Queer Discography: Scattered Speculations on Laura Jane Grace Gabel, Transition, and Anarchopunk Purity

Every act of becoming conscious
(it says here in this book)
is an unnatural act

-Adrienne Rich, from “The Phenomenology of Anger”

I was in the wooded hills of rural Kentucky, in a rented mini-SUV parked at a gas station, one of the rare sites in this terrain where reliable 3G can be found. I’m waiting on my mate to pick up some jerky; her protein levels are low, as she’s had only an enormous waffle for breakfast, and we’ll be spending the rest of the day in the northern reaches of a place called Red River Gorge, scrambling our way up cliff faces, navigating sandstone fissures with all the resources our bodies – queer, female-identified – have. I take this moment, alone in the car, to check the requisite social media, the email, and all seem to have blown up with news about Tom Gabel’s (now, Laura Jane Grace’s) transition. Two of my very best friends have emailed me links to the relevant Rolling Stone article; it was all over my Facebook feed – mostly supportive commentary about how amazing/wonderful/courageous/brave she is, with only a little commentary about how, to paraphrase, “she’s still a sellout” in relationship to riot-folk, anarcho-punk communities, the diy ethos.

There was other commentary, too, about what might happen to Against Me! during Laura’s transition – would they sound they same? Is her voice going to change? Are they still going to be as rough, aggro, ‘macho’ as they were? What about the fan base – are all of those (presumptively straight, white) angry young men still going to support the band? Underlying this line of interrogation is a set of presumptions regarding the motivation for listening to a band like Against Me! – it seems to have something to do with the resonant amplification of a rage that’s explicitly coded as maculine; one listens, then, to give vent – in a socially sanctioned manner – to the aggressive, violent, or destructive impulses typically cordoned off or curtailed; these impulses, in this set of wonderings, seem to be tacitly linked to some hackneyed, pseudo-Darwinian assumptions about testosterone and the masculine province of the aggro. This is, of course, bullshit. But it did get me thinking back to my own relation to some of those earlier Against Me! albums; and I feel it might be important, at this point in time – and by way of tacit refutation of the absurdly gendered assumptions at work in even the most ostensibly respectful, sensitive, and responsible journalism that has already, and will surely continue to, flood the screens of anyone attuned to the realms of music reportage or queer/gender politics – to write a bit about the resonances between queer lives and Against Me!’s discography.

At the forefront of my mind is this idea that knowledge of Laura’s transition somehow matters, maybe even vindicates the always-queered reading myself – and many other friends – had of particular tracks; there is a tendency to take this coming-to-light of a personal history of gender struggle and utilize it as a sort of hermeneutic key to the subtexts and intertexts of early Against Me! tracks, to prove the veracity and evidence of the queer desires generative of, and at work in, certain songs. But that seems reductive. What I can do is trace a little bit of the relationship I developed with certain of these tracks; think and write about why they were meaningful, and how, and what this might have to do with my own history of struggle with gender identity, queer desire, and economic and emotional vulnerability.

1) A particularly vivid memory:

Driving out to Uncle Sam’s Records in Lauderhill, FL, the kind of record store that knew how to cater to every relevant demographic in order to stay afloat, the sort of place where you could buy bongs, underground Miami bass, trip-hop imports, and the newest Dillinger Four album on vinyl. The year must have been 2002, just after the release of Reinventing Axl Rose, and, having listened to it and loved it I was stoked to get both the Acoustic e.p. and The Disco Before the Breakdown. Along for the record shopping adventure was my then-boyfriend, A., a queer Marxist with whom I spent a lot of time discussing class composition, queer politics, and the intricacies of desire. He was, at the time we met, gay-identified; I was a young boidyke just coming off of my first intense, long-term relationship; I had gotten used to validating erotic and gendered complexity by saying things “I identify as ‘lesbian’ for the sake of expediency, but I’m really a genderqueer pansexual”; utilizing these increasingly complex identifiers was, at the time, particularly important to me; now it’s less so. And that has, in part, to do with the moment I’m thinking about – getting into the car, using my keys to pry off the cellophane shrinkwrap, and putting the Acoustic e.p. into the cherry red Discman hooked up to the cassette deck. The first track, you might remember, is an acoustic version “Jordan’s First Choice,” with these lines:

The reality that you know/Is just behind your idea/Of a society, security, and self./Am I just fucked up?/’Cause I can’t remember/The last time any of this made sense,/ The last time I could stand up to myself.

I already knew the words, but was struck by the stripped-down vulnerability of this version, the plaintive caterwauling of “Am I just fucked up?” sandwiched, as it is, between what seems like a heavy-duty moral indictment of hegemony-writ-large and an infinitely more intimate moment of self-bifurcation, torn-ness, and indecision. Rage externalized and then involuted. It resonated, it was obvious – this moment, this set of lines, was about the mechanisms of internalized oppression, the intense self-scrutiny produced by being existentially at odds with, in resistance to, the metastructures of consent productive of social order.

A. and I had both gotten a lot of flak, speculation about our relationship – one that seemed, at first blush, to be taking place between a dyke and a gay man, one that seemed to be a logical impossibility for those whose realities were structured by neoliberal identity politics. Those realities, though, increasingly had no purchase on the spaces and bonds I was developing, wherein intimate resonances occurred between all manner of corporealities, and what took primacy were structures of feeling – for instance, a sense of shared rage – rather than the specificity of sexual objecthood. A. and I both loved this album, this song, and would spend a lot of time screaming along to it. It became a vindication of desires that violated neoliberal rules of erotic comportment; it helped me realize that what mattered, for me, in any engagement was a set of (anti)political inclinations, empathic understandings of the both the traumas and attendant joys of marginality. I was coming to realize that being queer, for me, had nothing to do with not sleeping with men because I preferred women, but rather with not sleeping with liberals or capitalists because they disgusted me.

And we rock/because it’s us against them/we’ve found our own reasons to sing/And it’s so much less confusing when lines are drawn like that, when people are either/consumers or revolutionaries/enemies or friends/hanging on the fringes of the cogs in the system/it’s just about knowing where everyone stands…”

It was a pretty Manichean arrangement, but one in which queer solidarities of all kinds flourished. I needed the insularity provided by these clean lines of complicity and hatred, needed them to begin to build some alternative ways of being in order to move past that internalized skepticism and mistrust, that self-bifurcation Gabel indexes – “am I just fucked up?”

2) And then there was the album cover for…As The Eternal Cowboy, the beautiful denimed torso, the jacket with the “Zapatista Gun Club” patch and the other one that ended in something about “the phenomenology of our anger.” The playing around, in a post-leftist register, with a sort of iconic, Springsteenish masculinity – this was something I did, continue to do. It’s about claiming aggression, claiming swagger, claiming a certain self-possession as specifically queer, female. That was what I loved about this image – this intense self-consciousness around masculinity, the ways in which this awareness effectively queered the image presented, worked as a send-up of rockandroll machismo and its links to colonizing frontier fantasies, destabilized by the Zapatista reference. Also, the intertext established – perhaps intentionally, perhaps not – with an old Adrienne Rich poem entitled “The Phenomenology of Anger,” an important poem, part of a corpus that help solidify another long-lasting queer bond that’s been formative, an intimate friendship that developed, in part, over late-night readings of Rich’s work aloud to each other, not parsing the words, but absorbing them. These were poems we lived with, poems that gave shape and sense to pre-articulate longings, dissatisfactions, and – yes – angers. Posthumously (though never much, as far as I was aware, while Rich was alive), much has been made about Rich’s ties to the profoundly transphobic lesbian sep Janice Raymond, and it’s been a difficult process reconciling a history of connection to transphobic political spaces with the intensity surrounding my relationship to her oeuvre; but really – I’m not, never was, connected to Rich herself; we probably wouldn’t have even liked each other. Words have afterlives and redeployments, they aren’t fixed in the web of meaning out of which they emanate; they travel, they become otherwise than they were at their point of inception. Rich knew this; it’s a centerpiece of the poem “North American Time”:

Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
Take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
Of standing outside of history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.

Does it matter to me that Rich had connections to an infamously transphobic writer? On some level, yes, absolutely. Does it matter to me that the frontwoman of Against Me! has penned lyrics critical of anarchist scene politics, has – in conjunction with the rest of the band – released records on majors? Again, on some level, yes. But the artifacts produced by these folks aren’t reducible to their biographies; we have all sorts of complex relationships with art objects, they move and inform us in multivalent ways. This is why it’s important to place them in a queer register, to recuperate them from a false narrative that limits their relevance to only, say, straight white dudebros – in the case of Against Me! – or essentialist lesbian womyn, in the case of Rich.

But, additionally – and this is perhaps an inquiry for a different moment – can we understand Laura Jane Grace’s criticisms of anarcho-punk scenes differently now, given the emergence of her long experience of gender dysphoria (not a term I like to use, but that’s the way she seems to be framing it)? I remember writing in an old journal, around the age of 22, about my own skepticism with the phenomenon of straight white kids from middle and upper-class backgrounds, some fundies, some not, dedicating their early adulthood to getting free. It seemed too easy, too naïve, too pugilistically posi; it didn’t tarry with the forces of negativity and nihilism in a way that I felt was necessary. Rather, I felt you couldn’t understand a queer life – or queer joy – unless you understood a little bit about trauma, coping, depression, abuse. For this reason, I identified with Gabel’s skepticism, while presuming it came from a different source – but what that source was didn’t particularly matter; what mattered was the resonance of the structure of feeling that engendered the skepticism. Knowing, now, that the taproot of criticality may be similar is interesting. It could perhaps prompt a reconsideration of the interplay between anarchist and trans*, queer, and gender non-conforming spaces, some further thought on how to develop queer anarchist collectivity. For certain, Laura Jane Grace isn’t the only one who felt disenchanted with the casual transmisogyny and queerphobia that sometimes circulates in avowedly rad and/or punk spaces; the response to her transition might be a good barometer for rad queers to gauge the difference between rhetorics of tolerance and support and real collective inclusivity.

–HJM

Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, Love Letters, Against Me!, anarchism, Laura Jane Grace, queer, Tom Gabel, trans issues, Transition

Two Articles on CeCe

The first, from Not Yr Cister: “This Is What Justice Looks Like: They Don’t Give a Fuck About Us.”

The second, by Bryn Kelly, from Original Plumbing, on Captive Genders and the case against CeCe.

For more details, and to provide support in whatever ways you can, go here.

To echo Not Yr Cister: For taking a life worth living by any means necessary,

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Anti-Jam, Captive Genders, CeCe McDonald, Free CeCe, Not Yr Sister, Original Plumbing, Prison Industrial Complex, queer

On Antisociality and Minoritarian Queerness

image from Femme Shark Communique #1

Excised from a larger piece I’m drafting, on utopia, queer nihilism, and the antisocial thesis; all the writing energy has been going to this particular project, and whatever energy is left over has been summarily expended in the act of repetitively climbing rocks, which is contributing to both intense muscle growth and decreased interweb dwelling. This bit is explicitly addressed to Lee Edelman’s No Future, which – as you’ll be able to tell – I’m not the biggest fan of, mostly because I think the force of negation can be (and has been) much more expansively conceived, rethought as not fully reducible to some self-shattering jouissance that some queers have a less mediated relationship to.

“When you are a transsexual, you look for your future, and you can’t see it”
– Lea T., the face of Givenchy, in The New York Times

….many minoritarian queers – trans folk, folks of color, economically disenfranchised, gender non-conforming queers – have never had the privilege of refusing the social contract of reproductive futurism, of deciding to embrace an alternative lifestyle modeled on what are quite obviously gay-male-specific sexual practices of routinized, asocial hook-ups. We never had to negate a future offered to us; we never felt we had one to begin with. To paraphrase Lea T., we looked to the future and couldn’t see it. We had no horizon of possibility – this was, of course, in part on account of a sensed estrangement from the promised land of reproductive futurism, but not at all reducible to it. For some of us, it was on account of barely being able to navigate the everyday – it is difficult to imagine a future if you’re otherwise committed to the difficult work having to scratch together enough money to eat, stay housed, and avoid collections; or gather together the emotional reserves necessary to inure oneself to repetitive quotidian violence. It is hard to invest in the promise of the Child when the promise of the next day is often nearly-betrayed.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Lea T., Lee Edelman, No Future, queer nihilism, The Child

On Hipster-Bashing

Since my relocation to the little gem of a city that is Bloomington, IN, I have not been queerbashed a-once; I have, however, been within earshot of a long, long stream of hipster-baiting and hipster-bashing, and I’ve become convinced it’s uniquely a response to the pretty firmly ensconced rotating contingent of anarcha-queers in this little town wherein Greeks and punks claim public space in roughly equal measure. As a rebuttal of sorts, let’s consider this little excerpt from “Fashion Anarchy: An Interview with the Boulavardier,” republished in Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology:

What do you think about hipster fashion?

First off, I think the term hipster has a definite air of femme-phobia to it. All artists, non-crusty musicians, or people who dress fashionable, yuppies, and teenagers magically become a hipster at the drop of the hat. It’s a defense mechanism for people who are afraid to see the world for what it is and afraid to step out of their comfort prisons and explore new forms of expression, And its use as a pejorative is not only rampant in anarchist circles but in conservative, yuppie, liberal circles…Almost every mainstream circle out there hates these damn hipsters, that should really tell you something. The criticism of hipsters is that they are not political and they’re too coked up to smash the state, but in reality, most of these so-called hipsters are potential allies if not accomplished anarchists in their own right and are only a-political because some upper-crust or elitist asshole made them think anarchism is a new religion.

A-right? A-right.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam, Bash Back!, hipster, queer, queer ultraviolence

On the Ethos of Radical Queer Spaces

The other day, in the grad course I’m teaching (“Queer Becomings: Affects, Assemblages, and Alterities”), we were sorting through Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” in relation to two other articles – Couze Venn’s “Individuality, Relationality, Affect” and Constantine Papoulias and Felicity Callard’s “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,” which can both be found in a special issue of Body and Society specifically concerned with this thing we’ve started calling ‘the affective turn.’ Papoulias and Callard’s article is especially interesting, as it concerns itself with the weird misreadings of work in neuropsychology that, they argue, refuse to grapple with the sedimented nature of inhabiting what they call, after Bourdieu, one’s “ideological hexis” (otherwise known as the habitus, really). This sidestepping of the habitus posits adult subjects as akin to infants in terms of their capacity to experience affect more or less directly.

Taking some cues from this work, we were talking about our capacity to access the virtual, which is thought by Massumi as a field of potentialities out of which the actual emerges. This elicited a pretty long detour around the question of the relationship between the virtual and the Lacanian real, an interesting and useful detour, I think, but one that’s not particularly relevant for what I really want to think about, which is the relationship between queerness and emergence, which leads me immediately to think about the sorts of spaces that enable actualizations of queer potential, spaces wherein alternative logics of corporeality, sexuality, and relationality enhance, in a Spinozan sense, joy – that is, our capacities to act in ways uncircumscribed by dyadic logics of normativity and deviance. By way of beginning to think about something we can call ‘queer emergence,’ I loosely made a distinction between homonormative, conventionally gay and lesbian spaces and radical queer spaces; one of the folks in the course mentioned, soon after, that they thought many ostensibly radical queer spaces operated according to exclusionary logics. This launched a pretty intense conversation about the constitution of said spaces, what they are, why they form, who feels welcome, who doesn’t, and why.

I mentioned, by way of offering anecdotal information, my long struggle coming to terms with the fact that I may very well be (I still bracket this, definitively, place it under suspicion and doubt) inclined towards monogamy. This is, actually, a rather shameful thing for me to admit, given my intense commitment to de-privileging this mode of erotic engagement, alongside the felt necessity to experiment with alternative modes of intimacy, etc. Part of coming to grips with this, however, was cognizing that it was in the context of a long-term, committed, and intensely collaborative relationship that I felt most able to take certain risks, intellectually and existentially, to engage in the sort of edgework that I think is absolutely necessary for the creation of sustainable, alternative, and resistant ways of inhabiting the everyday. The important point here, though, is that this grappling with monogamous tendencies was enabled by seeking out milieu that weren’t shaped by the presumption of monogamous coupling, by finding myself surrounded by folks who didn’t immediately impute that baggage when cognizing connections between folks. In short, I was only ever able to think critically about my relationship to monogamy when it operated as an explicit – and devalorized, to boot – option among others.

This, for me, is perhaps the crux of what radical queer spaces – amorphous and ephemeral though they may be – are about. That is, while cliquey-ness may happen, they’re fundamentally not about policing lines of inclusion and exclusion, nor about maintaining cliques, though they may not be the most comfortable spaces for het, monogamous, or gender-normative folks to inhabit. Rather, they’re about developing non-presumptive spaces wherein experimentation is possible in the absence of constant pressure to ID one way or another, gender-wise, sexuality-wise, intimacy-wise. That is, in other words, a space wherein affect isn’t immediately personalized and codified in the form of subjectivizing emotional responses; spaces where it’s alright to not know how you feel, not know what you want, to try and fail and retry different kinds of engagement and different modes of being while you figure this shit out, perhaps indefinitely, into perpetuity. I think radical queer folks understand the need for these spaces more than most; we know quite a bit about the violence of presumption and identitarian interrogation, and it’s not surprising that we attempt to cultivate spaces, however ephemeral, that are estranged from these dynamics. The interesting thing, though, at least for me, is that these spaces are rarely ever exclusively populated by ‘radical queers’ policing the terms of other folks’ behaviors. I’ve found spaces like this amongst predominately straight anarchist folk, amongst working-class friends and family that don’t particularly give a fuck about doing gender, sexuality, or intimacy in normatively bourgie ways; amongst co-workers at terrible service industry jobs.

There’s a really fabulous essay by Gavin Brown, “Amateurism and anarchism in the creation of autonomous queer spaces,” in the also fabulous volume Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power (Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, eds.). I turned to it the day after this conversation about exclusion in radical queer spaces came up, trying to think about it more usefully. First off, he posits queerness as an ethics, “a process of trying to put into practice a set of ethical modes of engagement with sexual and gender difference rather than a simple identity category.” It is this sort of queer ethics that I was trying to get at earlier, thinking about queer space as shaped by a lack of presumptiveness and pressure to identify – it’s not about who we are, but what rules of thumb we’re collaboratively developing as we support each other in becoming beings not done over or exhausted by hegemonic logics of gender, sexuality, and relationality. This happens, as Brown writes, through “experiments with autonomous practices” that are fully content to operate in amateur ways, to risk failure constantly, to work shambolically, to not be concerned with duration – building long-lasting relationships, institutions, etc – but rather to enable the emergence of phenomena with the power to desubjectivize, destabilize, and disrupt conventional ways of being/having sex and gender.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, Affect, Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, autonomy, Brian Massumi, Constantine Papoulias and Felicity Callard, Couze Venn, Gavin Brown, homonormativity, Jamie Heckert, monogamy, non-monogamy, queer, queer autonomy, queering affect, radical queer space, Relationships and Power, Robert Cleminson

Rihanna, Intimate Violence, and Feminist Rage

There is this post, by Ann Powers, on the Rihanna/Chris Brown collabs, that’s worth quoting, and worth reading in its entirety:

The songs Rihanna has chosen to record, and has sometimes co-written, are not ones I play for my own daughter (though yes, she’s heard them on the radio, and we’ve talked about them). They’re rarely, if ever, feel-good anthems encouraging self-empowerment. Rihanna has basically abandoned such efforts, ceding that ground to her friends Katy Perry and Beyonce. Instead, she’s entered into a space previously occupied by many blues women, country singers and girl groups, where women attempt to uncover the truth behind emotional violence, without necessarily comprehending ways to escape it.

The outrage over this one particular, very public reminder that folks who have experienced intimate violence don’t always fully disown, eschew, or even (gasp!) stop eroticizing their abuser has a whole lot more to do with the psychic boundary maintenance, experiential naivete, and forced/faux moral propriety of those engaging the decrying than it does with any kind of feminism.

A feminist response to this phenomenon? The phenomena of domestic violence more generally? Call me old-fashioned, but that might have something to do with, first off, providing some space outside of a Manichean moral system to think about the affective intricacies of the experience. This might be a cultural moment wherein things pop are prompting us to reconsider our collective refusal to engage the common, quotidian nature of abuse that occurs in contexts wherein the ‘victims’ rarely have the luxury to refuse to dignify the existence of their abusers; Rihanna might have the economic means to do this, but apparently not the psychic armor or access to structures of feeling that would enable her to do so. I don’t think many of us do – this is why there’s a little thing called ‘recovery’ that is a) a complex process and b) never complete.

Radical feminist thought, for me – particularly those inappropriate, outrageous feminisms Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminisms”, the kind disowned by liberal, mainstream instantiations of feminism on account of their antisocial, politically negative refusal “to remake, rebuild, or reproduce” conventional modes of femininity (The Queer Art of Failure, 138) – has been, through its vociferous refusal of these conventional modes of femininity coupled with a commitment to grappling with affective messiness, intimate horror, and everyday violence, one of the only sources capable of prompting an alternative structure of feeling – one of feminist rage – that could potentially counter the multivalent forces that normalize intimate violence. These discourses on abuse are a far cry from the hackneyed, conventional, condemnatory response all sorts of mainstream music journalists, and informal commentators, are doling out to Rihanna, responses wherein she’s being chastised for not definitevely estranging herself from Brown, responses that echo, in an only mildly modified register, what I’ve heard so many times before re: victims of domestic violence: “why doesn’t she just leave him?”

As for Chris Brown: man, my footwork is almost as good as yours, and I ain’t even famous.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam, Ann Powers, Chris Brown, domestic violence, Rihanna

State Science, Nomad Science, Trans/Intersex Coalition, + the Deleuze Studies Conference

Folks! I’m heading to the Deleuze Studies conference in New Orleans this June (the 25-27). If you’re going, holler. We can meet up/travel together/crash in each other’s hotel rooms/explore cemeteries/drag each other through humid streets searching for adventures.

I’m super psyched for it, in part on account of the fact that my lifelong best friend will be my date for the trip, but also because I’ve been craving more dialogue that links up the politico-theoretical worlds of radical continental philo and critical trans studies. I’ve just finished working through the bulk of Mille Plateaux with folks in the grad course I’m teaching, and it was an intense and gratifying experience being able to collectively consider the relevance of that set of concepts for folks working in gender studies/queer theory; I’m hoping this conference continues that trend, at least in part.

To be honest, though, I’m also craving veganized Creole dishes, bad.

That said – here’s my abstract for the conference:

The Royal Science of Gender Transition: Deterritorializing the Medicalization of Gender Non-Conformance

In the well-known “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” queer historian and critical trans theorist Susan Stryker offers a striking assertion pointing up a radical distinction between medico-scientific epistemologies regarding the aims and effects of gender transition and phenomenological, affective, lived experiences of transition, writing that

though medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate naturalness as their effect, engaging with those very techniques produces a subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve. Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an inassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist (243).

This epistemic investment in the production of gendered ‘naturalness’ is attested to across the archives of scientific sexology concerned with developing diagnostic and treatment protocols in instances of sex/gender non-conformance. Primarily concerned with the surgical and hormonal restructuration of the flesh of transsexual, transgender, and intersex folk, the writings of mid-to-late 20th century specialists in the pathologization of gender non-conformance repeatedly assert the psychic necessity of achieving this ‘natural’ effect, tacitly positing sex atypical or sex/gender non-congruent morphologies as a corporeal foundation for psychic imbalances ranging from mild anxiety to debilitating depression.

Utilizing a schizoanalytic approach, this paper positions the practical medico-scientific investment in the production of naturalness as a key component of statist regulation of processes of gender transition. Situating key sexological writings on gender transition as instantiations of what Deleuze and Guattari, in the twelfth plateau of Mille Plateaux (“1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine”) dub State (or Royal) science, I interrogate the emergence and maintenance of the disjunctive space Stryker points to, that rift between the production of the natural as effect and the “unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to Nature” experienced by many trans and intersex folk. Deleuze and Guattari clarify the reliance of State science on a pronounced hylomorphism; in medico-scientific epistemologies of transition, this hylomorphic emphasis engenders the production of ideally gendered templates – ideal forms, as it were – that force desires for corporeal becoming to submit to the a neatly binary form/matter hierarchy. The growing movement to demedicalize trans and intersex treatment protocols stakes its primary contestatory claims specifically against this binaristic hylomorphism. It is my argument that, in so doing, activists, academics, medico-scientific professionals and theorists engaged in this mode of counter-attack are fomenting what can be thought of as a nomad science of sorts, one that 1) stresses a hydraulic model of sexual difference attentive to flows and flux (something akin to what Claire Colebrook has theorized as ‘queer vitalism’); 2) emphasizes minoritarian becomings over sedimented, molar identities; and 3) focuses on pragmatic issues of livability rather than the teleological attainment of the ‘nature effect,’ thus taking a problematic rather than a theorematic approach to cognizing the entwinement of corporeality and technologies of transition.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Jam, Deleuze Studies Conference, intersex issues, New Orleans, Nomad Science, queer, Susan Stryker, trans issues, Transition

Unlikely Video Girl(s)

If you wait until the 1:00 mark, you’ll get a glimpse of fourteen year old Hilary, at a large outdoor music festival (I’m thinking it may have been Warped Tour, or perhaps some other sundry large, mid-to-late 90s punk/indie event. There were quite a few in the world of my adolescence). It re-appears a few times over the course of this video.

I received a link to this from an old and infinitely beloved friend, former housemate and general partner-in-trouble, who was trolling for Peter Broderick tracks (he’s worth giving a listen, if you haven’t – Portland-based, played on Efterklang’s Parades, which is a too-glorious album as far as glorious albums go) and found this footage. He shot it off to me, figuring it was a doppelganger. I watched it once. Rewatched it. Realized it was, indeed, myself; that I remembered a handful of those boy-faces surrounding me in that particular circle pit; that I could even assign a name to some of them, that I perhaps even dated one of them, but can’t remember, because the faces of some of those boys have blurred and become pretty abstract signifiers over the past 13+ years.

I sent the video off to my lifelong best friend, who was more than likely on the perimeter of that shot, somewhere to the left or right of the camera, singing along to whoever may have happened to be playing (was it Hot Water Music? The Bouncing Souls? It must have been a teenage favorite, as I seem to know all of the stop/starts, all of the vocal moments that deserve finger-points). He was definitely shaken up by it, as was I. But why? What’s so strange about it? What about it feels a little off-putting? I sent a link to MLA, who wrote back, in his typical and delightfully concise way, “Cameras are crazy.”

And that became a beginning, a way to sort out what was intensely affecting me. I was fourteen when this video was taken. A fourteen year old girl, the sort who walked through the world the way most fourteen year old girls do: feeling hyperbolically watched, intensively observed, and not at all because of a budding awareness of control societies and surveillance culture, but for reasons that have more to do with what Laura Mulvey has termed ‘to-be-looked-at-ness,’ the forceful injunctions we negotiate regarding the molding of our bodies to become objects of aesthetic and erotic consumption. Of course, these two phenomena (the commoditization of girls’ bodies and control societies) are interlinked, but my awareness of the former was infinitely stronger than the latter at that young age; I was infinitely more interested in feminism though I, of course, hated cops, security guards, and closed-circuit cameras the way any good punk does. Part of my resistance to the commodization of my flesh was my deliberate placing of it in the milieu of the circle pit; taking up space, refusing to understand my body as object and coming to inhabit it as a sort of weapon of counter-attack. The shitty thing was, growing up, that this often contributed to a sort of subcultural eroticization. Every punk girl has stories about groping and harassment in the sort of situation pictured here; it happened to me, too, repeatedly. An old story regarding our objectification in spaces of resistance.

And how, so many years later, I find in my inbox this (potentially feminist?) valorization of young punk girls; looped and spliced video footage of girls in the pit attached to a track entitled “Quiet Long Enough.” Which is, on the one hand, maybe sweet, and on the other, feels a little creepy. All those years ago, I was being taped? I was being watched and I had no idea, even there, even in that circle pit? The inner paranoiac yelps “I knew it! I knew it all along!” And now, here that moment is, anonymized and rendered a mythified (in the Barthesian sense) instance of feminine insubordination (look at these little girls, being pushed around and nevertheless insisting on disquiet!)

Strange, strange, strange.

–HJM

Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, The Jam, Laura Mulvey, Myth, Peter Broderick, Quiet Long Enough, Roland Barthes, to-be-looked-at-ness

New Article on Homonormativity and Suicide in ‘LGBT Issues in Philosophy’

Folks!

A full version of a paper I delivered at this past fall’s Feminist Ethics and Social Theory conference is in the just-released ‘LGBT Issues in Philosophy’ newsletter (one of the handful of American Philosophical Association newsletters). The whole newsletter is worth checking out – I’m excited, in particular, to have a look at Nathaniel Coleman’s piece on racialization, bottoming, and HIV (‘What, What in the (Black) Butt’) and Ellen Feder’s short piece on the connections between prenatal dexamethosone treatment in instances of infants with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and homophobia. You can find those, as well as my essay (‘What If It Doesn’t Get Better? Suicide, Negative Affect, and the Outside of Homonormativity’) here.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, homonormativity, LGBT Issues in Philosophy, Negative Affect, queer, Suicide

Why I adore Ladelle McWhorter:

I confess I take pleasure in seeing humanists sputter and protest. In that respect I am faithful to my upbringing. Every good Southern Protestant’s eyes narrow at the words “secular humanism.” It’s a reflex. Many of us have forgetten the cause of this physiological manifestation of suspicion, but there is one: the point of secular humanism is to do away with God.

Now, there have always been people who’ve done without God. They’re called sinners. They have no morals; they smoke and drink and dance and cuss and make a mess of their lives. Therefore they’re easy to pick out of a crowd and teach children to avoid. Secular humanists, though, are another animal. They are insidious, because they do without God and still act like moral, upright citizens. You can’t pick them out of a crowd; they might turn up anywhere; and no matter how well you raise your children they might end up taking a secular humanist as a role model. (This is why you hope your kids will go to the community college or the voc/tech school rather than the private university, even the church-affiliated one). Secular humanists set man up in place of God; they make man the repository and foundation of all values. Secular humanists are idolators. So say my forebears. And so say I. No point in setting up yet another God. Besides, I figure if you’re going to reject Jehovah, you at least ought to get to drink and cuss and dance. What’s the point of atheism if you’re still saddled with morality?

- from Bodies & Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, which you should probably read if you haven’t already, because it’s stellar.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam, Foucault, Humanism, Ladelle McWhorter, queer