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.
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