feministkilljoys

What I have loved about having my feminist killjoys blog is how it seems to have changed my relation to my own scholarly work: I am going back over the trails that led me here, to this moment, this point, in time. That sense of going back might also be something to do with finishing a book: that open space of the not quite after, that pause. It is not a general pause: it is not even a slowing down; it is the end of term; it is busy. But my foot hasn’t quite landed on the next stone, even though I have begun research for new projects, even though I sense that stone. There is a moment of dangling that I rather like, even though I am ready to jump!

I keep realising how things keep coming up, in different ways over the course of my thinking, writing, doing. One of these “things” is “breaking points.” I considered “breaking points” most explicitly in Queer Phenomenology, but they came up before that in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, even though I didn’t name them as such. In that book, published 10 years ago (almost!), I was thinking about investments in a rather ordinary way. I was thinking of how to wait for something is to become invested in that thing not necessarily because you estimate that thing as a good thing (what I was to call later “happy objects,” those things that you are directed toward because they are anticipated to cause happiness) but just because of the time taken in waiting for that thing.

It is ordinary life that helps here.  Think of the times when you are on a phone; you are waiting for someone to answer the call. The longer you wait the harder it is to give up, because you have invested more and more time by waiting (and thus more and more of yourself: to give time is to give yourself). My conclusion was as ordinary as the example: the failure of return extends the investment. And from ordinary life (so much of my own work is working from the ordinary, with the ordinary) we learn about how social norms too might become investments: it is not that they give you a return that is binding, but the failure of return. Norms become affective; they are ways of waiting for returns that are assumed to follow those ways. I was later to call this dynamic “the promise of happiness.”

But then there is a moment if you are still waiting when you give up. Giving up is so complicated; you don’t know whether you give up because something is lost; or whether you are giving up in case something is lost; or that giving up makes something lost. You worry, perhaps, that this “because” has got in the way; you worry about giving up because of this because. That’s a bit cryptic: you worry you will lose something because you thought you had lost something.

But eventually you do give up. Something breaks. You reach a breaking point. It was this “reaching” that I tried to explore in Queer Phenomenology. In the introduction, I rewrote the example from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, through thinking about paths (paths have stayed with me ever since, as an object that supports thought, that is, as a table, another object that supports thought). This is what I wrote:

For it is important to remember that life is not always linear, or that the lines we follow do not always lead us to the same place. It is not incidental that the drama of life, those moments of crisis that demand we make a decision, are represented by the following scene: the subject faces a fork in the road, and has to decide which path to take. This way or that one, one must decide. And then you go one way. You go that way by following the path. But perhaps you are not so sure. The longer you proceed on this path the harder it is to go back even in the face of this uncertainty. You make an investment in going and the going extends the investment. One keeps going out of hope that you are getting somewhere. Hope is an investment that the lines we follow will get us somewhere.  When we don’t give up, when we persist, when we are under pressure to arrive, to get somewhere, we give ourselves over to the line. Turning back risks the wasting of time, a time that has already been expended or given up. If we give up on the line that we have given our time to, then we give up more than a line; we give up a certain life we have lived, which can feel like giving up on ourselves.

And so you go on. Your journey might still be full of doubt. When doubt gets in the way of hope, which can often happen in a moment, as abruptly as turning a switch, then you go back, you give up. You even hurry back, as the time expended without hope is time taken away from the pursuit of another path.  So yes, sometimes you do go back. Sometimes you get there. Sometimes you just don’t know. Such moments do not always present themselves as life choices available to consciousness. At times, we don’t know we have followed a path, or that the line we have taken is a line that clears our way only by marking out spaces that we don’t inhabit. Our investments in specific routes can be hidden from view, as they are the point from which we view the world that surrounds us. We can get directed, by losing our sense of this direction. The line becomes then simply a way of life, or even an expression of who we are.

So at one level we do not encounter that which is “off course,” that which is off the line we have taken. And yet, accidental or chance encounters do happen, which re-direct us, and open up new worlds. Sometimes, such encounters might come as the gift of a lifeline, and sometimes they might not; they can be lived purely as loss. Such side-ways moments might generate new possibilities, or they might not. After all, it is often loss that generates a new direction; when we lose a loved one, for instance, or when a relationship with a loved one ends, it is hard to simply stay on course, as love is also what gives us a certain direction. What happens when we are “knocked off course” depends on the psychic and social resources behind us. Such moments can be a gift, or they might be the site of trauma, anxiety or stress about the loss of an imagined future. It is usually with the benefit of “hindsight” that we reflect on such moments, where a fork in the road before us opens up, and we have to decide what to do, even if the moment does not present itself as a demand for a decision. The “hind” does not always give us a different point of view, yet it does allow those moments to be revisited, to be reinhabited, as moments where we change course.

I think one of the reasons that I became interested in the very question of “direction” was because, in the “middle” of my life, I experienced a dramatic re-direction: I left a certain kind of life, and embraced a new one. I left the “world” of heterosexuality, and became a lesbian, even though this means staying in a heterosexual world. For me, this line was a lifeline, and yet it also meant leaving the well trodden paths. It is interesting to note that in landscape architecture they use the term “desire lines” to describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings. Such lines are traces of desire; where people have taken their own routes to get to this point or that. It is certainly desire that helps generate a lesbian landscape, as a ground that is shaped by the paths that we follow. And yet, becoming a lesbian still remains a difficult line to follow. The lesbian body does not extend the shape of this world, as a world organized around the form of the heterosexual couple. Inhabiting a body that is not extended by the skin of the social, means the world acquires a new shape and makes new impressions. Becoming a lesbian taught me, I guess, about the very point of how life gets directed, and how that point is often hidden from view. Becoming re-orientated, which involves the disorientation of encountering the world differently, made me wonder about orientation, and how much “feeling at home,” or knowing which way we are facing, is about the making of worlds.

I then return to this question of breaking points, in the second chapter, “Sexual Orientation.” Here I wrote:

In the conventional family home what appears requires following a certain line, the family line that directs our gaze. The heterosexual couple becomes a “point” along this line, which is given to the child as its inheritance or background. The background then is not simply behind the child: it is what the child is asked to aspire towards. The background, given in this way, can orientate us towards the future: it is where the child is asked to direct its desire by accepting the family line as its own inheritance. There is pressure to inherit this line, a pressure that can speak the language of love, happiness and care, which pushes you along specific paths.  We do not know what we could become without these points of pressure, which insist that happiness will follow if we do this or we do that. And yet, these places where we are under pressure don’t always mean we stay on line; at certain points, we can refuse the inheritance, points that are often lived as “breaking points.” We do not always know what breaks at these points.

I think that last sentence is hovering over me today: you do not always know what breaks at these points.

You can hear how I was already on the trail that led me to The Promise of Happiness. And here, in this book, the question of breaking points is reposed as a question of bearability. I wrote in the chapter, “Unhappy Queers,” the following:

Every sad book has its moments, moments where it is all “too much,” when a body, a life, a world becomes unbearable. Thinking about bearable and unbearable lives might offer a different angle on Judith Butler’s (2004) concept of livable and unlivable lives. A bearable life is a life that can hold up, which can keep its shape or direction, in the face of what it is asked to endure. To bear can also then be a capacity; a bearable life is a life that we can bear. A bearable life suggests that the conditions of liveability involve a relationship to suffering, to “what” a life must endure. A bearable life is a life where what must be endured does not threaten that life, in either the bare facts of its existence, or in the sense of its aim, direction, or purpose. A bearable life is a life that in being endured can keep its bearings. The unbearable life is a life which cannot be tolerated or endured, help up, held onto. The unbearable life “breaks” or “shatters” under the “too much” of what is being borne. You might note here that the conditions of bearability relate not only to the object (what someone is asked to bear, though it includes this what), and nor would it relate only to the subject (who is doing the bearing, though it includes this who). What makes for an unbearable life takes place somewhere between the subject and the world that throws “things” up; sometimes, something becomes “too much” to bear, where the “too much” is experienced as the breaking of a long history of involvement or the endurance that sustains suffering insofar as it is beared. When it is too much, things break, you reach a breaking point.

And then in Willful Subjects this question of breaking points, as moments when life is too much comes up again, this time as a question of snap. Let me share a short piece with you from chapter 4 of this book. They are not my final words on breaking points. It is question I will come back to again, because it is a life question: a question of how to live when what is required to keep going in the face of what you come against is too much.

Feminism: a history of disagreeable women!  If we hear this sentence as an exclamation it can sound empowering. And yet, to be given the content of disagreement is how others do not hear the content of your disagreement.  There is a “not hearing” at stake in the figure of the feminist killjoy, without question.  And there is no doubt that some of these experiences are wearing, even when we convert that figure into a source of energy and potential. And there is no wonder in the repetition of what we come up against, we might snap.  To snap might be to “snap the bond of fate” to draw again on Lucretius’s formulation. A bond of fate can be fatal.

Think of a situation in which a bond has become violent. What can make living with violence hard is how hard it is even to imagine or think the possibility of its overcoming; you might be isolated; you might be materially dependent; you might be down, made to think and feel you are beneath that person; you might be attached to that person, or believe that person when they say they will change; you might have become part of that person, have your life so interwoven with that person that it is hard to imagine what would be left of you if you left. But in spite of all of that, there can be a point, a breaking point, when it is “too much” and what did not seem possible becomes necessary. She fights back; she speaks out. She has places to go because other women have been there. No wonder that leaving a situation of violence can feel like snap: a bond of fate has indeed been broken. Perhaps the slow time of endurance can only be ended by a sudden movement. Or perhaps the movement might only seem sudden because we cannot “see” the slower times of bearing, what Lauren Berlant (2007) has called compellingly “slow death.” 

I think one of the reasons the feminist film, A Question of Silence (1982, dir. Marlene Gorris) remains so powerful is how it shows what we can call feminist snap. The film follows three different women: each of them has her own story, but they share what they are asked to endure: patriarchal culture. The film works by juxtaposing scenes of being worn down, worn out; sexism becomes a worn thread of connection. I saw this film most recently at the London Feminist Film Festival in 2012. One scene in particular had the audience of (mostly) women groaning in recognition. It is another table scene: there is one woman seated at a table of men; she is the secretary. And she makes a suggestion. No-one hears her: the question of silence is in this moment not a question of not speaking but of not being heard. A man then makes the exact same suggestion she has already made: and the other men turn to him, congratulating him for being constructive. She says nothing. It is at that moment she sits there in silence, a silence which is filled or saturated with memories of being silenced: her memories, ours. Femininity can be lived as the accumulation of experiences of being silenced; of having to over look how you are looked over. Sometimes we become accommodating because our views are not accommodated, a not that happens, over and over again.

If in the film, the women are shown as worn down; it does not just depict this wearing. There is an event. Three women happen upon each other because they happen to be in the same dress boutique at the same time. It might be a coincidence they arrive the same time, but that they are here is no surprise; they are doing what many women do, shopping for clothes as part of the ordinary routines of femininity. But whilst doing ordinary things they commit what appears to be an extraordinary act. One of the women is stopped by a male shop keeper as she attempts to steal an item of clothing; to take what she has not bought, what is not rightfully hers. Maybe she is stealing as an enactment of what has been taken from her. Maybe she experiences this event of being stopped as the injustice of not having recognized what has been taken from her. She is used to this injustice, she has come to expect it; but this time she snaps. They snap. These three women each have a hand in murdering the man with the tools that usually extend the female body; shopping trolleys, coat hangers, the high heel of a shoe. If it an act of rage and revenge, it is directed not only against this man, but this world. It is a seemingly random act of violence, a confirmation of female madness to the eyes of the law, but the film is told from the women’s point of view: and patriarchy becomes the reason.

When they are on trail, in the courtroom the women start laughing at the patriarchal reasoning of the Law. The laughter might be heard as hysterical, when you have a worldview that prevents you recognizing this reason. Maybe women are heard as reactive, as rash, as unreasonable, because the world we respond to, the injustices that keep coming up, again and again, do not come into view.  I have already noted how feminists might become mouthy; you might even shout in frustration at the difficulty of getting through; shout because you are already heard as shouting, realising an expectation in response to an expectation. We learn from this film how laughter can be another kind of willful and rebellious noise. When one woman begins laughing at the law, her laughter spreads. More and more women are caught up by it. To laugh compulsively, even violently, at the reasoning of Law, to gender as reason, is to expose its violence. It is also to risk being heard as the origin of the violence exposed. However the women’s laughter is heard, it becomes contagious for those who women in the courtroom who “get it.” Their laughter becomes a feminist lead. They leave the courtroom. Even if they are asked to leave, they walk out willingly, laughing with and to each other.

Feminist snap: to break the bond of femininity can be to make room for life by leaving the room.

Here breaking points (as snapping the bond) are re-described as opening by exiting.  Of course it can be hard to leave the room. This is possibly the most hopeful thing I have written because I do not attend to the hardness of leaving but the impossibility of staying. But we still have to work hard to reach this point.  It is an impossibility we can aim for.

Even feminist killjoys have their hopeful moments.

References

Berlant, Lauren (2007). “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry, 33: 754-780.

Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence,  London: Verso

I am currently preparing a new lecture that I will be giving in Vienna next week, “Diversity work as Emotional Work.” I will be drawing on some old material that I published in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional life (2012). It is interesting going back because you arrive with a slightly different lens, and you notice things even in your own interview transcripts that you just hadn’t noticed before. I have so enjoyed it: that reminder that projects are never over, that our materials are as full of life as we are. Or maybe more full of life, because sometimes we can feel depleted.

And that is what I am thinking about right now: feeling depleted. It is not that feelings are themselves being depleted (the rather economic model of emotions that is evident for instance in some uses of the concept of “compassion fatigue,” in which is it is assumed that emotions in being used are being used up) but that we can feel depleted. By saying “feeling depleted,” I am talking about material as well as somatic phenomena: of not having the energy to keep going in the face of what you come up against. Thinking back to my project on diversity work, I realise now how much of the account I offered was of the uneven distribution of energy, of how some bodies become depleted because of institutional requirements and how this depletion “registers” at a bodily level how institutions become stuck.

What do I mean by diversity work here? I am drawing on the model I offered in the conclusion of On Being Included. Firstly, diversity work can refer to work that has the explicit aim of transforming an institution; and secondly, diversity work can be what is required, or what we do, when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution. These two senses often meet in a body: those who do not quite inhabit the norms of the institution are often those given the task of transforming those norms. Some of us are given diversity as a task – becoming members of equality and diversity committees – because we are perceived as being diversity. When diversity becomes an invitation perhaps what is at stake is not so much who you are but who you are not: not white, not male, not straight, not able-bodied. If you are more than one of these “nots” you might end up on more than one committee! Embodying diversity can thus require additional work; the depletion of the energy of diversity workers is part of the embodied and institutional history of diversity.

In an earlier blog “It is tiring, all that whiteness,” I alluded to this phenomena (here). I described the experience of relief of entering a room and not encountering what you usually encounter, all that whiteness:

When you inhabit a “sea of brownness” as a person of colour you might realize the effort of your previous inhabitance, as the effort of not noticing what is around you. It is like how you can feel the “weight” of tiredness most acutely as the tiredness leaves you.  To become conscious of how things leave you is to become conscious of those things. We might become even more aware of whiteness as wearing, when we leave the spaces of whiteness.

When something is wearing, it is not always that you feel worn done. Feeling worn down can be a retrospective realization that you have been or are being worn down. It might be that in order to inhabit certain spaces we have to block recognition of just how wearing they are: when the feeling catches us, it might be at the point when it is just “too much.” You are shattered.

Feeling worn down: I think feminist killjoys are familiar with this feeling, that sense of coming up against the same thing, whatever you say or do. We have, I think, in face of this feeling to think about how to protect ourselves (and those around us) from being diminished. Audre Lorde taught us that caring for one self can be “an act of political warfare” as a form of self-preservation not self-indulgence (1988: 131). There are “those of us,” she reminds us, who were “never meant to survive” (1978: 32). The relations we develop to restore, to replete, are world making. With each other we find ways of becoming re-energised in the face of the ongoing reality of what causes our sense of depletion (I am willing to use the language of causality here, causality as contact zone). We can recognize each other, find each other, create spaces of relief, spaces that might be breathing spaces, spaces in which we can be inventive.

In Willful Subjects I reflected further on how tiredness (and depletion) can be unevenly distributed. In my discussion of habit and attunement in chapter 2, I drew on William James who quotes from the work of M. Léon Dumont to describe how over time a garment begins to cling more and more to the body that wears it. I think institutions could be thought of as rather like old garments: they acquire the shape of those who tend to wear them, such that they become easier to wear when you have that shape. Privilege could be thought of in these terms: another sense of wearing. Another of Dumont’s examples is the reduction over time of the force required to work a locking mechanism. The more you use a mechanism, the less effort is required; repetition smooths the passage of the key through the hole.  James describes this reduction of force or effort as essential to the phenomenon of habituation.  I would claim that the lessening of effort is essential to the phenomenon of privilege.  If less effort is required to unlock the door for the key that fits the lock, so too less effort is required to pass through an institution for bodies that fit. I think of social privilege as an energy saving device: less effort is required to pass through.  For other some bodies so much more effort is required to get through, to stand up; to stay standing.

Sometimes you can only stand up by standing firm.  Sometimes you can only hold on by becoming stubborn.  A social standing can thus be a material standing. Audre Lorde once wrote: “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone” (1984: 160). It would be hard to overestimate the power of Lorde’s description. Social forms of oppression can be experienced as weather. They press and pound against the surface of a body; a body can surface or survive by hardening.  For some bodies to stand is to withstand.  We can be exhausted by the labour of standing. If social privilege is like an energy saving device, no wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so trying. There is a politics to exhaustion. Feeling depleted can be a measure of just what we are up against.

Diversity work is emotional work because in part it is work that has to be repeated, again and again. You encounter a brick wall.  Even when a new diversity policy is adopted somehow things stay in place; they keep their place. I have many examples of these “wall encounters” that I shared in my book, On Being Included. To those who do not come against it, the wall does not appear: the institution seems open, committed and diverse: as happy as its mission statement, as willing as its equality statement. Things appear fluid.  I have said this before: things are fluid if you are going the way things are flowing. We can reflect on the significance of frustration here: it is not only that the wall keeps its place, but those who don’t come against it, don’t notice it.  This can be profoundly alienating as an institutional experience. No wonder that when the wall keeps its place, it is you that becomes sore.

One more thing: I wrote this blog when I was feeling depleted. And in that fact is another political lesson: sometimes we can feel less depleted by writing about being depleted or even just sharing that sense of being depleted with others.

References

Lorde, Audre (1988). A Burst of Light, Essays. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books.

——————–(1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg: The

Crossing Press.

———————-(1978). Black Unicorn. New Rork: W.W.Norton.

Sometimes writing can feel like a solitary affair. But writing is not solitary. When I write the texts I am citing become my companions; they are with me, often noisy, clamouring for attention. I have in my writing often worked with specific figures (feminist killjoys have become a key figure, this blog is organised around them, after all!). They too feel like my travelling companions. These figures not only come with me as I follow this or that trail; they often lead the way. The figure of the willful child, for instance, led me to materials I had not and probably would not have otherwise encountered. Even when sometimes I feel like I have arrived at this or that figure, or even that I have “come up” with them, I have in truth been following them; they are my leaders. I find that sense of being behind what one is writing about deeply suggestive for thinking through the (rather queer) nature of authorship. We often think of the author as behind the text in too limited a sense (say: the author as the originator or cause of an idea). But we can be behind texts in the sense of coming after them; we can even lag behind them.  I often find myself hurrying just to keep up!

The first figure I wrote about was the figure of “the stranger” in my book, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000). The image on the front cover (it is my least favourite of my book covers, but maybe it is right for it not to be favoured) evokes this figure: the stranger as a shadowy figure.

The stranger is a dark shadowy figure. I add the word “dark” deliberately here: any attempt to use dark as if it can be disentangled from its racial history is to be entangled by that history. The book explored these tangles; how racialisation works to make strangers, who then appear as if they are not already racialised, as if they are “anyone.”

In this book I was cautious about what it means to follow a figure. Borrowing from Marx’s description of commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital, I described “stranger fetishism” as a “fetishism of figures.” I suggested that the stranger can appear as a figure, one we assume has a life of its own, by being cut off from the history of its determination. To write about this figure is to give it a history; but of course, it is always possible that in following a figure one can retain it as fetish, as if the qualities it has acquired can be contained by its form. In my introduction to Willful Subjects (forthcoming, 2014) I discuss this possibility as a methodological challenge. The figure of the willful subject, I suggest, becomes a container for perversion. My aim in the book is not only to open but to spill the container. No wonder that messiness then becomes part of the process!

Strange Encounters proceeded from a rather simple observation. The stranger is not somebody we do not recognise; rather we recognize somebody as a stranger. I became interested in the techniques (we might think of these as bodily as well as disciplinary techniques) whereby some bodies are recognized as strangers, as bodies out of place, as not belonging in certain places. These techniques are formalized in Neighbourhood Watch or in discourses of child protection, in which the stranger is the one who must citizen/child must recognize, in order to protect themselves (their property, their bodies).  Recognizing strangers becomes a moral and social injunction.

It is worth me noting here that I became fascinated by the figure of the stranger in trying to account for some of my own experiences of being stopped (by police, by neighbours) whilst walking near my home in Adelaide. I was stopped by two policemen in a car, one of whom asked me, “are you Aboriginal?” It turned out that there had been some burglaries in the area. Aboriginality is figured as intrusion and criminality. It was an extremely hostile address and an unsettling experience at the time. As memory, it was an experience of being made into a stranger, the one who is recognized as “out of place,” the one who does not belong, whose proximity is registered as crime or threat.

The racialization of the stranger is not immediately apparent—disguised, we might say—by the strict anonymity of the stranger, the one who after all, we are told from childhood, could be anyone. My own stranger memory taught me that the “could be anyone” points to some bodies more than others. This “could be anyone” thus only appears as an open possibility, stretching out into a horizon, in which the stranger reappears as the one who is always lurking in the shadows. Frantz Fanon taught us to watch out for what lurks, seeing himself in and as the shadow, the dark body, who is always passing by, at the edges of social experience.  To give this figure back its history is to begin to hear how the stranger is pointed.

I have been thinking and writing all the time in the company of strangers; those deemed not only as not belonging but as threatening those who do belong, or even as threatening to belong. It was the saturated or “sticky” nature of this figure of the stranger that led me to write The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and then to think explicitly about how worlds become homes for some bodies and not others in Queer Phenomenology (2006). Most recently in writing about non-attunement for a paper, “Not in the Mood,” the figure of the stranger has again appeared. I became interested in how the experience of being attuned to others might create strangers not necessarily or only by making the stranger into an object of feeling (the stranger as the one we recognise as not being with), but as the effect of not leaning a certain way. Strangers thus appear at the edges of a room, dimly perceived, or not quite perceived, lurking in the shadows. Strangers become shadows: an effect of what and who our attention lights up.

I have been in the company of strangers. I am following their lead.

Dear feminist killjoys

I have been neglecting you recently! But feminist killjoys are out there, causing trouble, all on their own, if never alone. It is a little busy right now so I am sharing a piece I presented a while back, which I  hope to return some time soon (the idea of being sensitive to stigma is still underdeveloped, sorry about that).

I hope for your continued impatience!

All best

feminist killjoy

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Sensitivity to Stigma:  Eve Sedgwick and Queer- of-Colour Critique

Sara Ahmed

Goldsmiths College

Paper presented at Queer@Kings, March 19 2010 as part of Reconsidering the Closet: An evening reflecting on the legacy of Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), in celebration of the 20th anniversary of its publication

In her preface to the 2008 edition of Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reflects on her visceral solidarity with queer communities: “Growing up in a Jewish family after World War II, I had been sensitive enough to stigma that my child mind was deeply penetrated by it.” (xvii)  In my remarks today I want to think about how being sensitive enough to stigma can offer a queer methodology, as a bodily and epistemic approach to the world. One meaning of sensitivity is “easily affected.” Think of the refrain “don’t be so sensitive!” and suggest that before the “easily” there is often a “too.” To be sensitive can mean to be “too easily affected.” I will suggest in contrast that there is nothing easy about this sensitivity, even as I accept the excess of the “too.” Sensitivity to stigma requires labour even if it is shaped by an experience: we have to unlearn the tendency to turn away from what compromises our own happiness if we are to be affected by those negative affects that are not experiencable, at least in the first instance, as our own. I want to use my time today to consider how Sedgwick explores the vicarious relation between sexual and racial stigma. In doing so, my wider aim is to consider Eve Sedgwick’s contribution to queer-of-colour critique.

We can begin with Eve Sedgwick’s description of queer politics as “voluntary stigma,” as the “then almost inconceivable willed assumption of stigma” (2003: 30). Her argument could be related to Dan Brouwer’s who explores the use of tattoos in HIV/AIDS activism: “the conscious and willful marking of oneself as ‘tainted’ as a particular communicative and performative strategy grounded in visibility politics and practiced in the context of AIDS activism” (1998: 115). To mark the body can become a willed and willful act: stigma as political art. Of course, not all stigmas are voluntary; and this is partly the point. You will stigma given the history of unwilled stigma, which might include your own embodied history. Sedgwick herself contrasts the voluntary stigma of the picket lines with “the nondiscretionary” nature of skin color (2003: 30). Of course, colour might be experienced as unwilled (or even as a willful intrusion) only given the unmarked and unremarkable body of whiteness. I think some forms of sexual stigma too can be thought of as unwilled not necessarily because the stigma is “on the body” but because if a certain idea of the right body is in place, then some bodies will and do appear as the wrong bodies. If your body is already stigmatized, you might have to be willing (at least) to double that inheritance; to be stigmatized all over again. Eve is implying here that queer politics is willing to be stigmatized all over again.

Perhaps this all over again, can be trouble again. In his beautiful book Eve Sedgwick Jason Edwards reflects on how queer of colour critique has had or might have a critical relation to Eve’s work: “Although she is not unique among first-generation queer theorists, queer scholars concerned with race and ethnicity have often critiqued Sedgwick’s oeuvre for being concerned with a white Anglo-American or European canon” (2009: 185). We can place this observation alongside Eve’s argument about the importance of queers of colour to queer as such: “Intellectuals and artists of color whose self-definition includes queer – I think of an Isaac Julien, a Gloria Anzaldúa – are using the leverage queer to a do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state. Thereby the gravity (I mean the gravitas, the meaning, but also the centre of gravity) of the term ‘queer’ itself deepens and shifts.” (1994: p. 8). Are we as queers of color shifting the gravity of queer by challenging the whiteness of queer archives and queer bodies? Can we, do we, have we? Is the change of gravity implied here a kind of shift away from Eve’s own canon, a shift away, even, from Eve herself?

Yes, no, perhaps. We are turning toward Eve, of course, if we accept the invitation to turn away. I want to develop Eve’s idea that queer of colour critique offers a “new kind of justice.”  This new kind of justice might also “do justice” to Eve’s own work. This justice is premised on not simply staying proximate to stigma but thinking about how histories of stigma are proximate histories. Eve suggested that “notes on the management of spoiled identity” the subtitle of Erving Goffman’s book Stigma might be an appropriate subtitle for queer politics: though she adds to her queer subtitle the adjectives:  “experimental,” “creative,” and “performative” (1993: 4). This insistence on queer’s proximity to stigma is a hopeful insistence. A queer hope associates hope not with the overcoming of stigma, not with acquiring a body whose skin carries no trace of an injury, but hope in or even hope as the very failure to overcome.

Is there a promise as well as hope in Eve’s “sensitive enough”: a promise that an experience of a proximity to one kind of stigma can create a sensitivity to other kinds? I have for my own reasons been rather suspicious of this kind of promise. I grew up in Australia, where the desire for recovery from the violence of the colonial past is often a form of covering over. I am well aware of how whiteness can be performed as sensitivity to stigma. Sensitive white people can be scary; sensitive whiteness can be whiteness that wants proximity to the very scenes of its undoing, where the un-doing is at once a re-doing. I want to suggest is that Epistemology of the Closest teaches us how sensitivity to stigma does not require an assumption that “to fall” is to fall under the same shadow. At the very same time, Epistemology helps us to realise that a critique of the universalizing of stigma, a critique of the assumption that stigma provides a common affective horizon, does not mean that we have to think of histories of racial and sexual stigma as being apart. Not only that: it teaches us how it is not just in the bodies of queers of colour that these histories meet. We do not have to be the point of the intersection. What a relief: it can be tiring to be the point!

In Epistemology a reading is a meeting.  You have a meeting, if you are affected by something.  I want to think about Eve’s reading of Nietzsche on decadence, as an affective reading. Eve reads how Nietzsche’s texts are affected the object of his critique. She reads Nietzsche’s own revulsion of his former love object: Wagner, opera.  To be revolted is a rather odd affect. One is most affected by what one mostly rejects: “If one is to be fair to [The Wagner Case] one has to suffer from the destiny of music as from an open wound” (2008: 169).  Nietzsche’s skin keeps surfacing; the skin becomes the open wound, that which trembles with recollections; as that which is entered into. The thematics of decadence is redescribed by Eve as “a thematics of the organ of the skin – its fit, its integrity, its concealment, its breachableness, the surface it offers or doesn’t offer for vicarious relations” (171). To read the text is to attend to the failure of skin to contain.

Vicarious relations: Eve has taught me that precision can be a queer method. She uses words very precisely, in the precise sense of precise (from M.Fr. précis “condensed, cut short”): a word as a shortening, perhaps even a shortening of its own history.  A precision can have a startling effect. For example in Tendencies, when Eve talks of the free will as propaganda, I feel confident, I think I know what she means, and then she says she means propaganda in the sense of “to propagate.” To lose confidence can be the gift of a new thought. The word “vicarious” comes up in Epistemology precisely. Earlier in the text she describes how different stigmatised identities might be related through “chains of vicarious investment” (1994: 62).  Vicarious is a moving adjective. Eve is very attentive to adjectives: in her reading of Dorian Gray she lists the numerous uses of the adjectives “curious” and “subtle” (2008: 174), where the promiscuity of an adjective is a promiscuity of a rather queer sort. The word vicarious has a rather queer history:  “to substitute, deputy,” to change, exchange,” “to bend, turn.” A vicarious history is a history in which to substitute one thing for another is to bend a line, such that things become oblique, they do not keep their place. Histories are vicarious in the sense that each act of substitution is also a becoming saturated with affect: when one term replaces another, it is not a vacation of the former term. Remember that this is Eve’s point about the term queer: “it is a politically potent term…because far from being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene” (1993: 4). To cleave: to adhere, to stick. This cleaving is what allows queer to queer: twerk, to move across.

The substitutability of racial and sexual stigma is not predicated on a smooth passage from one to the other, rather it is about how things are turned by what they are in contact with. It is the figure of the addict that allows Sedgwick to turn from Nietzsche to Wilde, from The Genealogy of Morals to Dorian Gray. She shows how the decadence of drug addition is “suffused” with the homosexual. It is not the addict’s body she describes. She describes instead the national body and how opium becomes the “foreign substance” that opens up that body, an exposure to injury as an exposure to the other. In Dorian Gray, it is the opium that is the site of vicariousness: “a green paste, waxy in luster, the odor curiously heavy and persistent.” The opium is in the box, “a small Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, the sides pattered with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round crystals and tasseled in plaited metal threads.” (173) The foreigner enters. But Sedgwick does not simply read this moment as evidence of orientalism, of how the Chinese box comes to be a container for, and thus to contain, foreignness. It is Wilde’s own foreignness, his not quite whiteness, his alienation from the proper boundaries of the English (national) body, that is it stake. The homosexual is turned, or is even a figure for turning; the queer body can be turned into the racially inferior, which does not vacate whiteness, but let whiteness lose its place.

I want to take another quote from Sedgwick’s “Queer performativity” to think more about how sensitivity to stigma offers a queer turn. Sedgwick asks: “What’s the point of accentuating the negative, of beginning with stigma, and for that matter a form of stigma – Shame on you – so unsanitizably redolent of that long Babylonian exile known as queer childhood?” (1993: 4). I have often struggled with this description of queer childhood through the trope of Babylonian exile: it seems on first hearing to be a rather Orientalist trope. Babylon was a city-state of ancient Mesopotamia the remains of which are found in present-day Iraq, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad. If anything the bodies of those who mostly gather under the queer sign seem far removed from this Babylon. Eve taught me to listen to the sounds of our childhood. I recall a song from my own:

By the rivers of Babylon,

where we sat down,

there we wept,

when we remembered Zion.

Follow the turn. I had not known that this Boney-M cover of “Rivers of Babylon” in 1978 was based on Psalm 137. I did not know that “Babylon exile” referred not only to the exile of the Jewish people from Babylon, but was also a term used by African slaves. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues: “Babylon is a metaphor for complexity, exile, decadence that has resonated throughout Western modernity as well as the site of a series of historical experiences. It as the place of exile for the Jews and the imaginary locus of similar displacement for Africans in slavery” (2005: 4). The dictionary gives us at least two meaning for Babylon: it both refers to a historical place, and also suggests “a city or place of great luxury, sensuality, and often vice and corruption,” as well as “a place of captivity or exile.” A queer conjoining of sensuality, vice and exile: the very seat of your pleasure is what unseats you. I think I became too obsessed with tables in Queer Phenomenology to notice the queerness of the chair. But I did suggest that if we begin with the body that loses it chair the world we describe will be quite different. Eve began for us this work of redescription.

Babylon is a condensation of a history, a word that cleaves to the primary scene of its emergence, in its very potency, its capacity to move across. It is a saturated word and word for saturation. Daniel Boyarin in considering Freud’s own exile as a diasporic Jew notes how in one dream Freud is by a fountain in Rome and is almost in tears as his sons are brought to him to say goodbye, although they say goodbye not to him, but to another, who is their father (2000: 73). Freud makes the following association: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” Boyarin notes how in Freud’s dream Babylon is swapped for Rome (73). The swap is a kind of wish, Freud’s wish, that he pass his sons to another, those that can allow the sons to pass, to lose the signs of stigma. The conversion of Babylon to Rome is a straightening up: it is Freud’s wish to straighten the family line. Queerness emerges as the very failure to straighten an inheritance, to lose the sign of stigma. The long Babylonian exile which seems a mere passing description for a queer childhood thus conveys so much, perhaps even too much: it registers the perversion of history, its bent, the queerness of its turn. And in her claim that queers stay attached to the shame of childhood is also a political claim: a refusal to find what is promising in what lies ahead, a refusal of the idea of a promised land.

To stay sensitive to the scene of violence is to hear the sorrow of the stranger. The sorrow of the stranger is pedagogic not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it can estrange us from the familiar.  The familiar is revealed when we cannot pass into it. In another stigma memory I have already mentioned, Eve wonders at her tendency to relate a willful queer politics of stigma, of willingly assuming stigma, to what she calls the nondiscretionary stigma of skin color. She says in passing that her friend Brian “gave me his sign to carry.” (2003: 30) Eve was willing to carry this sign; for her friends, her students, for us, a queer community, who are sad, rightly sad, to have been left behind.  It is now up to us to carry Eve’s sign.  Sensitivity to stigma is a queer methodology; a way of attending to what or who is passed over. And it is what I hope we can inherit from Eve.

References

Boyarin, Daniel (2000). “Outing Freud’s Zionism, Or, the Bitextuality of the Diasporic

Jew” in Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler (eds). Queer Diasporas.

Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 71-104.

Edward, Jason (2009). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. London: Routledge.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2005). Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual

Culture. New York: Routledge.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2008). Epistemology of the Closet. Second Edition. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1998). Tendencies. London: Routledge.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993). “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the

          Novel.” GLQ: 1, 1: 1-14.

In my first ever blog (not that long ago, but already it feels like a long time ago!) I created a list. We might call this a list of the tendencies that feminist killjoys share, or a list of points that feminist killjoys tend to make (if feminists have to sharpen our tools just to get through the walls of perception, no wonder we tend to be heard as sharp!).

I suggested that you might be interested in a blog on feminist killjoys if you as a feminist killjoy tend to do x. One of these tendencies relate to citation.  Feminist killjoys “will point out when men cite men about men as a learned social habit that is diminishing (ie. most or usual citational practice).”

I am of course describing this feminist killjoy tendency in my own terms here. But so many of my feminist killjoy experiences within the academy relate to the politics of citation: I would describe citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.

These citational structures can form what we call disciplines. I was once asked to contribute to a sociology course, for example, and found that all the core readings were by male writers. I pointed this out and the course convener implied that “that” was simply a reflection of the history of the discipline. Well: this is a very selective history! The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part.

I have noticed as well that these citational practices can occur even when the topic is one that feminists have written extensively about.  I recently attended a conference in which there was a panel on reproductive justice, a topic that feminists have written rather extensively about, and two of the three papers were entirely framed around the work of male philosophers! Or take the case of scholarship on the body. Feminists have been writing about the body (and critiquing mind-body dualisms) for well over a century. But how often have I heard utterances in which such-and-such male theorist is identified as the origin of the turn to the body!

Indeed men can even cite only men when critiquing male privilege, as we can see here:

I also stated that this citational structure is “most or usual citational practice.” And I think within feminist and gender studies, the problem does not disappear. Even when feminists cite each other, there is still a tendency to frame our own work in relation to a male intellectual tradition. And there is certainly an expectation that you will recognise your place through giving your allegiance or love to this or that male theorist.

I mentioned this problem in my earlier blog post: “Creating Feminist Paths”.

I have noticed when giving talks or hearing other female academics giving talks how often the first question is ‘how does what you are saying relate to such and such a male theorist?’ as a way of slotting you into an established male intellectual genealogy. I think it is hard to convey how this works in the abstract; but it’s a style of questioning (where you almost become “the but” of a rebuttable, but what about, but what about) and you learn to hear the trouble they have in hearing you.

We are not just talking about citation within academic contexts. We are talking about what I think of as screening techniques: how certain bodies take up spaces by screening out the existence of others. If you are screened out (by virtue of the body you have) then you simply do not even appear or register to others. You might even have to become insistent, wave your arms, even shout, just to appear. And then of course how you appear (as being insistent) means you still tend not to be heard.

When we think this question “who appears?” we are asked a question about how spaces are occupied by certain bodies who get so used to their occupation that they don’t even notice it. They are comfortable, like a body that sinks into a chair that has received its shape over time. To question who appears is to become the cause of discomfort. It is almost as if we have a duty not to notice who turns up and who doesn’t. Just noticing can get in the way of an occupation of space.

When I think back to my own experience as an academic many of my most uncomfortable moments have been as a result of asking this question: who appears? And: who does not appear? There was one conference on Australian feminism for example, when only white women were invited as speakers. Hey: I was used to this, you come to expect this, and I didn’t say anything. Whiteness is wearing.

But then many of those speakers began talking about native title. They did so without referring to any Indigenous scholars; indeed they were talking about native title almost entirely in relation to the European philosophical tradition (Derrida, Delueze etc.) There was no discussion of the politics of that framing; no discussion of whiteness; or of what it means to speak from the position of occupying stolen land. When I pointed this out, it caused quite an upset. It became very uncomfortable. And then a special issue of a journal was published (again with all or only white non-Indigenous feminists) and the introduction stressed how Australian feminism was “good” with questions of cultural difference. Up against it, you come up against it. The wall keeps its place so it is you that becomes sore.

I am obviously giving my own account here, told from my point of view. But I want in this blog to think about as well as through these situations.

I am sharing below some paragraphs from the conclusion of On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. I will develop these arguments in Living a Feminist Life and will blog more about the politics of citation as I go along.

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When the restrictions governing who can occupy a category become explicit you are noticing what is around you, what gathers, but what does not ordinarily come into view.  When you realise that the apparently open spaces of academic gatherings are restricted, you notice the restriction: you also notice how those restrictions are either kept out of view or defended if they come into view.  Over and over again, it is revealed to me: this institutional lesson, which is also a life lesson, of coming up against a category in the very attempt to make the restrictions more explicit. How many times have I had male colleagues defending all male reading lists, all male speaker lists, all male reference lists!  To give an account of these defences is to account for how worlds are reproduced.

An open call comes out for an academic event on power and resistance. A number of speakers are named on the call: all male speakers but one, all white speakers, but one (is this “but one,” a way of holding onto the “all”?). Some of us point out the restriction. A wall comes up in the very denial of a wall. We begin with a friendly openness. It’s an open call, they say. Come along, they say. Take our places, they even say. Note here how the gesture of inclusion, which is also a promise of inclusion, can be offered in a way that negates a point about exclusion. To suggest incorporation as potential (come along as you can come along) blocks an acknowledgement that the open call was restricted as a call. How to respond? We point out publicly that the publicity of the call suggests the event is not open.  We didn’t mean anything by it, they say; it’s unfair to assume we did, they say. You have hurt our feelings; you have presumed knowledge of our intentions. That’s just who turned up. I respond: if privilege means going the way things are flowing, then letting things flow, will mean that’s who ends up going. The friendly tone ceases. You are the problem, they say. In assuming we have a problem, you are the problem.

It is not noticeable this “all” to those who pass through this “all” until you point it out, becoming a feminist killjoy, making sore points, assumed to be sore because of your points. I do not even usually bother to point out that the “all male” is often “all white,” though I could make that point, becoming an angry person of colour. Sometimes we have to take the risk of fulfilling the fantasies other people have of us!   I should note as well that I have experienced the most defensive reactions to such points from white male academics who think of themselves as “critical.” When criticality becomes an ego ideal, it can participate in not seeing complicity. Perhaps criticality as an ego ideal offers a fantasy of being seeing. Critical whiteness might operate as a way of not seeing in the fantasy of being seeing: critical white subjects by seeing their whiteness, might not see themselves as participating in whiteness in the same way.

At one moment I express my fatigue at the repetition of these gatherings, where the all is hidden by the assumed generality of a particular (open to all often translating into all male, all white; or all but one).  I express a sense of what is lost when academic gatherings are restricted to certain kinds of bodies. And someone replies that they thought I sounded “very 1980s,” and that they thought we had “got over” identity politics. Not only might we want to challenge the use of identity politics here as a form of political caricature, but we might want to think of this “over.” What does it mean to assume we have “got over” something? This claim might participate in a genre of argumentation I describe as “overing.” In assuming that we are over certain kinds of critique, they create the impression that we are over what is being critiqued. Feminist and anti-racist critique are heard as old-fashioned and out-dated, as based on identity categories that we are assumed to be over.

It is not always the case that “overing” arguments are made explicitly. I would say that in the landscape of contemporary critical theory there is a sense – sometimes spoken, sometimes not – that we need to “get beyond” categories like gender and race: as if the categories themselves have restricted our understanding; as if the categories themselves are the blockage points. Those who point out restrictions and blockages become identified with the restrictions and blockages they are pointing out, as if we are creating what we are describing. The hope invested in new terms (movement, becoming, assemblages, capacities) can thus be considered a way of “overing” as if these terms are how we “get over” the categories themselves. And in turn, academic work that works on questions of gender, or race, or which works with existing social categories (whether are not these categories are the starting points, and whether or not the categories are assumed in advance of starting), becomes associated with stasis.

An example of how categories are understood as “blockages of thought” is offered in the following statement here:

those of us who want to build on struggles in a way that embraces and amplifies the capacity to act instead of storying every momentary gain as ‘cooptation,’ —no wonder there is still a lingering melancholia of the left in some corners!—or those who want to think beyond the narrow categorizations of gender race and class (and ableism, ageism, et cetera) to new configurations and alliances. I think Hegel or Spinoza provides a kind of metaphysics that helps us move beyond current blockages in thought.”

Here race, gender, and class (and all that is relegated to the bracket, as well as all that is pointed to by the et cetera) enter theoretical discourse as “narrow categorizations.” The implication is that to exercise such categories would be to restrict not only the “capacity to act” but our capacity to think that capacity. Category thinking becomes seen as a narrowing of vision, associated with a lingering melancholia, as what is holding us back, stopping us from moving on. Perhaps those who point to such categories are the ones who linger, who are stopping the forward movement we might attach to progression. This is how those who “stay behind” can get in the way of a forward progression. I am not saying here that we need to dismiss these new theoretical vocabularies: we need resources to think differently as we encounter worlds. I am suggesting that the hope invested in “new terms” can mean turning away from social restrictions and blockages by identifying restriction and blockages with the “old terms” that we need to move beyond. And indeed, we need to note the narrowing of the descriptive or analytic potential of the old terms is part of this narrative of overcoming; a caricature of the work done by these terms allows the terms to be as it were, “given up.”

We can also consider how the language of critique and how that language is also assumed to be dated. I think even within some feminist writing, the idea that we should be critical of sexism has indeed been seen as rather dated and even as a habit that is blocking us, holding us down, or keeping us back: stopping us from reading or engaging most positively and affirmatively and creatively with the texts that are the objects of critique.  It would be timely to re-state the arguments that sexism and racism are not incidental but structural, and thus to understand sexism and racism, requires better, closer readings of what is being gathered. Attending to the restrictions in the apparently open spaces of a social world brings us into closer proximity to an actual world. We need feminist and anti-racist critique because we need to understand how it is that the world takes shape by restricting the forms in which we gather. We need this now; the time for this is now. We need this critique now, if we are to learn how not to reproduce what we inherit.