Queer In-Coherence

There is a lot to love about the anthology Self-Organizing Men, edited by Jay Sennett and published on the equally lovable Homofactus Press, dedicated as it is to copyleft, class-differential access, and most importantly building a roster of tomes that deal with extremely important, often under-researched and under-discussed facets of queer lives, refusing to minoritize the thinking and writing of transfolk, queers of color, those of us poor, working-class, femme-y — you know, the queer queers, which is only another way of saying those of us doubly estranged from both hetero- and homo-normativity.

But I’d like to write on one notion that I found sketched in broad outline in this volume that I think is a particularly promising addition to the queer epistemic tool-box, as it were. And this is Bobby Noble’s notion of in-coherence, developed in the essay “‘Trans’? ‘Butch’? ‘Man’?: Of the Political Necessities of Trans-Incoherence.” By way of elucidation, Noble writes on the topic of pluralizing our comprehension of trans subjectivities in the context of a glossed-over inclusion within LGBTQQI politicking that “the ‘T’ is forced to carry differences amongst trans-folks themselves, differences which mark the way we are positioned by other facets of our selves relative to power. Instead of assuming commonality or coherence, I suggest we need to actively seek out difference or in-coherence instead, all the more so if we are white. This means, as a start, not assuming or depending on commonality” (161). If this sounds an awful lot like a rehashing of an insistence on the necessity of intersectional thinking, that is because, in part, it is, at least as a conceptual inheritor of the importance of what a dear friend and interlocuter calls “the litany” — race/class/gender/sexuality/etc. But I’d like to mark its distance from a simple reiteration of the necessity of thinking through “the litany.” In order to do this, I’ve got to (or maybe just want to, as it’s occupying a whole lot of brainspace lately), make a detour through what Hardt and Negri have to say about identity politics and the distinction between emancipation and liberation in Commonwealth.

They set what they call “two positive tasks for identity politics,” which is, I think, their way of (rightly) guarding against a tendency to read their co-authored work as forthrightly and rather flatly “anti-identitarian,” rather than cognizing the deep engagements that run behind rather informed assertions regarding certain dead-ends, tamings, or failures to radicalize manifested in the multiply divergent realms hastily, too hastily, short-handed by “identity politics.” So what are these two tasks? The first: “to combat blindness and make visible the brutally real but too often hidden mechanisms and regimes of social subordination, segmentation, and exclusion that operate along identity lines. Making visible the subordinations of identity as property implies, in a certain sense, reappropriating identity” (329). Us queer queers are certainly task-masters of this first injunction — molding, mutating, and reshaping our selves in community, constantly revising our affects and ways of relating, in ways that are reductively glossed over by saying we’re, in this process, only being “true to ourselves,” when really, I think, we’re being true to our visions of possibility that struggle against so many foreclosures, so many chastisements and violences, so many accusations that what we do is un-’natural,’ impossible, or both (the latter on account of the former). This is nothing if not reappropriation, queer bricolage that seeks to make visible these “mechanisms and regimes of subordination,” what Bikini Kill has called, better, the walls that say you can’t. So, we are on relevant terrain with Hardt and Negri, here. What of the second task of identity politics, then? Particularly when many movements often “begin and end with the first task, sometimes combining it with pallid declarations of pride and affirmation” — that is, declarations of surely premature entrance into the political fullness of a given assignation that is, as it were, uncritical of this entrance into political fullness, an entrance that too easily becomes an excuse for ignorance of both other identitarian struggles as well as the circumscribed limits of this embrace of political intelligibility. So, the second task, then, which is also the really fun (and infinitely sexier) part: “to proceed from indignation to rebellion against the structures of domination using the subordinated identity as a weapon in the quest for freedom” (330). This is where the distinction between emancipation and liberation becomes important, for the banalities of pride and corporate accommodation come ready with the former, while this second task is the liberatory part, and also the part where we are no longer able to rely on affirmation of commonality, togetherness, and easy intelligibility because rather than affirming a taxon of identity (even one that is no longer entirely maligned, but rather newly accommodated) we are, here, as we utilize what we’ve been called, the nomenclature we’ve taken on and twisted, as a “weapon in the quest for freedom,” we are, in this quest, becoming something else, collectively and subjectively. Something we’ve never been before, as we’re creating situations and possibilities afresh, pushing through and past circumscriptions and foreclosures. It is in this process of liberation, then, queer or otherwise, that we need to insist on the okay-ness of in-coherence, to hold off and defer unitarian descriptions or inclusions, as they too easily become dangerously recursive.

This is what makes Noble’s insistence on being all and neither ‘butch,’ ‘trans,’ and ‘man’ compelling. For, in the commitment to queer radicality, we are marked by both a multiplicity of nomenclatures that shift according to situation but also (and perhaps more importantly) marked by our intense love affair with what we are becoming — that which we can’t prefigure, and wouldn’t want to if we could.

Hardt and Negri write that “whereas emancipation strives for the freedom of identity, the freedom to be who you really are, liberation aims at the freedom of self-determination and self-transformation, the freedom to determine what you can become.” If this process of autonomic transformation is to remain accountable to other folks, to other political projects, we need to focus not on the sense we make to each other, but on the sense we don’t make, while still being together. This attention to difference is not identitarian navel-gazing, nor a banal (liberal) embrace of a stolid multiplicity, not these things at all. Rather, it is an essentially radical commitment to grappling with opacity and refusing easy parallelisms and translations in the interest of refusing staid and constrictive reifications.

Ups to In-Coherence!

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam, Bobby Noble, Hardt and Negri, Homofactus Press, Jay Sennett, Self-Organizing Men