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.