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How
should queer politics respond to the attachment some
people feel to a stable gender identity? This is the question Judith Butler poses in
discussion with Sara Ahmed in the current issue of Sexualities.
Butler asks:
If ‘queer’ means that we are
generally people whose gender and sexuality is ‘unfixed’ then what room is
there in a queer movement for those who understand themselves as requiring –
and wanting – a clear gender category within a binary frame? … some people very
much require a clear name and gender, and struggle for recognition on the basis
of that clear name and gender.
It is a fundamental issue of how to establish
and insist upon those forms of address that make life liveable… How do I name
myself… and to what extent will my desire to live as a particular gender or
within an established gender category be honoured by those who claim to ally
with me?
Butler’s question is one that,
in different forms, has been much pondered over. Within trans politics, many proponents
fiercely contest the queer assumption that gender must be fluid and non-binary,
treating gender instead as a personal quality or property that is, really,
nobody else’s business. If someone “born” a boy has his “male” wants and
desires accepted as legitimate, why shouldn’t those of a transman be also?
Now this of course has
generated a lot of argument from feminists who reject the notion of gender as
personal property on the grounds gender is far more systemic and relational.
But I don’t want to get into this argument here. What I want to explore,
rather, is that part of the debate which concerns the attention paid to
identities and interests of the present.
Judith Butler frames it as a
question of supporting liveable lives. But is this right? What weight
should be given to the feminist argument that people’scurrent gender
preferences and desires should be transcended; that radical gender politics is
not about respecting what men and women want and desire as gendered subjects
(however voluntary the choice) but about creating new post-gender desires and
ways of living?
Does the emphasis on
respecting interests and desires as they are evacuate the
space for imagining other kinds of subjects, of who we might be, what we might
want and, as Judith Butler puts it, how we might come to “live with others”?
It’s not surprising that
radical politics has moved in the direction of affirming the interests and
desires people say they have given the twentieth century legacy of
authoritarian socialism. We can see this in feminist debates over
multiculturalism and power-transacting sex where affirming interests and
desires that actually existed seemed to trump other feminists’ arguments that
the interests and desires reproduced existing inequalities and violence.
But the battle-ground over
whether genital cutting or the psycho-sexual desire for role-based sex should
be affirmed or critiqued dragged attention away from another site of
engagement, and that is the politics of imagining life lived otherwise.
Where does this fit in a
radical gender politics? How does it relate to affirming the genders people say
they are? Is the latter as far as a left politics should go?
Imagining life otherwise is
the terrain utopian arts and thinking occupy. While much utopian work
elaborates on the structured patterns, architectures and routines of living in
ways that are more just and ecologically sustainable, one part of this project,
as utopian fiction demonstrates, is reimagining what people might be like in
worlds that don’t revolve around private property, markets, competition,
monogamy or gender.
Imagining and forging new
kinds of people was once a staple of left politics. In the left-wing British
children’s movement I belonged to, Woodcraft, we sang songs about the “new
man standing tall with his head high and his heart proud, and afraid of nothing
at all”; a man who would emerge in “a world that is free”.
Uncomfortably sexist and
eugenic (like much of the aspirational thinking of its time), today ideas of
creating new kinds of people seems out of favour; certainly far too normative
for the queer deconstructive politics Judith Butler discusses. But if we put to
one side the notion of perfect humans being realised in some distant future, or
better subjectivities designed and machinically created, what remains is a
sense that the politics of who we could become enacts important political
terrain.
What would it mean to be
human in a world where today’s cleavages and distinctions, of gender,
class, religion and race, either didn’t operate or operated very differently?
I don’t ask this as a
predictive question. As Fredric Jameson has remarked on utopias, thinking life
otherwise is inevitably anchored in the concerns of the present. With all its
limits and pressures on what is thinkable, it cannot actually tell us what will
come uinto being.
It’s also not an argument for
argument. I don’t think we’d be better off fighting over competing images of
the kinds of people who might inhabit our planet. At the same time, if we
discount a politics of future subjectivities, do we risk entrenching and
naturalising the identities of people as they now are; where our identities are
all we can be or all that matters?
Creatively exploring other
ways of being human (or post-human, animal or, indeed, merely living)
highlights the contingent qualities of present-day attachments—that our genders
or religious backgrounds, for instance, however deeply felt may not be
attachments to defend as everlasting value—the question is what they do, for us
and for others and how they evolve. Exploring other ways of living and being
human also enriches our political thinking which needs more than critique; and
it stimulates and develops our desire for change.
Utopian thinking is no longer
about timeless perfection, universal agreement or programmatic change. It has
evolved as far more complex, deliberately imperfect, agonistic, improvised and
unpredictable. But despite the range of utopian celebrations, exhibitions and
activities, evident especially now in the 500th anniversary
year of Thomas More’s Utopia, all too often the utopian remains
apart from political movements and grass-roots activism, as such its political
charge is muted.
How might an exploration of
new kinds of subjectivities be part of a radical politics? Can it be done in
ways that tie it to the challenges and interests of subordinated people in the
present? And in ways that avoid creating a battle-ground, in which some
people’s identities (but not others) function as the terrain on which
attacks and defences are played out?
Film, art, theatre, music and
dance seem important sources in providing modes of exploration which approach
new worlds and new peoples from usefully oblique and creative angles. The
collaboration on Utopia 2016 with its range of London
activities and events involving literature, fashion, art, design, film and
other stuff, going on now, seems an interesting current example of this.
Play also provides a mode of
self-making activity that foregrounds invention and takes the sting out of
conflict. And alternative social spaces, from protest camps to democratic
schools, local economic networks and even nudist communities, enable new
interests and desires to develop. This doesn’t mean people suddenly become more
communal or collectivist. In his writings on Summerhill School, founding head
teacher A. S. Neill described how he reverted to a system of private property,
in which kids used tool kits brought from home, because despite living
communally, they failed to treat collective things with enough care.
How people respond to living
differently, as Sasha Roseneil’s account of the women of Greenham Peace Camp
exemplifies, will vary. But what everyday utopias and other alternative spaces
demonstrate is that ontological change isn’t just an exercise in imaginary
politics. Participating in unusual innovative practices, including inhabiting
new genders, produces new wants and interests, even if these aren’t
necessarily, or always, the ones political radicals intend.
Today, political critique on
the left is incredibly developed and nuanced, built from the sediment of
multiple generations of political activity. By contrast, a politics of what
change could look like remains in its infancy—both in its details and in its
form. Compared to our ability to critique, the left is far less sure how to
engage politically and creatively with new ways of living as well as with new
ways of being human.
How then can we face in both
directions? Can we recognise and respect the cultural identifications which
allow the subordinated parts of who we are to thrive in the
present—identifications which may not be meaningful to future imaginings but which
are important attachments now? And can we, at the same time, explore the
richness of new identifications and attachments; these may not reflect the
future ahead (a future also that is far from singular), nevertheless they extend our
political commitments, experiments and aspirations?
Davina Cooper is Professor
of Law and Political Theory at Kent Law School, University of Kent.
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