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.
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