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The second objection — that not all women had vaginas — was trickier to address. In the first place, it had the distinct advantage of being true: not all women do have vaginas, nor do all vaginas have women. Then again, the pussyhat was not an artistic rendering of the female genitalia but a simple bit of costuming. Its most literal suggestion was not that the wearer was a woman but that the wearer was a cat. This ensured that the relationship between the hat and the sex organ was, whatever else it was, figurative: a verbal and visual pun that afforded demonstrators a sly bit of plausible deniability in matters of bourgeois decency. After all, it was not as if attendees were required to flash their gash before gaining entry to the Women’s March. The real question posed by the pussyhat was not whether women should be directly equated with an elastic muscle — a laughable notion, espoused by literally no one — but whether the refracted image of a vagina could be trusted to play the role of political symbol for a feminist movement that has largely denied itself the luxury of symbolism.
[...] After all, the pussyhat could be arraigned on charges of biological essentialism only if one had decided in advance that the only possible relationship to the vagina was having one. “Not all women have vaginas,” our defenders seemed to say, “but we do.” At worst, this line of thinking served as cover for the same old transphobic obsessions with our genitalia. Somehow, under the guise of inclusivity, cis women had given themselves the responsibility of reminding us of our dicks. At best, it assumed, with marvelous ignorance, that trans women simply wouldn’t be interested in a vaginal imaginary — as if our basic psychic integrity did not regularly rely, like everyone else’s, on identification with things we do not, in the hollowest sense of reality, possess.
I’m getting worked up. Whatever. The pussyhats were silly and cutesy and looked like your mom made them. [...] The real problem with the pussyhats was that they offered up, with the winsome naivete of the recently radicalized, the promise of a universal category of womanhood, which feminism has long made a cardinal virtue of forgoing. It would not be fantastic to suppose that those feminists who criticized the pussyhat most fiercely did so in part because they saw in its blithe adopters a younger, warmer version of themselves, still ugly-sweet on the romance of political consciousness, not yet having learned to be frugal with their hopes. Embarrassment is usually just pride, later.
damn, never thought i'd be so fascinated by an analysis of the women's march
That night, in bed at my apartment, I wept. I wailed, actually, the way mothers do in ancient manuscripts. My voice, which I have over several years trained myself to lift and smooth, grew raw; at a certain point, it broke, like a woman’s water, and something low and hoarse and full of legs crawled up my throat and out of my mouth. The truth was, I didn’t feel any more like a woman. I felt exactly the same. The pitiless beauty of the operation is that it’s all the same nerve endings, reclaimed like lumber from an old boat. This meant my vulva was alive, full of sensation, but it also meant that these sensations were the very ones I had gone under the knife to escape. The ship would always be Theseus’s, no matter how many parts I replaced. I guess I should have known this beforehand. I did, intellectually. You can stand on the beach and spy a sandbar across the water; if you swim, you can stand on the shoal and look back. Your location will have changed, but your position will be identical. You will always be Here, wherever Here happens to be. The tide goes in and out, but distance as such—that is the unswimmable. There, there is only drowning.
new tag on being trapped as oneself, unable to change despite wanting to?
FEMINISM NEVER succeeded in securing women as a collective subject of history, as the Marxist intellectual tradition once hoped to do with the working class. On the contrary, contemporary feminism is arguably defined by its refusal of woman as a political category, on the grounds that this category has historically functioned as a cruel ruse for white supremacy, the gender binary, the economic interests of the American ruling class, and possibly patriarchy itself. This has put feminism in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshipping her somewhat up in the air.
Perhaps the simplest solution to this paradox has been to quietly shift the meaning of the word feminism. In popular culture and especially online, feminism has become the go-to signifier for what the legal scholar Janet Halley calls convergentism: the belief that justice projects with different constituencies have a moral duty to converge, like lines stretching toward a vanishing point. Once the name of a single plank in a hypothetical program of universal justice, feminism now refers, increasingly, to the whole platform — hence the so-called Unity Principles put forward on the Women’s March website, which include calls for migrant rights, a living wage, and clean air as well as the familiar demands for reproductive freedom and an end to sexual violence. “It ain’t feminism if it ain’t intersectional,” tweeted Ariana Grande in March 2019, echoing a viral 2011 blog post by the writer Flavia Dzodan. Dzodan’s original phrasing was “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”; popular variations now include the formula “If your feminism doesn’t include x, then it’s not feminism,” where x might be trans women, women of color, fat women, sex workers, nonbinary people, or any number of other groups. The idea is not that feminists, being desirous of justice, should also commit to antiracism, anti-imperialism, and all the rest; it’s that feminism by definition consists in the making of extrafeminist commitments, such that without them, it would not be feminism at all. This is weird. It is as if, having guiltily assimilated the impossibility of speaking on behalf of all women, feminism has resigned itself to the modest virtues of playing hostess for other, frankly more persuasive political discourses — most of whose constituencies are composed of women, of course, but never simply as women. In this arrangement, feminism describes not a concrete political project but the moral imperative to do politics in the first place.
articulating something i'd vaguely wondered about never really crystallised. awesome
also, the negative theology aspect reminds me of china mieville's essay on apophatic marxism
HELLO.
Sorry for the runaround. I just wanted to make sure we could talk in private, you and me. Brain to brain, if that’s OK. It’s your brain that’s reading this right now on your computer or your phone, or bless you, maybe in print, feeling the coarse weight of the paper stock under your fingers, which are your brain’s fingers, with their thousands of nerve endings. The truth is it’s always the brain, reading or writing. It’s always the brain talking or eating, having sex, not having sex, lying about why, apologizing for earlier, walking around the apartment wondering where did I leave that thing, saying how could you do this to me, asking is this really happening, asking what will I do without you. Brains softly crying together. Brains kissing brains goodbye.
IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING trying transcranial magnetic stimulation for yourself, I think you’ll find that its appeal lies in treating your depression not as a psychological disorder, or even a chemical imbalance, but as a basically electrical problem. Sure, you can talk to a therapist or a psychoanalyst about all the things that make you want to die. They will help you narrativize your pain, or the jagged border around your pain; if they cannot stitch the hole inside you, then at least they can help you hem the edges. Or you can get a psychiatrist, and they will write you a prescription for an antidepressant, and you can spend months or years negotiating a dose with the animalcules who operate your cells. But the magnets are different, brain. They promise direct manipulation of the voltages inside you, much closer to physical therapy than to an SSRI. What the magnets say is, it’s just physics, dummy. What the magnets say is, what you need is a good kick in the head.
Merve Emre presents the stories of her interviewees as evidence that all reproduction is, and should be, assisted, not “natural.” But these stories are equally proof of just how hard it is to give up nature as an object of desire. Even queer theorists are sobered to learn the sex of an embryo. So when Emre proposes we expose the lie of nature, I’m not so sure. I’m alienated by the discourse around the natural, sure, but only the same way I’m alienated by the skinny white girls with dead eyes and bare midriffs who herald, like dandelions, the arrival of summer in New York City. Unfold my political critique at its creases, and you will be left with nothing but flat, blank envy. That doesn’t mean nature isn’t a lie. It just means that we never believed in it because it was true; we believed in it because we wanted to.
This is my way of saying what I think Emre means when she writes, “people’s bodies are unruly sites for politics.” It’s an observation she makes of micha cárdenas’s Pregnancy (2009), to which it applies if only by accident. cárdenas does indeed perform the ambivalence of reproduction, but not without arming herself with political buzzwords clearly intended to pack a moral punch. “oh the privilege of / cis-hetero reproduction!” the poet exclaims, a laptop sticker of a line sure to win righteous snaps from the mostly cisgender queers who are spending their Tuesday night at this independent bookstore in Oakland. I prefer Joanne Spataro, who longs in the New York Times to make a baby with her trans fiancée “the way fertile cisgender people do.” She makes no attempt to justify this desire politically. She wouldn’t be able to, anyway.
love her writing