By Tav Nyong’o

Has incivility become the new obscenity?

Everywhere one turns these days, it seems, ‘civility’ is being held up as a norm to which we all agreed to be held accountable. When was this consensus to be civil arrived at? Nobody can quite say. It must have been when we weren’t looking. But it’s suddenly everywhere: in open letters and videotaped homilies by university presidents, in the conference themes of progressive scholarly organizations, even in the campaign ads of Midwestern sheriffs (HT Ali Abunimah). Liberal icons John Stewart and Stephen Colbert even convened a national rally in 2010 “To Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” a sardonic retort to what those who attended perceived to be the raucous incivility of Tea Parties (HT Lisa Duggan). And indeed, civility sounds like a value all but a lunatic fringe should consent to. But it’s effects on our freedoms can be surprisingly negative. The exercise of what we could be forgiven for assuming were our “civil liberties” — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, common use of public space — increasingly hit tripwire detectors for incivility, often with arbitrarily punitive consequences.

At the moment, the charge of incivility is most frequently being wielded against those whose political speech touches a third rail in American politics: the near-universal support our political class and academic leadership gives to the State of Israel. Steven Salaita, a scholar of indigenous resistance in Palestine and North America, lost a job at the University of Illinois when his righteous indignation, as expressed on social media, over the Israeli bombardment of Gaza this past summer offended some of the university’s donors and trustees. Civility here must be read as a barely veiled code for ‘civilized'; and this recourse to ‘civil’ as a standard to which all must adhere calls to mind Malcolm X’s famous critique of ‘civil rights’ as a limiting framework for the black freedom struggle. Malcolm implored black people to internationalize our struggle by refusing the US and state-centric model of “civil rights” under law and instead appealing to global solidarity with the oppressed through the rubric of “human rights.” It is precisely this global appeal to a planetary, anti-racist standard of human rights that led to Salaita being indicted for his “incivility,” transgressing the political quietism of the imperial university was enough to get him booted off campus without the pretense of due process.

Scathing, funny, and impassioned political speech did not originate on Twitter; our right to it is in fact the reason we have a First Amendment. But in the “incredibly shrinking public sphere,” as Lisa Duggan has termed it, declamatory speech of the kind that would not be out of place as at a campus rally is now occasion for professional reprisals, with even liberals handwringing over how to ‘tolerate’ the ‘intolerable.’

Ostensibly, the new civility codes have little to do directly with sex. But the neoliberal rhetoric of the campus as a space under threat is deeply intertwined with in the continued infantilization of the democratic sphere, and is thus deeply connected to moral and sex panics. Jennifer Doyle demonstrates this point in a powerful recent pamphlet, Campus Security. Doyle recounts how one police justification for the notorious pepper spray incident at the University of California was the need to protect students, gendered as feminized victims, from the masculinized and racialized threat of occupiers who weren’t currently enrolled students. The justification of the use of real force against students in order to protect them from hypothetical aggressions is the kind of security state doublespeak we routinely confront these days. At the University of Illinois, for example, it apparently fell to administrators, trustees and donors to protect students from the political viewpoints of prospective professors, when and where those views could be adjudged (unilaterally, without any grievance process) to create even a potential situation of harm, discomfort, or threat.

The imposition of civility comes at a curious juncture when privacy is also everywhere under assault. The appeal of civility for those who stand to be regulated by it is that it will provide shelter from the radical loss of privacy that new technologies are unleashing. As Mark Zuckerberg once retorted when challenged regarding insufficient privacy controls on Facebook: what’s the problem if you have nothing to hide? Similarly, those who defend civility as a standard assume that only the truly aberrant would have anything to say that couldn’t be expressed civilly anyway. And why would we want to extend them the protections enjoyed by others?

These protections ostensibly extended by the new civility, of course, fall unevenly on actual students and other young people. Civility failed to protect Michael Brown, due to begin classes at Vatterott College this fall, who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri while walking in his neighborhood. Immediately after his murder, he was retrospectively vilified as a dangerous hoodlum, not a recent high school graduate with no prior criminal record, much as Trayvon Martin and so many black women and men before and after him have had their histories, rather than those of their assailants, placed on public trial. When Brown’s community rose up in righteous indignation against police occupation, the black exercise of civil liberties was met with tear-gas, rubber bullets, agents provocateurs, tanks, snipers and police screaming “animals!” at the citizens they were sworn to protect and serve.

In the wake of Ferguson, many more Americans learned that “civility” is experienced by black Americans primarily as compulsory and non-reciprocal compliance to arbitrary state violence. There were many messages of solidarity, and practical exchanges of resistance tactics, between Gaza and Ferguson. But, despite these rhizomatic uprisings against antiblack racism, imperialism, and war — all of which challenge us to be radically critical of the promise of freedom, democracy and civil society dangled before us by our rulers — the answer in some quarters remains, stubbornly, more of the same. More civility, rather than a radical questioning of its terms.

In the wake of such brutal and total abrogation of basic constitutional protections, international human rights, and the rule of law in the summer of 2014, one must ask: what is the point of being civil? If civility means the censorship of intellectuals, deference to racist cops, complicity in our state’s funding and support of aerial bombardment of civilians, and acquiescence to a decayed and corrupt system of democracy-turned-plutocracy, of what value is civility, exactly? What alternative to it might there be?

For queer politics, Gayle Rubin’s foundational essay, “Thinking Sex,” holds enduring relevance on this score. Her ostensible topic in that essay is sex and pleasure, not suffering and violence. But everything that is at stake in the essay has to do with the ability of the state and media — and ourselves — to magically convert the former into the latter, and to cultivate moral panics around harms where there are none. Rubin argued that our inability to recognize and value the range and diversity of means through which we seek and obtain pleasure, our reluctance to take sex seriously, is intertwined with a more general logic of repression, exclusion and violence.

In order to challenge the logic of repressive tolerance that divides us into good, civil subjects and bad, disorderly ones, we cannot seek to rescue the most eligible of the socially stigmatized: those clearest to the center of what Rubin calls “the charmed circle.” We must directly confront the apparatuses that divide the acceptable from the unacceptable.

Rubin’s charmed circle resonates with an image Kimberlé Crenshaw turns to in her famous law review article that disseminated the concept of intersectionality. Here she compared antidiscrimination law reform to the effort to lift a group of individuals from a subterranean basement, and the temptation to start with those nearest to the top, those whose difference seems the easiest to rehabilitate. Intersectional analysis, in Crenshaw’s view, was the refusal to take this easy out, and to instead labor on working on injustice from the bottom up.

Whether from the outside in, or the bottom up, both Rubin and Crenshaw urged feminist, anti-racist, and queer organizing not to pick and choose those campaigns deemed most winnable, those victims deemed most telegenic, those tactics deemed most acceptable, or that language deemed most civil. I have to admit that this is a difficult standard to live up to. Particularly as the political center of the nation has drifted ever-rightward, as the scale of endemic crisis grows ever more planetary, one can plausibly wonder if principled radicalism grows self-canceling past a certain point. But there seems to be no way to ask this question without reinstating the hierarchies that Rubin, Crenshaw, and a host of other intellectuals and activists have urged us to dismantle. And so it seems we still desperately need more politically vital questions to ask and answer than the tired old saw of “where do you draw the line?”

The very drawing of the line, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten show in their powerful recent essay, The Undercommons, is a strategy of white settler colonial rule. “The settler,” they write, “having settled for politics, arms himself in the name of civilisation while critique initiates the self-defense of those who see hostility in the civil union on settlement and enclosure.” Politics casts itself as surrounded by the pre-political, the anti-political, the para- and the infra-human. Their radical critique of politics as we know it, in favor of social life as we feel, sense, think, study and celebrate it, points us beyond the stale coordinates offered up by yet another civics lesson delivered by our betters. We don’t need to learn to be better citizens; as the ongoing mobilization around the Salaita case, around Ferguson, and a series of other insurgent movements shows. We need learn how better to refuse the terms upon which citizenship and the good star of “civility” is offered, always provisionally, to the charmed few.

As commentators have noted, civility sounds like a venerable democratic principle, but is actually antithetical to the direct and participatory democracy many want to build. Democratic society — and in particular the social movements that push against the constraints of populist conformism — in principle relishes vibrant and vituperative antagonism. And yet one routinely encounters attempts (such as the recent NY Times opinion parsing an invidious distinction between ‘impoliteness,’ which may be acceptable, and ‘incivility,’ which is corrosive. The distinction, it turns out, is unworkable, begging the question: then why draw it?

Perhaps a more useful question than where to draw the line would be to ask: Why are we, who are cast outside the circle of privileges that accrue to the civilized, still drawn to and invested in the lure of civility? Is it precisely because we sense that it is a tape against which we are measured and forever falling short?

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Private Secretary

I learned this lesson early in life watching A Passage to India, a film that had an indelible impact on my postcolonial childhood in Kenya. Indeed, the film instilled in me the anticolonial Kenyan ideology that Dinesh D’Souza hilariously attributes to our current president (if only!). In the film, Dr. Aziz, an educated Indian doctor during the period of British colonial rule, struggles to balance his genial and tolerant nature with the constant racism and snobbery of his English “betters.” In one unforgettable scene, Aziz pretends to have a spare collar stud (whatever that is) to lend to the Englishman who is brashly getting dressed right in front of him, which Aziz has to discretely remove the stud from his own impeccable suit. Later on, another Englishman, the local magistrate, mocks Aziz for appearing in public “in his Sunday best” but forgetting his collar stud (whatever that is). He casts racist aspersions on the doctor for being a foolish colonial mimic: trying to approximate British civil standards only underscores how innately different he is.

Dr. Aziz with the all-important thingamajig.

The moral of the story for ten year old me was clear: a) these British colonialists are crazy and b) don’t ever assume that your efforts to live up to Euro-American arbitrary standards of civilized dress, deportment, or language will ever be enough to reverse the power imbalance.

I was too young on first watching A Passage to India, however, to truly grapple with the second half of the film, which turns darker when Ms. Quested, a visiting Englishwoman Dr. Aziz thought was a friend, accuses him of rape, prompting a dramatic trial which ends up putting the unjust colonial system of law in the docket, and sends Aziz bitterly fleeing from “civilized” English India. His personal effects are exhibited in court, he is accused of planning a trip to a brothel, and otherwise depicted as a sex-crazed savage, rather than a genteel, English speaking physician. At a climactic moment Ms. Quested withdraws her accusation (making this a tricky film to revisit in the current climate of victim-bashing, I well recognize), but the stakes in interpreting this outcome are not nearly so simple as racism versus sexism. The total abandonment of Ms. Quested by her white colonial society, once they cannot use her victimization as a legal cudgel against insurgent Indians, tells the viewer all she or he needs to know. The colonial state is both racist and sexist, even (or especially) when it is defending values such as civility, feminine virtue, rule of law and white supremacy.

In an earlier blog on this site, Jack Halberstam explored “how a neoliberal rhetoric of individual pain obscures the violent sources of social inequity” and argued that “neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change.” Watching A Passage to India again today reminds me of the long colonial prehistory to contemporary neoliberalism. As many scholars in critical race studies have noted, colonized and racialized people were the first “flexible” and “precarious” subjects: that flexibility often demanded through the dynamics of what Homi Bhabha calls “sly civility.” Dr. Aziz, until his powerful rejection of the British at film’s end, embodies this sly civility: only when he grasps his fate is a collective one can he discard the exceptional status bequeathed him as one of the educated “good ones.”

In a contemporary context, Joseph Massad has recently written powerfully about how civility is used to police the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable Arab- and Muslim-Americans, and how we ourselves can get caught up in those police actions. “The war to control the university rages on” he notes, “but the forces of repression, which hide behind white Protestant normative civility that they deploy to advance neoliberal control, are sharpening their knives and learning from their past mistakes.” Behind every document of civility, he might as well have continued, is a document of barbarism. Creative disobedience to compulsory civility isn’t any kind of guarantee. But without its wild resources we would be greatly impoverished to wage the kind of struggles we are in the midst of now.

By Tavia Nyong’o

“I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” — Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform

“My thoughts are murder to the state.” — Henry David Thoreau, 19th century American writer, conservationist, and proto-anarchist.

Teaching Thoreau’s great essay on ‘Resistance to Civil Government‘ during a partial shutdown of the US federal government is an occasion for feelings of great ambivalence. The scholar Henry Abelove has called Thoreau’s prose persona seductive. And I, like Abelove, very much want to be seduced. But how can I extol the worldview of this fearless forerunner of queer anarchism while the anti-government wing of the governing party allows the sick and needy to go uncared for, the statistics on the jobless to go uncollected, the safety of our food supply to go unverified? There is a great deal of interest today, post-Occupy, in anarchist political philosophy and horizontal modes of organizing and action. This anarchist resurgence inspires me, even as it disquiets. I wonder: could I be mistaken in my conviction that, however much leftwing anarchism can sound like rightwing libertarianism, they ultimately form distinct and opposed political traditions?

For answers, I turn to Thoreau, and his queer little errand into the wild a century and half ago. Every American school child knows how Thoreau went to live in a cabin by a pond in Walden forest, and how he epitomized the search for a more basic and independent way of life. But, if we take too literally his descriptions of how he lived, and what he lived for, we can sometimes forget that the society he temporarily distanced himself from was, by today’s standards, itself incredibly spartan. Even those enjoying the heights of antebellum civilization that Thoreau rejected, did so without electricity, telephones, televisions, cars, the highway system, airplanes, or the internet. There was no federal income tax, no Social Security, no FBI or NSA. So, lest we be hopelessly anachronistic in our reading, we must keep in mind all that Thoreau could not have meant, when we try to recover what it meant for him to dwell apart from his society, what prompted him to utter his famous animadversions against government and to pronounce our individual duty to resist it.

The famously combative opening sentence of his essay on Civil Disobedience is memorable. “I heartily accept the motto–”That government is best which governs least”…Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe–”That government is best which governs not at all.” These are words to thrill a modern Tea Party activist. But just a page later we find Thoreau reformulating: “But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.” This idea is different: Thoreau’s expectancy for improvement, his call to better government, is less often heard, even from left anarchist circles, than his call to do without it.

Thoreau was unlike the “no-government men” or at least, he wanted to be. Much rightwing rhetoric today pronounces itself with vitriol equal to Thoreau’s against government programs they oppose, like health care, public education, and regulation (versions of government Thoreau scarcely knew). But vehemence alone does not establish a shared affinity. Libertarians like to claim him, but Thoreau’s experiment in Walden was not so much a “going off the grid” like today’s survivalist fringe, so much as it was an effort to find a way to live against state-thinking. The right forgets that when Thoreau went to jail rather than pay his poll tax, he was motivated by outrage against specific state actions: the war against Mexico and the Fugitive Slave Law, a law that made the entire union hunting grounds for slavecatchers, and mocked the vaunted freedom of states like Massachusetts. It was against the states crimes against humanity and its imperial wars specifically, not government as such, that Thoreau theorized his proto-anarchism.

Consider this: today’s “government shut down” is itself actually an act of state. It was planned and put into action by a governing party at the behest of its radical Tea Party fringe. Shutdown is, as Malcolm Harris noted, a euphemism for accelerating the ‘austerity‘ being implemented across the world currently. It is not a shutdown of all state functions, least of those having to do with the conduct of wars or surveillance, and many of even the “non-essential” have been ordered back to work, sometimes without pay. Threatening to send the nation into insolvency if pet agenda items are not enacted is not “getting the government off our backs.” It is the pursuit of neoliberal governmentality by other means. As with austerity elsewhere, the target of the shutdown is not ‘government,’ but the social welfare state and popular sovereignty. Just ask the people of Detroit, who have had their elected government suspended in order to allow predatory creditors and lawyers to loot their remaining assets.

A sectional interest abusing constitutional mechanisms to hold the nation at ransom to forward a divisive agenda built, around the protection of a form of property, even at the cost of ruining lives. That describes the Fugitive Slave Law of Thoreau’s day, and it describes the attempt to defund the government and Obamacare now. The real comparison to be made is not between libertarianism and anarchism, but between the reactionary agenda, then and now, to withdraw protections from those who are seen not to matter — slaves and Mexicans then, the sick, poor, people of color and marginalized today — and to instead focus the resources of the state on the policing and imprisonment necessary to keep this drastic upward distribution of wealth from exploding into violence. It was this sort of state, the very one dreamt of by the likes of Grover Norquist, that produced thoughts of murder in Thoreau. This was the sort of state he called on us to resist through direct action.

I am not among those who imagine queers and other anarchists can simply recreate Thoreau’s wild way of life. Anyone who sought to live in such precise antagonism to his own particularly day as Thoreau did can hardly have thought highly of those present day communities who idealize an arbitrary point in the past, beyond which they refuse to develop. True, Thoreau scorned the pursuit of wealth, the coveting of consumer items, the longing for marriage and family. He even scorned reading the newspaper: keeping up too closely with the revolting deeds of his fellow Americans was, he remarked, like a dog returning to its vomit. His idea of revolutionary action was certainly individualistic. But what he meant by individualism was different, almost antithetical, to the possessive, endlessly flexible individual so valorized today. There is an astonishing image at the end of his essay “Slavery in Massachusetts,” where Thoreau directly links wildness, contemplation, and anarchist belief with a profound sense of entanglement with affairs of state:

I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them. Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle?. The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.

As Pete Coviello points out in a fine new book on Thoreau and his era, Thoreau’s discontent with society was paradoxically motivated by powerful desires to connect, to love and be loved. The persona of his journals is different from the persona of his essays and Walden, but they are recognizable facets of a single, complex being. Thoreau’s queerness lay in his determined avoidance of the love, marriage, family, and property accumulation that were then, as now, extolled as the principal aims of white, bourgeois life. He refused to be heteronormative then, and would have not tried very hard to be homonormative now. But even as Thoreau rejected institutionalized forms of relationality, Coviello insists, he did so in order to allow himself the lifelong struggle of articulating another form of being, one that was, like friendship itself, forever without institution. Coviello quotes from Thoreau’s Journals:

Ah, I yearn toward thee my friend, but I have not confidence in thee. I am not thou—Thou are not I…Even when I meet thee unexpectedly I part from thee with disappointment… I know a noble man; what is it hinders me from knowing him better? I know not how it is that our distrust, our hate is stronger than our love…Why are we related—yet thus unsatisfactorily. We almost are a sore to one another (Coviello, 30-31).

Thoreau is here able to say, with pitch perfect ambivalence, that the experience of friendship is one of simultaneous expectation and disappointment, love and hate. I love him, Thoreau says of his friend, and yet I hate him. Contrast this to the stance of the libertarian who says: I hate him, and I love me (and mine)! Thoreau offers a stunning insight here, in the decades before the modern hetero/homo divide was solidified. It is one that may begin to make new sense now that there are tentative signs that divide it may be crumbling. He points out that friendship exists almost everywhere without institutional support or government sanction. Not that friendship is pathologized. Indeed, it is probably universally extolled as an anodyne to the ravages of consumerist, competitive society. But even where extolled, friendship always lacks an apparatus. Thoreau’s insight into the undercommons of the affections is at least as valuable as his demonstrations on how to grow without neighbors. Here is Thoreau’s queer path into the wilds, wilds that are as much between us, whoever and wherever we are, as they are along some romantic horizon, always just beyond reach.

Further Reading

Henry Abelove, Deep Gossip (2005)

Pete Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties (2013)

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons (2013)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Slavery in Massachusetts

Lisa Duggan

This is the first of several posts adapted for Bully Bloggers from an October 14, 2014 panel at NYU:

Taking Offense: Trigger Warnings & the Neoliberal Politics of Endangerment

a panel discussion sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality with Lisa Duggan, Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyong’o, Ann Pellegrini, & Avgi Saketopoulou, moderated Karen Shimakawa. 

The panel was planned as a follow up to Jack Halberstam’s July 5 and July 15 posts on the subject of trigger warnings on this blog.  Trigger warnings originated in the feminist and queer blogosphere, but proposals to recommend or require them on college syllabi are now being considered on many campuses, including at UC Santa Barbara, Oberlin, Rutgers, George Washington University and the University of Michigan.  This migration to the college and university setting was the context for the Oct. 14 panel, and for the following series of BB posts.

Part One: Personal Experience

During the 1990s, my friend Kathleen McHugh and I collaborated on two projects. We co-wrote “The Fem(me)inist Manifesto” (the most fun I ever had with a writing project) and we co-founded a little known entirely mythical underground organization—the Daughters of Irish Drunks. It was all a joke, of course, but a serious joke. At our “meetings” at the local café at the University of Illinois in Urbana, we hatched cartoonish revenge plots against our violent, sexually abusive alcoholic fathers.

This use of sophomoric humor had already become my primary coping strategy, along with a preference for direct confrontation and provocation. When I was 12 years old, I announced I was atheist, communist and a vegetarian at Thanksgiving dinner. I pretty much knew what would happen. My father chased me up the stairs with the carving knife as I ducked into the bathroom and locked the door. I loudly ridiculed him through the door. To me, it was all a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I developed a distinct preference for drawing the violence out, rather than trying to tip toe around it and wait for an eruption. A couple of decades later a therapist in New York asked me if I’d ever tried denial and avoidance? They were, she said, perfectly good defenses (and no doubt safer than provocation).

In 2002-2003 while on fellowship at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, I was seeing another therapist who asked me to color in a family genogram—with different color markers for violence, mental illness, incest and alcoholism. The chart looked like a roaring fire. The therapist wrote “culture of poverty” in the margin. I laughed out loud, crossed her words out, and wrote “cracker melodrama” instead. The therapist leaned in close and said with some intensity, “You do realize this isn’t really funny, don’t you?”

The only PTSD-like symptom I developed during my journey through childhood was the propensity to have a panic attack when I heard a barking dog. It is very very difficult to avoid the sound of barking dogs! Anywhere, any time, I might hear them. So I needed strategies to cope with the panic attacks, which could happen anywhere.

Given these defenses and this symptom, trigger warnings do not appeal to me as a method of coping with trauma. I don’t think it is possible to predict what will induce a PTSD reaction to past trauma—realist representations of trauma are not the reliable triggers people think they are. And I find all protectionist strategies patronizing and condescending. I want to face it all right now, no holds barred. Or at least I usually think I do.

Though the personal is political in many ways, personal experience and preference are actually lousy guides for political organizing and action. So what if this is my experience and these are my preferences and reactions? Other people navigate the world in different ways. In order to generate political action in response to collective experiences of trauma, we do need to do more than reference our own pain and strategies.

Part Two: Historical Analysis

In my book, Twilight of Equality, I analyze the impact of neoliberal politics and policies on social movements during the 1990s. The general drift of change from the 1970s to the 1990s has been from the utopian to the pragmatic, from the collective to the individual, from transformative to the therapeutic. That is of course an over generalization, there is a wide range of kinds of social movement politics all through this period. We still have utopian, collective transformative activism now, and we had piecemeal, self-directed and individualist politics then. Race, class, gender, nation, religion are all significant defining boundaries for social movements. But to give some examples of the general trend I’m referencing:

*During the 1970s, some feminists exposed the widespread incidence of father-daughter incest in families, as part of their critique of the patriarchal family. During the 1980s, this critique slowly morphed into a moral panic over Satanic child abuse in day care centers (by strangers, outside the family). By the 1990s, the popular media focus was on the individual pedophile, a deranged and monstrous individual who must be tracked down and locked up to keep families safe.

*1970s feminist organizing for reproductive freedom and justice morphed in the 1980s into a focus on the individual medical consumer’s right to “choose” to have an abortion. Rather than organize to provide support and resources for a full range of reproductive freedoms (including freedom from unwanted sterilization), the overwhelming majority of feminist organizations fought primarily for abortion rights.

*1970s feminist critiques of the culture of violence against women shifted into a focus on police enforcement of laws against domestic violence (supporting the expansion of policing and prisons during the period), and into anti-pornography politics represented by Women Against Pornography in the 1980s (Women Against the Novel makes as much sense). When I attended a WAP slideshow in Times Square during the 1980s, their donor chart on the wall showed their biggest donations coming from those with a stake in gentrifying the area—real estate corporations and the city.

These very sketchy examples are meant to illustrate the dangers involved as social movement politics move into institutions (like the law, the state or the university) with shaping interests of their own. Rod Ferguson’s recent book, The Reorder of Things, provides an extended examination of the university in particular, as social movements moved into programs and centers focused on race, gender and sexuality.

Part Three: Politics and Policy

So, what are the dangers in the path of trigger warnings as they move from a voluntary practice on feminist blogs and queer and trans tumblr to the university setting, a journey from politics to policy. One salient example for comparison is the career of sexual harassment law and policy. Feminist critiques of the sexualized power dynamics of the school and workplace moved into the arena of law, and were then taken over in the 1990s by corporate lawyers concerned with protecting their clients from liability. The workshops and policies developed at universities became more and more like military anti-fraternization codes. When I was teaching at Brown University from 1992-1994, I received warnings about the dangers of having dinner with students (lawsuits!), and learned about the 3^rd party complaint procedure whereby one student could complain about a relationship between another student and a professor that might put her at a competitive disadvantage.

Sexual harassment law and policy ultimately put a process in place that is easily exploitable by lawyers, administrators, reactionaries and stalkers, by gay panic sufferers and jealous competitors.

In the case of trigger warnings, once they become the province of student senates, administrative bodies and university policies, they run the risk of marking and targeting the courses on gender and sexuality, critical race theory, colonial and postcolonial studies. These courses can be marked as the location of materials that endanger student welfare, and administrators may police their content in the name of “protecting” students. Rather than attend to the sources of inequality, conflict and trauma, some students may be motivated to look for triggers in books and films and ask for protection rather than resources and redress. This can apply to anti-gay Christian students who are “triggered” by queer material, as easily as to any others.

I think the strongest argument for trigger warnings comes from the disability justice movement. It does seem that a student with PTSD symptoms should have the same right to request accommodation as any other student with a disability. But this process of medicalization of trauma, in the service of institutional accommodation also has its dangers, as many disability studies scholars have pointed out. Does marking trauma as medicalized disability work like setting aside “disabled rooms” in hotels, allowing the hospitality industry to avoid instituting universal access design? Shouldn’t our classes approach collective trauma with an eye to exposing, critiquing and confronting systematic violence? Rather than singling out experiences in a decontextualizing and ultimately depoliticizing way, by marking representations of them with trigger warnings? Can’t we avoid turning politics into neoliberal policy yet again?

With trigger warnings as university or public policy, what could go wrong? Um, maybe this?

Ann Pellegrini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avgi Saketopoulou

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

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

Trauma both compromises and constitutes us

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

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

Trauma and signal anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOWARDS THE END OF THE INTERVIEW, HUDSON ASKS:

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

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

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

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

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

The Highs

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

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

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

The Lows

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

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

The Trans Sex Scene

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

 Ultimately

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

By Tav Nyong’o

In Adorno’s notorious critique of jazz, he consigned the efforts of black musicians to a quixotic struggle against racial capitalism. “With jazz,” he wrote in 1936, “a disenfranchised subjectivity plunges from the commodity world into the commodity world; the system does not allow for a way out.” This double-bind of the commercial black artist remained on full display during the pilot episode of Empire, black gay director Lee Daniel’s new foray into episodic network television.

A primetime melodrama about making it in today’s music business, Empire is also a test of the ongoing viability of a mainstream show about black people. As an entertainment about the entertainment business, Empire is more interested in finding a way into the system than imagining a way out. So why was I gripped to my seat for every soapy, cliché-riddled plot twist?

An opening scene from Empire demonstrates that, wrong as Adorno was on the aesthetic merits of black music, he remains disturbingly prescient about the structures of racism and exploitation within which it continues to get made. In the studio, Lucious listens dissatisfied to a singer deliver a ballad. He demands take after take before finally telling her to sing as if she were singing to her brother who has been shot and killed. When that trauma finally triggers the soulful vocal he was listening for, Lucious grins at the sound of a hit. Black suffering and death, yet again, is spun into commercial gold.

The premise of Empire revolves around Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard, in his usual mode of unintentional Brechtian acting), rapper turned music label head, who has just been given a fatal medical diagnosis, and deliberately sets into motion a war of succession among his three sons. His plans are upended by the unexpected release from prison of his ex-wife Cookie (Taraji P. Henson in a scenery-chewing, scene-stealing role), who took the fall for the drug deal that gave Lucious his original start-up capital, and has come back for her dues. This is the kind of over-the-top material is catnip for a director like Daniels. If it therefore invites filing under “guilty pleasure” for the rest of us, the inclusion of a gay character among the principle cast remains a novel enough premise to keep queer viewers skeptically engaged.

Lucious’ gay son Jamal (Jussie Smollett) is what the mainstream press would like to call “non-stereotypical,” and what a more critical queer studies vocabulary would term “homonormative.” Neither an effeminate nor a homo thug living “on the down low,” Jamal would hardly be out of place among the cast of HBO’s Looking. That he is a talented musician (portrayed by an actual singer Smollett) lends his character a timely pathos. On the one hand, his father’s homophobia keeps him out of the spotlight that would otherwise seem to be his birthright. On the other, being out of spotlight spares him the fate of black masculine hypervisibility that his straight brother Hakeem seems consigned to. Homophobia forces him to the margins, but that is where the music is.

Black suffering is also at the center of a later dramatic scene, this one from Jamal’s childhood when the family still lived in the ghetto. In flashback, we see a thuggish Lucious dump Jamal in a trash can for daring to dress up his mother’s pumps and headscarf. Based on an experience from Daniels’ own childhood, this trauma is replayed over a scene of the now-adult Jamal performing “Good Enough,” a plaintive ballad addressed to his punishing superego, the father figure who will never be proud of him no matter how hard he tries. As his mother Cookie watches in the wings, Jamal stages the drama of “the best little boy in the world,” the angst of the black queer son whose overachievement serves as compensation for the paternal love he will never receive.

Can upwardly-mobile black queer sons and daughters like Jamal escape this “good enough” life? That is the unasked question behind this scene of black homonormative striving. The Lyons are, after all, remarkably functional as a kinship unit, despite all the melodramatic stigma of prison, crime, violence, and addiction that surround them. The incongruity of soapy drama like this lies in the fantasy we cling to as an audience that even people as rich, talented, and attractive as Jamal and his family nevertheless face the same demons as we do. The good life is really just the never good enough life.

Wouldn’t Jamal be happier without his father’s approval, without celebrity, without a corporation to run? What if the one thing he can’t have, full social acceptance, is the last thing he actually needs?

Works mentioned

Theodor Adorno, “On Jazz” in Essays on Music Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2002.

Fucking AIDS fucking cancer of the larynx, fucking dictatorship, and fucking facade of democracy, fucking macho mafia that they keep on calling a political party, fucking censorship, fucking couples, and fucking ruptures, fucking Pedro and fucking Pancho, fucking television, fucking alternative movements, fucking socialism, fucking colonial church, fucking NGOs, fucking multinational pharmaceuticals, fucking neoliberal post- dictatorship party, fucking map of the southern cone, fucking cultural consensus, fucking tourism, fucking tolerance, fucking art biennials, and fucking museum of homosexuality. Fucking you and fucking me. Fuck your body that lost. And fuck your soul that will never lose. Fuck the minority crowd confronting one armed man. Fuck the Mares and fuck the Mapocho river. Fuck the days we spent together in Santiago, fuck the nights in Valparaiso, fuck your kisses and fuck your tongue. We were watching the Pacific and I cited Deleuze: “The ocean is like cinema, an image in movement,” and you told me “don’t pretend to be an intellectual, little man. The only image in movement is love.” You raised me and from you I emerged like a son, of the hundreds you had, invented by your voice. You are my mother and I cry for you as one cries for a transvestite mother. With a dose of testosterone and a scream. You are my mother and I cry for you as one cries for an indigenous and communist mother. With a hammer and sickle drawn on the skin of your face. You are my shaman mother and I cry for you as one cries for ayahuasca. I go out into the streets of New York and I hug a radioactive tree and ask for forgiveness for not having come to see you – because of the fear of memories of torture, because of the fear of confronting dogs that are starving to death, and the mines of Antofagasta. Diamonds are eternal and so are bombs. AIDS speaks English and says “Darling, I must die” and it doesn’t hurt you. And cancer doesn’t speak. You die in silence like a cheap Barbie that is South American, proletariat, and a faggot. You are Incorruptible, like a trans-andean goddess. And they will yank us from history in those books that you will no longer write. But not your voice. And they will be born again, a thousand boys with a broken wing and a thousand girls that will carry your name. Pedro Lemebel. A thousand times, in a thousand tongues.

Paul B. Preciado

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:

The original text by Preciado, which is written in Spanish, plays with the gender performativity found within language. In English this performativity is obscured by the word “Fuck” which is neutral and can be applied to both masculine and feminine nouns. In the Spanish version masculine nouns are prefixed by “Puto” a word that can be translated as both Fuck and Faggot, while feminine nouns are prefixed by “Puta”, which translates as both Fuck and Whore. This dual entendre is especially active in the necrology’s auto ethnographic details, and reiterates the author’s trans*masculine gender performativity, just as it emphasizes Lemebel’s trans*feminine gender performativity. Lissette Olivares

By Eng-Beng Lim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Sandy Soto

In his sharp Bully Bloggers post on “Civility Disobedience” last fall, Tavia Nyong’o  pointed out that (in)civility is too often taken up by we who might be most suspicious of that tool: “Why are we, who are cast outside the circle of privileges that accrue to the civilized, still drawn to and invested in the lure of civility? Is it precisely because we sense that it is a tape against which we are measured and forever falling short?” Yes, I think so.

I’ve been thinking about Tavia’s questions a lot in the context of brownness—both brownness in relation to Chicanada and brownness in the more capacious, but more specific, way that José Esteban Muñoz had been thinkin’ it, feelin’ it, diggin’ it.

Chicanada is a term I’ve always thought of as lovingly and proudly naming brown resistance in all its complicated and competing forms—from the vato loco cry ¡Pachuco Yo! (raul salínas), to the dyke’s tattooed ofrenda (Ester Hernández), to the in-your-face literature written by The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About.

raul salínas, University of Wisconsin, late 1970s

La Ofrenda II (1990) Ester Hernández

Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991

The great thing about Chican@ is that the moment you claim it for yourself, you necessarily give yourself some breathing room against bourgeois norms–including civility. We leave accommodation to the Hispanics. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. But then, NACCS.

• Around the time that we were becoming glued to the Steven Salaita case in outrage that the UIUC administration had fired him just weeks before he was to start his job because, in the words of the Board of Trustees, “we must constantly reinforce our expectation of a university community that values civility as much as scholarship.” (HT Lisa Duggan for noting in her 2014 ASA presidential address that, “I have yet to hear an administrator denounce the incivility of university donors or those who defend their interests.”)…
• Around the time that in Ferguson, Missouri a white cop murdered 18-year old Michael Brown, unarmed but Black…
• Around the time that the media and pundits were accusing broken-hearted protestors in Ferguson of being uncivil animals and around the time that militarized forces were sent in to restore order…

Around that time—actually, not around, but on the heels of Salaita and Ferguson–the National Association of Chicana & Chicano [not Hispanic, right?] Studies (NACCS) announced their theme for the 2015 conference in San Francisco.

Exploring Civility within the Chicana & Chicano Studies Discipline

Huh? Does that mean that civility is something that exists in Chican@ studies and that we are being invited to write some papers that explore its existence? Or, did NACCS mean to work “Discipline” as a double-entendre, which, in relation to Civility, was meant to critically invoke disciplining, because Salaita, because Ferguson, because HB 2281 (which shut down Ethnic Studies in TUSD classrooms based on a right-wing campaign run on the argument that those classrooms were teaching students to be uncivil), because imperialism, because colonialism, because genocide, because the cult of true womanhood….? Why else would they have risked reducing Chican@ Studies to one, singular Discipline in their theme when we all know that Chican@ Studies is a heterogeneous, interdisciplinary site of contestation that at its best resists groupthink and disciplining in relation to academic codification and/or injunctions toward civility?

But, no. The three paragraph description of the theme and the list of possible topics in the CFP, made it clear that NACCS–at least in this moment under this particular leadership–had adopted the rhetoric of civility and was using it in the most prescriptive ways to shape the 2015 gathering.

Original NACCS Call for Papers

Since its formation in the early 1970s, NACCS has provided a much-needed infrastructure for the Chican@ Studies annual gathering of academics, students, artists and activists—most of them Chican@. NACCS bills itself as an organization that “rejects mainstream research, which promotes an integrationist perspective that emphasizes consensus, assimilation, and legitimization of societal institutions,” and that “promotes research that directly confronts structures of inequality based on class, race, and gender privileges in U.S. society.” And for the most part, it has resisted professionalization. It’s one of the few conferences I know of, for example, that welcomes—and has a dedication to accepting—submissions from undergraduate students. (I can’t imagine not having had access to NACCS myself as a young MEChista. Those annual experiences helped me believe that I could make a place for myself in academia.)

As you can imagine, then, the moment the call for papers and conference theme were announced, Chican@s took to social media and hallway conversation to express shock that NACCS was calling for civility, and at this particular moment, no less. Some people—mainly NACCS insiders—did come to the defense of the chair-elect (who thought up the theme) by explaining that she had actually chosen civility as her conference theme before the Salaita incident and before Ferguson (as if those uses of civility are anything new), or by reminding us that the theme doesn’t much matter anyway, because submissions don’t need to stick to it (as if a conference theme and CFP aren’t reflections of the spirit and values of the organization). It kills me that I’ve decided not to include here a gorgeous screenshot of one Chicano professor’s particularly noteworthy postings on facebook in defense of the theme. But let me tell you, people, it was a beautiful combination of fuckity fuckity fuck you (but more masculine than the ity I just typed, sabes?) hurled at those of us who were critical of the theme, and an in-your-face machista invitation to go toe-to-toe, esé. Hell, any day give me those speech acts instead of the politely soft responses we  received from the NACCS leadership:

1. “The NACCS Board appreciates the comments expressed on the 2015 theme. At this time the description has been removed and the Board will be discussing these concerns.” (09/04/14)
2. “The Board thanks the membership for the feedback of the recent CFP. After deliberation and feedback from Board Members, a CFP revision will be released on September 12, 2015. The Board feels that the idea of ‘civility’ is important to engage in its different forms, in its various meanings, and in its numerous consequences. We look forward to the continued discussion of these ideas in our forthcoming conference.” (09/07/14)
3. And, finally, the new and improved theme, dressed up with some Español, cool slash marks, and struggle (09/12/14):

Chicana/o In/Civilities: Contestación y Lucha:
Cornerstones of Chicana & Chicano Studies

Revised CFP

No thank you, NACCS.

The revised CFP claims that “Communications and dialogue with the NACCS membership” took place after the original CFP was released. No they didn’t–unless there were conversations (other than the fuckity fuck one) that I wasn’t privy to. I only saw those of us who were critical of the theme expressing our thoughts. It wasn’t a reciprocal conversation. But what’s most upsetting to me about the revised CFP is not that, it’s this: “‘Civility’ is a complex yet essential concept for social interaction and communication. Change agents such as Emma Tenayuca, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Corky Gonzalez, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many current leaders of different social movements have struggled to strategically find the balance between ‘civility [sic] and ‘incivility’ in order to achieve cultural, political, and economic transformation at both the individual and social level.” How have we arrived here—a juncture in which our brown revolutionaries are dubbed (through the corporate-derived speech of capitalism) “change agents”? How have we come to the place where a political construct like “civility” (that has a history) is completely naturalized by NACCS leaders as though it always already existed in some pure natural form, if only we could work our way back to that sweetness against all of the misuse and corruption over time?

By Lisa Duggan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Half way through the erotic snooze fest (no seriously, the woman next to me was snoring 10 minutes in!!), Fifty Shades of Grey (FSOG), our eponymous hero presents his lover to be with an offer she can’t refuse in the form of a multi page contract. While conventional courting material used to include roses and chocolates, in our neo-liberal world order, romance is now filed under “C” for “consent” or “contractual” depending upon your location. The contract that our heroine receives in FSOG, lists the sexual activities that Mr. Grey proposes for them to undertake along with check boxes in which she can indicate her preferences and disinclinations. Lawyers and bureaucrats might be salivating at this point, but for the rest of us, this seems like an emphatically decent proposal with very little frisson.

The heroine of FSOG, Anastasia Steele played by a winsome if vacant Dakota Johnson, goes over the contract line by line while biting her lip—her signature (and only) sexy move—and, after putting her newly earned English literature degree to work in decoding the document in front of her, surface reading it if you like, she gives her suitor his answers. Yes, she will agree to light whipping, some bondage, the use of slings and even the use of some designated sex toys. But, and our respect for her is supposed to grow at this point, she has some very clear limits. Thinking back to readings from her Gender Studies classes, she remembers that in all negotiations around sex, there are trespassers and line drawers. She will draw the line, she tells Mr. Grey, at “anal fisting.” How about “vaginal fisting?” he counters. Heroine bites lips and makes her decision. No, that is also off limits, and she scratches the item off the list.

Somehow, of all the nasty, filthy, deliciously perverse things that human bodies can do to one another, fisting becomes the sign of going too far. Fisting, of course, has often been linked to queer sex and it indicates a phallic order that exceeds the penis and offers in its place a larger and more dexterous limb. When fisting is the furthermost limit that a sex film can imagine, you know you are in the gray zone alright – not the gray zone of limits pushed and desires tangled, but the gray zone of boredom, banality and avowedly vanilla sex. Having dispensed with the nasties – here represented, and it is worth repeating, as fisting — our sharp, shiny, heroine, Ms. Steele, has only one more question: “what is a butt plug?” What is a butt plug? Really? That is your only question here? Not: wait, what? Does our sex really require a contract? Or, I don’t see anything here about water sports. Or, how about, how much are you paying me? No, the lovely and newly deflowered Anastasia Steele has only one remaining, lingering concern …what …is ….a…butt…plug? A butt plug, dear lady, is a plug you put…wait for it…in your butt!

And so we are off and running in the race to drop a blockbuster smack into the middle of a long winter and a hyper commercialized valentine season (yes, it is now a season. But, Valentine, let’s not forget, was a saint who was killed for marrying Christian couples – hence our definition of romance is linked definitively to Christian marriage, not to mention male martyrdom and female subjugation!). But Fifty Shades of Grey also drops smack into the center of a highly charged national conversation about sexual assaults on campus, on which, more in a moment.

The movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey promised dynamic sex, the subjugation of a feisty if inexperienced woman, the allure of a dominant man, but it delivers only a series of pre-queer theory lectures on BDSM and has less effect, I am willing to bet, on the libidinal urges of its audience than an episode of The Golden Girls – and I mean no disrespect here to that glorious and lusty project of octogenarian girl power.

By the time Mr. Grey, played less winsomely and way too wholesomely, by Jamie Dornan, finally gets Ms. Steele into a kneeling position in his play room awaiting her punishment, we have dispensed with contractual foreplay, we have been teased with silk ties, perfectly laundered shirts and sex toy shopping in a hardware shop, and we feel as an audience that we too by now deserve something – pleasure, punishment, light torture, whatever it is, get on with it! But alas we get nothing close to the Pasolini style torture we have been promised. All that transpires…trigger and spoiler alerts in full affect…is a little spanking, a lot more lip biting, a few feathers, six (count them) pats with a paddle and a whole lot of cross cutting to make the whole deal seem energetic.

Fifty Shades of Grey, one is tempted to say, is Last Tango in Paris without the butter, without the sex and without Brando and Maria Schneider…What it does have, however, are great aerial shots, lots of hard torsos and soft core lenses, some nice car porn and way too much chatter. But this is not a movie review, partly because FSOG is barely a movie! The question towards which I have inched, for anyone who cares to answer or is still reading, is this: what is the relationship between a widely shared and expressed, seemingly white, cultural fantasy of male domination and female submission, and the epidemic of sexual assault accusations on college campuses across the
U.S. right now?

Of course, it is entirely possible that the two phenomena, sexual assault charges, new laws around consent in California, and fifty shades of sex play, have nothing at all to do with each other. One is, after all, about the violent and disastrously non-consensual interactions between young men and
women, and the other is about fantasy and a narrative of consensual engagements between a wealthy man and his aspirational and virginal lover. And yet…And yet, there is certainly more to our odd sexual climate in which a popular romance involving BDSM and selling 100 million copies worldwide sits uncomfortably along side statistics indicating that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in college! This weird historical juncture seems made up of part sex panic, part paranoia, part patriarchy, part Peewee Herman (I am not sure which part is Peewee but I sure hope he is in there somewhere).

In September 2014, California became the first state to adopt a law that requires college students to confirm that they have consent for sexual interaction. This law has been dubbed the “yes means yes” act counteracting the date rape rule of thumb that “no means yes and yes means anal” as some fraternity brothers have it. I would like to amend the nickname into “no means no, yes means yes, and maybe means pass the butt plug.” I would also like to designate February as the month for “inviting your fraternity boyfriend to provide oral sex on demand” and March as “take your boyfriend to your gender studies class” month. And as for April, the cruelest month, maybe in April we can begin the Anus Monologues and all think about why “anal” anything and everything has become short hand for punishment, pain and the yuck factor.

No, but seriously, what do we make of the trend for (misrepresented) BDSM in romance fiction and the multiplying charges of sexual assault among college women? As many letter writers to the New York Times Magazine noted in their responses a few weeks ago to a long article about a soured relationship between a male instructor and a female student at Stanford University, the article appeared online with ads for FSOG popping up in the margins. The article in question tells of a relationship that was once completely standard on college campuses (and I am not saying this approvingly necessarily), that of a young female student and a slightly older instructor/TA/professor. Many of those relationships in the past were quickly legitimized through marriage and whatever impropriety may have presented itself in the early moments of the relationship were swept to one side with the explanation of “true love” and so on. Until, that is, the professor replaces his once-student-now-wife with another student-soon to become-wife. In the NYT’s piece,The Stanford Undergraduate and the Mentor a 21 year old junior got involved with her 29 year old mentor, dated him on and off over the course of a year and then, when the relationship soured, she accused him of forcing her to have sex with him. The case, which involves lots of romantic texting, lots of he said/she said back and forth, and lots of accusations and counter-accusations (he assaulted me/she is mentally unstable) is still in the courts.

The New York Times’ piece, like the much ballyhooed Rolling Stone piece, “A Rape on Campus,” before it about accusations of sexual assault on the University of Virginia campus has no answers about sexual assault on campus, only more questions. I am willing to bet that the real problem in the US at any rate in relation to sex on campus has everything to do with limited sex education for high school students, lots of alcohol, and lots of very bad sex. No doubt there are guys who just don’t care whether the woman they are with actually wants to have sex with them, and no doubt there are women who consent and then regret their decision and make assault charges. But ultimately, the problem cannot be legislated one lawsuit at a time. What we need, IMHO, is a robust model of feminism for all genders, a clear program for sex education in high school and some kind of national discussion about what’s wrong with heterosexuality!

So, before wrapping up this rambling attempt to make sense of the confusing and treacherous terrain of sex in college, romantic fantasies and realities and the heterosexual fear of and fascination with the anus, let me just close with three arguments, ok, people always say three, so I will go for four:

1. We should really be asking not what would I do under these circumstances, as either the accused or the accuser, but more importantly, what would James Franco do? I am surprised in fact that, despite his rumored homosex proclivities, his time spent taking queer theory courses at Yale and his role in many a Judd Apatow film, that Franco has not become the designated spokesperson for what’s up with college students and sex. No doubt once he is finished restoring sex scenes to various queer classic films, he will step up and offer us a book, a poem, an installation or even a film on Fifty Shades of Ass Play.

2. Could the real problem be not just bad people taking advantage of naïve people but sheltered people having lots of bad sex with lots of cheap alcohol thrown in for good measure? Can it really be true, as some have asked, that college women are the most vulnerable population when it comes to sexual assault? What do we leave out of the picture when we focus on college campus scenarios to the exclusion of say sexual assault in the home, sexual assault of sex workers, sexual assault of queers? I don’t know the answer to these questions but I think Professor Amy Adler, a law professor at NYU and a smart and creative commentator on sex and the law might – ask her!

3. What is a “butt plug”?

4. And finally, because four questions/conclusions are a bare minimum, can we all stop the violence now – no more horrendous clichés about virgins and powerful, rich, young and handsome men; stop propping up the worn out narratives of heterosexual love and sex; someone shut James Franco up or down; and next time, if you want me to pay lots of money for a two hour snooze fest, please let there be fisting.

By the way folks, there is actually a pretty good BDSM film out there by Peter Strickland involving two women who play out a series of erotic fantasies of control, domination and submission. The Duke of Burgundy (2015) is beautifully shot and has a credit for the “lingerie manager” so you know it is on the right track. With scenes involving constraint, coffins, golden showers, stilettos, stockings, punishment and delay, the film makes BDSM less of a party trick, less about the equipment and more about repetition, waiting, suspense and reward. Ditch the hen parties on their way to FSOG and take your date to a real film.

And that’s all I have: no haters, just laters baby!

By Tav Nyong’o

7. It’s S/K, not K/S (yes, it matters)

I never quite got it, by the way. Slash fiction, that is: the fan genre of narrative that fantasizes catching Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mister Spock in flagrante delicto. I’ll say it here: William Shatner does nothing for me. And I think I identify too much as a Vulcan to really relish being with a Vulcan like Leonard Nimoy. So despite a queer trekkie, I never “shipped” Kirk and Spock, as the kids now say. At least not until the latest reboot of the franchise — with its casting of queer, doe-eyed Zachary Pinto in the role a knowing wink at its shipping audience — practically begged me to.

6. Slash is neither the love of sameness nor of difference, but of the performative punctuation of the two

 For more on the queer performativity of punctuation, see here. The principle that a slash is a punctuation mark, not an equal sign applies, by the way, to the delight slash fantasy takes in reconjugating the relationship between actor and role. Long before Hollywood wrapped it’s head around openly queer actors playing straight, slash writers and artists understood the pleasures to be found in the interstices between what is seen and what is shown, delighting, as proper fans will, in candid shots of the actors on set, or in their leisure time, displaying the kind of foreplay affection that would find, in their fan fictions and images, a more heated description. Depicting not just the characters but the actors in shipped roles becomes a key more fan participation; creepy at times, to be sure, but also silly and playful, an little sharing out of the unshareable (J-L Nancy) in an unequal, unfair, hostile and unforgiving world.

One received wisdom holds that slash fiction is actually a genre written by and for straight women, who insist on projecting romantic scenarios where no screenwriter had gone before. Despite being an ardent Trekkie, I have however never really immersed myself in this particular fan archive, so I just, a bit idly, imagine slash to be a kind of feminine ecriture, a queer feminist rewriting of a master text whose blatant violations of the Bechdel test admits no possible response short of a complete transcoding. In this world, Kirk and Spock are not lonely bachelors stranded in space, but loving bedfellows who exchange thoughts and sentiments (the one more thought, the other more sentiment) and give themselves over to langour and play.

I suspect, nonetheless, as does the cartoonist below, that any number of straight men also “ship” Kirk/Spock (probably, fewer I am guessing ship Spock/Kirk). I have no novel theory of heteroflexibility to offer to account for this: Freud taught us a century ago that everyone is capable of making a same sex object choice and in fact has already done so in their unconscious. And if shipping is just having a wet dream under erasure, perhaps it is no surprise to find Kirk and Spock still secluding themselves from this generation’s pornographic spotlight. Not closeted, not self-hating, they are simply discreet. Three’s a crowd.

5. Spock is a Jew

4. Spock is Asian, and a woman

The orientalist overcoding of the Vulcans as some ancient wise race from the East increasingly finds a contemporary sequel in manga depictions of an Asian Spock and blond Kirk. Again, I have no theories beyond the obvious nod to postmodern pastiche and cultural globalization, but I do find it both interesting (and maybe even a bit worrisome) that K/S should be pulled out of taciturn obscurity and made to conform too easily to a legible East/West dualism. On the other hand, when the creativity capacity of queer fabulists the world over fully outstrip the source text, they unsettle a certain white supremacist logic of discovery and conquest, opening outer space to other, decolonial uses.

It is also interesting to see the loving pair grow younger as they age, a fate as inapposite as that of the original Number One in the un-signed 1964 pilot for Star Trek, played by Majel Barrett. Somehow the brainy, intellectual foil to the passionate captain did not scan for studio executives when that foil was female bodied. Although Spock appears in that original pilot, he steps into the Barrett’s role as number one in the series proper, and, thereby, into the romantic sub-plot of aloof feminine reserve played against passionate male impetuousness that she had set up in that unnumbered, unaired episode.

The original pilot didn’t feature the African American starfleet member Lt. Uhura, but it was a story — deemed “too cerebral” by the network — of human captivity. Captain Pike (Kirk’s predecessor) is trapped by an alien race, the Talosians, who tries to get him to reproduce with another human, captured in an earlier crash, in order to generate a servile class. He is obliged to make love to a trapped woman at the pain of being sent mad by the mind-controlling Talosians, Vina, but his contempt and hatred of being enslaved prove too strong. (This is a classic motif in the white mythology of Anglo-Saxon liberty by the way: slavery may be a condition suited for other, lesser races, but not for us!) While the Talosians snare the two additional women from the starship Enterprise, the Captain won’t deign to mate with them either (female willingness and suitability for both marriage and slavery is, of course, assumed by both the Talosians and the screenwriters of this teleplay). Having survived a raw clash of wills, the Talosians give up and return all three starfleet members to the ship, leaving behind Vina who, it is revealed (spoiler alert) is not young and beautiful, but aged and grotestquely disfigured from her crash. Too late to be rescued by reality, Vina waves a sad goodbye to the Captain before walking off, hand in hand with the illusion of him created for her by the Talosians.

Are shippers just digging deeper into homonormative pathologies, or are they displaying the restless and recombinant inventiveness of a connective generation, when they attempt to resolve the real contradictions of race, gender, and sexuality by reimagining slash fiction, beyond the erotic dyad, as a kind of super team: S/U/K?

2. Where life is an illusion, love is only logical.

The enduring appeal of slash, such as I can discern it, is that even the nerdy, awkward, overly rational and reticent can and need love. I doubt this appeal has lost its relevance in our era of alleged nerd ascendancy. Anyway, Spock wasn’t that nerdy, wasn’t that geeky. He was aloof and enigmatic, loyal and logical, cool and conflicted. Now that the actor who created the role has passed on, the actor who succeeded him might be able to perform out from under his long shadow. More likely, however, as Joseph Roach notes of all acts of surrogation, the real replacement for Spock will be found elsewhere than in his official successor.

1. Number your days

Spock cannot be replaced. He is finite, and falls back into the one. An alert shipper notes that the hashtag #LLAP may be too  crypto-Christian in its patterns of memorialization, especially in the image of an afterlife that is implicitly promised. The Vulcan do not offer that sign to the dead. When Spock or Kirk die (as they seem to die repeatedly in the incompossible worlds of Star Trek, where Adam sins and does not sin) the surviving lover refuses to receive a parting benediction in his mourning. Live long and prosper? I shall do neither. Live long and prosper. No.

The shipped and the bereft are thus brought back to the one, which teaches us to number our days, that we might get a head of wisdom.

In Memoriam: Leonard Simon Nimoy. Mar 26, 1931 – Feb 27, 2015

1.

attente / waiting

Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being,

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

–Roland Barthes

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

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

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

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

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

2.

Souveinir / remembrance

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

–Roland Barthes

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

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

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

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

Moraga attaches this endnote to “[Indigenous]”:

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

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

3.

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

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

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

To cane or not to cane, that is the question: Somewhere between the mirror and the international stage, Singaporeans and Singaphiles alike must all face the cane as the instrument and metaphor of state regulation in loco parentis whether or not the name of its founding father Lee Kuan Yew is invoked. The question has  polyvalent resonances for political commentators, cultural pundits, media watchdogs and queer theorists attuned to this model city-state, and is endlessly reproducible. It is on everyone’s lips as soon as Singapore or LKY is mentioned even on the fly at a cocktail party in D.C. or an Asian Studies seminar in Durham. Whether it has to do with the existential or the parodic, Lee, the cane and Singapore are a guaranteed lightning rod for thinking about liberal democracy, capitalist social formation and political subjectivity.

Now that Harry has died, what will happen to that perennial inquiry?

As a kid growing up on the island, one of the prompts for my postcolonial English composition class under Lee’s immaculate administration was “‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’ Discuss!” The unvarnished and phallic test question is barely able to conceal its paddling tendencies even with the padding of the verby imperative “Discuss!” On paper, it was an exercise for organized thinking (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) but all I can remember was my teenage terror, trembling pen in hand, at having to expose the rituals of corporal punishment in my social surround. Worse still was to find the rattan cane with frayed edges hidden behind some closet at home.

More than LKY, my immediate references for authority as a self-hating queerlet were two competing domestic regimes with my domineering live-in grandmother as an established matriarch and my dad as the emergent patriarchy. Both were immigrants from China and simultaneously tender and terrifying as they wielded the cane in different ways. In the case of my grandma, the cane was also aimed at school bullies in the neighborhood who dared to pick on my sisters. I secretly loved the vigilantism of her Hokkien street justice even as it was an implicit warning she could turn on me just the same if I misbehaved (she never did.)

Cane-talk often incited a will to action, making the instrument itself at once legendary and real. I don’t remember now if it was even used with any regularity or at all…

The assignment to write about caning was ostensibly for a grammar lesson but it felt like a kind of Chinese family tradition. And that family was also a nation with a Sino-chauvinistic edge. I am talking about a national pedagogy led by LKY with a disciplinary moral center and an operational racial logic. It stayed with me as a writer around how I think and unthink. If pedagogy sounds a lot like ideology, a quick revisit of Louis Althusser’s notes about educational ISAs (Ideological State Apparatus) may clarify their intersection or interanimation. As Althusser notes, the school is paramount in the state’s arsenal of ISAs that propagate in a concealed and symbolic way ideologies that elicit rather than enforce public consent for capitalist social formation. As a main conduit of bourgeois self-production, the school hones the common ideology of the ruling class through captive rehearsals (“the obligatory audience of the totality of children… eight hours a day”) that are like parental guidance. The difference in Singapore is “[w]e are ideology-free,” says Lee in a 2007 interview with The New York Times in reference to the state’s illiberal pragmatism that is based on a can-do (others say cane-do), do-it-over ethos.

It is no wonder then that writing a response about the rod and its virtues at school brought out every juvenile authority I thought I wielded as a class monitor, pledge leader, gardening club president, and school prefect. Denuded of queer agency, my compensatory overdrive for delusional moral leadership took the form of ever more extra-curricular activities. If the neoliberal regime had an early model of exhaustive excellence, this overdrive was one of its forceful charge. From oratorical, singing, drawing, handwriting and translating competitions, I did them all! Drama society, audiovisual club, boy scouts, bring them on! My singular drive for competitive endeavors was trained and destined for the free market. As an all-around go-getter, Teamy the bee, the mascot for the national productivity campaign (1982) would approve of me, as would Singa the Courtesy Lion:

“Good better best! Never let it rest, if it’s good make it better, if it’s better, make it best!” says Teamy the Bee, mascot of the National Productivity Campaign, 1982, Singapore.

Singa the Courtesy Lion, the mascot of the National Courtesy Campaign launched by the Ministry of Culture in 1982, Singapore.

My law-abiding perfectionism seemed to know no bounds. Not only would it be rude to talk back to Daddy Dearest in his anthropomorphic drag as cartoon apian or lion, it would have been a total betrayal of his patriarchal patronage for my own good.

The operationalization of cane pleasure and pain by Lee, one part Confucius/Asian Values, one part Ayn Rand, and one part cartoon bureaucracy, was thus set in motion for Singaporeans of my generation. It puts the interrogation of the original question around the caning of American teenager Michael Fay in 1994 for public vandalism a freaky sideshow. What’s more notable in that spanking-gate was the way it brought Bill Clinton, Larry King and William Safire together as media mansplainers of that authoritarian regime over there in the East. As Safire opined earnestly in his 1994 NYT Op-ed, “Lee Kuan Yew, the aging dictator of Singapore… Lashed U.S. by way of Fay… so as to make himself an ethnic hero of Asia.”

As the nation-state mourns for Lee’s passing on March 23, 2015 at the age of 91, the symbolism of the cane hovering over the discourse of Singapore runs the risk of nullifying its own excess and the question of national hyperbole around the loss of a Father Figure. So closely identified is the Asian patriarch with the garden city-state invented by him in the late twentieth century as a new temple of efficiency that the two have become one and the same. The mourners call him the Father, and thank him for the material wealth afforded to them. A FaceBook entry depicts a well-groomed male professional leaning on an expensive car professing his gratitude for Lee: “I love you…Without you, I could have been a construction worker in a foreign land.” The eulogies from Singaporean citizens who identify as his sons and daughters, the majority of whom he had never seen or touched, attest to the strengths of the affective binds that the game of cane, the disciplined nation and the love of Daddy Dearest bring together for better or for worse.

As Singapore holds its state funeral procession today (29 Mar 2015) for Harry with Bill Clinton, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and other world leaders in attendance, an undated open letter of resignation from Singa the Courtesy Lion is resurfacing on the internet.

The death of a national mascot and its ignored funeral portend the end of an era just the same. Singa is evidently sick of being polite and kind, and no longer gives a shit about creating a gracious society. It refuses to be a cover for the ugly Singaporean, and no endless campaigns with cartoon niceties are going to conceal a nation of cruel optimists or the selfish bourgeois materialists of the system.

Will “no cane, no gain” dissipate as a national axiom or will it make a softer comeback post-Harry? And will queer discipline qua neoliberal excellence find a different form? Only time and more hurt-so-good memories between Harry and me will tell.

By Lisa Duggan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in January of this year, 2015, a curious story began to circulate in online education journals like Inside Higher Ed: “A student group at Mount Holyoke College has decided to cancel its annual performance of The Vagina Monologues, saying the play excludes the experiences of transgender women who don’t have a vagina.” Now, I am no big fan of Vagina Monologues, or any kind of speaking genitalia for that matter (I am flashing on a show I saw on HBO a few years ago on “The Puppetry of the Penis”…don’t ask…don’t tell…). But, despite my aversion to genital soliloquies, and my general disinterest from the get go in The Vagina Monologues, I still do not understand the premise for the cancelation.

If the students had decided that the play was too focused on universalizing US experiences of womanhood, or that it participated in an imperialist feminist paradigm that cast North American feminist body politics as representative of all versions of body politics, I might have thought ok, shrugged and moved on. But canceling it because it does not include the experiences of trans women or women who lack vaginas just did not add up. The play is not saying that women without vaginas or that women with surgically constructed vaginas are not women after all, it is just saying…well, what is it saying? Love your vagina? Love whatever you have that is not a penis? Love your penis that can now be reterrritorialized as your vagina? Talk to your vagina? Listen to your vajayjay…not sure but it is NOT saying, transwomen are not women.

Like the debates around the inclusion of trans-women in historically women’s colleges, this all feels like a storm in a teacup. It is clear that we are living at a time when gender norms have so definitively shifted beyond stable concepts of man and woman, that there should be no need for anguished and urgent debates about the admission of transgender women to women’s colleges or about the extension of monologues about female genitalia to trans women with or without surgically constructed vaginas (talkative or not). Trans women will be admitted to spaces formerly reserved for women born women precisely because the activism that would enable us to see an expanded and expanding category of “woman” has already taken place. The current activism on college campuses now calling for for the expansion of the category of “woman” to trans women, in fact, is belated and after the fact. Activism is not simply calling for something. Activism is about creating a context within which the thing that you are calling for comes to make sense – this process, in relation to trans womanhood, began back in the early 1990’s with the rise of poststructuralist feminism and queer theory and it comes to bear now on the discussions about gender protocols.

It is of course true that the time for The Vagina Monologues is surely come and gone – and I am not so sure that it was ever here in the first place — but certainly a few generations of enthusiastic college students did perform the play with pride and gusto and who are we to sneer at that. So why not quietly move on from the performance of talking vaginas to other theatrical projects more suited to this historical moment? Can the very vocal and publicized decision to cancel The Vagina Monologues be understood as part of what has been identified as a new censorious mood on college campuses in general? What fuels this new sensitivity on the part of students to all kinds of “problematic” material and is it part of a new millennial moralism?

In recent weeks, articles by Laura Kipnis in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times have generated outrage (and protests in Kipnis’s case) because these authors dared to suggest that we seem to be in the grips of a moral panic on college campuses. While Kipnis took aim at administratively authored “sexual paranoia” at her university, Northwestern, which had taken the form of a ban on consensual relations between professors and students, Shulevitz accused students of “hiding from scary ideas” by deploying the defense of calling for “safe space.” Both Kipnis and Shulevitz articulated what is, I believe, a fairly widely shared belief, that in Kipnis’s words “students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.” We don’t have to agree with everything Kipnis or Shulevitz has to say in order to feel that something has certainly changed in the way that campus politics are transacted.

And, there are probably many factors that contribute to this “skyrocketing” sense of vulnerability for college students – students have been produced within the neoliberal university as consumers, dependents, debtors, children and pre-professionals. They have been cheated, patronized, exploited and abused. They exit the university with massive amounts of debt, a sense of futility and a need to make money and they want someone to blame. It is always easier to blame the messenger rather than going after the system that produces debt and despair in equal measure. But it is surely a mistake for students to be “calling out” (the new term for demanding accountability) their Gender Studies professors for showing them disturbing material on sexual assault; or calling out their Ethnic Studies professors for showing images of racial violence; or calling out their political theory professors for arguing that power is productive and ubiquitous not local and possessed. Local calls for this or that form of speech to end does not really help anything. Rather than demanding simply that category X be admitted to this or that, we need wide-ranging structural analyses of the production of violence of exclusion and inclusion within neoliberal forms of governance.

To wind down my rant, let’s turn to an example of what NOT to do as a feminist: In a great episode of Portlandia, Candace (Fred Armisen) and Tony (Carrie Brownstein), the fictional proprietors of the women’s bookstore, Women and Women First, go to a Portland Trailblazers basketball game. They watch the game and are amazed at how much they enjoy it: “these people are really good at what they do!” But then, in a time out, when the Blazer’s cheerleaders come on to dance for the crowd, Toni and Candace become outraged by the exploitation to which they have become witnesses. Candace wonders why the cheerleaders are wearing so little clothing, and they both end up calling for the “liberation” of the “private dancers.” “Let them speak!” yells Candace, “say something! Tell us your stories!” The two feminist pioneers demand a meeting with the dancers in order to “help” them and they ask the dancers to “drop their poms poms.” Providing them with a “safe space,” they call on them to “read and resist” rather than dance and be oppressed and they create a new performance piece for them that involves telling the audience who they are and crawling out from under the oppressive regime of the NBA – all accompanied by a primal scream performed by Toni. The episode is hilarious as a good-natured satire of a feminism that has misguidedly become a crusade to protect and rescue.

Activism, Portlandia reminds us, is not the transaction of change through the blotting out of ‘problematic’ speech  on behalf of new disciplinary norms of conduct. Inclusion can be as corrosive a technique of rule as exclusion and speech as much as silence can be a vector for oppression. In an era when universities are saddling their students with debt, transforming their teaching staff from permanent to adjunct labor, paying their administrators corporate salaries and buying up all the real estate in their neighborhoods for luxury housing, calls for inclusion have to be accompanied by broader critiques of the transformation of the university. In a speech at Berkeley last year titled: “Free Speech Is Not For Feeling Safe,” Wendy Brown reminded us that:” today, the gears of the machine don’t clang and grind out there: they are are soft, quiet, and deep inside us.”  Trans women should certainly be admitted to women’s colleges, and vaginas probably do need to stop monologuing but inclusive policies, safe space, correct speech and sexual paranoia will not change the middle-class demographics of the university and will not stop the university from its rapid evolution into a factory for the production of the next generation of bankers. What we need are new and inventive modes of protest not more safe space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Lisa Duggan

How I Toast Marriage While Being Against It

by Kathryn Bond Stockton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s my colleague, Cliff Rosky….

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