Final Thesis Thoughts: Critically Queer and Imitation

In this final post, I want to consider how the bathhouse door policies limit or expand a notion of queer implicit in the formulation of the space via last session’s text material. Before addressing this question, I want to point to one passage in ‘Critically Queer’ from Bodies That Matter(BTM) that gets back to my recognition problem posed in the last post. Butler writes,

I can only say ‘I’ to the extent that I have first been addressed, and that address has mobilized my place in speech; paradoxically, the discursive condition of social recognition precedes and conditions the formation of the subject: recognition is not conferred on a subject, but forms that subject. Further, the impossibility of a full recognition, that is, of ever fully inhabiting the name by which one’s social identity is inaugurated and mobilized, implies the instability and incompleteness of subject formation (BTM 225-226).

As discussed in the last session, this passage is extended and nuanced in both Giving an Account of Oneself and Excitable Speech. When posing my earlier question regarding recognition and a particular trans subject, I think I overlooked this argument both in the context of this work and her later work. This argument illuminates the problem of recognition via its relation to unstable and constantly changing subject formations. Hence, where one should seek (proper) recognition is not the central question. Instead, as Butler argues, there is an impossibility of full recognition in the first place due to the difficulty of fully inhabiting the various interpellations one is afforded.

Also, as a quick response to Marie’s last post, I want to make clear that I was not trying to raise a one-sided anxiety of the political paralysis (tied to a loss of intelligibility and recognizability) that might occur when dis-identifying (although, looking back on my own words, I understand how this misunderstanding could arise). What I was trying to suggest with my dis-identification argument is that, like most identifications, it is accompanied by a dual enabling and constraining motion. The constraining aspect is, of course, the anxiety. (Dis)identifications, however, also have the enabling ability to critically position those terms we are afforded within the power relations that cast them. In other words, in dis-identifying, participants might be encouraged to BOTH critically ask why they dis-identify (to expand the parameters of thinkability) while at the same time, comfortably or uncomfortably residing in those dis-identifications for the sake of a pleasure derived precisely from becoming or being unintelligible. Also, below I highlight Butler’s performativity argument in BTM, and I think that too, responds to Marie’s suggestion that a dis-identification might risk becoming normative.

As mentioned in the previous post, The Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) indicates that events like these are purposeful political projects intended to dismantle preconceived and constraining notions of women’s sexualized and gendered selves. The TWBC traces these preconceived ideas back to a particular lesbian feminist ideology of the 1980s which created a politic that moved away from the freedom of sexual expression, emphasized a gendered code of sexual passivity, and berated (for example) butch and SM-loving lesbians for imitating heteronormative gender sex matrices. Accordingly, the TWBC and the organizers in Halifax continue to develop a spatial strategy which seeks to queer women’s sexualities within the bathhouse space. I want to address how this queering is deployed and what kind of limitations and possibilities it facilitates.

The organizers deploy a slippery notion of queer within their formulation and constitution of the space. I understand the deployment as slippery via the numerous inconclusive debates that occur among organizers and participants regarding the mission statement of the bathhouse. These inconclusive debates primarily concern the door policy. I want to suggest that the deployment of queer as a concept within the space is at once enabling and constraining. I also want to preface my discussion of queer. It seems to me that within queer theory, queer activism, and queer studies (three arenas I see as distinct though often attempt to overlap one another), everyone deploys the word queer while everyone means something a little bit different. I understand both a conflation of queer theory into queer activism (and reversed) and the sharp desire to make the two distinct as dangerous moves that displace theory’s unique impact on practice. However, as an attempt at clarity, in this post I want to consider queer as a concept in relation to these bathhouses in an effort to determine what sort of social work that theoretical position might influence. Due to this departure, I hope to avoid signifying queer as a (dis)identification and instead position queer as a productive critique of those (dis)identifications.

Informed primarily by the work of Michael Warner, David Halperin and Judith Butler, I understand queer as a concept appearing in a constant state of flux, molded from prior usages in ways that can never be delimited in advance. The concept functions as something always contested, something always ripe with questions of power, and thus, as something that often plays itself out politically either discursively or ‘on the ground’. As Butler writes,

If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes . . . in ways that can never be fully anticipated in advance . . . The political deconstruction of ‘queer’ ought not to paralyze the use of such terms, but, ideally, to extend its range, to make us consider at what expense and for what purposes the terms are used, and through what relations of power such categories have been wrought (BTM 228-9).

I preoccupy myself with this question of deploying ‘queer’ within the bathhouse space in an effort to determine what kinds of social transformation can come from this dual motion (enabling and constraining). Although I am aware that these questions might not necessarily immediately spark some huge revolutionary change in how we come to understand certain bodies, I do believe the questions that queer as a concept raises in relation to these sites contributes to a rethinking of heteronormative codes.

First, the claim of gender imitation. Researchers working in these spaces have been relentlessly preoccupied with the negative consequences of sexual and gender imitation as it relates to the door policies. These researchers point to the regulatory implications of heterosexual imitation in the sites and with this claim I take issue. They ask how a space can transgress heteronormative codes when the most visible identification in that space is one that is traditional and heterosexual (for them, a butch-femme configuration). They conclude that imitation is politically regressive and that it upholds traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity, rather than dismantling those traditionalist constructions all together. Presumably, for them, a ‘proper’ deployment of queer should dismantle those constructions. Our last session readings highlight the danger of such a claim. Butler writes,

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. . . the naturalistic effects of heterosexualized genders are produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexuality, one that is produced by the imitation as its effect . . . If heterosexuality is an impossible imitation of itself, an imitation that performatively constitutes itself as the original, then the imitative parody of ‘heterosexuality’ –when and where it exists in gay cultures—is always and only an imitation of an imitation, a copy of a copy, for which there is no original. . . It is important to recognize the ways in which heterosexual norms reappear within gay identities, to affirm that gay and lesbian identities are not only structured in part by dominant heterosexual frames, but that they are not for that reason determined by them. They are running commentaries on those naturalized positions as well, parodic replays and resignifications of precisely those heterosexual structures that would consign gay life to discursive domains of unreality and unthinkability . . . The parodic replication and resignifcation of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames . . . shows that heterosexuality only constitutes itself as the original through a convincing act of repetition. The more that ‘act’ is expropriated, the more the heterosexual claim to originality is exposed as illusory (‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ 127-130).

Here, Butler’s argument indicates the performative nature of all identifications and thus, that gender imitation is always a copy of a copy rather than a copy of some perceieved original. Butler’s argument that heterosexuality as an original construction is illusory brings a sense of agency to those subject-positions potentially present within the space of the bathhouse under its own terms and conditions. The passage illuminates the danger of the claims made by these social science researchers—if, for example, butch-femme constructions are read as blueprints of traditional heterosexual replication, then we run the risk of reading those phantasmatic ideals as somehow original and natural. Additionally another researcher objects to the idea that the sort of space building and the sort of expressions fostered at Pussy Palace and SheDogs are an instance (imitation) of gay male behavior; the impact to her argument suggests that the bodies playing in these sites are rendered passive and manageable via this comparison which again runs the risk of not deploying queer ‘properly’. Although, this researcher also engages the above Butler citation in her work, I argue that she and I understand these passages differently. By formulating an understanding of identifications and gender based on Butler’s arguments in this way, it is possible to understand the subject-positions that play in the bathhouse as chained iterations with specific histories and particular citations. In this sense, there seems to be no real danger in citing either heterosexual or gay male practices; instead, each citation intervenes in the larger discussion regarding the possibility for new (dis)identifications to emerge. In this sense, citational thinking illuminates how identifications are at once enabling and constraining via the phantasmatic ideals that inform those constructions. This dual motion complicates the level of predictability in the bathhouse setting and nuances how particular identifications come to intervene in existing dominant discourses sometimes with possibility, sometimes with perimeter. In response to these researchers, I would say it is not a question of ‘proper deployment’ but rather, a question of a particular deployment that largely depends on at what points those identifications enable the intelligibility of new and emerging selves and at what points the language of the citation might constrain that emergence.

Second, the question of trans inclusion. The TWBC and Halifax organizers highlight on their websites and promotional materials that the bathhouses are for women, regardless of sexual identification, as well as for those whose gender exceeds a normative reading of woman. Under the ‘FAQ’ section of the Shedogs bathhouse website, the following question is posed: “What does that mean anyway, ‘women and transfolks’?” The answer reads,

It means that the bathhouse strives to welcome lots of people who couldn't go to Seadog's [the male-only bathhouse which runs year round] on most other nights. It is a woman-positive space, and embraces those of us who come for the opportunity to celebrate and revel in our sexiness as women, whether we are lesbian, bi, straight, and/or trans. The bathhouse also welcomes those who feel that they don't fit conventional definitions of sex, gender or sexual orientation; are between genders; or neither gender... whether we call ourselves bois, grrrls, butches, bitches, genderqueers, or nothing at all (http://shedogs.ca/faq.php).

This passage illuminates Butler’s imitation argument cited above; the language used suggests the difficulty of categorizing gendered and sexualized selves. Recognizing the performative characteristic of all (dis)identifications, both on the discursive level and in practice, is an example of how queer as a concept may be deployed. If the (dis)identifications referred to in this quotation are understood as performative, the difficult categories such as ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian’ become situated within a frame that considers referentiality, a concept we discussed in Butler’s Excitable Speech. This consideration speaks to the very instability of queer and what questions the concept itself might raise. Reading (dis)identifications as performative already suggests a sort of unstable politics, an in-flux resistance to naturalized identity categories, while simultaneously fostering a constantly changing language that operates in accordance with those new and emerging (dis)identifications (those that illuminate the ‘problem’ of performativity and referentiality). Democratizing a politics that depends on queer as a concept hinges on the possibility to construct spaces in ways that resist narrow and constrained preconceived notions of identity. Because Shedogs and the Pussy Palace constantly engage in considerations of for whom the bathhouse is intended and continues to expand their definition of woman-positive and, in turn, queer, the space can be read as a transformative location—one that is under a constant enabling renovation.

I also want to suggest that the Pussy Palace and SheDogs events constrain a deployment of queer as a concept. As briefly mentioned in my last post, Pussy Palace explicitly excludes cismen. This exclusion, based on the idea that cismen are presumably legible and thus afforded social space elsewhere, highlights how a deployment of queer is constrained at the door. Here I imagine a queer-identified cisgender man. Because he is cisgender, he is presumably ‘easily readable,’ though his queer identification complicates this categorization of intelligibility. He very well may be woman-positive and seek out various non-normative sexual desires including those not found in typical gay male bathhouses; those desires might include mutual leather and SM-loving with butch women. For him, his desire to enter a space that might offer that sort of play, both Pussy Palace and SheDogs, is denied on account of his apparent intelligibility as a biological man who identifies as man, one that is neither formerly, presently, nor intends in the future to perform female-bodiedness. The exclusion resists a deployment of queer in the sense that the cisman is not approached indeterminately; rather, the specific exclusion of cismen suggests that those working the door have the capacity to approach and determine what bodies are presumably legible as cismen and thus not allowed in at the door. The presumption of legibility is based on biologically determined readings of the body that might reflect gender identifications, though neglects to consider asymmetrical sexual identifications. If queer were deployed differently in this instance, it would suspend immediate judgment and reconsider that presumption. This confrontation creates a social space that facilitates questions regarding embodiment, performativity, referentiality, and the (dis)identifications of new and emerging selves. For example, how do we come to make legible those desires of cismen who complicate the heteronormative gender/sex matrix? Without places like SheDogs and Pussy Palace, the above scenario of confrontation would never occur in the first place. The cisman who attempts to enter on account of his sexual desire and subsequent sexual identifications challenges the normative in such a way that asks how queer as a concept can expand to include new and emerging (dis)identifications. These questions within queer theory are so compelling and provocative that they encourage a continued rethinking of embodiment, performativity, and non-normative sexualities in actual (often political) spaces.

From Opacity to Legibility

Re-reading the first posts of this blog pushes me to draw a metaphorical bridge between the beginning and the end of our reading of Judith Butler’s thoughts and theories. In fact, I believe that the bridge is begging to be written down, being in the end but a very logical step in Butler’s theoretical approach.

We started with the notions of opacity and transparency, subject formation and dispossession, with the notion of the necessity to recognize the unacknowledged and un-acknowledgeable side both of the self and of the other. We ended our seminar with notions of intelligibility, eligibility and recognition.

Intelligibility, eligibility and recognition are again three notions demanding that we look very closely and attentively at what is being precisely meant. To sum up it short, it can be said that in order to be eligible, one must be recognized and intelligible. Recognition goes back to the scene of address, in which someone gives an account of oneself to an addressee. It is the moment when someone is being recognized as existing in all his/her differences and shared qualities. It is thus the moment when opacity is put at play, at least if the encounter succeeds in performing some ethical rules; for as Butler expresses it in Undoing Gender, “recognition implies that we see the Other as separate, but as structured psychically in ways that are shared” (UG 132). These “ways that are shared” refer to the state of shared vulnerability that becomes central within ethical encounters.
Intelligibility is that which gives a subject the possibility to be understood in the realm of language. It is that which gives the subject a place in a system/frame that is being (theoretically/intellectually) thought. Legibility is that which enables a subject to claim rights, i.e. to politically claim his/her recognizability and intelligibility.[1] In order to be legible, one must thus acknowledge a certain identity—be it provisionally. The complex and two fold aspect of such an acknowledgement is to be read in the following excerpt of Undoing Gender:

I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship. (UG 117)

Note that Butler insists on the “critical and transformative relation to the norms”. The importance of this transformative factor echoes the temporality of interpellation, i.e. the temporality of the effects of norms that produce a subject. A subject’s identity is thus something that is constantly transforming, being redefined again and again due to an infinite process of iteration and transformation (see Excitable Speech). Identity is thus an effect of the re-iteration process through history. This takes us back to the beginning of our discussion again, where we discussed the irrecoverability of the subject’s origin; for the process of infinite reiteration in performative identity forming disables any ontological quest all the same.

In my first post, I discussed the irrecoverability fo origin in relation to the Deleuzian notions of difference and repetition. These Deleuzian notions are echoed in “Imitation and Gender in Subordination”, as Butler appears to have chosen to quote Deleuze as heading to her essay. The quote goes as follows:

Beyond physical repetition and the psychical or metaphysical repetition, is there an ontological repetition?... This ultimate repetition, this ultimate theater, gathers everything in a certain way; and in another way, it destroys everything; and in yet another way, it selects from everything. (IGS 120)

The quote reminds us of the intrinsic complexity of subject formation. In fact, it is precisely this complexity that calls for an acknowledgment of opacity in our relation with others; for if the origin is indeed irrecoverable due to a process of repetition and difference, it means that not only the origin is irrecoverable, but also that only a partial part of the subject can be knowable. Therefore, identity will always remain provisional—and strategic (IGS 123). For be it in the context of gender activism, in the context of terrorism or in the context of injurious speech or excitable speech, it appears that we never can account for a subject’s identity without doing him/her some violence. Yet again, this identity remains sometimes necessary in order to maintain the subject’s legibility, i.e. the subject’s possibility to actively resist certain systems of powers.
This idea of a necessary error of identity had already been raised by Michaela in her comment to my post “Who is the Opaque Subject?” (March, 2nd), where we discussed the problematic of the opaque subject vs. the transparent subject in the frame of (medical) institutions. The problem that was then encountered was that identity appeared to be imposed on subjects who had been defined as pathologized in advance, thereby also preventing them to give an account of themselves as opaque subjects, the discourse accompanying these medical institutions being in fact utterly dominant and restrictive. The difference that can be observed between those discursive “victims” of medical institutions and people who consciously endorse a certain identity for political purposes is that the latter can be done strategically, whereas the former is usually viciously imposed on people who have been identified as having the so-called Down Syndrome—or other pathological syndromes.
Can it be suggested that in both cases, the subject is being dispossessed of himself/herself? In fact, in both cases, the subject appears to endorse an identity that submits him/her to certain norms of recognition.
Yes, perhaps; for it still seems important to distinguish between imposed identity and “self-chosen” identity. In fact, can an imposed identity also be accounted as a strategic endorsement in order to have some claim to legal and political rights? Isn’t it rather a case of radical dispossession, in which the subject is being threatened by ethical violence? It seems in fact that such an imposed identity leaves but very little room for resistance from an opaque point of view.

In “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification” (PLP), Butler gives a reading of the subject formation through a dialogue between Foucault and Freud. Quoting Foucault in the following terms, Butler accounts for the necessity to constantly revise our interpretation of who we are:

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind”, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. … We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. (PLP 101)

Michaela already raised an anxious question with regards to this dis-identification practice suggested here (see Michaela’s post of June, 7th). Her fear was that such dis-identification would eventually lead to a loss of recognition and intelligibility on the part of the subject (a tension that Butler herself also raises in Undoing Gender). This might be true if the dis-identification is definitive, i.e. if the dis-identification becomes normative; for dis-identification would then lead the subject to accept a continuous state of exception that may foreclose him/her from any legibility due to a lack of intelligibility and recognition. To compare it with another Butlerian query, it may be the same impasse as postponing judgment indefinitely. For in fact, isn’t it that judging is one possible way to impose a certain identity on someone?
The anxiety of loss of recognition and intelligibility can perhaps be resolved through a reading of dis-identification that leans on Butler’s performativity theory exposed in Excitable Speech. What pushes me to this reading is the following paragraph found in The Psychic Life of Power:

… the signifiers of identity are not structurally determined in advance. If Foucault could argue that a sign could be taken up, used for purposes counter to those for which it was designed, then he understood that even the most noxious terms could be owned, that the most injurious interpellations could also be the site of radical reoccupation and resignification. (PLP 104)

What Butler suggests here is that we should look at identity in terms of signifiers, i.e. in terms of language—thereby also restating her strong anchor in the psychoanalytic tradition. What she states is that whatever signifiers of identity might have been imposed on the subject by a regime of power, there should always remain some room for the subject to take distance and re-appropriate those signifiers in a subversive way. Yet, what if the signifiers of identity keep being imposed on a subject again and again? Isn’t it that the room to maneuver becomes smaller and smaller? To a certain extend, yes. Yet, there should always remain some room in which the subject should be able to perform a subversive reversal, be it only due to his/her own impossibility of to know himself/herself totally.
Ideally, the subject would indeed always have the power to provisionally accept the rules of subjectification and the violence of a certain transparency through identity. The provisional aspect of such an identification would then preserve a dialogue between the self and the subject, thereby also safeguarding a certain degree of opacity, which is according to Butler—and I profoundly sympathize with this view!—the primary ground for any ethical encounter to take place. So, however profound and personal the notion of identity may be, its expression and its practice remain a matter of relationality, being thereby directed toward the others; for as Butler has it,

it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds. (GAAO 20)


To conclude—which I can’t, what can I say more than to express a genuine wish to see one’s ethical responsibilities be taken in juridical-political institutions, expressing the recognition of a narrow bound between opacity and legibility. Hopefully we’ll come there. Hopefully.


[1] Note that ‘legible’ is defined as readable or decipherable in English dictionaries. Butler proves to use a slightly different meaning of the word by giving it a political content. Nonetheless, her usage of the word still directly refers to readability or decipherability due to its narrow connection with the notions of intelligibility and recognizability.

Constituting Recognitions

I’d like to respond to Michaela in this post as well as to extend our discussion of sexual coalitional politics by reconciling the space of the bathhouses mentioned with the discourses (de)mobilized via Prop 8 in California.

First, in ‘More Thesis Thoughts’ Michaela posits that the sexual-political goals of the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee, and, by extension, the bathhouse events offered, are “purposeful political projects intended to dismantle preconceived and constraining notions of women’s sexualized and gendered selves.” Michaela reads this alongside Butler’s account of psychic resistance within sexual subject formation in PLOP: that sexuality is the continuous ebb and flow of resistance and emergence, enablement and constraint, and therefore “speaks to the types of resistance available for deployment, especially within queer activism.” Representability is Michaela’s central concern, and she seeks answers to how those strategies of extending representability in the space of the bathhouse foster simultaneous exclusions to other forms of representation and intelligibility. Her penultimate question of this give-and-take recognition in bathhouses, asking “if excluded, is this to say that you are part of the prohibiting mechanism?”, leaves me feeling profoundly unsettled and eager to respond.

So, in grappling some of these concerns myself, its my sense that within this ‘enabling and constraining’ paradigm and within Butler’s meditations on resistance, there exists a space for one to extemporize sexuality and desire. Yes, in going to the bathhouse and being conscious of the door policy, one would be part of the prohibiting mechanism, but probably to the same extent I’m personally part of a prohibiting mechanism whenever I choose a toilet marked ‘Heren’ or ‘Dames’. If the TWBC is explicitly politicized against this “particular lesbian feminist ideology”, as Michaela affirms, then perhaps the operative questioning would be to interrogate what purpose the reanimation of biologically-based (mis)recognitions like ‘cismen’ serves within the contemporary political horizon? Yes, there’s an initial prohibition on ‘cismen’ at the bathhouses, and yes, this would seem to undercut the larger political project of the TWBC. However, I think we need to look past the explicit slogans rallied by the TWBC to see what kind of social work is being ‘done’ within these spaces; that is, these lovely ‘G-spot rooms,’ masturbation circles, private rooms, and ‘sexy’ labyrinths provide, and, indeed, incite, space for both unrepresentable and emergent sexualities to articulate themselves in unanticipated ways. Those new recognitions, new desires, and sexy surprises emerge precisely because the policy is both enabling and constraining. And that’s a warm fuzzy feeling. It reminds me of the opening section of UG (‘Acting in Concert’) where Butler positions gender as an “improvisation within a scene of constraint,” as well as our discussion of subject opacity in GAAOO, where the dispossession of the ‘I’ does not the end of political claims but instead opens and realizes them as relational and therefore a “question of so much more than the two of us” (UG 151). The rethinking of desire and recognition in this capacity does not entail a return to sexuality per se, but it does thankfully dislodge us from grander strategic political narratives of Freedom and Progress.

Second, to a similar extent, the TWBC problem is closely related to the Strauss case: what is the door policy on constitutional rights in California? Well, from 1911 onwards (when the process of popular initiative constitutional amendments became possible) the door policy could be considered to fall under the rubric of ‘popular sovereignty’ (both this view and the process it entails is warranted in the Strauss dissent by J Moreno). That is, aside from the normal legislative process to amend constitutional rights, it’s a majority rule situation, which presents its own sets of enabling and constraining conditions. But how do we make legible to a majority of California’s population desires and forms of sexual relations that are yet ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘unknown’ already (even though they may be already socially practiced)? Getting fifteen million voters on the same page as you is a tall order. Is the discourse of Equal Protection—in both its legal and vernacular circulation—elastic enough to bring different forms of recognition within its symbolic sanctuary? Care to wager on that? One the one hand, Strauss shows the ugly side of coalitional politics, where people gather to install exclusions on civic performativity; on the other hand, the sheer number of popular initiative constitutional amendments in California’s history coupled with the current discourses of outrage from same-sex marriage advocates makes certain Prop 8 will have an imminent expiration date.

But, of course, framing it that way is itself the seduction of coalitional politics, because this legal ‘debate’ is all a red herring (especially for Butler, see PL 25 and UG 20 again). The above outlined ‘gameplan’ to overturn Prop 8 (a perspective paralleled in J Moreno’s Strauss dissent), where coalitions come together in the initiative process to amend/repeal the Prop 8 amendment—by way of individuals’ ‘finding themselves’ and working towards specific ends, goals—perhaps advances along the same imaginary track as the TWBC. That is, how Michaela’s quandary of creating desires to meet the needs of a political end-result necessitates exclusions. Yet, what if it’s not about a ‘turn to the state’ so much as its about a turning to one’s neighbors, a turning toward new forms of kinship, a turn toward expressing those already existing unrepresentable forms of kinship, one which relies on the emergence of intelligibilities instead of a resistance to its legal prohibitions? For political action and social transformation, I think this is closer to Butler’s counsel that we have to “think politics from such a site of unrepresentability” (UG 106, emph mine).

This is about remaking one’s own world and urging its contamination within the dominant ‘popular’ ‘lexicon of legitimation’, not the other way round.

Recognition, Resistance, and Exclusion: More Thesis Thoughts

[In this post I return to the two previous session texts, The Psychic Life of Power (PLOP) and Undoing Gender (UG), and consider questions of resistance, recognition and exclusion, which are all central to my third thesis chapter. Throughout the post I deposit some questions with which I still struggle and welcome any and all feedback.]

Tim’s post “Constitutions, Recognitions” speaks to the recent Prop 8 ruling in California in conjunction with Butler’s kinship and recognition chapters in Undoing Gender. He posits the problem of coalitional politics when it is rallied to create exclusions and suggests that the exclusions occurring within the Prop 8 debates are so purposeful that one is brought to the voting booth to legally sediment those exclusions. In this post I want to consider something similar. I also concern myself with coalitional politics, though my preoccupation is with those coalitional movements that seek to include as many as possible in the face of prior limitation. The type of politics that unfolds in these scenarios, however, often also enacts a certain level of exclusion. Like Tim’s argument, those exclusions often play out within the frame of political resistance and the problem of recognition.

As mentioned in my previous post, the third chapter of my thesis considers two lesbian and trans folk bathhouses both of which exist in Canada. These spaces are both similar and different from ‘traditional’ gay male sex bathhouses which exist internationally. The events, ‘The Pussy Palace’ and ‘The SheDogs Bathhouse’, occur irregularly a few times a year in Toronto Ontario and Halifax Nova Scotia, respectively. The bathhouse events are intended to provide spaces supportive of casual social-sexual encounters and they cater to those women and trans bodies that formerly, presently, or in the future identify with some sort of female-bodiedness. When the events do occur, they reappropriate male bathhouse spaces and translate through citation a version of those gay male sites. The events include ‘women-of-color’ nights, ‘G-spot rooms,’ masturbation circles, private rooms, a ‘sexy’ labyrinth, and various sex workshops. Both transmen and transwomen are welcome with the only explicit exclusion being cismen. For the organizers, cismen refer to those individuals biologically categorized as male at birth and as a consequence identify as men. This classification is considered as synonymous with non-transgendered and non-transsexual men. Additionally, The Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) indicates that events like these are purposeful political projects intended to dismantle preconceived and constraining notions of women’s sexualized and gendered selves. The TWBC traces these preconceived ideas back to a particular lesbian feminist ideology of the 1980s which created a politic that moved away from the freedom of sexual expression, emphasized a gendered code of sexual passivity, and berated (for example) butch and SM-loving lesbians for imitating heteronormative gender sex matrices.

In chapter four of The Psychic Life of Power, Butler quotes Foucault on resistance at length. In the session, we read this particular passage closely. For the purposes of my third chapter object, the bathhouse events, I find the first and last lines of the quotation compelling. Butler citing Foucault writes, “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are . . . We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (PLOP 101). First, I think this is the very idea which influences Butler’s chapter on the enabling and constraining characteristic of the state sanctioned marriage debate in Undoing Gender. Second, this passage speaks to the types of resistance available for deployment, especially within queer activism. Because I understand the construction of these bathhouse events as a nod towards a particular queer activism/politics, I find the idea to refuse who we are also as at once enabling and constraining (as a side note, I intend to blog on this problem of the deployment of queer within the bathhouse events next week in conjunction with our reading of “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” and “Critically Queer”).

Although dis-identifying can certainly be understood as a way of identifying, I am left with this question: how are we to do activism and render tangible political movements when we constantly refuse who we are, risking unintelligibility and the lack of recognition. This is the tension raised by Butler in Undoing Gender. She writes,

Here a normative crisis ensues. On the one hand, it is important to mark how the field of intelligible and speakable sexuality is circumscribed, so that we can see how options outside of marriage are becoming foreclosed as the unthinkable, and how the terms of thinkability are enforced by the narrow debates over who and what will be included in the norm. On the other hand, there is always the possibility of savoring the status of unthinkability, if it is a status, as the most critical, the most radical, the most valuable. As the sexually unrepresentable, such sexual possibilities can figure the sublime with the contemporary field of sexuality, a site of pure resistance, a site unco-opted by normativity. But how does one think politics from such a site of unrepresentability? (UG 106).

To clarify, I think this problem of unrepresentability lies at the center of the bathhouse events. Because the organizers are constantly committed to allowing participants to dis-identify, this above passage becomes illuminated every time. In dis-identifying, participants might be encouraged to both critically ask why they dis-identify while at the same time, taking the dis-identifcation as a radical and possibilizing given (a site of pure resistance). Additionally and on the other hand, some of the organizers and participants point to the events as a place where one can ‘find oneself’ and ‘be who you really are.’ Although potentially politically empowering, I wonder how this sort of discourse relates to not discovering who we are, but refusing who we are. How do political projects that allow you to ‘find yourself’ compare with those political projects that allow you to ‘refuse who you are’? On a personal note, to which space would YOU be more drawn? On a utopian note, wouldn’t a happy medium of the two be wonderfully fabulous?! (Somehow I consider the bathhouse events as spaces where that happy medium has the potential to critically unfold).

The bathhouses depart from a particular politics which installs the space as a site of resistance to those limitations that come in the form of hetero-patriarchy and particular lesbian feminist ideologies. This particular strategic resistance (rather than say a general, multi-faceted emergence), thus, only welcomes a certain subject into the space which fosters a level of exclusion. Through my research, I have discovered that Pussy Palace and SheDogs are primarily for those ‘part of the sex-positive queer culture’. Hence, the very resistance deployed in these spaces has the potential to subjectivize a particular sexuality. How this subjectivization leads to identity is problematic. Butler writes,

For Foucault, a subject is formed and then invested with a sexuality by a regime of power. If the very process of subject-formation, however, requires a preemption of sexuality, a founding prohibition that prohibits a certain desire but itself becomes a focus of desire, then a subject is formed through the prohibition of a sexuality, a prohibition that at the same time forms this sexuality—and the subject who is said to bear it. . . In this sense, a ‘sexual identity’ is a productive contradiction in terms, for identity is formed through a prohibition on some dimension of the very sexuality it is said to bear, and sexuality, when it is tied to identity, is always in some sense undercutting itself (PLOP 103-4).

It is my sense that this is similar to the movement of subject-formation within the bathhouse events. Because the spaces are purposeful political projects that seek to resist limitations (prohibitions) like hetero-patriarchy and particular lesbian feminist ideologies (which often demand stable identities), a particular type of subject is formed behind the door of the events and subsequently a particular type of subject is excluded from even entering. Given this movement, I am left with this question: if excluded, is this to say that you are part of the prohibiting mechanism?

Additionally, although the door policy is explicit in its inclusion of trans folks, the question of recognizing those bodies is precariously situated. The question of recognition becomes problematic within the bathhouse space when there is a failure of mutual, multi-directional desire and a failure to make legible particular bodies. Although the organizers continue to work on trans-inclusion, some trans participants have voiced their concerns. Whether explicitly or implicitly vocalized at the events, sentiments such as “‘So, like, are you the token fag?’; Are you an honorary woman for the night? . . . ‘Is that a man?’” indicate that all those who enter are certainly not always already recognizable. Hence, even if a certain level of recognition occurs within the bathhouse space, the question of trans intelligibility complicates the authorization rendered. This complication destabilizes recognition in that a lack of multi-directional desire coupled with an inability to make legible particular trans bodies fosters neither the level of intelligibility needed nor the corresponding legitimation which might result from a certain level of recognition. I say ‘a certain level’ because I still am a bit confused as to where one should seek recognition. I suppose the question lies somewhere in what kind of recognition YOU demand, though I am unsure if there is such a thing as proper recognition. Certainly, the recognition sought by a trans person from the state in regards to her legal documents is different than the recognition she might seek from a cisgendered woman at the bathhouse. As Butler asks, “Does the turn to the state signal the end of a radical sexual culture?” (UG 105). When a trans person turns to the state to demand their sex identification be changed on legal document, does that turn jeopardize a radical sexual culture or challenge the limitations? Does the answer hinge on whether or not she is successful? Surely these questions are the crises of legitimation to which Butler is referring.