This conversation first appeared on Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast. To listen to an edited version of their discussion (and the rest of the episode) click here. What appears below is a more complete transcript of their conversation.
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When I sat down to read Andrea Long Chuâs essay âOn Liking Womenâ in n+1, I didnât expect it to reflect back to me so vividly a key aspect of my own experience of being a woman: wanting to be and to have things I shouldnât. The essay, which explores the origins of transness in desire on the one hand and in feminist politics on the other, sparked a debate long in the offing about whether desire, and in particular sexual desire, should be seen as the new frontier for social justice. The patterns of desire certainly seemed to follow discriminatory pathways. Was there something we could do about it? Should we try? Amia Srinivasan wrote for the LRB that while no one has the right to demand to have sex with anyone else, perhaps we have a duty to engage with our desire in the hopes of rendering it less exclusionary and less unjust. In late April, I sat down with Andrea in New York to discuss this further.
âAnastasia Berg
Anastasia Berg: So I thought weâd start by asking: What motivated this article? Is there a back story?
Andrea Long Chu: The material genesis of the project is that a friend of mine, Marissa Brostoff, pointed me towards n+1, and told me, âThereâs an editor at n+1 whoâs looking for someone to write something engaging trans folks and feminism.â And I said, âWell I have opinions about that!â So it was really just happenstanceâI hadnât been thinking of myself as someone who would be doing non-academic writing.
The story that begins the article is an account of me in high school, long before Iâve transitioned. Iâm on the athletics bus as the manager of the girlsâ volleyball team, and Iâm the only boy on the bus, and weâre driving to an away game. And it was like this really intense erotic experience for me. And one of the things you do as a trans person, especially if you donât have the luxury that some of us have of sort of always having felt âthis way,â is when you do transition you go back and think, Okay, so what are the signs? So I was looking for signs. And this bus ride seemed to be demonstrative of something, of a way that I sort of felt without knowing that I felt that way. So that was where the piece came from in terms of some of the more personal aspects, but it was a lot of things Iâd just been thinking about, and sort of dying to say and not feeling like I had a space to say it.
AB: You conclude the story of being on the bus by saying, âThe truth is I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.â And I think for some readers who are less familiar with how debates within feminist discourse and trans discourse have been going on this could sound pretty innocent. But actually this isnât very much an innocent statement at allâto talk about liking women and wanting to be like women in one and the same breathâbecause this is the kind of thing that has been used as an accusation.
ALC: Oh, absolutely. Something thatâs kind of lurking in the background in this piece that doesnât get discussed explicitly, I donât think, is that the first accounts of transsexuality and transvestitismâweâre talking about Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for the Science of Sexuality in Berlin in the early twentieth centuryâthose first accounts are sexual accounts. Transsexuality and transvestitism are understood as being essentially erotic projects, you know. One hears an echo of that in the discourse around the bathrooms, for instance, as if the reason that trans women transition is so that they can have easier access to little girls in bathrooms. As a result, weâve had a hard time talking about the role that desire, sexual desire, erotic interestâall of those thingsâplay in transition, which is⊠itâs soâitâs so incredibly real.
AB: Why did thatâtranssexuality as having to do with desireâbecome something that got denied and replaced with the model that you discussed of identity?
ALC: Well, the problem with the Hirschfeld model or the models that followed, the difficulty with those accounts is that the sexual valence that was treated to transsexuality was a pathologizing one. That was a part of a way of marking it as a form of perversion, which is something that again continues to today. In recent sexology thereâs this largely debunked theory that transsexual women are in fact men, and you can divide them into two categories: homosexual transsexuals, or straight trans women, and autogynephilic transsexuals, men who are aroused by the idea of being women.
This is, again, widely recognized as a pathologizing transphobic model, and so people are rightly skeptical of reintroducing sexuality in the equation. Thereâs been a lot of work both in terms of social activism and legally that has gone into keeping gender over here and sexuality over there. And where they have met seems to have been dominated by transphobic attacks on trans people. So thatâs made it, rightly so, very difficult to talk about the role played by sexuality in transition, in transness, and by extension not just sexuality but wanting in general.
AB: Another hurdle that you have to clear in introducing your arguments is the strong connection between TERFsââtrans-exclusionary radical feministsââand something that is captured under the title of âpolitical lesbianism.â Can you describe what is that position and what are these connections?
ALC: Right, so, a TERF is this label that, gosh I donât know the exact age of itâitâs got to be less than ten years old, could be even younger than that, this term that has sprung up to describe contemporary iterations of transphobic feminism which usually go along the lines of something like, âTrans women are in fact men; they are interlopers who are here because they have some kind of perverted interest in invading womenâs spaces; and they (notably) reinforce gender roles, when in fact the feminist project should be dismantling those roles.â
Itâs really important to say that this is not necessarily what we would call a biological essentialist position. This actually is often extremely copacetic with the thing we call social constructionismâwhich is spoken about now as if we all sort of understand what that means. In many cases TERFs are arguing, on the one hand, that gender has been socially constructed, and on the other hand that therefore the goal of feminism should be to deconstruct or to dismantle gender as it has been constructed. This is sort of the TERF position that you can find if you go online, you know, they have their own subreddits; they have their own websites. And honestly I thought I was going to get more TERF hateâI was sort of looking forward to that. [laughs]
AB: I was going to ask, what was the extent of it? Youâre okay? Youâre not getting bullied online?
ALC: No, Iâm not getting bullied online the way some women do, but one of the potentially more controversial things about this article is that I amâsympathetic wouldnât be the right word, but Iâm generous in how I read TERFs. And I sort of love the idea that TERFs have no idea how much I agree with them about things. Not everything, but a number of things.
One of the things I argue is that this name is misleading insofar as it follows implicitly a kind of historiographic move where the radical in trans-exclusionary radical feminist is supposed to signify that the TERF is actually this sort of holdover from the Seventies. As in, she was a radical feminist in the Seventies, and she just sort of kept being a radical feminist instead of getting with the picture and jumping onto all the other waves and learning to be more, you know, âintersectional.â Itâs an account of TERF as essentially a kind of anachronism. And I donât think this is true.
It is indeed true that there are folks who, in the Seventies, were anti-trans, who continue to be anti-trans today. But the implication is that radical feminism as such, feminism from 1968 to sometime in the 1970s, was completely anti-trans. And thatâs plainly untrue.
But where there is a connection is that the TERF is more rightly described not just as a radical feminist, but as having something in common with this thing that happened in the Seventies called political lesbianism. Political lesbianism being the idea that lesbian is actually a political position, sometimes a spiritual one, sometimes but not always a sexual oneâso you could be a lesbian without having sex with women. [In this view,] lesbian was a political position that you could choose that represented a kind of separatism from men, or at least a kind of strike on heterosexuality, and it had to do, I think, with lesbian as a conceptâwhich no one agreed on what this meant!
Today lesbian is kind of almost an anachronistic term because everyone is, like, queer. Lesbian sounds sort of old fashioned, and kind of dowdy⊠like youâre middle aged and you hike a lotâthat kind of thing. (Not that there arenât lesbians to whom that applies.) But I was just reading the Lesbian Tide, which was this magazine from (I think) â71 to â74. And this particular issue of the magazine was right after this infamous conference known as the Second West Coast Lesbian Conference of 1973. The fascinating thing about this issue is that itâs got pieces by different people who were at the conference; none of them agree with each otherâthereâs so much infighting, itâs incredible. And one of the things that theyâre infighting about is the word lesbian. Like, this is called the West Coast Lesbian Conference and no one agrees on what a lesbian is! We wouldnât argue about this nowâwe would argue about for instance what trans means, or potentially what queer means. Those are the terms in which people are storing their political optimism, but in the Seventies, among a certain group of feminists, the term that housed that optimism temporarily was lesbian.
AB: What is the connection to be drawn between today’s TERFs and yesteryearâs political lesbians? And why is it productive in introducing another way of thinking about being trans and transitioning?
ALC: Political lesbianism was the height of a contradiction that had developed within feminism: the more powerful your critique, the more you could enumerate the ways in which patriarchy functioned on an everyday level, the more impossible it seemed to just live your life without being immediately subject to all of these technologies of oppression. And what that produced is a kind of revolutionary subject in the Seventies, the political lesbian, who could through sheer force of political will change her own desires and reorient herselfâdecide that she was going to leave her husband, that she was going to abjure the company of men.
AB: And so would you say that the analogy between that position and the TERFsâ position is that in the TERFâs mind what the transgender woman does is, in fact, give in to a certain kind of desire that she refuses to engage with critically?
ALC: Yes, absolutely, but I think the other important thing is that trans exclusion, for instance at the famous 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, wasnât these feminists just sitting around and scheming about how to make trans womenâs lives horrible. The skepticism, to put it mildly, among some of those feminists (but not all of them) of transsexual women was actually last in a long line of suspicions.
So, the radical feminist Robin Morgan, who spoke at this controversial conference in â73, says in her speech that thereâs what she calls an âepidemic of male styleââfeminism has been invaded by an epidemic of male style. And what she means by âmale styleâ is not actually transvestites or transsexuals, even though thatâs sort of the extreme example. What she means is like, bar butches! Like, what sheâs referring to are women who are listening to the Rolling Stones, or who are collaborating with the brocialist members of the New Left, or those who are just here to fuck and arenât actually interested in the sort of tender, caring, emotional, nurturing environment that the lesbian conference is supposed to be.
What happened in the Seventies is that maleness was abstracted: youâre no longer actually talking about men, youâre talking about some sort of relationâwhich was in itself misogynist, patriarchal, oppressive. That structure could then be repeated across all experience. The dream of separatism was sullied by the fact that when you get a bunch of lesbians on the UCLA campus for a couple days for this conference they are just like at each othersâ throats the whole time!
And there were some women, according to Morgan, who were collaborators, and what being a collaborator meant was that you still retain some aspect of this âmale style.â So the trans woman, or the transsexual womanâBeth Elliott, in this case, at this conferenceâis just the last in a whole series of different ways that patriarchy could be smuggled into lesbian utopia.
I donât think it was nearly as much about an anti-trans animus as it was about trying to take to its fullest consequences the implication of an analysis. And this is why maybe I have some sympathy for [TERFs], or why I want to read TERFs generously, because I think thereâs a real experience of finding out that critique wasnât going to do the thing it said it was going to do for you⊠And as [radical] feminist theory developed, in its nascent stages, the stronger it got and the more honestly compelling that it got, the more one came to realize that it was going to be impossible to live by it. I think thereâs something very poignant that was happening, and that TERFs sort of havenât acknowledged.
AB: It marks also a deep difference between that generation that youâre describing and what the term TERF gets applied to today, to go back to TwitterâŠ
ALC: For the contemporary Tumblr TERF, or Twitter TERF, there is an adoption of some of these radical feminist positions or dilutions of them, but as I say in the piece I think it has a lot more to do actually with how the internet works. Feminism on the internet has become a fandom. And what I mean by fandom is that itâs actually a form of generating feelings of belonging that uses forms of knowledge, not insofar as they are true or false, but insofar as they help produce a feeling of being with others. So there are protocols that have developed on the internet about being feminist, and if you follow those protocols, then you can feel feminist, and you can feel part of a group. And I think TERFs are actually part of that. The protocols are different protocols, but I think in large part theyâre doing what everyone does at the internet, which is staring off into the void of the thing and trying to trying to see if thereâs life on the other end.
AB: With all of this put in place, after this very generous reading that you perform, where do you come in in the piece?
ALC: So I have a lot of sympathy for the separatist position on a personal level because it feels like itâs meaningfully descriptive of something that I felt myself in terms of my own transition. I did feel like it was an act of defiance or an act of just rejection: I have never wanted to spend time with men, least of all myself! And so at some point I just put that into practice. I was my own Second West Coast Lesbian Conference of 1973.
AB: And yetâŠ
ALC: And yet! Well, one, itâs not like I donât interact with men in my life anymore. But two, I couldnât actually embrace the position that, well, Iâm the most political lesbian that there ever was, because all the things that I want are still completely mired in the same patriarchal, misogynist culture that radical feminists are already discovering in the Seventies. The TERF position that I would through transition be solidifying and reproducing normative gender rolesâI find that argument completely convincing. I mean I think itâs completely right, because I know that itâs right, because itâs the thing that I want! Like, Iâm not interested, actually, not at all interested in dismantling gender. No⊠like, I am completely aware that these things are bad for me.
AB: Let me first read something that is one of my favorite parts of your article, and then I want to ask you what this claim means. So you say, âThat trans lesbians should be pedestaled as some kind of feminist vanguard is a notion as untenable as it is attractive. In defending it, I would be neglecting what I take to be the true lesson of political lesbianism as a failed project; that nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle. You could sooner give a cat a bath.â
And reading this and reading the article I think I could hear two kinds of argument. One is, I canât do anything with what I want. Desire is not something that I can change and affect by way of second order desires. And in another piece of yours, âDid Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?ââwhich taught me about a genre of porn I was not familiar with, which was excitingâyou say, âMost desire is nonconsensual. Most desires arenât desired.â So thatâs one way of hearing your claim: we canât do this, and so why waste our time? And then thereâs something else, which is the question should we if we could? When you say something like ânothing good comes of trying to force desire to conform to political principle,â I hear both options.
So, before you answer, let me just introduce a recent argument made by Amia Srinivasan for the LRB. The main question she takes up in her piece is do we have a duty, or a responsibility, to try and work on our desiresâespecially insofar as theyâre reflective of discriminatory political practices? So itâs not just a question of you enforcing the patriarchy by wanting to present yourself a certain way, or wanting to be in a certain kind of relationship. Sheâs also talking about the sexual choices that people make. And sheâs saying that many are exclusionaryâthey seem to follow certain kinds of patterns of discriminationâand she asks whether or not we have a duty to try to change them? Sheâs subtle in her response, but I think sheâs saying, insofar as we can change them, we do have a duty to try to do so. So, this is the question to you: Can we, can we not, and should we if we could?
ALC: I read with great pleasure Amiaâs piece in the LRB, and first of all, I agree that these are difficult questions. Iâm absolutely aware that desire is childlike and chary of government, but am I talking about a rapistâs desire, am I talking about a racistâs desire? Who gets to fall under that and am I prepared to take that all the way to the end? And gosh, I think itâs very complicated. But! She isnât really talking about whether we need to acknowledge that the rapistâs desire to rape is as equally ungovernable as any other desire, though thatâs an important question. The easiest fix there, by the way, is to say desire and action are different things, so like you can tell someone to do something, but you canât tell them not to want something, because ontologically, itâs not going to work.
AB: Well, arenât we as adults supposed to learn to control certain desires? We are not supposed to be acting on all of them. Forget who weâre attracted to! I mean basic things: you might be in one relationship and you might be attracted to someone else, and we all learn to govern that, and that seems to be a separate question from whether or not we should be trying to change our own desires. The latter is a much more radical claim. And Srinivasan herself says at a certain point âno one wants a mercy fuckâŠâ
ALC: Right!
AB: And so what sheâs trying to suggest is not, you know, as a matter of course you would get moral bonus points if you go and have sex with someone who normally less people want to have sex with. Sheâs talking about actually trying, to the extent that we can, to exercise our willpower on our desire. And then it seems to me that youâre totally right in putting that question of acting on and not acting on given desires aside: sheâs talking about trying to want different things.
ALC: Yeahâactually, actually trying to change your desire.
AB: She references this exercise that Lindy West has written about where she looks at photos of women who are overweight and she asks herself, What it is to consider this beautiful? And the thought is that that is supposed to open her eyes to seeing, or finding attractive, things that she didnât find attractive before.
ALC: I had forgotten that she brought up Lindy West. I canât stand body positivity. I cannot stand it. It is just anathema to me. Itâs moralizing. Itâs really fucking hard to figure out a way to tell people to change their desires that isnât moralistic, and that isnât actually about doing the same kind of thing to desire that supposedly queer politics was supposed to be against in the first place. Queers are very, very bad at talking about desires that they are not supposed to have, especially considering that they are people who have, by definition, desires that they are not supposed to have.
The reason that I canât stand body positivityânot just that I think thereâs something very churchy about like staring at like a photo of someone who is fat like you are and meditating your way into affection for yourselfâthe reason I canât stand it is because I feel implicated. Because what it says is that my self-loathingâand I donât mean mine generally, I mean mine, mine, Andrea Long Chuâs self-loathingâis a result of a lack of having had my consciousness raised. I say churchy not by accident, I do think thereâs a kind of Protestantism to the notion of, at least we have to try. No, my self-loathing is precious to me, and it is a form of knowledge about myself, and itâs also by its own very structure fundamentally incapable of being fixed through consciousness-raising because self-loathing is a form of consciousness.
Thereâs this scene that one can imagine if one is a woman, or even if one isnât, of standing in front of the mirror and assessing oneâs body and you donât like your gut and you wish your nose was a different shape and you have a double chin and you feel like your breasts are too big or your breasts are too smallâwhatever it is. Now you can run all of your feminist analyses about how this is patriarchy, and itâs body-phobic and itâs fat-phobic and itâs sexist and itâs the cosmetic industry and beauty standards and the media. You can do all of this, and you will not at any point be wrong. But, you also wonât feel better. If anything now you will feel worse, because now youâre ugly and stupid.
AB: Or morally depraved. Youâre wrong for wanting to be different, for doing anything to be different than you are.
ALC: Right. So with regards to the erotic preference thing, Iâve had this conversation with other folks, I know itâs a really important conversation. Often times the sort of âno fats, no femmes, no Asiansâ comes up, which I think Amia mentions, maybe.
AB: Yeah, thatâs right.
ALC: Itâs a real question.
AB: So in context she begins with a group of men called incels, âinvoluntary celibates,â whose main creed is to claim that they are entitled to sexâthat they have the right to sex thatâs being denied to them by evil bitches. So she dismisses that, obviously, but then asks, do we, nevertheless, have this duty to work on our desires? She says, âThere is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferencesââand then she delivers these titles in caps, âNO DICKS, NO FEMMES, NO FATS, NO BLACKS, NO ARABS, NO RICE, NO SPICE, MASC-FOR-MASCâare never just personal.â And that is her invitation for us to think about the ways we can work on our desires because they are themselves the result of these political processes.
And Iâll say one more thing that has really been bugging me. She says at some point, âthe question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that “who is desired and who isnât is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.â And what really puzzled me for a while was: What does it mean that itâs âa political questionâ? I actually couldnât parse the phrase. What does it mean that she says itâs a question? The only thing I could come up with is that she means itâs a political problem. That there is here an injustice (and I think this is the real controversial claim). We think, well, itâs unfair that Iâm not as attractive as someone else, but is it unjust in the sense that it presents society with a political task that some people are not drawing the same attention as others?
ALC: The scarier question is, is it unjust and also none of us have a moral obligation to do anything about it? Iâm not sure I want to endorse that claim, but thatâs the real question that rears its head. Of course you can say any given personâs desire is produced through the interplay of power relations. Thatâs a truism of the post-Foucault academy: that everything is constructed and itâs all power. Itâs not that thatâs meaningless. Obviously something like âno fats, no femmes, no Asiansâ is a desire that has a history, and has a politics, that can be described by reference to political processes: imperialism, white supremacy, and also, like, the world-historical defeat of the female sex are all included in this desire. You can show how history has led to this moment, but it doesnât necessarily mean that knowing that is going to do anything.
So say someone says, âI donât like sleeping with fat, femme, or Asian guys.â The implication of the critique of that is that fat, femme, and Asian guys, (1) want to be slept with by that person, and (2) that being fat, femme or Asian requires you by definition to want to sleep with people who are fat, femme or Asian. The people who are victims in the ecology of desire are assumed to have, by nature, or by virtue of their marginalized position in the structure, desires of their own which are inevitably more ethical than anyone elseâs. I think that is a kind of moralism that can be really insidious because it implies that there are people who are so oppressed that they are not allowed to want things that are bad for them. Everyone should be allowed to want things that are bad for them. I think Iâm prepared to defend that statement at least.
So the journalist Meredith Talusan, who writes for this publication them., had this piece actually a year or two ago (itâs relatively recent): the headline is âWhy canât my famous gender nonconforming friends get laid?â, and sheâs talking about folks who are friends of hers, nonbinary femmes, who are having a lot of trouble getting dates. When they sign up for Tinder they have to decide if theyâre going to say that they are men or women. Are they going to say they are into straight guys or gay guys?
So thereâs a lot of obstacles, just purely representationally. Tinder is not a happy space for them, which Iâm completely sympathetic to. But the conclusion that Meredith comes to is not dissimilar to Amiaâs, which is that other peopleâs desires should change: these men should be open to their gayness being changed and becoming bi in some expansive sense, or pansexual, or whatever. And this is actually, according to her, a kind of gift that trans people give the world, the sort of inherent queering of other peopleâs sexuality. What this misses is that itâs quite likely that the reason these gay men donât want to fuck her nonbinary femme friends is because these gay men want to fuck the exact same people that her friends want to fuck, which is masc-er menâideally, straight men! So the reason they canât have sex, the reason their desires are not compatible, is that they share the exact same fucking desire, which is to be fucked by someone who is masc enough to pass as straight, or who is just straight period. (This is the famous top shortage, of course.)
Itâs not that this piece isnât responding to a real problem. Itâs not that there isnât real loneliness or pain or anxiety, all of these things: I completely affirm the affective experience of her friends on Tinder. But thatâs not the point. The point is, how do you adjudicate when itâs not actually, one person wants something thatâs good for them, the other person wants something thatâs bad? How do you adjudicate when both people want something thatâs basically bad for them? How would you then go about adjudicating between those desires? And the point here is not to say Meredith Talusanâs friends need to just suck it up because the world is hard, thatâs not at all what Iâm saying. What Iâm saying is, her friends should be allowed to want things that are bad for them. Thatâs one of the ways in which I would part most strongly with Amia, in my worry that moralism about the desires of the oppressor can be a shell corporation for moralism about the desires of the oppressed.
AB: Thatâs really, really interesting because it means that the project that Amiaâs describing, and sheâs trying to make room for⊠Sheâs quite gentle about it, but she tries to make room for a certain kind of project of thinking critically about our own desires insofar as they reflect this political and moral principles. But the first step is then to recognize that the desires of the people that weâre now supposed to be more accommodating, that weâre supposed to direct ourselves with in our projects of self-fashioning, we would have to look at those. And once we start looking critically at those, itâs not clear why weâre looking at the desires of the oppressor to begin withâbecause now it looks like the moral responsibility of the privileged to be accommodating to desires that arenât any better, or arenât any less reflective of the same discriminatory patterns. And then that makes you think that maybe we should step back and rethink the whole thingâthat something is messed up about the question.
ALC: Right, right.
AB: Is that right?
ALC: Yes! I think that is right.
AB: I think thatâs fascinating.
ALC: My desire to, like, lose a bunch of weight may be indebted to all of these misogynist forms and patriarchal structures and all of that, and I might decide that I donât want that desire. Or someone else like my therapist or my friend might tell me, âNo! Love yourself, you should practice self-care, you should stare at photographs of fat women, and learn to feel better about yourselfâŠâ Thatâs another form of desire, and thatâs equally as ungovernable as the first one. Iâm not sure if you can moralize about even the desire to moralize. I mean, it does start to get a little heady, but I do think we can think about those shoulds, and we can think about ethical and political imperatives, in terms of a desire.
AB: When Amiaâs article came about, one thought that I had was that itâs very hard for me to imagineâand perhaps this is a failure of my imaginative powersâbut itâs very hard for me to imagine a society in which an individualâs desires do not include and exclude, or follow different gradations. Whatever people find attractive today they might find completely unattractive in a hundred years, but they will always find something attractive and something unattractive, and thatâs essential to desire, thatâs not just a function of a political system that works on unjust hierarchies.
ALC: I do think thereâs sort of preferential nature to desire, period. Desire involves cutting a lot of things out of the world, so that you can imagine a space where your object is going to give you a thing that you want it to give you. That always involves a certain amount of fantasy and potentially a certain amount of violence. Desire has to be a process of subtraction. And I think itâs probably always going to be a process of subtraction. You canât want everything. It wouldnât be wanting it if it was everything.
The question of whether sexual desire is different from other kinds of desire in degree or kind is a really, really good question. My first impulse is to say well, sort of, you know, of course everything is sexual, all desire has the shape of sexual desire. But I think it might sort of be the reverse actually. Iâll put it this way: itâs very easy to show how lots of things that are not sex are in fact about sex. Itâs also very easy to show that sex is very rarely about sex. Like people donât have sex because they are experiencing intense erotic fixation on each other. They have sex because theyâre bored, or theyâre nervous, or theyâre trying to renew a sense of kinship that is at risk of unraveling. You have sex for all of the kind of reasons that you might do anything, which is to say usually for sort of kind of oblique and ordinary and banal reasons. You know, I love Freud, but Iâm not a sort of capital-f Freudian in this sense: itâs not like the libido in some great cosmic way. So Iâm saying that sex isnât really about sex, and yet Iâm still talking a lot about sex, and I think the reason for that is that sex is one of the places where the structure of desire is laid bare, or becomes available. Insofar as sex is sort of pointless, desire can feel purposive in other places in life (even though it probably isnât) but in sex like the purposiveness is shown for like the ruse that it is.
AB: I still think that thereâs a way to think of the difference between desire and sexual desire, although we might then in a second step have to dismantle these differences. One way of putting it is something like, well, if you can imagine human life without the unconscious I can still make sense of the fact that we will do a lot of thingsâseek food, for example, but it will not make sense that we would have sex the way we do. We will procreate, maybe we will rub against things, but it would not make sense that we would do things that are strange and perverse and illogical and bad for us, as so many of our sexual desires demand that we do. The way youâre putting things now makes me think that itâs precisely the impossibility of imagining us without an unconscious that sort of undoes that whole thought experiment. Because we are not in actuality the beings that live with a lot of desires that make sense and then are burdened with one extra desire that doesnât make sense, but we are beings that are deeply implicated sexuallyâall of our activities are not activities like a giraffeâs, whoâs just feeding. And thatâs where I stand, but I do think that thereâs something, that thereâs a certain kind of distinction that one can maintain. Another way of putting it is that, like we were saying about the slippage that goes with the concept of action, when you say donât want it itâs one thing to say, âYou canât do it,â i.e., you canât exclude people because itâs not right, and another thing to say, âNo, you have to get hot for people that youâre not finding attractive.â These are different ways of thinking about desire.
ALC: Right. But because sex isnât about sex you have to do other things. Thatâs why you have conversations or eat or go to the movies or read a book, or whateverâbecause the thing sex was supposed to be about it turns out it wasnât about. So that would be a model of sublimation where itâs not that you have an unconscious desire to fuck and then you sublimate it into something like typing away at your computer in your cubicle; it would be that in the realm of sexual experience you actually have none of that, and in order to produce the thing that you thought was going to be part of sex, you have to go into your cubicle, or make great art, or run for office, or whatever else you might do.
AB: I think some of that has to be the case once you also realize sublimation is not an individual project, repression or sublimation is not something that each of us does, itâs a societal project. And Freud, at the end of his career, begins to think in those ways and suggests that an entire society comes out of our inability to organize our life around this purposeless activity of constantly trying to sleep with your mother.
Andrea, before we finish I would like to ask you about a project youâre working on, called Bad Politics.
ALC: Bad Politics is the name of my academic book project that Iâm working on right now. The way I define âbad politicsâ is: bad politics is what happens when people who are living under oppression donât feel like resisting and do something else instead. Thatâs responding to the state of the academy (first and foremost), so there are critical habits that have developed over the past twenty to thirty years that by now have their own genre conventions, and that can, in my opinion, limit the way that we do cultural analysis. And this is because of the formation of identity studiesâwomenâs studies, gender studies, African American studies, various cultural studies that involve some sort of identity group.
What has happened is that identity studies has conceived itself from the get-go as being an academic discipline whose unity derives not from a shared object, nor from a shared methodology, but from a shared political commitment. There are these disciplines which are founded on the idea that doing academic work is a form of political action. This is the fantasy of critique as a political act. When I say fantasy I donât mean something that isnât true, I just mean something which you would believe even if it wasnât true. And what this fantasy means is that we often tend to do one of two things when we look at objects: we either bludgeon them for being too complicit with the status quo, or we celebrate them for reflecting membership in the very same political project in which we as critics believe that we are, in this moment, in the writing of criticism, participating. So what that means is that we spend a lot of time looking for objects in which we can see our own reflections and not a lot of time sitting with objects that disappoint us.
So the project is about learning to be disappointed as a criticânot to quarantine disappointment as if it were some kind of infection which could ruin the project. And very simply this means remembering that most non-normativity isnât anti-normativity. As anyone who has ever taught a class of student knows, most disruptions are not productive. Thatâs also to say most disruptions are not supposed to be productive. So the project is about thinking about objects whose non-normativity doesnât amount to resistance in the way that we like to imagine in order to flatter ourselves.
AB: So certain things are non-normative, but they are not thereby anti-normative. They are not shaking up the fundamental structures. You call out sissy porn, and you show why we donât have to overstate the political-moral virtue of the project of sissy porn just because it looks like itâs defying these standards of sexuality. Thatâs one side, but are you also saying that there are forms of kind of productive disruption that are not simply and recognizably political?
ALC: The project is invested in finding, or seeing if one can find, modes of valuing that are not necessarily political. Itâs not like I am against anti-normativity. I just think something dangerous happens when we start to conflate validity as such with political validity. You see this on the internet all the time, where âIâm sadâ is not valid. âIâm sad for X, Y, and Z political reasons, I can show how my depression or my misery, my self-loathing is like part of this system of oppressionââthat has a kind of soundness intellectually, or is supposed to, that just being sad wouldnât. I think that thereâs good reason to think about, and good political reason even, to think about validity outside of the political. And what that means is that the project is really invested in describing shit. I like to say that almost everything in the world doesnât have a name. Which is really an incredible opportunity. It means thereâs a lot to do. And thereâs a lot to be gained, I think, from coming up with names for things. Weâre not done with that. A name sort of like lifts up the curtain on a previously undisclosed portion of reality, and that, I think, can be valuable in itself. We were speaking before about what is the intellectual for, and at least one of my answers would be, it’s for naming things, because we donât have enough names. We should have more names.
AB: Thank you.
This conversation first appeared on Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast. To listen to an edited version of their discussion (and the rest of the episode) click here. What appears below is a more complete transcript of their conversation.
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When I sat down to read Andrea Long Chuâs essay âOn Liking Womenâ in n+1, I didnât expect it to reflect back to me so vividly a key aspect of my own experience of being a woman: wanting to be and to have things I shouldnât. The essay, which explores the origins of transness in desire on the one hand and in feminist politics on the other, sparked a debate long in the offing about whether desire, and in particular sexual desire, should be seen as the new frontier for social justice. The patterns of desire certainly seemed to follow discriminatory pathways. Was there something we could do about it? Should we try? Amia Srinivasan wrote for the LRB that while no one has the right to demand to have sex with anyone else, perhaps we have a duty to engage with our desire in the hopes of rendering it less exclusionary and less unjust. In late April, I sat down with Andrea in New York to discuss this further.
âAnastasia Berg
Anastasia Berg: So I thought weâd start by asking: What motivated this article? Is there a back story?
Andrea Long Chu: The material genesis of the project is that a friend of mine, Marissa Brostoff, pointed me towards n+1, and told me, âThereâs an editor at n+1 whoâs looking for someone to write something engaging trans folks and feminism.â And I said, âWell I have opinions about that!â So it was really just happenstanceâI hadnât been thinking of myself as someone who would be doing non-academic writing.
The story that begins the article is an account of me in high school, long before Iâve transitioned. Iâm on the athletics bus as the manager of the girlsâ volleyball team, and Iâm the only boy on the bus, and weâre driving to an away game. And it was like this really intense erotic experience for me. And one of the things you do as a trans person, especially if you donât have the luxury that some of us have of sort of always having felt âthis way,â is when you do transition you go back and think, Okay, so what are the signs? So I was looking for signs. And this bus ride seemed to be demonstrative of something, of a way that I sort of felt without knowing that I felt that way. So that was where the piece came from in terms of some of the more personal aspects, but it was a lot of things Iâd just been thinking about, and sort of dying to say and not feeling like I had a space to say it.
AB: You conclude the story of being on the bus by saying, âThe truth is I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.â And I think for some readers who are less familiar with how debates within feminist discourse and trans discourse have been going on this could sound pretty innocent. But actually this isnât very much an innocent statement at allâto talk about liking women and wanting to be like women in one and the same breathâbecause this is the kind of thing that has been used as an accusation.
ALC: Oh, absolutely. Something thatâs kind of lurking in the background in this piece that doesnât get discussed explicitly, I donât think, is that the first accounts of transsexuality and transvestitismâweâre talking about Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for the Science of Sexuality in Berlin in the early twentieth centuryâthose first accounts are sexual accounts. Transsexuality and transvestitism are understood as being essentially erotic projects, you know. One hears an echo of that in the discourse around the bathrooms, for instance, as if the reason that trans women transition is so that they can have easier access to little girls in bathrooms. As a result, weâve had a hard time talking about the role that desire, sexual desire, erotic interestâall of those thingsâplay in transition, which is⊠itâs soâitâs so incredibly real.
AB: Why did thatâtranssexuality as having to do with desireâbecome something that got denied and replaced with the model that you discussed of identity?
ALC: Well, the problem with the Hirschfeld model or the models that followed, the difficulty with those accounts is that the sexual valence that was treated to transsexuality was a pathologizing one. That was a part of a way of marking it as a form of perversion, which is something that again continues to today. In recent sexology thereâs this largely debunked theory that transsexual women are in fact men, and you can divide them into two categories: homosexual transsexuals, or straight trans women, and autogynephilic transsexuals, men who are aroused by the idea of being women.
This is, again, widely recognized as a pathologizing transphobic model, and so people are rightly skeptical of reintroducing sexuality in the equation. Thereâs been a lot of work both in terms of social activism and legally that has gone into keeping gender over here and sexuality over there. And where they have met seems to have been dominated by transphobic attacks on trans people. So thatâs made it, rightly so, very difficult to talk about the role played by sexuality in transition, in transness, and by extension not just sexuality but wanting in general.
AB: Another hurdle that you have to clear in introducing your arguments is the strong connection between TERFsââtrans-exclusionary radical feministsââand something that is captured under the title of âpolitical lesbianism.â Can you describe what is that position and what are these connections?
ALC: Right, so, a TERF is this label that, gosh I donât know the exact age of itâitâs got to be less than ten years old, could be even younger than that, this term that has sprung up to describe contemporary iterations of transphobic feminism which usually go along the lines of something like, âTrans women are in fact men; they are interlopers who are here because they have some kind of perverted interest in invading womenâs spaces; and they (notably) reinforce gender roles, when in fact the feminist project should be dismantling those roles.â
Itâs really important to say that this is not necessarily what we would call a biological essentialist position. This actually is often extremely copacetic with the thing we call social constructionismâwhich is spoken about now as if we all sort of understand what that means. In many cases TERFs are arguing, on the one hand, that gender has been socially constructed, and on the other hand that therefore the goal of feminism should be to deconstruct or to dismantle gender as it has been constructed. This is sort of the TERF position that you can find if you go online, you know, they have their own subreddits; they have their own websites. And honestly I thought I was going to get more TERF hateâI was sort of looking forward to that. [laughs]
AB: I was going to ask, what was the extent of it? Youâre okay? Youâre not getting bullied online?
ALC: No, Iâm not getting bullied online the way some women do, but one of the potentially more controversial things about this article is that I amâsympathetic wouldnât be the right word, but Iâm generous in how I read TERFs. And I sort of love the idea that TERFs have no idea how much I agree with them about things. Not everything, but a number of things.
One of the things I argue is that this name is misleading insofar as it follows implicitly a kind of historiographic move where the radical in trans-exclusionary radical feminist is supposed to signify that the TERF is actually this sort of holdover from the Seventies. As in, she was a radical feminist in the Seventies, and she just sort of kept being a radical feminist instead of getting with the picture and jumping onto all the other waves and learning to be more, you know, âintersectional.â Itâs an account of TERF as essentially a kind of anachronism. And I donât think this is true.
It is indeed true that there are folks who, in the Seventies, were anti-trans, who continue to be anti-trans today. But the implication is that radical feminism as such, feminism from 1968 to sometime in the 1970s, was completely anti-trans. And thatâs plainly untrue.
But where there is a connection is that the TERF is more rightly described not just as a radical feminist, but as having something in common with this thing that happened in the Seventies called political lesbianism. Political lesbianism being the idea that lesbian is actually a political position, sometimes a spiritual one, sometimes but not always a sexual oneâso you could be a lesbian without having sex with women. [In this view,] lesbian was a political position that you could choose that represented a kind of separatism from men, or at least a kind of strike on heterosexuality, and it had to do, I think, with lesbian as a conceptâwhich no one agreed on what this meant!
Today lesbian is kind of almost an anachronistic term because everyone is, like, queer. Lesbian sounds sort of old fashioned, and kind of dowdy⊠like youâre middle aged and you hike a lotâthat kind of thing. (Not that there arenât lesbians to whom that applies.) But I was just reading the Lesbian Tide, which was this magazine from (I think) â71 to â74. And this particular issue of the magazine was right after this infamous conference known as the Second West Coast Lesbian Conference of 1973. The fascinating thing about this issue is that itâs got pieces by different people who were at the conference; none of them agree with each otherâthereâs so much infighting, itâs incredible. And one of the things that theyâre infighting about is the word lesbian. Like, this is called the West Coast Lesbian Conference and no one agrees on what a lesbian is! We wouldnât argue about this nowâwe would argue about for instance what trans means, or potentially what queer means. Those are the terms in which people are storing their political optimism, but in the Seventies, among a certain group of feminists, the term that housed that optimism temporarily was lesbian.
AB: What is the connection to be drawn between today’s TERFs and yesteryearâs political lesbians? And why is it productive in introducing another way of thinking about being trans and transitioning?
ALC: Political lesbianism was the height of a contradiction that had developed within feminism: the more powerful your critique, the more you could enumerate the ways in which patriarchy functioned on an everyday level, the more impossible it seemed to just live your life without being immediately subject to all of these technologies of oppression. And what that produced is a kind of revolutionary subject in the Seventies, the political lesbian, who could through sheer force of political will change her own desires and reorient herselfâdecide that she was going to leave her husband, that she was going to abjure the company of men.
AB: And so would you say that the analogy between that position and the TERFsâ position is that in the TERFâs mind what the transgender woman does is, in fact, give in to a certain kind of desire that she refuses to engage with critically?
ALC: Yes, absolutely, but I think the other important thing is that trans exclusion, for instance at the famous 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, wasnât these feminists just sitting around and scheming about how to make trans womenâs lives horrible. The skepticism, to put it mildly, among some of those feminists (but not all of them) of transsexual women was actually last in a long line of suspicions.
So, the radical feminist Robin Morgan, who spoke at this controversial conference in â73, says in her speech that thereâs what she calls an âepidemic of male styleââfeminism has been invaded by an epidemic of male style. And what she means by âmale styleâ is not actually transvestites or transsexuals, even though thatâs sort of the extreme example. What she means is like, bar butches! Like, what sheâs referring to are women who are listening to the Rolling Stones, or who are collaborating with the brocialist members of the New Left, or those who are just here to fuck and arenât actually interested in the sort of tender, caring, emotional, nurturing environment that the lesbian conference is supposed to be.
What happened in the Seventies is that maleness was abstracted: youâre no longer actually talking about men, youâre talking about some sort of relationâwhich was in itself misogynist, patriarchal, oppressive. That structure could then be repeated across all experience. The dream of separatism was sullied by the fact that when you get a bunch of lesbians on the UCLA campus for a couple days for this conference they are just like at each othersâ throats the whole time!
And there were some women, according to Morgan, who were collaborators, and what being a collaborator meant was that you still retain some aspect of this âmale style.â So the trans woman, or the transsexual womanâBeth Elliott, in this case, at this conferenceâis just the last in a whole series of different ways that patriarchy could be smuggled into lesbian utopia.
I donât think it was nearly as much about an anti-trans animus as it was about trying to take to its fullest consequences the implication of an analysis. And this is why maybe I have some sympathy for [TERFs], or why I want to read TERFs generously, because I think thereâs a real experience of finding out that critique wasnât going to do the thing it said it was going to do for you⊠And as [radical] feminist theory developed, in its nascent stages, the stronger it got and the more honestly compelling that it got, the more one came to realize that it was going to be impossible to live by it. I think thereâs something very poignant that was happening, and that TERFs sort of havenât acknowledged.
AB: It marks also a deep difference between that generation that youâre describing and what the term TERF gets applied to today, to go back to TwitterâŠ
ALC: For the contemporary Tumblr TERF, or Twitter TERF, there is an adoption of some of these radical feminist positions or dilutions of them, but as I say in the piece I think it has a lot more to do actually with how the internet works. Feminism on the internet has become a fandom. And what I mean by fandom is that itâs actually a form of generating feelings of belonging that uses forms of knowledge, not insofar as they are true or false, but insofar as they help produce a feeling of being with others. So there are protocols that have developed on the internet about being feminist, and if you follow those protocols, then you can feel feminist, and you can feel part of a group. And I think TERFs are actually part of that. The protocols are different protocols, but I think in large part theyâre doing what everyone does at the internet, which is staring off into the void of the thing and trying to trying to see if thereâs life on the other end.
AB: With all of this put in place, after this very generous reading that you perform, where do you come in in the piece?
ALC: So I have a lot of sympathy for the separatist position on a personal level because it feels like itâs meaningfully descriptive of something that I felt myself in terms of my own transition. I did feel like it was an act of defiance or an act of just rejection: I have never wanted to spend time with men, least of all myself! And so at some point I just put that into practice. I was my own Second West Coast Lesbian Conference of 1973.
AB: And yetâŠ
ALC: And yet! Well, one, itâs not like I donât interact with men in my life anymore. But two, I couldnât actually embrace the position that, well, Iâm the most political lesbian that there ever was, because all the things that I want are still completely mired in the same patriarchal, misogynist culture that radical feminists are already discovering in the Seventies. The TERF position that I would through transition be solidifying and reproducing normative gender rolesâI find that argument completely convincing. I mean I think itâs completely right, because I know that itâs right, because itâs the thing that I want! Like, Iâm not interested, actually, not at all interested in dismantling gender. No⊠like, I am completely aware that these things are bad for me.
AB: Let me first read something that is one of my favorite parts of your article, and then I want to ask you what this claim means. So you say, âThat trans lesbians should be pedestaled as some kind of feminist vanguard is a notion as untenable as it is attractive. In defending it, I would be neglecting what I take to be the true lesson of political lesbianism as a failed project; that nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle. You could sooner give a cat a bath.â
And reading this and reading the article I think I could hear two kinds of argument. One is, I canât do anything with what I want. Desire is not something that I can change and affect by way of second order desires. And in another piece of yours, âDid Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?ââwhich taught me about a genre of porn I was not familiar with, which was excitingâyou say, âMost desire is nonconsensual. Most desires arenât desired.â So thatâs one way of hearing your claim: we canât do this, and so why waste our time? And then thereâs something else, which is the question should we if we could? When you say something like ânothing good comes of trying to force desire to conform to political principle,â I hear both options.
So, before you answer, let me just introduce a recent argument made by Amia Srinivasan for the LRB. The main question she takes up in her piece is do we have a duty, or a responsibility, to try and work on our desiresâespecially insofar as theyâre reflective of discriminatory political practices? So itâs not just a question of you enforcing the patriarchy by wanting to present yourself a certain way, or wanting to be in a certain kind of relationship. Sheâs also talking about the sexual choices that people make. And sheâs saying that many are exclusionaryâthey seem to follow certain kinds of patterns of discriminationâand she asks whether or not we have a duty to try to change them? Sheâs subtle in her response, but I think sheâs saying, insofar as we can change them, we do have a duty to try to do so. So, this is the question to you: Can we, can we not, and should we if we could?
ALC: I read with great pleasure Amiaâs piece in the LRB, and first of all, I agree that these are difficult questions. Iâm absolutely aware that desire is childlike and chary of government, but am I talking about a rapistâs desire, am I talking about a racistâs desire? Who gets to fall under that and am I prepared to take that all the way to the end? And gosh, I think itâs very complicated. But! She isnât really talking about whether we need to acknowledge that the rapistâs desire to rape is as equally ungovernable as any other desire, though thatâs an important question. The easiest fix there, by the way, is to say desire and action are different things, so like you can tell someone to do something, but you canât tell them not to want something, because ontologically, itâs not going to work.
AB: Well, arenât we as adults supposed to learn to control certain desires? We are not supposed to be acting on all of them. Forget who weâre attracted to! I mean basic things: you might be in one relationship and you might be attracted to someone else, and we all learn to govern that, and that seems to be a separate question from whether or not we should be trying to change our own desires. The latter is a much more radical claim. And Srinivasan herself says at a certain point âno one wants a mercy fuckâŠâ
ALC: Right!
AB: And so what sheâs trying to suggest is not, you know, as a matter of course you would get moral bonus points if you go and have sex with someone who normally less people want to have sex with. Sheâs talking about actually trying, to the extent that we can, to exercise our willpower on our desire. And then it seems to me that youâre totally right in putting that question of acting on and not acting on given desires aside: sheâs talking about trying to want different things.
ALC: Yeahâactually, actually trying to change your desire.
AB: She references this exercise that Lindy West has written about where she looks at photos of women who are overweight and she asks herself, What it is to consider this beautiful? And the thought is that that is supposed to open her eyes to seeing, or finding attractive, things that she didnât find attractive before.
ALC: I had forgotten that she brought up Lindy West. I canât stand body positivity. I cannot stand it. It is just anathema to me. Itâs moralizing. Itâs really fucking hard to figure out a way to tell people to change their desires that isnât moralistic, and that isnât actually about doing the same kind of thing to desire that supposedly queer politics was supposed to be against in the first place. Queers are very, very bad at talking about desires that they are not supposed to have, especially considering that they are people who have, by definition, desires that they are not supposed to have.
The reason that I canât stand body positivityânot just that I think thereâs something very churchy about like staring at like a photo of someone who is fat like you are and meditating your way into affection for yourselfâthe reason I canât stand it is because I feel implicated. Because what it says is that my self-loathingâand I donât mean mine generally, I mean mine, mine, Andrea Long Chuâs self-loathingâis a result of a lack of having had my consciousness raised. I say churchy not by accident, I do think thereâs a kind of Protestantism to the notion of, at least we have to try. No, my self-loathing is precious to me, and it is a form of knowledge about myself, and itâs also by its own very structure fundamentally incapable of being fixed through consciousness-raising because self-loathing is a form of consciousness.
Thereâs this scene that one can imagine if one is a woman, or even if one isnât, of standing in front of the mirror and assessing oneâs body and you donât like your gut and you wish your nose was a different shape and you have a double chin and you feel like your breasts are too big or your breasts are too smallâwhatever it is. Now you can run all of your feminist analyses about how this is patriarchy, and itâs body-phobic and itâs fat-phobic and itâs sexist and itâs the cosmetic industry and beauty standards and the media. You can do all of this, and you will not at any point be wrong. But, you also wonât feel better. If anything now you will feel worse, because now youâre ugly and stupid.
AB: Or morally depraved. Youâre wrong for wanting to be different, for doing anything to be different than you are.
ALC: Right. So with regards to the erotic preference thing, Iâve had this conversation with other folks, I know itâs a really important conversation. Often times the sort of âno fats, no femmes, no Asiansâ comes up, which I think Amia mentions, maybe.
AB: Yeah, thatâs right.
ALC: Itâs a real question.
AB: So in context she begins with a group of men called incels, âinvoluntary celibates,â whose main creed is to claim that they are entitled to sexâthat they have the right to sex thatâs being denied to them by evil bitches. So she dismisses that, obviously, but then asks, do we, nevertheless, have this duty to work on our desires? She says, âThere is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferencesââand then she delivers these titles in caps, âNO DICKS, NO FEMMES, NO FATS, NO BLACKS, NO ARABS, NO RICE, NO SPICE, MASC-FOR-MASCâare never just personal.â And that is her invitation for us to think about the ways we can work on our desires because they are themselves the result of these political processes.
And Iâll say one more thing that has really been bugging me. She says at some point, âthe question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that “who is desired and who isnât is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.â And what really puzzled me for a while was: What does it mean that itâs âa political questionâ? I actually couldnât parse the phrase. What does it mean that she says itâs a question? The only thing I could come up with is that she means itâs a political problem. That there is here an injustice (and I think this is the real controversial claim). We think, well, itâs unfair that Iâm not as attractive as someone else, but is it unjust in the sense that it presents society with a political task that some people are not drawing the same attention as others?
ALC: The scarier question is, is it unjust and also none of us have a moral obligation to do anything about it? Iâm not sure I want to endorse that claim, but thatâs the real question that rears its head. Of course you can say any given personâs desire is produced through the interplay of power relations. Thatâs a truism of the post-Foucault academy: that everything is constructed and itâs all power. Itâs not that thatâs meaningless. Obviously something like âno fats, no femmes, no Asiansâ is a desire that has a history, and has a politics, that can be described by reference to political processes: imperialism, white supremacy, and also, like, the world-historical defeat of the female sex are all included in this desire. You can show how history has led to this moment, but it doesnât necessarily mean that knowing that is going to do anything.
So say someone says, âI donât like sleeping with fat, femme, or Asian guys.â The implication of the critique of that is that fat, femme, and Asian guys, (1) want to be slept with by that person, and (2) that being fat, femme or Asian requires you by definition to want to sleep with people who are fat, femme or Asian. The people who are victims in the ecology of desire are assumed to have, by nature, or by virtue of their marginalized position in the structure, desires of their own which are inevitably more ethical than anyone elseâs. I think that is a kind of moralism that can be really insidious because it implies that there are people who are so oppressed that they are not allowed to want things that are bad for them. Everyone should be allowed to want things that are bad for them. I think Iâm prepared to defend that statement at least.
So the journalist Meredith Talusan, who writes for this publication them., had this piece actually a year or two ago (itâs relatively recent): the headline is âWhy canât my famous gender nonconforming friends get laid?â, and sheâs talking about folks who are friends of hers, nonbinary femmes, who are having a lot of trouble getting dates. When they sign up for Tinder they have to decide if theyâre going to say that they are men or women. Are they going to say they are into straight guys or gay guys?
So thereâs a lot of obstacles, just purely representationally. Tinder is not a happy space for them, which Iâm completely sympathetic to. But the conclusion that Meredith comes to is not dissimilar to Amiaâs, which is that other peopleâs desires should change: these men should be open to their gayness being changed and becoming bi in some expansive sense, or pansexual, or whatever. And this is actually, according to her, a kind of gift that trans people give the world, the sort of inherent queering of other peopleâs sexuality. What this misses is that itâs quite likely that the reason these gay men donât want to fuck her nonbinary femme friends is because these gay men want to fuck the exact same people that her friends want to fuck, which is masc-er menâideally, straight men! So the reason they canât have sex, the reason their desires are not compatible, is that they share the exact same fucking desire, which is to be fucked by someone who is masc enough to pass as straight, or who is just straight period. (This is the famous top shortage, of course.)
Itâs not that this piece isnât responding to a real problem. Itâs not that there isnât real loneliness or pain or anxiety, all of these things: I completely affirm the affective experience of her friends on Tinder. But thatâs not the point. The point is, how do you adjudicate when itâs not actually, one person wants something thatâs good for them, the other person wants something thatâs bad? How do you adjudicate when both people want something thatâs basically bad for them? How would you then go about adjudicating between those desires? And the point here is not to say Meredith Talusanâs friends need to just suck it up because the world is hard, thatâs not at all what Iâm saying. What Iâm saying is, her friends should be allowed to want things that are bad for them. Thatâs one of the ways in which I would part most strongly with Amia, in my worry that moralism about the desires of the oppressor can be a shell corporation for moralism about the desires of the oppressed.
AB: Thatâs really, really interesting because it means that the project that Amiaâs describing, and sheâs trying to make room for⊠Sheâs quite gentle about it, but she tries to make room for a certain kind of project of thinking critically about our own desires insofar as they reflect this political and moral principles. But the first step is then to recognize that the desires of the people that weâre now supposed to be more accommodating, that weâre supposed to direct ourselves with in our projects of self-fashioning, we would have to look at those. And once we start looking critically at those, itâs not clear why weâre looking at the desires of the oppressor to begin withâbecause now it looks like the moral responsibility of the privileged to be accommodating to desires that arenât any better, or arenât any less reflective of the same discriminatory patterns. And then that makes you think that maybe we should step back and rethink the whole thingâthat something is messed up about the question.
ALC: Right, right.
AB: Is that right?
ALC: Yes! I think that is right.
AB: I think thatâs fascinating.
ALC: My desire to, like, lose a bunch of weight may be indebted to all of these misogynist forms and patriarchal structures and all of that, and I might decide that I donât want that desire. Or someone else like my therapist or my friend might tell me, âNo! Love yourself, you should practice self-care, you should stare at photographs of fat women, and learn to feel better about yourselfâŠâ Thatâs another form of desire, and thatâs equally as ungovernable as the first one. Iâm not sure if you can moralize about even the desire to moralize. I mean, it does start to get a little heady, but I do think we can think about those shoulds, and we can think about ethical and political imperatives, in terms of a desire.
AB: When Amiaâs article came about, one thought that I had was that itâs very hard for me to imagineâand perhaps this is a failure of my imaginative powersâbut itâs very hard for me to imagine a society in which an individualâs desires do not include and exclude, or follow different gradations. Whatever people find attractive today they might find completely unattractive in a hundred years, but they will always find something attractive and something unattractive, and thatâs essential to desire, thatâs not just a function of a political system that works on unjust hierarchies.
ALC: I do think thereâs sort of preferential nature to desire, period. Desire involves cutting a lot of things out of the world, so that you can imagine a space where your object is going to give you a thing that you want it to give you. That always involves a certain amount of fantasy and potentially a certain amount of violence. Desire has to be a process of subtraction. And I think itâs probably always going to be a process of subtraction. You canât want everything. It wouldnât be wanting it if it was everything.
The question of whether sexual desire is different from other kinds of desire in degree or kind is a really, really good question. My first impulse is to say well, sort of, you know, of course everything is sexual, all desire has the shape of sexual desire. But I think it might sort of be the reverse actually. Iâll put it this way: itâs very easy to show how lots of things that are not sex are in fact about sex. Itâs also very easy to show that sex is very rarely about sex. Like people donât have sex because they are experiencing intense erotic fixation on each other. They have sex because theyâre bored, or theyâre nervous, or theyâre trying to renew a sense of kinship that is at risk of unraveling. You have sex for all of the kind of reasons that you might do anything, which is to say usually for sort of kind of oblique and ordinary and banal reasons. You know, I love Freud, but Iâm not a sort of capital-f Freudian in this sense: itâs not like the libido in some great cosmic way. So Iâm saying that sex isnât really about sex, and yet Iâm still talking a lot about sex, and I think the reason for that is that sex is one of the places where the structure of desire is laid bare, or becomes available. Insofar as sex is sort of pointless, desire can feel purposive in other places in life (even though it probably isnât) but in sex like the purposiveness is shown for like the ruse that it is.
AB: I still think that thereâs a way to think of the difference between desire and sexual desire, although we might then in a second step have to dismantle these differences. One way of putting it is something like, well, if you can imagine human life without the unconscious I can still make sense of the fact that we will do a lot of thingsâseek food, for example, but it will not make sense that we would have sex the way we do. We will procreate, maybe we will rub against things, but it would not make sense that we would do things that are strange and perverse and illogical and bad for us, as so many of our sexual desires demand that we do. The way youâre putting things now makes me think that itâs precisely the impossibility of imagining us without an unconscious that sort of undoes that whole thought experiment. Because we are not in actuality the beings that live with a lot of desires that make sense and then are burdened with one extra desire that doesnât make sense, but we are beings that are deeply implicated sexuallyâall of our activities are not activities like a giraffeâs, whoâs just feeding. And thatâs where I stand, but I do think that thereâs something, that thereâs a certain kind of distinction that one can maintain. Another way of putting it is that, like we were saying about the slippage that goes with the concept of action, when you say donât want it itâs one thing to say, âYou canât do it,â i.e., you canât exclude people because itâs not right, and another thing to say, âNo, you have to get hot for people that youâre not finding attractive.â These are different ways of thinking about desire.
ALC: Right. But because sex isnât about sex you have to do other things. Thatâs why you have conversations or eat or go to the movies or read a book, or whateverâbecause the thing sex was supposed to be about it turns out it wasnât about. So that would be a model of sublimation where itâs not that you have an unconscious desire to fuck and then you sublimate it into something like typing away at your computer in your cubicle; it would be that in the realm of sexual experience you actually have none of that, and in order to produce the thing that you thought was going to be part of sex, you have to go into your cubicle, or make great art, or run for office, or whatever else you might do.
AB: I think some of that has to be the case once you also realize sublimation is not an individual project, repression or sublimation is not something that each of us does, itâs a societal project. And Freud, at the end of his career, begins to think in those ways and suggests that an entire society comes out of our inability to organize our life around this purposeless activity of constantly trying to sleep with your mother.
Andrea, before we finish I would like to ask you about a project youâre working on, called Bad Politics.
ALC: Bad Politics is the name of my academic book project that Iâm working on right now. The way I define âbad politicsâ is: bad politics is what happens when people who are living under oppression donât feel like resisting and do something else instead. Thatâs responding to the state of the academy (first and foremost), so there are critical habits that have developed over the past twenty to thirty years that by now have their own genre conventions, and that can, in my opinion, limit the way that we do cultural analysis. And this is because of the formation of identity studiesâwomenâs studies, gender studies, African American studies, various cultural studies that involve some sort of identity group.
What has happened is that identity studies has conceived itself from the get-go as being an academic discipline whose unity derives not from a shared object, nor from a shared methodology, but from a shared political commitment. There are these disciplines which are founded on the idea that doing academic work is a form of political action. This is the fantasy of critique as a political act. When I say fantasy I donât mean something that isnât true, I just mean something which you would believe even if it wasnât true. And what this fantasy means is that we often tend to do one of two things when we look at objects: we either bludgeon them for being too complicit with the status quo, or we celebrate them for reflecting membership in the very same political project in which we as critics believe that we are, in this moment, in the writing of criticism, participating. So what that means is that we spend a lot of time looking for objects in which we can see our own reflections and not a lot of time sitting with objects that disappoint us.
So the project is about learning to be disappointed as a criticânot to quarantine disappointment as if it were some kind of infection which could ruin the project. And very simply this means remembering that most non-normativity isnât anti-normativity. As anyone who has ever taught a class of student knows, most disruptions are not productive. Thatâs also to say most disruptions are not supposed to be productive. So the project is about thinking about objects whose non-normativity doesnât amount to resistance in the way that we like to imagine in order to flatter ourselves.
AB: So certain things are non-normative, but they are not thereby anti-normative. They are not shaking up the fundamental structures. You call out sissy porn, and you show why we donât have to overstate the political-moral virtue of the project of sissy porn just because it looks like itâs defying these standards of sexuality. Thatâs one side, but are you also saying that there are forms of kind of productive disruption that are not simply and recognizably political?
ALC: The project is invested in finding, or seeing if one can find, modes of valuing that are not necessarily political. Itâs not like I am against anti-normativity. I just think something dangerous happens when we start to conflate validity as such with political validity. You see this on the internet all the time, where âIâm sadâ is not valid. âIâm sad for X, Y, and Z political reasons, I can show how my depression or my misery, my self-loathing is like part of this system of oppressionââthat has a kind of soundness intellectually, or is supposed to, that just being sad wouldnât. I think that thereâs good reason to think about, and good political reason even, to think about validity outside of the political. And what that means is that the project is really invested in describing shit. I like to say that almost everything in the world doesnât have a name. Which is really an incredible opportunity. It means thereâs a lot to do. And thereâs a lot to be gained, I think, from coming up with names for things. Weâre not done with that. A name sort of like lifts up the curtain on a previously undisclosed portion of reality, and that, I think, can be valuable in itself. We were speaking before about what is the intellectual for, and at least one of my answers would be, it’s for naming things, because we donât have enough names. We should have more names.
AB: Thank you.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.