Issuu

December 2018

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University Published December, 2018 Volume 1 | Issue 1

cover art: â€œuntitledâ€? by Claire Adler Oil on canvas March 2018 layout & design by Charlie Blodnieks

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4 5 16 17

“Mountain Mistique” by Najaad Dayib

32 33

“The Elephant” by Adrienne Allen

40 41

“Carl and Tom” by Zöe Sottile

Diagnostic Confinement by Anja Chivukula “Growing” by Sarah Courville Queer Comradeship; or, Fielding the Natural by Aaron Su Haiti and Agential Trajectories of the Dispossessed by Isaac Jean-François Trans Magic by Kiran Zelbo

COLLECTIVE STATEMENT

que(e)ry

DEAR READERS, que(e)ry could not be more excited to present you with our first publication of queer and feminist theory from Columbia University’s undergraduate community. que(e) ry was founded from a desire to immerse ourselves further in an intellectual field that ignites our curiosity while theorizing from the identities we hold dear. Queer theory is a branch of critical theory that has emerged out of multiple academic and cultural contexts, including women’s studies, sexuality studies, race and ethnicity studies, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, radical activist movements, and more. Queer theory seeks to explore texts through a queer lense, as well as to theorize about meanings of “queerness” itself and how it can be used to critique not only hegemonic understandings of sexuality and gender, but also economic systems and political structures. In this publication, students explore norms and expectations in transgender diagnostic standards, the place of sexuality within post-socialist China, contemporary neocolonial encroachment in Haiti, and the intersection between trans identity and magic. que(e)ry has been meeting for the last four months to challenge one another in our thinking both inside and beyond our understandings of queer theory. Our meetings have functioned as both a discussion space and a workshop to perfect these beautiful pieces you now hold in your hands. the qu(e)ry collective, Anja Chivukula Abby Connell Isaac Jean-François Nicole Kaiser Aaron Su Kiran Zelbo

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

“MOUNTAIN MISTIQUE” BY NAJAAD DAYIB Acrylic on glossy paper Summer 2017

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

Diagnostic Confinement: Tracking the Imposition of Gender Norms in Transgender Diagnostic Standards BY ANJA CHIVUKULA

An earlier version of this essay was submitted as an assignment for the class “Critical Approaches in Social and Cultural Theory,” taught by Professor Alexander Pittman at Barnard College. In 1966, the publication of Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon presented one of the first standardized approaches to evaluating the candidacy of transgender patients for gender-affirming treatments like hormone therapy and surgeries. Potential patients desiring access to these kinds of medical care were judged against his medical standards in order to determine whether the treatments were actually necessary. While the frameworks used to evaluate patients have changed in the fifty years since, the practice of an interviewer determining whether or not a patient needs a gender-affirming medical treatment has not. Furthermore the diagnostic standards Benjamin proposed are filled with social norms about how those of a given gender look, act, and feel—the proper performance of their gender. Patients’ conformance to or distance from such gender norms continue to serve as barriers to desired treatments. In this paper, I seek to analyze the impact of the presence of gender norms in Benjamin’s original diagnostic standards and in the modern versions which have been created following

his model1. Using Judith Butler’s framework of gender performativity, I present an analysis of the subversive capacity of transgender identities which can help to explain how and why reactionary violence emerges against these identities. Then, building on that exposition, I examine how past and current diagnostic standards are constructed and applied. Through this analysis, I show how these guidelines serve as another form of reactionary violence by restricting the acceptable range of patients’ gender productions to those which conform to normative models of gender. The Disruptive Potential of Transgender Identities Traditional understandings of gender and sex hold that gender, as a set of roles and behaviors, follows from prediscursive sexual dimorphism, whether by cultural imposition or natural inclination. Judith Butler’s work upends this organization, however, and she maintains that the gendered/ sexed body only appears to be given 1

In particular, the three modern diagnostic standards I

will examine are those which appear in the Standards of Care, made by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the DSM-5, made by the American Psychiatric Association, and the ICD10, made by the World Health Organization.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory by nature, but rather is discursively constructed. In her view, gender is “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”2 She continues to say that “the effect of gender is produced by the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”3 Thus, within this framework, categories of gender/sex are not observations about how the world inherently is, but rather the products of everyday performative acts, the repetition of which congeals into “the appearance of [an underlying] substance.”4 Performative, here, refers to the idea that “gender reality… is real only to the extent that it is performed,” meaning not only that gender’s performance is what creates the illusion of its ontological primacy but also that gender performances do not refer to any “pre-existing identity by which an act or attribute might be measured.”5 Instead, categories of gender/sex are given by cultural norms and constrain the possibilities of what might constitute a successful, or otherwise acceptable, performance of gender. As Butler puts it, “just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.”6 The goal of this “cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions,” Butler states, is the 2

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender

reproduction and concealment, through naturalization, of “the system of compulsory heterosexuality.”7 Such an organization of people into gendered/sexed categories serves the interests of societies is promoting their “reproductive interests,” and guaranteeing the continuation of their cultural systems and kinship networks into the future. Hence, within the Butlerian framework, the social pressure of the heterosexual contract mandates maintaining the appearance of natural gender/sex categories through the performance of stylized acts. That gender is a “performative accomplishment,”8 however, makes it vulnerable to disruption through what Butler calls “subversive repetition.”9 This refers to a kind of gender performance which challenges the naturalized status of gendered categories by making visible the processes by which they come to appear natural, i.e. the performative nature of the acts themselves. Of such practices, Butler describes parodic gender performances as acts where “in the place of the law of heterosexual coherence [between sex and gender], we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.”10 It is within this context, as a form of parodic repetition, that transgender identities can be seen as a potential site for the subversion of gender norms. For instance, in her discussion of drag as an example of gender parody, Butler writes that “If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the

Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” 7

Ibid., 524.

Ibid.

Ibid., 520.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Ibid., 527-528.

Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 199.

Ibid., 526.

Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (Dec.1988): 519.

Ibid., 189.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but between sex and gender, and gender and performance.”11 Thus, transgender articulations of gender can subvert existing categories by bringing to the foreground the contradictions already present within them. As Jay Prosser phrases it, “where ‘straight’ gender occults its own performativity according to a metaphysics of substance, queer transgender reveals the performativity of all gender.”12 Prosser’s reading of Butler complicates this association of transgender identity with performativity, however, when he notes that, “there are transgendered trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that which this scheme devalues. Namely, there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be non-performative, to be constative, quite simply, to be.”13 He then continues his critique: If Gender Trouble enables the syllogism transgender = gender performativity = queer = subversive, it stabilizes this syllogism through suggesting as constant its antithesis: non-transgender = gender constativity = straight = naturalizing. The binary opposition between these syllogisms proliferates a number of

appearance of an ontological continuity, regardless of whether one

mutually sustaining binary oppositions… queer versus straight; subversive versus naturalizing; performativity versus constativity; gender versus sex… But the transsexual, as Butler later realizes in Venus Xtravaganza, ruptures these binaries and their alignment.14 Here, Prosser shows that the disruptive potential of transsexual identities comes not only from how they might parody categories of gender, but also how they might move between or exist outside of these categories. The transsexual desire for a constative, rather than performative, articulation of gender thus presents a challenge to gender/sex norms by crossing naturalized boundaries and refiguring what it means to embody a gender. That is, transsexual practices might not only suggest a radical division and friction between gender and sex, but simultaneously a permeability of sex categories and a reformulation of the gender episteme in which one’s sex (or at least, the sex one desires to embody) follows from one’s gender. Each of these ways of interpreting the subversive capacity of transgender and transsexual identities, within parodic frameworks or as a transgression of the boundaries between gender/sex categories, shows the potential they hold for destabilizing the normative system of gender/sex/ sexuality which structures our society. In reaction to this disruptive potential, then, society consistently threatens and enacts violence towards transgender people. For example, Butler notes how “the sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even

actually exists.

11 12

Ibid., 187. Jay Prosser, “Judith Butler: Queer Feminism,

Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 263. 13

Ibid., 264. The question of ontological authenticity

which Prosser raises here is one which is outside the scope of this paper. The manifestations of gender norms (and their enforcement) with which I am concerned have to do with maintaining the

Ibid., 265.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory violence.”15 In this case, the shift from an explicitly theatrical to a mundane context for gender performance makes parodic performances dangerous, rather than comical. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the potential for reprisal, however, is given in the death of Venus Xtravaganza, one transgender woman whose story is followed in the documentary Paris is Burning. Venus was a sex worker who was strangled by one of her clients upon his discovery that she was a pre-operative transsexual. In analyzing her death, Prosser notes that Venus had, “a body in transition off the map of three binary axes— sex (male or female), sexuality (heterosexual or homosexual), and race (of color or white): a lightskinned Latina transsexual body under construction as heterosexual and female. At work in Venus’s murder,” he argues, “is not fear of the same or the other but fear of bodily crossing, of the movement in between sameness and difference.”16 Thus, the destructive possibility of transphobic violence is fully realized in Venus’s case, in an attempt to eradicate the challenge her existence posed to categories of gender/sex. This paper will argue that a different form of reactionary violence is at play within the diagnostic standards for administering transgender healthcare. The goal of such practices is not elimination, but rather the restriction and neutralization of the disruptive potential of transgender identities through forced conformance to cultural gender narratives. Transgender Diagnostic Standards and Normative Violence Within Harry Benjamin’s original classification system for transvestitic and transsexual identities, the enforcement of gender norms abounds. One of the

most obvious expectations in his work is that greater identification with (and proper adjustment to) womanhood necessitates greater or exclusive attraction to men, and vice versa, as exemplified by his “sexual orientation scale.”17 In one article, he writes that while “transvestites… are majority heterosexual,” “homosexual inclinations always exist in the transsexualist,” as a result of their feeling “as women.”18 He continues that, “[transsexuals] consider the fact that they are attracted to men natural because they feel as women and consider themselves of the female sex. For them to be attracted to ‘other females’ appears to be a perversion.”19 This shows an explicit assumption that attraction to the opposite binary gender is a necessary part of healthy, typical gender identification. As a result, Benjamin would only consider patients who expressed heterosexual desire (from the perspective of the gender they sought to embody) for whatever treatments they might have desired. Similarly, modern requirements for a diagnosis of gender identity disorder in children, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, require that patients demonstrate tendencies for cross-dressing, playing the typical role of the experienced gender, engaging in activities and with toys designated for that gender, and/or the rejection of all of these for their assigned gender.20 Failure to adequately fulfill these expectations may result in the disbelief 17

Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon

(Düsseldorf: Symposium Publishing, 1999), 19. 18

Harry Benjamin, “Transsexualism and Transvestism as

Psycho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 47. 19 20

Ibid. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Butler, “Performative Acts,” 527.

Disorders, DSM-5, (Arlington: American Psychiatric Association,

Prosser, “Judith Butler,” 273.

2013), 452.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University of the primary criterion for diagnosis: that the patient has “a strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that [they are] of the other gender.”21 Each of these sets of requirements thereby imposes the boundaries within which an intelligible gender must be performed in order to receive desired treatments. This sense of performance, however, contains dual meanings. On the one hand, those habits which Benjamin classifies as evidence of a patient’s internal gender might be enacted by patients on the basis of their desire to embody such external standards for their experienced gender. In the example of the ‘male transsexualists’ (today more appropriately referred to as trans women), acts such as expressing attraction to men, dressing femininely, and adopting feminine manners exemplify what Butler might call mundane stylizations of the body. The patient performs these acts out of the belief that they embody womanhood (as demarcated by standards like Benjamin’s), and in doing so construes them as evidence of their own womanhood, confirming the ontological authenticity of their gender by conforming to the standards set for out for them by doctors. Through repetition over time, this congeals to the appearance of an essential, metaphysical gender for both the patient and the doctor, much as predicted by Butler’s framework of gender performativity. The need for a sustained performance in order to create this illusion of an “abiding gendered self ” is perhaps best visible in the standards of the World Health Organization, which require two continuous years of gender expression for a diagnosis of transsexualism.22, 23

At the same time, however, many patients might perform by simply acquiescing to the requirements put forth for them by such diagnostic standards. Performance, in this sense, involves the modification or fabrication of a coherent transgender self in order to fulfill diagnostic guidelines. Butler describes such practices in “Doing Justice to Someone”: It is, for the most part, the gender essentialist position that must be voiced for a transsexual surgery to take place, and that someone who comes in with a sense of gender as changeable will have a more difficult time convincing psychiatrists and doctors to perform the surgery. In San Francisco female-to-male candidates actually practice the narrative of gender essentialism that they are required to perform before they go in to see the doctors, and there are now coaches to help them, dramaturges of transsexuality who will help you make the case for no fee.24 This represents an obvious form of coercion, where the patient must profess the narrative expected of them, regardless of whether or not it accurately reflects their experiences, in order to receive the treatments they desire. The distinction between these two senses of performance within the application of gender dysphoria diagnostic standards, however, is rarely so clear-cut. Rather, the very practice of the interview by which patients are Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines (World Health Organization, 2016), 168. 24

Judith Butler, “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex

Ibid.

Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality,” in The Transgender

Butler, “Performative Acts,” 519.

Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York:

The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and

Routledge, 2006), 191.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory assessed, according to transgender healthcare guidelines, is a site at which they often intersect.25 Such interviews are conducted by medical practitioners to evaluate patients according to diagnostic standards, meaning that the assumptions present within these standards structure which questions are asked, what topics are discussed in detail, and how the interviewer responds to the interviewee’s statements. This process creates a narrative by which the patient interprets which acts signify their embodiment of a given gender. Thus, conceptions of how those of a given gender act and are within diagnostic criteria might sculpt how the patient comes to describe and understand themself within the context of the interview. As Butler writes, “The act of self-reporting and the act of self-observation take place in relation to a certain audience, with a certain audience as the imagined recipient, before a certain audience for whom a verbal and visual picture of selfhood is produced.”26 Here, the patient’s performance of their gender “in the mode of belief,”, as resulting from their sense of gendered identity, is already inextricable from the performance expected from them by medical evaluators in order to seek treatment; the way in which they come to see themself as embodying a given gender is affected by the prescription of what such a gender is like, as laid out for them by diagnostic standards.27 Following from the comprehensive nature of these interviews, the patient’s new understanding of their gendered embodiment then affects every part of their social existence. According to 25

One might think of this along the lines of the

the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (previously the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association), diagnostic evaluations not only include an “assessment of gender identity and dysphoria,” but also examine the “history and development of gender dysphoric feelings, the impact of stigma attached to gender nonconformity on mental health, and the availability of support from family, friends, and peers.”28 This means that the patient’s history, their everyday social interactions, and their reactions to each of those are brought into the interview and evaluated within the context of the applied diagnostic standards. In order to receive treatment, then, the patient is expected to give a performative reconception of their experiences of gender, both past and present, in conformance with medical guidelines. That the performance of a coherent transgender identity follows, rather than precedes, diagnostic standards undermines their premise, however. Instead of describing “characteristic syndromes of signs and symptoms that point to an underlying disorder [of identity],” diagnostic criteria act as ontological impositions, insisting upon patients’ conformance to gender norms.29 Such an atypical chronology is characteristic of what Rae Langton calls an “anomalous direction of fit,” whereby “an observer’s beliefs can render observational circumstances abnormal by helping to alter the properties of the observed.”30 Within such circumstances, she describes how “instead of belief arranging itself to fit 28

Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual,

Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People 7 (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), 23. DSM-5, 19.

confession of Foucault’s scientia sexualis. In the interview, the same

guidelines that compel the interviewee to speak prefigure both this

speech and its evaluation by the interviewer.

Exclusion and Objectification,” in The Cambridge Companion to

Rae Langton, “Feminism in Epistemology:

Butler, “Doing Justice,” 189.

Feminism in Philosophy, ed. Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby

Butler, “Performative Acts,” 520.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 136.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

Ibid., 139.

expression of transgender identity. This strict confinement of patients’ gender productions thus maintains the apparent coherence of transgender identities, to the end of eliminating the threat such identities might otherwise pose to the normative system of gender/ sex. Of norms present in children’s gender diagnostic standards, Butler writes: Do parents regularly rush off to gender identity clinics when their boys play with yarn, or their girls play with trucks? Or must there already be an enormous anxiety at play, an anxiety about the truth of gender that seizes on this or that toy, this or that proclivity of dress, the size of the shoulder, the leanness of the body, to conclude that something like a clear gender identity can or cannot be built from these scattered desires, these variable and invariable features of the . . . structure of proclivity of attire?34 The anxiety she describes is precisely the one inspired by the threat that the disruptive potential of transgender identity poses to the social mandate of maintaining coherent, distinct genders. It is as a response to this anxiety, then, that gender diagnostic standards emerge as a form of normative violence. In wielding over patients the possibility of withholding the treatments they desperately desire, the use of such guidelines elicits the conformance of transgender patients to the imposed gender norms. This phenomenon thus stands apart from other violent enforcements of normative gender categories in that it is characterized not by annihilation but by transformation. Unlike the case of Venus Xtravaganza, whose death

DSM-5, 452.

the world, the world arranges itself to fit belief.”31 This dynamic only takes place, however, along gradients of social power. Hence, Langton specifies that, “the world ‘arranges itself ’ — at least in part — to fit what the powerful believe… Thinking so can make it so, when it is backed up by power.”32 Within the application of diagnostic standards, then, the ‘world’ of the transgender patient’s experiences is rearranged through repeated performance to conform to doctor’s expectations of how those of a given gender act. In this case, power is concentrated in the hands of the medical practitioner by virtue of their ability to withhold the treatment sought by their patient. As the DSM-5 notes, the patient’s current (untreated) condition is “associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, school, or other important areas of functioning.”33 Thus, in order to alleviate the discomfort or distress they experience without treatment, the patient is compelled to give a performance of gender in line with their evaluator’s beliefs. This allows gender diagnostic standards to persist in seeming like objectively neutral descriptions, when in reality their appearance as such is made possible only by leveraging transgender patients’ own physical and mental wellbeing against them. Within the outline of this imposition of gendered norms onto transgender patients, the shape of reactionary violence emerges. By evaluating patients for treatment according to gender diagnostic standards, doctors impose the gendered norms present within those standards onto their transgender patients, thereby narrowly restricting how gender may be performed as an

Butler, “Doing Justice,” 190.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory Butler characterized as an attempt to “eradicate those phenomena that require an opening up of the possibilities for the resignification of sex,” the application of gender norms within diagnostic standards is not predicated on the elimination of transgender identity.35 Rather, it confines the possibilities of transgender gender performance to those which conform to pre-existing gender narratives, thus neutralizing the disruptive potential transgender identities might otherwise hold. Instead of expelling transgender identity from the system of gender signification entirely, the norms within gender diagnostic criteria restrict the forms of expression available to transgender patients to those which reiterate such a system. This results in the metabolization of transgender identity by the system of gender/ sex, a reconception of transgender experience which ultimately allows for its use in preserving and reproducing the apparent “truth of gender.”36

quoted in Prosser, “Judith Butler,” 274.

Butler, “Doing Justice,” 190.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Harry. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Düsseldorf: Symposium Publishing, 1999. ---. “Transsexualism and Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 45-53. New York: Routledge, 2006. Butler, Judith. “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 183-193. New York: Routledge, 2006. ---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2007. ---. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1988): 519–531. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM5. Arlington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines. World Health Organization, 2016. Langton, Rae. “Feminism in Epistemology: Exclusion and Objectification.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, edited by Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, 127145. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000. Prosser, Jay. “Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 257-280. New York: Routledge, 2006. Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People 7. World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), 2011.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

APPENDIX

From the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

APPENDIX CONTâ€™D.

From The Transsexual Phenomenon by Harry Benjamin.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

“GROWING” BY SARAH COURVILLE Analog paper collage 2018

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

Queer Comradeship; or, Fielding the Natural BY AARON SU Earlier versions of several fragments were presented at World Picture Conference, University of Cambridge under the title, “Reproduction Under the Hands of the State: Theses on Digitality in China.” What forms of attachment, interdependency, and indebtedness are being implemented, funded, obliged, or simply and violently enforced; and what tender possibilities are foreclosed?1 –Angela Mitropoulos, “Legal, Tender: The Genealogical Economy of Pride, Debt, and Origin” To the ends of diagnosing capitalism as a situation—that is, as a particular material-semiotic moment as well as a continuous means of situating objects and relations—an examination of its methods becomes instrumental. Sexuality, as we know, has constituted a superordinate terrain whereby discourses of personhood and citizenship within the fold of capitalist relations have taken form; its emergence and confirmation as a category of knowledge customarily dates back to the advent of modernity in western Europe.2 This now widely accepted historicization expands the scope of possible capitalist intervention but brackets two unsung considerations: alternative chronologies of development, especially in the Global South, and the “perpetual motion” of sexual categories as an arbiter of conflict after the general fact of sexuality’s successful appropriation into the

value form.3 Insofar as contemporary scholars following Rosa Luxemburg have complicated the supposed finitude of primitive accumulation by revealing that “the accumulation of capital, seen as a historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further down to the present day,” in this essay I offer provisional thoughts toward a necessary revision of the place of sexuality in this history, which is in fact not a fixed position but a continuous, sometimes futile, effort of subsumption into the capitalist “natural.”4 This project is germane in particular to the question of China, whose post-1989 economic transformations are still very much caught up in the act of what Mei Zhan calls “re-worlding.”5 An outcome of this process is that universallyaspiring sexual categories like “gay” and “lesbian” have only recently emerged as the set of expressions for the “proper embodiment of desire” in China’s postsocialist imagination.6 3

Fred Moten, Black and Blur: consent not to be

a single being, 53. “Insofar as structure and agency retain the discrete separation of object and subject, practice emerges instead as the already amalgamated process of these last two terms. From the perspective of practice, it is no longer possible to insert human activity into a fixed landscape of social structure; both moments are formed in perpetual motion.” 4

Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, 372.

Cited in Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Angela

Mitropoulos,

“Legal,

Tender:

The

Primitive Accumulation.” Social Text 34, vol. 3 (2016): 39. Mei Zhan, Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine

Genealogical Economy of Pride, Debt, and Origin,” Social Text 29,

no. 3 (2011): 88.

through Transnational Frames.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An

Introduction, 15-36.

Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in

Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, 5.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory A grand sum of popular China scholarship’s presuppositions are aptly reflected in Jing Wang’s argument that “political, cultural, and economic capital in post-1992 China now emerge as interchangeable terms of value.”7 This comes as a corollary subsequent to Engels’ anticipation of “the transformation of the human body into an object of socialist [now postsocialist] planning and administrative regulation,” a conceit invoked cardinally in the legal and political philosophy of the People’s Republic since its constitution.8 Wang’s ambition toward this theory’s realization extends additionally to a generous reading of Capital, as noted by Nikhil Pal Singh: “The rise of the commodity form, as Marx tells us, helped advance ideas of universal exchangeability, formal equality, general abstraction, and a human subject without particular qualities.”9 This paper foregrounds the argument that the assumed completion of this task—and hence the full material adequation of multiple representations of value—jettisons any possibility of social resistance to the preconditions set by political economy. This social logic is the same one that unfittingly forestalls the status of sexuality as one of complete economic consolidation after its emergence as a category ipso facto. Not so long ago, Stuart Hall, taking up Antonio Gramsci on hegemony, reminded us that cultural production (coterminous here for purposes of brevity with “ideology” and “superstructure”) always retains the ability to exceed its indexicality to the corresponding economic relation; “assuming the categories of bourgeois political economy as the foundations of all economic calculation,” a reductionism in the last instance, gives 7

Jing Wang, “Culture as Leisure and Culture as

Capital.” positions: asia critique 9, no. 1 (2001): 70-71. 8

Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen

way to an infinite regression whereby the same “forms and relations would go on forever.”10 Indeed, to the contrary, we see here that if global capital’s seizure of sexuality under the mandate of neoliberalism were determinative to the extent that the whole range of extant sexual categories was rendered eternally static as economic infrastructure, there would be no evidence of the multiplicity of expressions eliding or straddling the value form that Aihwa Ong discerns in her formulation of neoliberalism “by describing a global structure of sutured differences.” To meditate further on this register of “difference” is apropos inasmuch as it intimates the functional co-presence of not just vertical but lateral relations, some of which might be the different permutations of sexual identities whose performances within processes of valorization are varied to an outstanding degree. Neferti X. M. Tadiar provides an analogous account of this gradient in a reconsideration of China’s new leadership in the production of visual culture: “there is no unified field of ‘culture’ that one can point to as the object of capitalist subsumption. We can see this in the very unevenness of the global art market, which points to the widely disparate levels of recognition and valorization of visual representational practices in the world today and suggests that some ways of seeing and being are better codified and integrated within the formal global economy than others.”11 This incongruity, translated in terms of the sexual, forms the crux of what I would like to identify as a space of fallout; to insist on maintaining the unassimilable heterogeneity of sexual expressions as they threaten to, but never fully, come under siege by circuits of recognition, subsumption, and financialization is to offer up 10

Stuart Hall, “The problem of ideology: Marxism

Dühring’s Revolution in Science, 324-25. Cited in Gary Sigley,

without guarantees.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, vol. 2

“Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of Technoscientific Reasoning.”

(1986): 28–44.

positions: asia critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 549. 9

Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-

Called Primitive Accumulation.” Social Text 34, vol. 3 (2016): 30.

Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Cultural Revolution

Internationale?” with J. L. Beller, “And Now China?” A Special Issue of Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, no. 11 (2008): 41.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University new political purchase vis-à-vis the overdetermined role of sexuality in general as a fully realized sphere of capitalist accumulation. Intensifying the stake of this avowal are the “banality of globalization” and its attendant technologies provisionally gathered under the category of “new media.”12 The anxieties of total appropriation become understandable insofar as they are intentionally contemporaneous with the expansion of the visual and the digital, which work to securitize dispersed moments of valorization tethered to particular desire-producing social identities made “natural”—in this case, under the auspices of “gay equality” or homonationalism, for example. It comes as no surprise then that the problem of immutability or lost subjectivity animating this paper is, among other things, embedded into the psychic life of the image, whose power “creates the technosocial modifications necessary to engineer the adaptive forms of social cooperation that have become the prerequisites for the preservation of capital,” Jonathan Beller tells us.13 Cited elsewhere as manufacturing a “lingua franca” for capital’s capture, the image and the screen have colloquialized and aestheticized a whole set of social relations to be reckoned as constituting the proper citizen-subjects of productive civil society. Notably, descending down the chain of relations of production, both China’s state-planned incentives for bourgeois popular consumption and the relentless expansion of an inestimable domain of cheap labor alongside its manufacturing boom have fashioned it to be a key actor in the material implementation of this “technoscientific reasoning” of the new world order.14 One repercussion of China’s new role in the arena of global capital has been an emergence of discursive 12

Jonathan Beller, “Paying Attention.” Cabinet 24

(2007).

practices in the province of public culture intending to articulate the legitimacy of Chinese citizens as consumers and producers unto various tiers of transnational exchange (a process reflexively sustained by its very participation in the digitization of social life, which comprises a quite curious positive feedback loop). Deliberating the global impact of China’s newfound investment in transnational expansion as well as elaborating upon the cultural aftermath of 1990s economic reforms, Lisa Rofel observes that “the Chinese state and its citizens do not merely embrace the cultural and political encounters that constitute our post–Cold War world, but rather participate in creating them.”15 She imagines a recent and spectacular historiography of “desiringproduction,” as Deleuze would have it, mobilized in service of crafting suitable post-industrial personhoods to be introduced into a world of decentralized economic planning, where the mythos of individuated desire, replacing state intervention, functions as the medium par excellence of neoliberal aspiration and ultimately as the guarantor of Chinese futurity.16 Where the question of globalization intervenes is toward the development of the recipient of this desire, which now namely is an alignment with the restrictive (post-)Enlightenment rubric of universal human nature.17 Under the revisionist tutelage of what Rofel calls the “postsocialist allegory of modernity,” which “tells a story of how Maoism deferred China’s ability to reach modernity by impeding Chinese people’s ability to express their gendered human natures” among other things, post-reform Chinese citizens now arrange themselves to accrue particular desirous ends in pursuit of the natural, not merely what is figured under capital.18 While not to 15

Rofel, 2.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

(1972), 340.

Ibid.

Rofel, 3.

Sigley, 538.

Ibid., 13.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory understate the recent inauguration into social relations of the technological imperative toward a lingua franca, the pursuit of particular modes of hegemonic cultural belonging has been inscribed for roughly four decades now into the cosmology of what China’s natural order should and will be after the event of revolution. Hence, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” an empty signifier portending not much other than the adequation of “Chinese characteristics” with the obligation of individual choice under the tenets of a thoroughly elaborated and privileged market economy, seeing as though not much else has changed in the domain of economic life. This conflation of national providence with the cultivation of particular procedures by which one should properly desire the world—now retroactively paradigmatic with respect to the intelligible principles of “neoliberalism”—has, of course, a political-economic history. The ordinance of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” instituted by the Deng Xiaoping administration in 1982, rendered calculable and justifiable the widespread anxieties pertaining to lethargic improvements in lived conditions experienced across all echelons of the People’s Republic after the conciliation of communist revolution and its tumultuous restructurings of social lives.19 The raison d’être of the status of the economy came to be couched in terms of a misinterpretation of Marxist teleology, wherein pricing systems were prematurely made contingent to the labor theory of value without the accumulation of wealth and infrastructure favorable to a fullyfledged transition of the relations of production. Of note at this moment, in lieu of the theoretical transformation of the party’s orientations toward the national political economy, was the emergence of an enduring discourse about China’s material and cultural 19

Henry Yuhuai He, Dictionary of the Political

Thought of the People’s Republic of China. M.E. Sharpe. 386.

predicament in relation to a proper Marxist chronology informed by both orthodox theory as well as the status of other nation-states across the globe. At a Central Committee plenum in June 1984, Deng imparted upon his comrades: We were not quite clear about this in the past. Marxism attaches utmost importance to developing the productive forces… This calls for highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth. Therefore, the fundamental task for the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces. As they develop, the people’s material and cultural life will constantly improve. One of our shortcomings after the founding of the People’s Republic was that we didn’t pay enough attention to developing the productive forces. Socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism.20 In a similar fashion to James Ferguson’s scholarship on what he identifies as the “social experience of decline itself ” in crisis-ridden mining communities along the Zambian Copperbelt, Deng can be seen to articulate here the social life of particular mythologies of economic development and the subsequent ambiguities and fissures that give rise to forms of ideological negotiation.21 What I glean here is not just a modification and clarification of reform policy, but a sweeping performative utterance that instantiates an aesthetic relation to the place of China in both Marxist and global time.22 Principally, it places the historicalmaterialist stage of China’s economy in anterior position to the aggregate production volume of countries approaching advanced capitalist standing and, in so doing, contrives of an aspiration in the direction of these 20

Deng Xiaoping. “Building a Socialism with a

specifically Chinese character.” People’s Daily. Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 1984. 21

James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity:

Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Perspectives in South Africa), 13. 22

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University forms of political-economic rationality under the pretext of theoretical continuity and Marxist human destiny. Chairman Deng’s speech is instructive in that it provides a parlance—to be further made vernacular—for the new narrative of progress in China that remains operational to the present day. How this affair becomes protracted into the public sphere is made lucid by Rofel’s ethnography again in what she ascertains to be the imperative of “cultural citizenship” as a primary mode of subject formation after the establishment of wealth accumulation as a paramount national enterprise.23 Alongside the indispensable incentive for economic expansion as an enrichment of material conditions (what political economy might call now a “standard of living”), it is globalization as a function of China’s open-door policy, concomitant and auxiliary to Deng’s announcement of national economic reforms, that influentially shapes the idiom of participation in the global market. This idiom is a satisfaction perennially deferred by the narrative arc chronicling China’s need to “catch up” to the rest of the world, followed by the intensification of cultural modes of belonging that perform “techniques of normalization”24 in conversation with a global arena where “culture becomes a relevant category of affinity.”25 Importantly figuring in her analysis is that “sex is a critical site where the normalizations of cultural citizenship are being reformulated… Cultural citizenship, perhaps more so than legal subjectivity or theories of psychological personality, establishes proper and improper sex in postsocialist China.”26 Even further, “Chinese gay identities materialize in the articulation of transcultural practices with intense desires for cultural belonging, or 23 24

Rofel, 94. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural

Logics of Transnationality. Cited in Rofel, 94.

cultural citizenship, in China.”27 This is because a large part of this cathexis is, of course, bulwarked by the temporal regime of the aforementioned “postsocialist allegory of modernity” wherein post-1980s reforms allocated to citizens their ability to realize a proper universal human nature, which is namely the nature of modernity Foucault sutures so compellingly to the discourse of sexuality as a critical site of identification.28 What this social history bears on an understanding of the strain of neoliberalism experienced by China is the observation that “technoscientific reasoning” emerges as a rubric not only conditioned by forms of mass mediation but also by the preceding political landscape of globalization itself, ushered in through a rejection of Maoism and an embrace of the cultural politics of neoliberalism as the method by which China would attain levels of accumulation sufficient for socialist transformation. Neither the imposed teleologies of digitization or political economy function in sui generis fashion, but rather work in tandem to animate the figure of the natural in securing Chinese futurity. Understanding the trope of naturalization as a fulcrum conjoining state speculation (in the post-1980s organization of marketoriented political economy) and influential forms of private enterprise (increasingly toward efforts of national and global digitization) illuminates the magnitude of, and political rationality behind, the consolidation of various social relations in China, which in the final analysis is a means of siphoning excess practices of life-making in service of a universal humanity whose proximity to the neoliberal project furnishes an assurance of precipitous capital accumulation and ultimately— though arguably the “warm illumination of a horizon” is seldom palpable or relevant any longer29—the 27

Ibid., 89.

Foucault, 15-36. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then

Ibid.

Ibid., 95.

and There of Queer Futurity, 1.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory completion of the communist project. With the expansion of the national economy onto the global frontier comes a more pronounced boundary of the conditions of possibility of social life in China that fit the figure of universal human nature mobilized at the heart of neoliberalism’s regulatory guidelines. To echo my previous sentiments about the alluring finality of this transformation, and to follow from Neferti Tadiar’s work on different orders of labor and life in the “enlarged production time of capital,” a worthy undertaking in this moment would be to “dwell on modes of life lived and practices of living that are remaindered in the process of production of biopolitical life, that is, both the waste of life and wasted life, what is not consumed in the consumption of life forces as the basis of the expropriation of value.”30 These are “life-times that are not fully subsumed by apparatuses of capture or consumption or waste, but instead remain at our disposal as perhaps a resource to remake the rules of just life.”31 What practices, orientations, and aesthetics pose to us methods of remaining in this zone? And, to the extent that Tadiar’s inquiry is importantly informed by the technologies of recognition and disposability, what intelligibilities and pleasures may be had in these relations procedurally thrown into excess? These are the questions we must turn to for some fresh air in charting out the historical and present conditions of the natural. Philology and the Natural The second part of this paper will address the sexual identity of tongzhi (同志), a term which broadly signifies both “comrade” and “queer.” Its present straddle across multiple orders of valorization forges a potentially embodied site of opposition to what Gary Sigley calls China’s new regulatory discourse

“technoscientific reasoning.”32 Though I have demonstrated that the natural now functions as an overdetermined political directive of the state and its functionaries as well as a technology of value formation, the question of what constitutes nature— particularly with respect to the problem of language—in contemporary China has been mobilized since the afterlife of 1912 and the inexorable end of dynastic rule. Insofar as official moves toward standardizing national pronunciation through dictionaries and other repositories did not gain traction until the interim republic headquartered in Nanjing after the Xinhai Revolution, China flaunts an idiosyncratic history wherein a national vernacular has been sutured unilaterally to the experience of modernity.33 An auxiliary effect of this conjunction after the transformation of land into capital is that populations of dialect-speaking rural migrant workers and other proletarianized, dispossessed subjects—whom Neferti Tadiar brilliantly finds to function in China as risk-absorbing collateral or securitized assets “that will ultimately shoulder the costs of fallout of any and all speculative maneuvers”—are further cast away from recognition in the global economy because of their literal inability to assimilate into the lingua franca, albeit their instrumentality to social reproduction both as laborpower and as liquidated commodity futures that enable the work of financial speculation.34 Returning to the rubric of the lingua franca as an organizing method of both technological infrastructure and global cultural citizenship, what has facilitated its implementation as a 32 33

Sigley, 538. Ping Chen, Modern Chinese: History and

sociolinguistics, 18-38. As a point of clarification, the concluding Ming and Qing dynasties made moderate and incomplete efforts to standardize written language, but both high imperial court speech and colloquial tongues were not indexical to the morphemes used in text. Moreover, the divide between bureaucratic and popular styles of

Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Life-Times of Disposability

within Global Neoliberalism.” Social Text 31, no. 2 (2013): 24. 31

Ibid., 41.

speech and writing was maintained with wavering intention until the start of the Republic of 1912. 34

Tadiar, 25-29.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University “natural” aspiration of Chinese statecraft is its relevance to rhetorics of national solidarity and efficient administration. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, after performing a historical anthropology of early modern European statecraft and its reliance on standardized measurements for tabulating land, property, and commodity exchange, argues that “certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision,” and that “this very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation.”35 We see this maneuver performed in the consolidation of Chinese modernity after 1912 and again after the Communist Revolution, not only in terms of land management (a common historical procedure executed across dynastic regimes), but for the first successful time through speech and writing. Where methods of violently enforced regional dominance proved sufficient for securing dynastic rule, a transition toward prioritizing the vocabulary of consent—through individual desire, cultural coherence, and the proper nation form—under liberal and neoliberal protocols required the unification of language to legitimize the Chinese administration’s participation in the new global order.36 Some of this work entailed the deliberate manufacture and expulsion of vocabularies to serve political purposes, calcifying a discernible relationship between Chinese language and culture. A stellar display of the latter exercise was the removal of a whole set of Chinese honorifics, ancillary terms to display the social status of speakers in relation to their interlocutors (such as the use of bî, “lowly/base” or bēi, “inferior,” in place of “I” when addressing elders or superiors).37 Such 35

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain

Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. “Nature and Space,” 11.

vestiges came to be framed as part of a past imperial order through the very administration of standardized dictionaries and pronunciation guides, now widely disseminated by the arrival of mass print and digital media; at a cursory glance, these terms appear classified under “literary” or “archaic” morphemes today. On the other hand, one of the most pronounced linguistic creations of the twentieth century was tongzhi, which has in the span of a century traversed multiple connotations blatantly in ideological opposition. The word tongzhi (literally, “same” “ideals”) entered into vernacular expression at one of China’s defining entry points into modernity—namely, the Xinhai Revolution—when “father of modern China” Sun Yat-Sen excavated the term from scant use in historical literature as a method of addressing his supporters, before their split into Nationalist and Communist factions.38 Notably, his 1925 will deploys the term audaciously in a call for action: “As the revolution is not yet complete, my tongzhi must endeavor to carry it out.”39 For a couple decades following, tongzhi enjoyed a privileged position of unifying Chinese populations against foreign intervention in a straining moment of national consolidation. Yet given its sonic proximity to the Russian word for “comrade” during the Soviet Union—arguably as a result of direct translation, although sources are unclear—it quickly became popularized as a symbol for the communist enterprise in its eventual triumph over Nationalist forces. Hongwei Bao attributes this to “the egalitarian political ideals it embodies… in polar opposition to terms commonly used in the Republican era, which suggest inequality and difference in terms of 38

Yuzhi Chen, “Tongzhi in China: A Social Marker or

Not?,” 7. 39

Fang, H., & Heng, J. H. Social changes and

Jacques Rancière, Chronicles of Consensual Times.

changing address norms in China. Language and Society, 12(4), 495-

William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart, Old Chinese:

507. Cited by Yuzhi Chen, “Tongzhi in China: A Social Marker or

A New Reconstruction.

Not?,” 7.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory gender and class.”40 From 1949 onwards, tongzhi became an object of “deliberate nation-wide language planning,” an early permutation of “technoscientific reasoning” where language and culture were invoked as compulsory grounds on which to begin effecting communist relations of production.41 This prefigurative strategy proved unexpectedly lucrative in severing cultural attachments of the dynastic order, which had earlier elicited state anxieties over a consensual implementation of new relations of production. Bao remarks that tongzhi was able to “map social relations in a new way, a way that opens the traditional family and kinship structure to relations and connections between strangers who share the same political views, and it transforms private intimacy into public intimacy.”42 Indeed, the tongzhi campaign, first weaved into public culture primarily through print media such as Maoist pamphlets and posters, fulfilled these ends most visibly through the spectacle of the Cultural Revolution, where thousands of family members and close colleagues turned against each other in outbursts of public defamation and murder as displays of allegiance to the politics of the state, which took priority over personal ties on all counts.43 Ironically, the years following this decade of tremendous social reorganization constitute the period when most historians begin to document the decline of tongzhi’s ubiquitous vernacular use in favor of currently normalized terms of address like “Sir” or “Miss,” as if its function as a political technology were no longer needed.44 Today, after many scattered moments of appropriation by queer communities, first in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and then in mainland China, tongzhi has become the Sinophone 40

Hongwei Bao, Queer Comrades, 71.

Chen, 12.

Bao, 132. Cited in Jodi Dean, “Four Theses on the

Comrade,” e-flux. 43

Frank Dikotter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s

History. 44

Ibid., 42.

identity par excellence of any person excluded from the practice of heterosexuality. A glaringly self-evident yet unacknowledged explanation via queer studies provides context for this semantic displacement conventionally regarded as arbitrary. Its premise is the historical observation that well into the 1980s, the project of tongzhi served to open up normative contracts of social relations to intense scrutiny on the grounds of politics itself. The severance of previously unquestioned “parakinship networks” and other dregs of moral obligation following the performative acts of the Cultural Revolution were not merely personally motivated, but conjoined to a whole nexus of radical criticisms of normative social arrangements, in which Confucianism partook as a major player for centuries.45 Contemporaneous with moments of intimate and systematized violence, then, were instances of imagining queer oppositions to the “ordered inscriptions of genealogy” associated with antiquity and repression.46 Attending to these ties enables a more nuanced reading of the adoption of tongzhi as the principal vernacular of Chinese queer sexuality. A conventional account juxtaposing the term with other labels for sexual minority, such as the clinically accepted tongxinglian, conducts itself solely through the affective: “tongzhi replaced tongxinglian inasmuch as the latter terminology was imposed by the state and imbued with pathological indictment.” This is true, but does not account for its total purchase, as much as “queer” in Anglophone regions undertook a similar trajectory yet still remains in use, perhaps more politically in the academy than ever before. Tongzhi emerges through this new reading as not just an escape from linguistic connotation, but a means by which queer sexuality could possibly retain an affiliation to modes of queering the fulfillment of contractual 45

Tadiar, 37.

Mitropoulos, 80.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University social life. And thus state anxieties over relinquishing tongzhi over to queer life come as no surprise. With China’s newfound stability in its developmentoriented political order comes what Angela Mitropoulos calls “a return to foundations in a new way—at once invoking fiscal prudence, familial/ sexual norms, and originalism—as the refoundation of genealogical order in its simultaneously economic, sexual, and legal senses.”47 Following her lucid argument identifying that “genealogy is as much a question of historiographical method and political practice as it is a means of discerning the legitimate ordering and transmission of property, money, right, and debt,” I argue that tongzhi, since its semantic reformulation, has continued to administer a thorny blockage to China’s attempts at these forms of consolidation, wedded to its power of recalling queer pasts vis-à-vis the statewilled forgetting of radical ruptures in social relations that were unable to foster a stable means of transmission required for capitalist reproduction. In this sense, tongzhi in the present moment remains a political enterprise, with dominant protocols of cultural production suspending its temporality by retaining its official status as a relic. Dictionaries administered by both private and public institutions chronicle the phrase’s first definition as “comrade” in spite of its now principal use as a colloquial mode of address for “queer,” and representational practices in (heavily monitored) cinema and literature occasionally arrange for tongzhi’s articulation only in the former sense. These genealogical strategies communicate to us that China cannot fully bestow tongzhi to the definition of personal and political queerness insofar as it would throw under siege the continuity of the value form and its reliance on securing contractual subjects bound by notions of legitimate social organization and reproduction.

Undertaking my digital ethnography for a previous project, I came to realize that nowhere on Blued—the largest gay dating app in China (and in the world, but overwhelmingly due to the mainland’s sheer population size)—does tongzhi appear on any interface. As of 2018, the English-language version’s opening screen features, in cursive handwriting font, the slogan “Enjoy the gay life,” an ostensibly broad reference that really insinuates its predominantly male user base.48 The Chinese version of the app, whose download is restricted to users located in mainland China and confers upon these users more options for social networking tethered to other national platforms, not only excludes this statement, but also entirely eliminates any tinge of sexual identification. The Chinese version of the Blued official website, whose retrieval likewise seems to be restricted in the United States and to which I only attained access through a virtual private network (VPN), advertises Blued as “the world’s leading interestbased social and health education network (全球领先的兴趣社交APP 和健康教育平台)” (see Figure 1).49 The absurdity of this nomenclature bespeaks a kind of comical entrapment for Blued: unable to use tongxinglian because of its colloquially discredited and medicalized history, unable to use tongzhi because it would hail its other queering valences into administrative recognition, and with no other sensible recourse left in the Chinese language as an alternative option. Not annexed by the same problem, Grindr’s international capture of users brilliantly presents how the language of sexuality can function as the new frontier of financial speculation. In one move, with 48

Here I am taking as presupposition the preeminence

of “gay” in China as a signifier restricted to gay males, a tendency colloquially reinforced in Anglophone regions to a lesser extent. 49

“Blued,” http://blued.com/cn. As a point of

clarification, I am referencing the version of the page made available to mainland China, not merely the Mandarin translation of the

Ibid., 74.

English version of the page.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory options for profile “personalization” that effectively reduce themselves to predetermined corporeal categories like race, gender, body type (toned, average, large, muscular, slim, stocky), position (top, bottom, versatile), and tribe (bear, clean-cut, daddy, discreet, geek, jock, leather, otter, poz, rugged, trans, twink), Grindr both naturalizes particular social relations in temporal perpetuity—a feature of software discerned by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun—and animates a categorical necessity for how queer bodies must encounter each other, creating an ample and consensual pool of subjects to be harnessed for digital labor.50 Filling out these fields becomes a rite of social recognition; anxieties over counterfeit profiles disallow users from doing otherwise. Synchronously, trafficking in these forms of “technoscientific reasoning” allows Grindr to accrue billions of bits of data and attention to first be liquidated into ad revenue and then converted into bundles that yield greater returns elsewhere via risk, speculation, derivatives, and the like.51 As an item of language, tongzhi is incommensurable to the proclivities of fully realized capitalist valorization, in that “like ‘queer,’ it is not defined by the gender of one’s erotic object choice but connotes an entire range of alternative sexual practices and sensitivities.”52 Hence they each make no appearance on their respective application interfaces. Tongzhi cannot be hailed as a category of definitional enclosure, and as such it allows the specter of the communist rearrangement of social relations to dwell in the purview of modern life. In her paradox of the “double bind,” Gayatri Spivak discloses that the subaltern fades away from knowledge the very instance it is made subject to representation; analogously, tongzhi’s 50

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the

Persistence of Visual Knowledge.” Grey Room 39, no. 18 (2005): 43. “Software is a functional analog to ideology.” 51 52

Beller, 158-174. Chou Wah-shan, Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex

Eroticism in Chinese Societies, 3.

provisional inability to assimilate into the vernacular of capitalist recognition is precisely the means by which we can perceive its ulterior registers.53 While the capture of value, of course, exceeds a binary arrangement—we see occasional moments of tongzhi successfully mobilized in the Chinese pink economy of entrepreneurship and brand-making—its lack of faculty as a value-producing category in other digital capacities decisively complicates what Jonathan Beller observes as “the content indifferent calculus of computational capital.”54 Moreover, the boundary between intelligible and unintelligible social relations under the value form is further made seen as contingent in the face of memes such as “Estoy gay” in the Hispanosphere (contrasted with “Soy gay,” the proper grammatical form conveying that gayness is an objectpermanent character trait), which temporarily deride the genealogical order in their linguistic reclamation of sexual categories perceived to be immutable across time (see Figure 2). These moments uncover the immense precarity and work of capital’s continuous seizure of social relations, here framed usefully as a problem of language itself. In fleeting times like these we attend critically to how capitalism situates objects and relations as natural, which often becomes a practice requiring the labor and authority of statecraft, culture, and other intimate and embodied technologies to uphold. In surrendering unilateral control over economic planning to culturalist and individualist pursuits of the natural, China gave rise to a throng of previously unimaginable material developments, of which nearly universal digitization comprises just one part. The manufacture and dispersal of new social relations attendant to these transformations 53

Gayatri

Chakravorty

Spivak,

“Rethinking

Comparativism.” New Literary History, 40, no. 3 (2009): 609-626. 54

Jonathan Beller, “The Computational Unconscious.”

boundary 2, b2o: an online journal 3, no. 3 (2018).

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University certainly generate new terrains for capitalist subsumption, but also expressions and lifestyles that fall out of reach. The vocabularies of these unruly manifestations indelibly open up new prospects, such as the possibility of an unalienated relationship to the sexual dimension, which this paper attempts to treat.55 In so doing, we speculate toward outlets that engender great anxiety for capital’s natural elaboration, but incommensurable gratification for lives worth something outside of value.

In this sense, I owe some of my general

methodological approaches to the dissertation of Alexandria Elizabeth Wright, “The Body in Space: In Search of a Sensuous Dwelling in the Space of Accumulation.” University of California, Berkeley (2017).

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory BIBLIOGRAPHY Agard-Jones, Vanessa. “Bodies in the System.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17, no. 3 (2013). Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press (1962). Bao, Hongwei. Queer Comrades. Nias Press (2018). Bao, Weihong. “Introduction,” Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China. University of Minnesota Press (2015). Baxter, William H. and Laurent Sagart. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford University Press (2014). Beller, Jonathan. “The Computational Unconscious.” boundary 2, b2o: an online journal 3, no. 3 (2018). The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital. Pluto Press (2018). “Paying Attention.” Cabinet 24 (2007). Canguilhem, Georges. “The Living and Its Milieu.” Translated by John Savage. Grey Room 31, no. 7 (2001). Chen, Ping. Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press (1999). Chen, Yuzhi. “Tongzhi in China: A Social Marker or Not?” Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania 27, no. 2 (2012). Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge.” Grey Room 39, no. 18 (2005). Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press (2016). Dean, Jodi. “Four Theses on the Comrade.” e-flux no. 86 (2017). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Penguin Classics (1972, 2009). Dikotter, Frank. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History. Bloomsbury Publishing (2016).

Engels, Frederick. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. Progress Publishers (1969). Fang, H., & Heng, J. H. “Social changes and changing address norms in China.” Language and Society 12, no. 4 (1983). Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Perspectives in South Africa). University of California Press (1999). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Editions Gallimard (1984). Fuchs, Christian. “Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time.” Time & Society 23, no. 1 (2014). Hall, Stuart. “The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, vol. 2 (1986). Harvey, David. “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘PostModernism’ in the American City.” Perspecta 34, no. 6 (1990). He, Henry Yuhuai. Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic of China. M.E. Sharpe (2001). Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013). Luxemburg, Rosa. Accumulation of Capital. Monthly Review Press (1951). Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics (1992). Grundrisse. Penguin Books (1993). Mazzarella, William. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Duke University Press (2013). Mitropoulos, Angela. “Legal, Tender: The Genealogical Economy of Pride, Debt, and Origin.” Social Text 29, no. 3 (2011).

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University Moten, Fred. Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being. Duke University Press (2017). Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press (2009). Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke University Press (1999). Neoliberalism as Exception. Duke University Press (2006). Rancière, Jacques. Chronicles of Consensual Times. Bloomsbury Publishing (2005, 2010). Rofel, Lisa. Edited by Lisa Lowe and Jack Halberstam. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Duke University Press (2007). Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press (1998). Sigley, Gary. “Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of Technoscientific Reasoning.” positions: asia critique 17, no. 3 (2009). Singh, Nikhil Pal. “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation.” Social Text 34, vol. 3 (2016). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Rethinking Comparativism.” New Literary History, 40, no. 3 (2009). “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” diacritics 15, no. 4 (1985). Tadiar, Neferti X. M. “Cultural Revolution Internationale?” with J. L. Beller, “And Now China?” A Special Issue of Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, no. 11 (2008). “Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism.” Social Text 31, no. 2 (2013). Wah-shan, Chou. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. Psychology Press (2000).

Wang, Jing. “Culture as Leisure and Culture as Capital.” positions: asia critique 9, no. 1 (2001). Wright, Alexandria Elizabeth. “The Body in Space: In Search of a Sensuous Dwelling in the Space of Accumulation.” Dissertation for University of California, Berkeley (2017). Xiaoping, Deng. “Building a Socialism with a specifically Chinese character.” People’s Daily. Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (1984). Zhan, Mei. Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames. Duke University Press (2009).

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory APPENDIX

Figure 1. Blued website, Chinese version (http://blued.com/cn); available in mainland China, accessed via virtual private network. Retrieved 15 March 2018.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University APPENDIX CONT’D.

Figure 2. “Estoy gay” meme, in contradistinction to “soy gay.” Retrieved 27 October 2018.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

“THE ELEPHANT” BY ADRIENNE ALLEN Ceramic, wood, candy November 2017

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

Haiti and Agential Trajectories of the Dispossessed BY ISAAC JEAN-FRANÇOIS An earlier version of this essay was submitted as an assignment for the class “Gender and Power in a Transnational Perspective” at Columbia College with Professor Selina Makana.

Informed by a history and culture of revolt, Haitian liberation and nation-building was actualized through revolt. This practice of refusal goes beyond a dismissal of an oppressive status quo or a reorientation of power from Master to Slave. Revolt liberated the the Haitian slave and constituted the nation of Haiti. Yet, the state of once-colonized spaces and peoples is always vulnerable to contemporary modes of neocolonial and neoimperial encroachment. We must reconsider the undercurrents of contemporary forms of dispossession mediated by putative “World powers”.1 Disrupting contemporary colonial presences in “dispossessed” nations and societies, the practice of refusal operates in ways that characterize the dynamic interaction of neocolonial power and those who are subjected by that power. What happens to the terms “dispossession” and “agency” when they are considered within a human rights, transnational or nationalistic project? How does the intersection of these different projects amplify common understandings of the body in need of saving while at the same time reify differentials in claims

to power? The practice, not only of refusal, but of dispossession and agency, is a reiterative process that either reifies or undoes systems of power. I’d like to engage a transnational critique of the constructed “dispossessed Haitian in peril” in order to consider the possibility for disidentificatory2 conceptualizations of agency. Power is embedded within and flows between institutions and bodies that either dispossess and restore notions of nation and self. Michel Foucault writes in his essay titled “The Subject and Power” that it is essential to characterize the nature of this schematic to understand the “mechanisms of subjection.”3 Socially and politically informed “states,” or material sites of discipline (e.g. law), are spaces where power is taught to and “individuality [is] shaped” within a society positioned within a state.4 State power, in this way, is inextricably born within each member of society— regardless of one’s sociopolitically 2

Here, I am building off of the term “disidentification”

in José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). I understand terms like “dispossession” and “agency” to always already be in a dialectical relationship that is mediated by power and

Alexandra Villarreal. “Flee or Hide: Haitian

Immigrants Face Difficult Decisions Under Trump.” (The Guardian,

pressure. The terms, then, emerge as partially identifying with and against the structures that conjure them. Michel Foucault. “The Subject and Power.” (Critical

October 30, 2018) Accessed December 2, 2018. https://www.

theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/30/haiti-immigrants-new-york-

Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982), 782.

temporary-protected-status-trump-tps.

Ibid., 783.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory sanctioned status. Similarly, state power is born within the systems created to save others. Social structures, informed by state power, make it possible for people to be recognized as both members of the state and actors of the state. In this dichotomy, moments of agency or “sites of liberation” are produced as people both withstand and refuse state power. Foucault reads these moments as “anti-authority struggles,” which position the subject in tension with the oppressive power structure.5 I must stress that these actions are limited to the subject’s position within the state and, though an individual may deviate from the norm (e.g. to become deviant), continue to be implicated in the hold of power. Yet, these tense moments, for Foucault, do not suggest that an oppressed person is in any way more powerful than the state. To be constituted as a subject, as a person who was, is or will be managed by the state, is to already be reduced to an effect of power. Tension, understood to be moments of and movements with agency, may simply mean the moments when the body is not entirely consumed.6 “Slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains,” writes Foucault.7 I find this statement troubling, as Foucault appears to backpedal against his initial characterization of legitimate antihegemonic forces. These practices of refusal do not dismantle edifices of power but disrupt the micrologics of the power’s control. The potential to exist as an agentive subject, for Foucault, is foreclosed when one is binded “in chains.” Yet, that potential suggests an alternative manifestation of agency, one that exists through hegemonic

strongholds. Agential trajectories,8 or physical and psychic movements through which bodies actualize and effect their own emancipation within and outside of oppressive state regimes, are informed by individual and collective experience. Agency, for those who have been sociohistorically marked as available for domination, is a matter of negotiating an immediate moment of dispossession while simultaneously attending to alternative spaces and times of liberation. One must engage with spatiotemporal sites of refusal practiced by those who are oppressed because it is the moment of refusal that both constitutes the deviant subject and locates a weakness in the control of the state. The putatively unableto-refuse subject, upon practicing refusal, is constituted in spite of state control undermining the allconsuming machine of state power. How do entirely dominated people have or exercise agency while being dispossessed? Foucault considers “relations between individuals (or between groups),” as a potential site of power to analyze, but considering the relations of power that manifest themselves in historically objectified and “othered” populations calls for additional reflection. Considering our contemporary moment, specifically, I cannot ignore the manner by which race, sex, sexuality and gender sustain normative structures manifest in society and also engage with power in material ways. Foucault does not consider power dynamics structured on the very basis of race in nations where slavery, inseparable from colonialism, is an essential feature of the nation’s 8

Karen Barad. “‘Getting Real: Technoscientific

Practices and the Materialization of 5

Ibid., 780.

Reality.”Meeting the Universe Halfway, (Durham: Duke University

Consider Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s Anti-

Press 2007), 189–222. I am reimagining the concept of “agential

Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin Publishing Group, 2009).

realism,” as framed in Barad’s text. Barad writes, “Agency is not an

I say moment and movement, here, to stress the spatiotemporal focus of my

attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe

argument. The body or land, as space, is not separated from the time that

is agential intra-activity in its becoming” (141). The “intra-activity”

captures its consumption and processing into subjectivity qua dispossessed.

between historically produced spaces and times and mechanisms of

Michel Foucault. “The Subject and Power.” (Critical

sociopolitical management of bodies influences the ways in which

Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982), 790.

agency manifests.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University foundation and continuation. Neocolonial characterizations of Haiti as an inherently “crippled” nation suggests that Haiti set itself up to fail, writes Myriam J.A. Chancy in “Desecrated bodies/phantom limbs: Post-traumatic reconstructions of corporeality in Haiti/Rwanda.”9 This conclusion is contingent upon a belief that imperial forces are no longer engaged with or implicated in colonial projects, yet have the power to mark failing nations and states. The dichotomy of the “developed world” understood only in relation to the “developing world” as “more modern,” for example, illustrates this point. Immediately after the earthquake the media was dominated by headlines that called upon those who were “better off ” to come save the nation from its own destruction and ineptness. Chancy makes mention of media outlets who claimed that Haiti “had engineered the calamity,” as the nation was ill prepared for a natural10 disaster.11 “When I see CNN reporters commenting on the smell of urine and decay,” writes Colin Dayan in “‘Civilizing’ Haiti,” “I recall other representations of Haiti. They never change. As early as 1853, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle... called Haiti ‘a tropical dog-kennel and pestiferous jungle.’”12 The production of knowledge about the natural disaster becomes a blame game where the most immediately affected are discursively reproduced as culpable, inept and in need of saving. This naming also becomes an intensely political process, as government organizations and 9

Myriam

J.A.

Chancy

“Desecrated

Bodies/

Phantom Limbs: Post-Traumatic Reconstructions of Corporeality in Haiti/Rwanda,” (Atlantic Studies, 8:1, 2011), 109-123. DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2011.539779. 10

The earthquake, of course, was an ecologically

natural disaster, but this conclusion does not consider the ways in

nongovernmental organizations alike battle over how to save the dispossessed from themselves. Chancy’s text examines two extremely influential manifestations of power: medicine and “common knowledge.” The text explores what society has accepted as “known” (e.g.“we know we should help”) may, in fact, cover the violence found in certain forms of humanitarian aid. Chancy makes it clear that “many [humanitarian aid] projects [were] designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects.”13 There are two forms of “the people” that Chancy draws attention to in the text: large neocolonial nations (e.g. The United States) and Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs). In the case of external governmental involvement, entering Haiti meant “rationalizing the militarization of aid, pushing for a new status for Haiti, that of U.S. protectorate.”14 Haiti is understood, in this case, less as a nation choosing to be helped but one that requires intervention and aid—the moment of transformation where Haiti is no longer understood to be an agent of its own circumstances. The agential shift here becomes shrouded under the imperial notion of “protectorate,” a ward of the United States. The objective framework that many NGOs carry with them into “developing” spaces transforms nations into “slums as foreign lands.”15 It is no longer a “different” space, but a space that requires management because of its inability to tackle and resolve national concerns. External intervention is also mobilized in an effort to restore normative ideals of “the Nation” which, itself, is a colonial construction of political and social management of space. The practice of discovering “the other” is contingent Kidder qtd. in Myriam J.A. Chancy “Desecrated

which Haiti was set up for failure from the outset. This “natural

disaster” is natural inasmuch as the nation of Haiti has been molded,

Bodies/Phantom

through a history of neocolonial meddling in Haiti, to be naturally

Corporeality in Haiti/Rwanda,” (Atlantic Studies, 8:1, 2011), 115.

unprepared.

Limbs:

Post-Traumatic

Reconstructions

Dayan qtd. in Ibid., 114.

Ibid.,114.

Anne McClintock. Imperial Leather Race, Gender

Colin Dayan. “”Civilizing Haiti”.” (Boston Review,

and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. (New York, NY: Routledge,

January 20, 2010).

2015), 121.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory upon reading the status of suffering through the lens of a neocolonial gaze (e.g. “we are not here to take over but to save you”), despite the fact that many of these humanitarian efforts mimic the structure of colonial interventions. This is a western construction of the “necessary other” that is discovered in peril and simultaneously produced as “the other” through the work of NGOs. The dynamic process of confinement and freeing, specifically, the tension inherent in static inhibition and the process of liberation, is a core feature of colonialism, suggests Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather. It is important to note that the erotics of othered spaces and times is one that is a reiterative practice throughout the history of engagement with colonized peoples and nations. “Within colonial narratives,” McClintock writes, “the eroticizing of ‘virgin’ space also effects a territorial appropriation, for if the land is virgin, colonized peoples cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights...”16 One’s ability to claim rights, here, is explored as a move within and outside of signification as the “eroticized other.” Expanding upon Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjectification, McClintock writes, “abject peoples are those whom industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do without.”17 Framing NGOs as “industrial imperialists” could be a harmful gesture, as the assumed mission of the organizational work is to help people in need of support. Nevertheless, it is imperative to interrogate the politics of these “disaster response mechanisms” to understand how they are complicit in a project of domination while administering aid. The question of agency, specifically in the context of Haiti, cycles intensely through gendered bodies and spaces as sites of management and control. The eroticized abject emerges from this spatiotemporal negotiation with powers that disfigure lands and bodies in order to insist on their subjectivity as mechanisms of production. NGOs

and external neocolonial forces, too, have positioned themselves in the larger project of sustaining a saviorabject relationship between themselves and Haiti. This is an example of the continuation of what McClintock calls a “porno-tropic tradition” where othered peoples and nations serve as sites of colonial and neocolonial desire and fantasy.18 Highlighting the dramatic, yet calculated, shift in the politics of aid, Chancy writes, “humanitarianism, as a field, has been emptied of its humane purpose.”19 It is difficult to locate where aid ends and fetishizing of others’ precarity begins in the practice of saving those in need. Agency, understood in this context as a claim to life, body and space, becomes illegible; the abject cannot grasp on to its own subjectivity in this dance through reiterative mechanisms dispossession. An affected20 reaction to precarity is an important feature of NGO and external hegemonic influence in other nations. Intensely linked to the formation of the subject, precarity is rooted in a performance of suffering that is only legible as racialized and gendered. In her “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics,” Judith Butler writes that the “reproduction of gender is thus always a negotiation with power.”21 I have argued earlier that Haiti, a nation that revolted against colonial hegemony, has remained an eroticized and gendered space. One line of agency that spurts out from this negotiation is the affective materiality of subjectivity. The abject subject is 18

Ibid., 22.

Myriam J.A. Chancy “Desecrated Bodies/Phantom

Limbs: Post-Traumatic Reconstructions of Corporeality in Haiti/ Rwanda,” (Atlantic Studies, 8:1, 2011), 117. 20

Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.”

(Cultural Critique, no. 31 1995), 83. doi:10.2307/1354446. Massumi writes, “emotion and affect—if affect is intensity—follow different logics and pertain to different orders” (88). I don’t want to trap this argument in neocolonial human rights frameworks, rather, I’d like to attend to the ways in which bodies and spaces refuse capture in alternative ways (e.g. affective negotiations of dispossession). 21

Judith Butler. “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual

Ibid., 30.

Politics.” (AIBR. Revista De Antropología Iberoamericana 04, no.

Ibid., 72.

03, 2009), 1. doi:10.11156/aibr.040303e.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University understood to be in a state of precarity because of their performance which, for external hegemonic influence, locates them as a population in need of assistance. I must stress here that it is the neocolonial presences (NGOs and external governments) that have characterized these signifying qualities (i.e. what makes a nation or group of people in need of saving). Butler writes, “precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized vulnerability.”22 This vulnerability is inextricably linked to an emasculated rendering of “the other in need of care.” It is a political process less in that it involves a strategic process of communication between nations, and more in that it requires the presence of neocolonial powers to locate and name precarity. Returning to an earlier quote from Chancy, the prefered method of intervention rarely results in an intervention that is beneficial to the population in need.23 Butler also adds, “the performativity of gender is thus bound up with the differential ways in which subjects become eligible for recognition.”24 As bodies remain legible based on their performance of gender, and subsequently classified as gendered bodies, the agential trajectory of abject peoples becomes contingent on this performance. Agency and the paths through which bodies experience selfemancipation is also hinged upon a negotiation with power.25 Placing the specific nature of this negotiation in conversation with Gayatri Spivak, Butler writes, “under conditions of subalternity […] the only way to lay claim to rights is through assimilating to those juridical structures which […] continue to require that same

effacement and exploitation.”26 This returns to the reflexive process of operating within and, simultaneously, outside of systems of power. The practice of revolt and refusal, practices where agency and the performance of it are combined, involve being implicated in the system of power at all times. Much of Chancy’s text characterizes a series of horrific acts of violence against the corporeality of Haitian people in the form of unnecessary amputations after the earthquake. Violence against the body, orchestrated by “objective” scientific presences, question the core of individual freedom.27 How is a body’s agential trajectory, or path of liberation, entirely forclosed when systems of power locate and dismember it? It was only after the horrific acts were deemed “unpalatable” by the home countries of the NGOs that humanitarian scholars recognized the need “to heed and support the experts who can truly rebuild Haiti, the Haitian people.”28 As agency emerges within a tension with the power overall, the dispossessed people regain the ability to alter their own circumstances. We must consider the moments of ambivalence, apprehension, and revolt that have informed much of Haitian people’s history—a history of survival. Butler adds, “norms act on us, work upon us, and this kind of ‘being worked on’ makes its way into our own action.”29 Individual action, on the part of the Haitian people, cannot be ignored. It is concluded that “hegemony is being maintained primarily through global humanitarian avenues,” but this realization cannot silence the process of liberation.30 26

Ibid.

Myriam J.A. Chancy “Desecrated Bodies/Phantom

Ibid., 2.

Limbs: Post-Traumatic Reconstructions of Corporeality in Haiti/

Myriam J.A. Chancy “Desecrated Bodies/Phantom

Rwanda,” (Atlantic Studies, 8:1, 2011), 116.

Limbs: Post-Traumatic Reconstructions of Corporeality in Haiti/

Ibid.,119.

Rwanda,” (Atlantic Studies, 8:1, 2011), 117.

Judith Butler. “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual

Politics.” (AIBR. Revista De Antropología Iberoamericana 04, no. 03, 2009), 4. 25

Politics.” (AIBR. Revista De Antropología Iberoamericana 04, no. 03, 2009), 11. 30

Ibid., 10.

Myriam J.A. Chancy “Desecrated Bodies/Phantom

Limbs: Post-Traumatic Reconstructions of Corporeality in Haiti/

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory The practice of revolt and refusal are essential to the process of liberation. In their “‘My Body is Mine’: Qualitatively Exploring Agency Among Internally Displaced Women Participants in a SmallGroup Intervention in Leogane, Haiti,” Carmen H. Logie and CarolAnn Daniel explore the process by which women consciously participated in shaping their agential trajectory after the earthquake in Haiti. The article focused on the particular moments when the women themselves actualized their own liberation. Based on a peer knowledge exchange model, the study worked primarily with internally displaced women who experienced forms of domestic violence. Despite having a small sample size, Logie and Daniel conceptualized a comprehensive approach to defining agency as “multidimensional, socially constructed and contextual.”31 I find that this is an essential model for reimagining hegemonic definitions of agency, as this allows individual experience and location to influence one’s own process of self-emancipation. Logie and Daniel also focused their research on the “intrapersonal and collective dimensions of agency.”32 Logie and Daniel make it clear that the women involved in the research must be taught by trained community members, and that these voices were meant to facilitate the process of learning not to shape the individual learning experience. While this does allow for external hegemonic influence imparted from coordinators to community-based facilitators, it returns to Chancy’s earlier mention of “Haitian people helping Haitian people.” The findings of Logie and Daniel’s research suggested that the most powerful expression of agency was found in the process of learning Rwanda,” (Atlantic Studies, 8:1, 2011), 118. 31

Carmen Logie, and CarolAnn Daniel. “‘My Body Is

Mine’: Qualitatively Exploring Agency among Internally Displaced

about different ways to respond to being both displaced and domestically abused. The transformation in “the intelligibility of the body in space and time,” writes Butler, triggers a renewed understanding of one’s own corporeal materialization in the world. It is at this moment that one is able to reimagine their own agential process.33 Although “structural violence connected to larger gender norms and poverty” is inherent within intimate partner violence, collective community based “conscious-raising” allowed for intrapersonal agency to arise.34 This research is an example of “practice informing theory,” or ways in which theoretical interventions can offer new insight into issues that affect the body and its humanity.35 “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” written by Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, explores how academics and activists alike can approach theoretical texts. The authors write, “[intersectional scholarship] has also amplified its generative focus as an analytical tool to capture and engage contextual dynamics of power.”36 The practice of refusal, as it manifests in a struggle with power against the body, space and time, is an alternative engagement with power. This engagement not only undermines the forces that mark certain bodies as “other,” but offers an alternative site for the emergence of agency in struggle.37 33

Judith Butler. “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual

Politics.” (AIBR. Revista De Antropología Iberoamericana 04, no. 03, 2009), 10. 34

Carmen Logie, and CarolAnn Daniel. “‘My Body Is

Mine’: Qualitatively Exploring Agency among Internally Displaced Women Participants in a Small-Group Intervention in Leogane, Haiti.” (Global Public Health, vol. 11, no. 1-2, 1 Apr. 2015), 131. 35

Cho, Sumi, et al. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality

Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013), 786. 36

Cho, Sumi, et al. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality

Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013), 788. Mahmood, Saba. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment,

Women Participants in a Small-Group Intervention in Leogane,

Haiti.” (Global Public Health, vol. 11, no. 1-2, 1 Apr. 2015), 123.

and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic

Ibid.

Revival.” (Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2, 2001): 202-

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University Considering agency, and the paths people take to actualized their own liberation, as a transnational and amorphous pressure allows for the reflexive engagement of “theory and practice” to play out. Agency cannot be defined or limited to a specific space or time; it is borderless. Agency looks different across space and time, as embodiment, continuous and everchanging in its process of becoming, responds and adapts to specific lands and cultures. Once a body is recognized and categorized under hegemony as “a subject” the limits to individual agency are marked, but those marks are constantly resisted. Theory and practice requires a critical reading of each respective discipline, academia and activism alike, in order to arrive at an intersectional grasp of how agency emerges out of or alongside individual responses to power. An attendance to agency requires a multifaceted approach that considers dynamic spaces and times where people effect their own liberation. 36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/656537. Mahmood writes, “we might think of agency not only as the capacity for progressive change but also, importantly, as the capacity to endure, suffer and persist” (217).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu‐Lughod, Lila. (2002), Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropologi cal Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist, 104: 783-790. doi:10.1525/ aa.2002.104.3.783 Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Femi nism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990. — “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics.” AIBR. Revista De Antropología Iberoamericana 04, no. 03 (2009). doi:10.11156/aibr.040303e.

Campt, Tina M., Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017. Cho, Sumi, et al. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Soci ety, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013. Dayan, Colin. “”Civilizing Haiti”.” Boston Review, January 20, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2009. Foucault , Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp. 777–795. Logie, Carmen, and CarolAnn Daniel. “‘My Body Is Mine’: Qualita tively Exploring Agency among Internally Displaced Women Partici pants in a Small-Group Intervention in Leogane, Haiti.” Global Public Health, vol. 11, no. 1-2, 1 Apr. 2015, pp. 122–134. Mahmood, Saba. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202-36. http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/656537. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, no. 31 (1995): 83. doi:10.2307/1354446. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Colonial Contest. Routledge, 2015. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifica tions: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Myriam J.A. Chancy “Desecrated Bod ies/Phantom Limbs: Post-Traumatic Reconstruc tions of Corporeality in Hai ti/ Rwanda,” Atlantic Studies, 8:1, 2011, 109-123, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2011.539779 Villarreal, Alexandra. “Flee or Hide: Haitian Immigrants Face Difficult Decisions Under Trump.” The Guardian, Octo ber 30, 2018. Accessed De cember 2, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2018/oct/30/haiti-immigrants-new-york-temporary-protected-status-trump-tps.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory

“CARL AND TOM” BY ZOE SOTTILE Oil on canvas March 2018

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

Trans Magic BY KIRAN ZELBO

An earlier version of this essay was submitted as an assignment for the class “Text, Magic, and Performance” at Columbia University.

“Mana is not simply a force, a being, it is also an action, a quality, a state. In other terms the word is a noun, an adjective and a verb…. It is obscure and vague, yet the use to which it is put is curiously definite. It is abstract and general, yet quite concrete….” Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic In the United States today, we often deny the existence of powerful forces such as magic, possession, trance, and animism. However, although we say that we do not believe, we are affected by the emotional residues of these “primitive” beliefs. We are terrified by unidentified movements in the dark, made uncomfortable by hyper-realistic dolls, and horrified when we cannot tell whether something is dead or alive. We know that things cannot move on their own and that the dead cannot come alive, but nevertheless we fear that they might. This illogical mixture of denial and fear is hauntingly reminiscent of the way straight-cisgender people often speak about queer people. Throughout history, straight-cisgender people have denied the existence of queer people. At the same time, they also seem to truly

believe that we exist, and they demand that we be punished. Currently, amid discussions of bathroom bills denying trans people the right to access bathrooms that match our gender identities, vocally transphobic people express this mixture of denial and belief. I have heard people argue that trans women should not be allowed into women’s spaces because trans women are not “real women.” However, at the same time, these trans-deniers also claim that trans women should not exist, and through harassment and assault they punish trans women for their existence. The word “transphobic” highlights the emotional response fear, and it is impossible to fear what one is certain does not exist. Violently, these people seem to hold faith in this contradiction: “trans people do not exist, and when they do, they should not exist.” What is more interesting to me than the logics of transphobic people are the ways in which queer people speak about our own queer identity. We are past the surface level of questioning and doubting existence, and we can explore difficult coincidences on a deeper, more engaging level. Throughout my study of Marcel Mauss’ General Theory of Magic1, my questions about magic, possession, and trance seemed to change tone. Instead of asking questions such as, “Am I sure people are not just pretending to be 1

Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic.

Routledge Classics, 2001.

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory possessed?” I would ask, “How could they possibly be just pretending?” Now, magic seems more real than trickery, and possession more reasonable than pretense. Through this project, I hope to apply the logics governing magic to an exploration of queer identity from a queer perspective to understand more clearly what it means to be queer. This is a quasi-ethnographic project on modern queer experience; I interviewed seven trans and nonbinary participants, at Columbia University about their identities2. They are all interested in queerness, but have never studied it academically. None of my interviewees had ever taken classes on feminist or queer theory, and therefore their statements and views are relatively uninfluenced by dominant academic discourses. In this paper, I examine the similarities between the illocatable, undefinable, and unexplainable power of magic according to Mauss and the power of queer identity according to my interviewees. In the interviews, I asked participants to list words that they and others use to describe their trans/ nonbinary identities. Among the responses were these interesting words: “Gender-Variant.” “Transgender.” “Transsexual.” “Nonbinary.” “Queer.” “Trans-masculine.” “Trans-feminine.” “Other.” “Trans.” Many of these words define themselves as transgressing boundaries. The prefix “trans” implies movement. Trans is not a static identity; trans is constantly moving, shifting, crossing. At the same time, “trans” might seem to imply that there is a stable, static goal in mind; “trans” seems to mean that we are crossing from one gender to another. There seems to exists an ideal which we strive towards. At the same time, “trans” also implies never reaching that ideal. To “achieve” a new gender is to no longer be crossing and thus to no longer exist as “trans” in that sense. Achieving a new gender is not trans identity. Instead, movement 2

I obtained verbal consent from each of my

itself becomes our identity. Some of the other words my interviewees used to describe themselves seem to denote not a substantive identity, but rather an absence of materiality. These words express themselves in terms of what they are not; trans people seem to embrace opposition as identity. “Nonbinary” is the absence of the binary. “Gender-variant” is an absence of conformity. “Other” is the absence of what is considered normal. Trans identities embody the coincidence of stability and volatility, of substance and absence, and of identity and opposition. The language that we have available to speak about our identity defines us in opposition to straight-cisgender people. Of course, it is true that all language defines itself in terms of what it is not3; definition through opposition is a feature of language itself, and this phenomenon is particularly visible in the language of queer identity. In A General Theory of Magic, Marcel Mauss offers a description of magic across cultures. One of his main goals is to locate the site of magical efficacy. According to Mauss, on the most literal level magical efficacy arises out of three main scenes: the actor, the objects, and the rites4. Each of these scenes plays an important role in making magic work, but no single one of these three places is sufficient to explain magic’s very real effects, which include curing the sick, healing wounds, exorcizing demons, and encouraging plentiful harvests. Magical efficacy cannot be clearly delineated; there is always a residue left behind, and there is always something else at work; “...the whole adds up to much more than the number of its parts5.” Just as magical efficacy is powerful and elusive, so is gender efficacy. Consider our growing vocabulary to express gender variance. Some examples include the newly widespread term ‘non-binary, the 3

de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General

Linguistics. New York Philosophical Library, 1959. 4

Mauss, Marcel.

A General Theory of Magic.

interviewees for this project, and I anonymized all participants to

Routledge Classics, 2001. (Chapter 3).

protect their privacy.

Ibid. (107).

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University singular pronoun ‘they/them,’ and the honorific Mx., recently added to the OED as an alternative to Mr. or Mrs.6. These new words open up the possibility for people’s lives and existences. In this way, vocabulary creates identity. However, at the same time, identity creates vocabulary. Trans and non-binary people must have existed before the words ‘trans’ and ‘non-binary’ existed. Their nonnormative experiences of gender create a demand and a need for new terms, while at the same time, these new terms create new identity. With both magic and queer identity, “cause and effect become confused7.” Where exactly is gender identity located? Identity is a profoundly personal concept, but identity also relies on other people. Identity is both individual and social. It is impossible to identify ourselves without identifying in connection with or in opposition to other people. We are only truly ourselves because of others. I asked my interviewees whether or not they could identify people as queer, and the responses were overwhelmingly “no.” My interviewees insisted: “No, I can’t tell if someone is queer.” “No definitely not.” “I mean, no, of course not.” “I don’t know, sometimes you can kind of tell, but mostly no.” I don’t think so.” There are certainly various stereotypes that allow us to connect appearance with queerness, but those stereotypes are superficial signifiers. I also asked participants whether they identified with queer people with whom they have no personal connection. My respondents answered: “Yes, I definitely do feel connected with queer strangers.” “Yeah, I identify with people I think are queer.” Some of my respondents identified moments of seeing queer-seeming people on the street and experiencing a moment of intense connection. In many cases of 6

OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018,

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mx.

Accessed

November 2018 7

Mauss, Marcel.

Routledge Classics, 2001. (78).

A General Theory of Magic.

connection, there was no proof of the stranger’s queerness – no pride flag, no queer pun, and no rainbow jewelry. One of my respondents summed it up: “I guess I didn’t know they were queer, I just felt it.” Two contradicting facts exist at once: There is no way to determine if someone else is queer. Queer people feel connected with queer strangers. Queer identification, like magic, is impossible to locate, but nevertheless it is powerful and important in the lives of queer people. Like the efficacy of magic and gender, the source of queer voice also seems to be located in multiple different realms. One of my interviewees told me, “when I’m around straight men, I consciously lower my voice to try to fit in.” This person’s word choice “consciously” indicates that they make an active choice when they perform their voice. Another of my interviewees discussed the phenomenon slightly differently. They told me, “I sometimes feel like I’m performing my voice. My voice goes up and down in pitch depending on who I’m talking to. When I’m talking to an authority figure my voice goes up because I think that’s more feminine when its higher.” This person speaks about their voice as if the voice has a mind of its own; the phrase “my voice goes” shows that the agency comes not from the person themself; the voice is the subject of the clause, and the agency actually lies within the voice itself. Another of my interviewees discussed the phenomenon of their voice moving on its own when they interact with other queer people. “When you’re with other queer people, your voice inflects in a certain way, and you don’t realize it until you are halfway through the conversation.” My interviewees seem to be leading me to the different ways voice can move. In some cases, voice-performance is an agent-filled and deliberate act of expression, and in some cases the voice truly moves on its own. When the voice moves on its own, sometimes it moves as a safety mechanism, and sometimes it moves in order to identify

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory with people of similar experience. The queer voice has the ability to recognize, identify, and connect. Trans people often have an especially powerful connection with voice. Many of participants have gone through great lengths to change their voices; they have undergone voice therapy and hormone therapy in order to help their voices match their identities. Some of participants identified voice as an effective method to interact with society in their true gender. Some of their responses included: “I want a deeper voice because I’ll pass better as a guy.” “I feel like my voice is too feminine – it makes me seem like a girl.” “After I went on testosterone, my voice deepened, and people didn’t call me “she” anymore.” However, at the same time, some of my trans friends expressed a different sentiment. For them, voice was something more than a way to express gender effectively in society. I asked participants to consider this question: “Would you still make efforts to alter your voice if you lived in a society without the expectation that women have higher voices and men have lower voices?” Many of participants thought that they would still change their voices, regardless of society. One boldly claimed, “I would have voice dysphoria even if I was born on the moon and had never spoken with another human being in my entire life.” Where does this strong desire for voice come from? Voice is not only the most powerful connector between others and ourselves, but also between our own bodies and our own minds. Through voice, we experience ourselves outside of ourselves. Voice is the ultimate connection between the exterior and the interior, and it holds surplus power. As well as considering the efficacy of magic, Mauss also identifies the operative power of names8. Names hold real power. In order to exorcise an evil spirit, you must name it. Once you uncover the name, the power is no 8

Mauss, Marcel.

Routledge Classics, 2001. (81).

A General Theory of Magic.

longer in the hands of the demon, but in yours. The power of names is relevant to queer and trans experience. Names, especially for transgender people, hold an overflow of meaning. A name is much more than just the collection of letters and sounds produced. In English there are certain combinations of letters and sounds that denote “boy names” or “girl names.” Adding an “a” to the end of a name and altering the syllabic melody transforms a “boy name” into a “girl name.” A slight shift on the level of the signifier drastically alters our assumptions about the person that belongs to the name. A transgender person’s birth name with which they no longer identify is commonly referred to as a “dead name.” The term “dead name” reveals the name’s power, which has the potential to be horribly dangerous. It is as if the person who used to hold the name is now dead, the name itself is dead, or the name has the power to cause death. A “dead name” is like a curse; materially, it is only a particular combination of breath and movement of vocal cords, but it wields the power to enact real harm. My two of my interviewees described what it felt to be dead-named: “It feels really horrible. I feel like I’ve been punched.” “It makes me feel like I want to throw up.” Both of my interviewees with experience being dead-named felt the pain located near their abdomen. The abdomen faces outwards towards the world and is unprotected by the ribcage; it is one of the most central and vulnerable spots on our bodies. Dead-names strike where we are most defenseless. In magic and in queer identification, names overflow with power. One aspect of magic that seems especially unfamiliar and threatening to contemporary U.S. society is animism -- when things move on their own. However, animism is actually closer to us than we might like to believe. I asked my interviewees to think of examples of things that move on their own that are in some way related to their queer identity. Here are some of the responses I received:

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University “Language surrounding queer identity definitely evolves by itself over time. Even in a few years, things can change dramatically. Like ‘transsexual’ was once a term people used, and now it’s inappropriate to call someone that without knowing that they use that term.” “Well, growing up, my body moved on its own. I got really tall really fast, which I wasn’t expecting, and I didn’t like.” “My hair moves on its own. It physically grows, and I don’t notice it until around when it covers my ears. I feel weird about it because when my hair gets too long, I feel really girly, which makes me pretty uncomfortable.” “My clothes are related to my queer identity because they help me express my gender. My clothes I think move on their own. I start each day looking put-together. At least I try. My clothes are nice and my hair is done, but by the end of the day everything is wrinkled and my hair is a mess.” Some of my respondents spoke in a matter-of-fact way about their encounters with contemporary animism. Others expressed discomfort at things moving on their own. The respondents who talked about their hair and clothes becoming messy seemed to be identifying this phenomenon: it is especially unnerving that we can never notice our own unruly appearance until it is too late. At the point when we realize that we are upset with our appearance, we have already gone through an unidentifiably long stretch of time of presenting in a way that we dislike and do not identify with. The disconnect between actual appearance and our conception of our appearance is particularly distressing when our presentation is intimately connected with our gender. I asked participants to list all the different ways they could use the word “queer” in a sentence, and I encouraged them to consider all the various parts of speech that the word “queer” could exist. The responses included: “You can be queer.” “We

are all queer. It’s an adjective.” “I’m a queer.” “I’m writing a paper about how science needs to be queered.” “I think queer is an adjective, but its use has been extended to a noun and a verb too.” “Queer is a noun – it’s a state of being.” “It can be a verb too, like ‘queering the map.’” As well as a noun, adjective, and verb, “queer” is also transformed into an adverb and a prefix and a suffix: “Queer-friendly spaces.” “Genderqueer.” “I am living my life queerly.” “Queerly-intentioned.” “Queerness is great.” I began my interviews by asking questions about gender, voice, and names, and I ended the interviews with the simple question: “what is queer?” At that question, people who had been consistently talkative, confident, and willing to share their ideas suddenly became quiet, serious, and thoughtful. People’s faces closed up, and they conveyed through their expressions the gravity of the question. My interviewees seemed to recognize the power of the word “queer” and its importance to their own lives, but they were at a loss for how to describe it. “Queer I think is anyone who identifies as not completely … not attracted to … I think it’s just a feeling. I mean, it’s not just a feeling. here are certain things you have to … I don’t know. It’s hard to describe.” “I’m not really sure. It’s not easy to describe.” “It’s like what embodies you and fills your existence.” “Its anyone who isn’t normal.” “Um… hmm. I think I would need to think about it for longer.” “It’s pretty hard to define.” The difficulty in defining “queer” lies in its nature as both abstract and concrete. My interviewees described it in abstract terms such as “its just a feeling” and “it’s like what embodies you.” However, at the same time, queer has specific uses and not everyone can claim it as their own. One interviewee insisted that“it’s not just a feeling. There are certain things you have to ….” Unable to finish their sentence, this respondent trailed off. They were at a loss for words. Queer is abstract and expansive, but only

que(e)ry journal of queer and feminist theory a certain subset of people can call themselves queer. This contradiction is similar to the contradiction Marcel Mauss identifies with the concept mana9. Mana is a notion not easy to define. Mana in it simplest sense is magical power, but “on the whole, the word covers a host of ideas which we would designate by phrases such as a sorcerer’s power, the magical quality of an object, a magical object, to be magical, to possess magical powers, to be under a spell, to act magically10.” (133-134). Like mana, queer does not have a single or simple definition – it defies simplification. Queer crosses boundaries and it demands that all of these different conflicting descriptions be taken into account. What happens if we replace the word “mana” with the word “queer” in Mauss’ definition? “Queer is not simply a force, a being, it is also an action, a quality, a state. In other terms the word is a noun, an adjective and a verb…. It is obscure and vague, yet the use to which it is put is curiously definite. It is abstract and general, yet quite concrete….” “Queer” fits surprisingly well; the logics governing both forces are unmistakably similar. Despite how difficult it is to locate, to define, or to explain power, it is nonetheless here and important in our lives.

Mauss, Marcel.

Routledge Classics, 2001. (133). 10

Ibid, (133-134).

A General Theory of Magic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. New York Philosophical Library, 1959. Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic. Routledge Classics, 2001. OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/mx. Accessed 23 November 2018.

Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are grateful for the support of The Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, The Department of English and Comparative Literature, Multicultural Affairs and The Office of the Core Curriculum.