[Hey very kind readers and supporters! I know it’s been a long time since an update. As I look ahead to a very uncertain future in academia, I’ve been trying to retrain myself and explore lots of options. A course in Data Structures and Algorithms consumed a lot of my spare time these last few months. Also, we bought a house with friends. However, I think I’m ready to get this on track and have a bunch of writing to make up for the dry spell. Fair warning, these posts may be a little more searching and personal than strictly argumentative. And, well, if you know anyone at Verso Press or something, I’d be happy to just turn this newsletter into an advance for a manuscript and duck out of that academic thing altogether, á la Andrea Long-Chu. You know, just in case.]
I’ve been in Berlin for a week, on a research trip to the archives of the Schwules Museum. Being abroad, something I’ve had the privilege of doing a few times in my academic career, always heightens my senses to all those fine differences of behavior, sound, visual field, and semiotics and sets my brain to overdrive in trying to extrapolate some sometimes-specious grand meaning-making about those differences. In this weird state of hypersensitivity and relative dutylessness, I’d like to get to writing. In other words, while I’m here, I’d like to use this as a place to sift through and filter down some of those thoughts. I find the experience of immersing myself in another cultural system so similar to the one I live in, and yet with its own internal logic and values, one of the most valuable things for getting me to see my own culture in relief, as alienating as it can be (and as dubious as it is as an anthropological research method). Unfortunately, this means I’m going to be paywalling most the posts that come of this; I’m a wild oversharer and internet attention hog (in addition to my other porcine identities), but I’ve got no interest in career suicide. My own experiences researching Berlin’s gay fetish scenes, rendered in first person, seem like something best kept away from the prying Sauron-eye of Google. But remember, I’m happy to give out free subscriptions to those who ask (and identify themselves)!
My ongoing falling out with academic culture and my own, uh, research methodologies have me thinking about “the body.” And how bad we are at thinking about it. This is, of course, a cliché in academic theory – Western thought has long criticized its own neglect of the body in contrast with the mind, something that intensified with the wave of academic feminist criticism in the ‘70s. And the alienated, dulled, bored male intellectual igniting himself to the sensory pleasures of the world by rediscovering the pleasures of the body is an even more weatherworn literary cliché. (Some of that literature’s quite good! Disgrace, by Coetzee, and Lolita, by Nabokov, are novels I’d put in that category). But I mean something a little different and more specific by this. For one thing, I think a lot of those laments about Enlightenment philosophy’s neglect of “the body,” that reverse-original-sin that began when Descartes vomited up the apple of mind-body dualism with his Cogito, ergo sum, are themselves wildly abstract. The hell is “the body,” anyway? That definite article nags. Is it a concept, a figure, a metaphor, a reference to a statistically normal body averaging all the instances of actual bodies on our big dear planet? I admire the woman and her thought with something like a lifelong fiery fervor, but consider this rather representative opening to Judith Butler’s brilliant 1993 book, Bodies That Matter:
Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender? And how does the category of ‘sex’ figure within such a relationship? Consider first that sexual difference is often invoked as an issue of material differences. Sexual difference, however, is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices. Further, to claim that sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as claiming that discourse causes sexual difference. The category of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a ‘regulatory ideal.’ In this sense, then, ‘sex’ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls. Thus, ‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, ‘sex’ is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law. (1-2)