world and the active environment, Povinelli extends the possible meanings of “queer studies” in hugely productive ways. But in doing so, she also draws upon, incorporates and extends earlier work, and invokes the normalizing force of neoliberal markets and extractive capitalism, via a discourse of sexual pathology and normalization in a settler colonial context. In these usages of the notion of the norm, she blends the Foucauldian meaning with the imperial one. She is working from the complex multidimensional work on norms, that Wiegman and Wilson reduce to simple dyadic oppositional antinormativity.

It’s hard to understand the motivation behind this issue that works so hard to diminish work in queer studies through reductive readings and via a singular definition invoked as an abstract standard. I have the uneasy feeling that the motives are political, that the work being reduced to unrecognizable simplicity is somehow too left, too committed to the critique of racial capitalism for these editors. They don’t seem to be offering renewed vitality or renovated methods and approaches in their return to the work of the 1990s in particular. They seem to be calling for a new queer complacency, where we revel in the norms that, in averaging differences, reflect our beautiful diversities (cough, gag):…..more Queer Theory without Empire than without antinormativity.

By Tav Nyong’o

A question has been ringing through my ears this past week, growing louder with my every attempt to brush it away.

“Who the fuck made you master?”*  It was a question asked, no shouted, in a moment of despair and righteous discontent. An angry, no, an uncivil question, and to that extent, a question without any answer in a civilized society whose underside, as Walter Benjamin well knew, contains countless barbarisms.

“Who the fuck made you master?”

The questioner has been mocked, admonished, even physically threatened for daring to ask it. In this era of viral publicity, bullies morph into the bullied and back again with dizzying speed. We feel constantly pushed around and always on our last nerve. But we should always stop and pay careful attention to those moments when someone — a young black woman in this instance — is threatened with physical retribution for asking an inconvenient question.

The questioner’s location as one of the privileged few at Yale University should not distract us from the relevance of her demand for the rest of us. We all have parents, bosses, teachers, authority figures charged with our safety and well-being. Many of us are fortunate to receive the care and support that is promised and expected. But all of us know or have experienced situations where an authority figure has grievously failed. It is disorienting and difficult, which is to say it takes tremendous courage and conviction, to stand up to that authority figure and simply ask where their authority comes from. Democracy, real democracy, always begins with a question that cannot but provoke a conflict with the status quo: who made you the boss of me?

I could only bring myself to watch the viral video in question this morning. I felt I already knew its content and, even more, I knew how it would be received by an anti-black, anti-woman, anti-intellectual culture. I knew the clip could not possibly provide a full or accurate picture of the black and native student struggle at Yale, and that it would be all the more of a misleading caricature for being a decontextualized fragment of something that did indeed happen.

But when I did finally watch it, the angst with which the questioner spoke those words moved me in a way that I was unprepared for. What few seem to notice or give credence to was what it had cost her to lose her temper in that way, to meet the establishment defenders of “free speech” with her own brand of “fearless speech.” What was that cost, I wanted to know? And aren’t we all now, because of that cost she paid, in her debt?

Black studies as a the critique of Western civilization teaches us to ask: What do we owe each other for the sacrifices we each are called upon to make to rebuke and repair this world? How can we — those of us who profess to educate — accept the student demand not only as a rebuke, which it certainly is, but also as a gift?

I am now glad the video has been seen by so many, not because it provides visual proof of  a privileged millennial “crybully” asking to be protected from free speech and intellectual inquiry, but because it forces again a question America keeps refusing to answer:

Do black lives matter? And, if they do, or if they should, don’t we have to immediately change everything about how a society and culture founded in white supremacy and settler colonialism continues operates?

How can any institution — a school, a corporation, an army, a police force, a prison — expect to continue along with business as usual after conceding that it is founded upon structural racism and colonial settlement?

And yes, who, exactly, made you master?

Black students in Missouri, South Africa, New Haven and beyond have in the past few weeks renewed the promise of a #BlackLivesMatter movement many of us feared was beginning to falter. Without conceding an inch on questions of police and vigilante violence and killings of black women, transgender black people, black men of all ages, these students have broadened the scope of concern from the moments of our dying to the days of our living. This is crucial for those of us who don’t want to live our lives in a constant state of mourning, even as we honor and remember our dead. Those of us who need to dance at the revolution, who have to sing at the sit-in, who want to feel the joy and solidarity of being alive while we still can. Those of us who understand that beauty, friendship, peace, and mutual aid are always fragile things in this turbulent world, and never to be taken for granted or dismissed as secondary pursuits, (to be taken care of perhaps by the women and queers, as the sad militant pursues his ever more totalizing view of some ever more grim and punishing “reality.”)

I was asked recently: was it ethical for a student to go on hunger strike to oust the president of the University of Missouri for incompetence in addressing racism and economic gender inequity? I felt a note of care and concern for the consequences of “student extremism” was behind the question. I don’t know how I would have counseled a friend who was considering such a path; I haven’t yet walked in those shoes. But I do know that hunger strikes belongs to a venerable tradition of non-violent resistance to civil government. It is a complex and rich question that Patrick Anderson’s insightful book, So Much Wasted, explores in greater detail than I can here. But how could I do anything but honor and salute the bravery of a student who stood publicly to declare unacceptable the arbitrary withdrawal of health care — and in particular of reproductive medical care for women —  because of political and budgetary pressures?

It may seem wrong to endanger our health, but it is right to stand by passively as the health of thousands is endangered by the  sanctimonious and the greedy?

The new black student movement is teaching me that it is not enough to protest wrongful death, or to chant each others names (as we must) when another one of us is murdered. We must also challenge the terms of our living as well as our dying; we need an actual say in how we live and thrive, how we learn and grow.

We need to “decolonize our gratitude” as someone told me on Twitter; we must challenge the quietist assumption that black and brown people should express more and frequent gratitude over just being allowed to live (rather than killed), over being given educational opportunity (rather than being jailed or beaten), over being citizens of a wealthy and privileged nation at a moment of great chaos, poverty, and disaster in our present world (rather than held in infinite detention at the bleeding borders where the desperate, fleeing extremism, meet the accusation that they themselves are the bearer of the horror they flee).

The new black student movement is changing the terms upon which our culture responds to the performative utterance: Black Lives Matter. Only yesterday, the best that the irrelevant could say in response was to retort, “well, All Lives Matter”! But the student movement has already moved us well past this feeble stutter. Now we actually have to face the question: if black lives, like all lives, matter, then what? Why would expect that answering in the affirmative — yes, black lives do matter — would be the end of it? The students aren’t looking for a cheap affirmation. They already know that their black lives matter; it’s a rhetorical question!

The real challenge is not just to verbally concede the equality of human dignity and the unacceptability of racist speech, conduct, and of violence targeting black, brown, muslim, Asian, and indigenous people. The real challenge is, having conceded this principle, to follow up on actions that actively transform this situation. “Act from thought should quickly follow,” the poet W.H. Auden once wrote, “what is thinking for?”

No one thinks it acceptable, in the name of transgressive free speech or adult child development, for white Ivy League students to mock and abuse native American and black students by dressing as rastafarians or Indian chiefs for Halloween. This is not a question of “safe space” or hypersensitivity: common sense tells us that no civil society could accept such behavior without public reprimand. You cannot study and live together with someone you think of as your inferior, or treat as a laughingstock. You cannot leave the slain unburied in the hot sun for hours, or leave the murders of indigenous women unsolved and uninvestigated. When we act in uncivilized, barbaric ways towards Muslims, blacks, and native peoples, we deserve to be admonished, upbraided, and chastened to do better.

No one thinks it acceptable for Americans to continue to lampoon sacred native rituals in “war dances” or paint their faces at sports competitions featuring teams with names like “Redskins.” The resurgence of native survival and resistance  — no, of intellect and creativity — in North America and beyond is one of the most exciting developments in recent years, where have you been? Do you want to live in the world of Clinton the Second or Bush the Third, or is another world not only possible, but already present in the epistemologies and ontologies of the oppressed?

Movements like #IdleNoMore and #BlackLivesMatter are first and foremost movements among black and native communities to regain the self respect with which we can say, without fear of reproach or ridicule, that triumphalist signs of genocide, slavery, and segregation cannot possibly remain at the symbolic center of our culture. Rhodes must fall. So must any other name that serves to honor those who would prefer we never walk their halls except as servants. I once took ironic pride in belonging to institutions named after racists, anti-semites, and other disreputable characters. My very presence was a rebuke, I once thought. But I am starting to wonder whether I need to start dreaming bigger dreams.

The students are doing nothing more than demanding that society actually live up to the values it professes. And they bear the unbearable truth that society can never openly admit: that to actually live up to its stated values, it would have to become something wholly other, even something unrecognizable to its former self.

Transformation is never easy, and rarely is any local struggle fully cognizant of the broader canvas. What is more, the passionate rebuke of the status quo is difficult, dangerous, emotional work. These students are adults, not children, and it is wrong to infantilize them, and a mistake to draw on our expertise in child psychology or our experience as pedagogues to talk down to them.

At the heart of all the student demands heard ringing through the world these past weeks and months, there is this singular fact: the fact of the student demand.

What does the student demand?

The student demands to know who made you the master and her the dependent. The student demands to set the future conditions for her study, which she understands to be a collective study, a study that cannot be contained by Ivy or state school walls.

The athlete demands to know who made you coach, and why he has been robbed of an education and possibly injured for life while you make millions off of his play.

The student demands the right to reclaim her study; to know the world in order to change it. That demand is the freest, most fearless speech we may have the privilege to hear. Will we listen?

*A free, indirect paraphrase of a range of student speech acts heard recently, rather than a direct quotation of any individual person. Thanks to Zahid Chaudhary for reminding me to add this clarification. On free, indirect discourse, please see Typewriter.

It is not a question of whether you are or were a fan of David Bowie, it is a question of which Bowie was your Bowie. My Bowie, at various times, was the lightning streaked face of Aladdin Sane, the dulcet voiced soul man of Young Americans and the rock god of the Orwellian extravaganza, Diamond Dogs. I also kept Station to Station and Low on my turntable for weeks at a time in the 1970’s during Bowie’s “Berlin” period and listened to David Live obsessively, especially the mash up of “Sweet Thing” and “Candidate” from Diamond Dogs. For me, as for so many, David Bowie represented a glittering, odd, unearthly reminder that life is about change, risk, madness and mayhem, and that while our domestic structures work hard to keep the madness at bay, we must be ready at all times to “turn and face the strange.”

Social History. Housing. Manchester, England. Circa 1970’s. Slum clearance in Salford showing a terraced area being demolished.

To understand Bowie, you partly have to understand what England was like in the 1970’s and what it meant to suddenly, in the middle of this a grey, ruinous landscape of charred buildings, post-war debris, and financial collapse, find out that there is a “starman “waiting in the skies.” This was the message that British youth watching Top of the Pops in 1972 received loud and clear from a beautifully eccentric and sexy performance of “Starman” by Bowie and Mick Ronson. Dressed in shiny pant suits and wearing high boots and shaggy hair-do’s, Bowie and Ronson really did look like they had fallen to earth from some distant planet where people had fun, believed in something and knew they could change worlds. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust told us to be receptive to the messages from Mars and other planets; he counseled youth to listen to the secret memos from the starman, to pay attention to the coded communications from other worlds; he told us that the starman would only speak to us if we sparkled (“if we sparkle, he may land tonight”), and he taught us that all that sparkles is indeed gold. And no sooner did he create a persona with which to tell new stories about sex, rock and riot than he killed the man and started again.

My first Bowie album was Aladdin Sane. I studied the cover art for some clues as to who this ambiguously gendered person might be and I thrilled to the persona of the mad lad singing of mortality, protest, drag queens and race riots in Detroit. I knew no queer people at that time and knew of few escapes from the suffocating normativity of British school life in the 1970’s. But I felt that Bowie represented something special, something just out reach, something or someone that I did not know yet but set off to encounter. With his otherworldly voice that ranged from low growls to ethereal falsettos, and with his calls to rebellion – both social and gendered – Bowie captured the emergent political imagination of a generation. He was queer before queer, punk before punk, cool long after Presley. Bowie disobeyed all laws of genre and he merged English glam rock with US soul music, rhythm and blues with jazz and funk with electronica without seeming opportunistic, appropriative or dilettantish.

Bowie’s sexuality was always up for grabs. It was not a question of whether he was gay (“John, I’m Only Dancing”) or straight (“Be My Wife”), many of his public relationships have, after all, been with women; but Bowie always laid claim to a kind of excess, a set of identities that exceeded norms and expectations and that were some combination of male femininity (Ziggy), masculine exotic (Aladdin Sane), Martian sexiness, ethereal beauty, originality and innovation. The word most often used about Bowie, and one I have made recourse to here, is “otherworldly.” His reputation as profoundly alien was enhanced by movies like Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 space oddity: The Man Who Fell to Earth. This movie, like no other (apart from maybe his “walk off” cameo in Zoolander!) confirmed Bowie’s status as unearthly. He needed no make up to be convincing as a man from another world – in the film he is called a “visitor,” a “freak,” an “alien” and he manages to convey a sense of bodily oddness that is unique in film.

Is there life on Mars? If you believe in David Bowie, the answer is yes. While earth for Bowie is a place where time is on perpetual repeat (“Always Crashing in the Same Car”), in the exotic and exciting moonage daydreams that Bowie conjures, apocalypse appears alongside utopia, futures are exciting and curtailed (“we can be heroes…just for one day”), and the body is a place to play out colorful fantasies of love and rebellion. As we say goodbye to a truly queer icon, a performer who invited us to “press your space face close to mine, love,” we also bid farewell to someone who has reinvented fame, spectacle, eccentricity and stardom.

But, Bowie left us a final album to decode, Blackstar, where he intones:

“I can’t answer why (I’m not a gangster)

But I can tell you how (I’m not a flam star)

We were born upside-down (I’m a star star)

Born the wrong way ‘round (I’m not a white star)

(I’m a blackstar, I’m not a gangster

I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar

I’m not a pornstar, I’m not a wandering star

I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar.”

Not a white star, not a gangster, not a wandering star, a black star – Bowie’s final message, part physics/part undercommons, draws upon the metaphors of space that saturate his entire output. A black star in physics represents, Wikipedia tells us “a transitional phase between a collapsing star and a singularity,” it is a zone where event and infinity collide, where matter disintegrates into a vacuum. It is a space of death and dying. But black star could also be a way of rethinking racialized embodiment itself such that the thin white duke recognizes himself in the black aesthetics that swirl through his music, the soul inflections that he channels and inhabits and the machinery of fame that works through a process of Black music/white stars, transferring fame to white bodies from music created through and around the experience of blackness. What others appropriate, Bowie inhabits. What others steal, Bowie acknowledges. What others hold at a distance, Bowie embraces.

“I’m a blackstar,” Bowie sings, “I’m a blackstar.” So, while we attribute some of Bowie’s incandescent oddness to gender and sexual ambiguity, race is also a huge part of what rendered Bowie a star – not a white star, not a pornstar, not a wandering star, but a black star. As Bowie now passes into immortality, as he assumes legendary proportions, as he comes to represent the expansiveness of wild reinvention, musical experimentation, bodily flexibility, political imagination and queer uncertainty, we should look up to the sky and sparkle in the hopes of receiving a message from pop culture’s most beloved astronaut, a starman waiting in the sky.