Half-Thoughts: Zwergobst aka Free Game
I was planning to start this newsletter a few years ago and wrote at that time a few essay starts, which I was startled to find the other morning.
I'm working on another translation of a psychoanalysis paper, this time by Michel de M'uzan—check out in the meantime his 2008 article, "The Hell of Creativity," collected in "Permanent Disquiet." The one I'm translating is from the sixties and even crazier.
I'm really enjoying this project of hobby translation even as I'm a bit down on psychoanalysis at the moment. Nothing against Freud, but you know, it's possible to be a pure patient, or to practice, or to be a historian of the field, but when you're none of the above, exactly how much does it make sense to hang around? I constantly run up against this doubt, and was at some point trying to get up the nerve to start training. But I don't think I'll do it. I've got my own problems, and I'm too much of a talker. De M'uzan was a novelist before he was an analyst and stakes something on the idea that you can't do both. I might agree. But in that case I choose against analysis.
In general, let's be less reflexively interdisciplinary and retain the possibility of finding ourselves purists, or dilettantes—reporting for duty—so of having one or many quite distinct styles.
I'm going to share a few of the essay starts, with a little bit of modification but without completely elaborating them. Maybe I can say a bit more soon. But I think it's in the spirit of the newsletter to fire from the hip, from the desk drawer, from my old email account—
1. How Dare You Compare...
The plan here was for an essay on the suspicion of analogy, and insistence on the singularity, authenticity, and incomparability of suffering. I've noticed this pattern in afropessimism and in some of the insistence on analyzing things in terms of "transmisogyny" which actually affect all trans people, and beyond. The idea wasn't to deny specific characteristics of struggle, but somehow to emphasize that this principle of non-analogy had become reflexive, frequently a barrier to thought and to solidarity. I still think so. Contemporary discourses of incomparability compared to negative theology's apophatic dead end. The appreciation of the phenomenon becomes aesthetic, actually narcissistic, instead of looking through the window we see the cracked or stained glass. Declaring the object incomparable is finally not even a way of respecting the object. There are a few more contemporary examples that I'm talking around.
2. Idealism in the Pejorative Sense
I think that a good definition of idealism in the pejorative sense is "taking rationalizations at their word." For example, I might try to justify a socially conservative position by appealing to nature, to divinity, as self-supporting timeless convention ("that's how it's always been"), or as insecurity about the same past, which is wavering, has entered a period of crisis, perhaps we've lost track of something important. I could bounce between these justifications forever while you continue to see an argument where there isn't one, or that the world turns on such arguments. So the complaint about idealism becomes a relative of passionate phrases like "my rights aren't up for debate!" In fact they are, always. The mistake is to assume that this debate always operates in good faith, that it remains in the frame of discourse, or that it is a game played for low stakes by children, lawyers, and Jesuits. Would be better to say that they aren't up for that kind of debate, acknowledging a wider field. Ideas are the same way. This seems to relate to the previous.
3. Trans Literature and Adjacent Sexuality
There was a moment where it felt important and newly possible to break silences around adjacencies and intersections between transness and stigmatized sexualities, and a newfound curiosity for phenomenology of pre-trans life. Find here "eggs" (please for the love of God let's never use this word again) but also books like mine or Imogen's or Torrey's for a start. Recognizing this as a distinct moment, and perhaps one that has passed. Trying to historicize that moment in relation of all of this to the collapse of TS/TG tensions in the wake of informed consent trans healthcare and reconfigurations of liberal LGBT politics after the collapse of the 90s trans-exclusive ENDA. In my case, a little reflection on what had drawn me to write in this way and what now draws me away from it. My own feeling of being a latecomer to this discourse, which was probably not shared in any way by the majority of my readership, who come to this literature in a jumble or all at once. Relevance of the concept of "stolen valour."
4. Kicking without Kicking Off
About the odd phenomenon where a lot of people I know invest themselves in mildly reactionary or nostalgic positions which are post-Queer, the way that this actually recommits to the pocket of inverted hegemony which had been the source of the complaint, by keeping it in focus. Your problem is not those people, but your mistaken view of them as the horizon of the world. This is often seen in analogy to school or the family, since those locations produce this feeling materially, by actually limiting our social context, and we aren't very self-conscious or able to fend for ourselves mentally at that point. But it's more of a "structure."
5. "I see you, Femme"
Many people who've objected to the stereotypes and coercion in the system of gender tout court have in practice singled out feminine expression as especially complicit. The best summary of this attitude appears in Halberstam's 1998 "Female Masculinity"
While much of this book has concentrated on the masculinity in women that it s most often associated with sexual variance, I also think that the general concept of female masculinity has its uses for heterosexual women. After all, the excessive conventional femininity often associated with female heterosexuality can be bad for your health. Scholars have long pointed out that femininity tends to be associated with passivity and inactivity, with various forms of unhealthy body manipulations from anorexia to high-heeled shoes. It seems to me that at least early on in life, girls should avoid femininity. Perhaps femininity and its accessories should be chosen later on, like a sex toy or a hairstyle. In recent years, I believe that society has altered its conceptions of the appropriate way to raise girls; indeed, a plethora of girl problems, from eating disorders to teenage pregnancy to low intellectual ambitions, leave many parents attempting to hold femininity at bay for their young girls. Cultivating femininity in girls at a very early age also has the unfortunate effect of sexualizeing them and even inducing seductive mannerisms in preteen girls. The popularity of the tomboy is one indication that many parents are willing to cultivate low levels of masculinity in their female children rather than undergo the alternatives.
If masculinity were a kind of default category for children, [...]
—Halberstam, Female Masculinity, pp. 268-9
Nothing against JH, but this attitude throws a few people under the bus. Not everything has to account for everyone. But trans women, lesbian femmes, harmoniously heterosexual women (I'm told they're out there somewhere), where do they fit in? Why would one expression be symptomatic or suspect in a way the other isn't? I think the reason this reads so strangely now is that this is a pretty good response to the stifling and coercive character of normative femininity, but seems not to imagine that its author's doctrine might also possess some normative force. But in some circles, it was beginning to.
In the 2000s there emerged a little bit of counterweight to this position, a unity which produced quite a lot of political articulation and maturity. In the 2000s we saw a kind of "femme politics" emerge that united some of these strands, which was not only helpful in rebalancing things in queer space, but I think it was a site where a lot of trans women found a political education and a language, a lot of people I looked up to: thinking of Imogen Binnie or Mira Bellwether (RIP) or Bryn Kelly (RIP) or Elena Rose, all of whom seemed to me at least to be explicitly checking in with a femme-forward politics in greater dyke-space.
By the 2010s, I think all of this had crashed. Partly the popularization of drag, partly the shift to visibility politics, the point is that this temporary alliance had ceased to function and was no longer visible behind the word, which never fully summarized it. Instead we had glitter, if anything a shift in the other direction, which in many cases seemed to leave trans men out in the cold in some ways, asking them to ironize their gender with glitter and drag and boyishness—if that's you, do you—but you know you don't have to, right? We also got at this time an amazing expansion in straight people talking like drag queens. I still don't get what that's about. But I was never that much of a slay queen diva boots or whatever the fuck you people are on about.
I think the best way to see this development is to bookend it with two pieces by the same author. Rocko Bulldagger's 2000 ["The End of Genderqueer"](https://biblioteca-alternativa.noblogs.org/files/2012/03/The-End-of-Genderqueer.pdf) and Sloan Lesbowitz's 2012 ["Nothing can be Said of Being Butch"](https://truequeerlove.blogspot.com/2012/06/nothing-can-be-said-of-being-butch.html?m=1).
We can trace it up to here, the rejection and redemption of femininity, which was actually a piece of the history and the the dance in words of butch and femme, alliances forged and broken along the way, alliances which gave birth to entire styles of subjectivity, to the possibility of an art form which I find myself camped out on the corner of.
Is that conversation now over? Starting again at the beginning? Here I'd want to retreat a little bit from the normative questions, which would have us name the moment and the paths from here, but to think a little bit about the medium of memory. So little of what matters finds the page, let alone publication. Individuals are exhausted and retreat, often with good reason, into their private lives. There's essentially no continuity of places or of institutions and even very little continuity of individuals (partly because people suffer, partly because personalities have been pressed into extreme molds and there is unsurprisingly a lot of conflict).
Recently I was writing some stories that take place in a trans world less than a decade ago, a world I was a part of, and feel less capable of synthesizing, maybe because it was all around me. Maybe having said this much will allow me to return to them, as if to pick up the story from there.