sophistry and butch feminism

Senior Hire: My letter on Jack Halberstam

I’m writing to share my reflections on Jack Halberstam’s visit a few weeks ago. I’m in my third year in the Rhetoric program, working on my field exam with Diane Davis supervising. I attended Dr. Halberstam’s lecture and graduate seminar and Saturday brunch. I did not attend the other candidates’ events except David Eng’s lecture yesterday evening.

Dr. Eng’s lecture was quite engaging, but the only comparative observation I’d like to offer is the number of student questions he received (I think only one), versus Dr. Halberstam (quite a few). This is certainly no fault for Dr. Eng, but I think it points to a significant difference in the way Drs. Eng and Halberstam approached their lecture audiences, and also to the performative work of Dr. Halberstam’s talk on “low theory” and the importance of circulating scholarly critique throughout our culture.

Simply put, hiring Jack Halberstam would change my life: in all seriousness. Dr. Halberstam is part of my Nerd Dream Team, a scholar whose work has been transformative for me as an intellectual (more than once) and as a person (more than once). Female Masculinity quite literally made it possible for me to be in the world, to see myself as a butch and an intellectual, to envision a future for myself and a career in the academy. Dr. Halberstam’s work on queer utopia and negativity has helped me formulate my research agenda, and The Queer Art of Failure is helping me define the questions I want to ask in the field of rhetoric that will guide my dissertation.

A few days ago, a graduate student in our department told me she thought Dr. Halberstam’s lecture was not “as intellectually rigorous” as another she had attended. I was truly surprised by this argument, since perhaps the most important contribution of Dr. Halberstam’s “Gaga Feminism” project is her critique of certain conventions and constraints in the name of “intellectual rigor,” and moreover, her response in the mode and model of “low theory,” a term that allows us to think about forms of intellectualism not normally or not already recognized and esteemed by the academy. I cannot think of a more important asset for the Department than the agility Dr. Halberstam’s low theory will offer. I am sure that resonance of her work outside “the ivory tower” was apparent in the size and in the faces of the crowd attending Dr. Halberstam’s Thursday evening lecture. Her work appeals to organic intellectuals both in and out of the academy because it is rhetorically inventive and also invested in the communities in which is it situated.

It’s not as though I don’t understand that grad student’s concern: I consider myself a “high theory” type of scholar, and have been known to work with traditional, often difficult, and even hostile archives. As a student of Diane Davis, intellectual rigor is a value extremely near to my heart and my sense of integrity in my work. But it is because of exactly this position that I am excited, impassioned, and challenged by Dr. Halberstam’s most recent work. She will continue to produce new lines of inquiry and debate that raise the caliber of academic work at the same time as she pushes us to reach (at times) beyond the limited audience of professional academics (an audience I belong to and love, to be sure!).

If you’ll permit me a few paragraphs more, let me speak to being a student in Dr. Halberstam’s special seminar. Dr. Halberstam was quick to learn each of our names. She made sure every student had an opportunity to raise their own questions and interests. She gave us thoughtful and affirming responses that directed our conversation from issue to issue, meandering through each of the three readings so as to highlight their relationships. As you might have guessed from my questions in the seminar, I was particularly delighted to read from Avital Ronell’s Stupidity. Dr. Halberstam’s selection is a perfect “high theory” complement, I think, to the “Gaga Feminism” project, and her choice has much to tell us about how the production of “low theory” for multiple audiences is informed by other kinds of scholarship and texts.

Finally, the graduate student brunch with Jack was just what a grad student might wish for: a frank and informal chat about job placement, advising and professional relationships, campus life, local culture, and so on. Jack showed interest in each of us and our projects, and even though I was suffering through a bad head cold, Jack’s visit left me feeling refreshed and inspired.

In the final comparison, I am sure all candidates for this senior hire are eminently qualified, and each would be a great addition to our faculty. But none would make the kind of difference hiring Jack Halberstam would make.

Please share these comments with the committee in full, and please let me know if you have any questions about my comments. Thank you for soliciting responses, and I hope the committee finds them useful.

Sincerest thanks,
Kendall Gerdes
—
Kendall Gerdes, M.A.
RSA Governing Board Member
Doctoral Program in Rhetoric, Dept. of English
University of Texas at Austin

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In case you’d like to leave longer comments, or comment without reblogging.

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Halberstam — part 2, low theory

Part 1, on “Masculine of Center,” here.

start-anywhere:

• the relationship of academics to theory and “high theory” v. low theory
• learning through failure

I just spend a good long while writing a letter to the hiring committee on behalf of Jack Halberstam. I may share it in full later, but it did give me some formulations on the question of “low theory” Halberstam argues in a forthcoming project on “Gaga Feminism.” In my letter, I explain low theory as

a term that allows us to think about forms of intellectualism not normally or not already recognized and esteemed by the academy.

A very striking moment in Halberstam’s job talk was her introduction of low theory as a term that described something many of those in attendance were already doing outside the academy, and the response of assent from the crowd. I think it’s very validating of a kind of activism that does not necessarily take the form of organizing, or of neoliberal political strategies like badgering congress &c. I might venture to say that low theory is why I like arguing with everyone, if only they would argue with me. It probably describes a lot of the arguments I like on tumblr (and probably NOT a lot of the rest of what goes on on tumblr, though maybe that’s me not being fair to arguments I think are argued badly).

Jack’s talk criticized the idea that “theory for theory’s sake” is the purest form of knowledge. I’m not quite sure who is the target of this critique, and I think it applies more fairly to certain theorists (Agamben? Badiou?) than it does to others (Ronell, e.g.). The talk emphasized, though, that a “rule” of low theory is a refusal to sacrifice complexity. That seems hugely important to me, but also perhaps quite difficult. In a letter I wrote to Jack after her visit, I asked:

where does low theory stand in relation to work that’s notoriously difficult to read, even reputedly hostile to its readers?

Such work is usually where I find my “archive,” and for that reason I find low theory to be a very challenging concept, pushing the limits of what I center on and asking me to turn to other kinds of texts that I’m not as comfortable with (animated film, pop music, etc.). At minimum it seems only fair to be willing to be uncomfortable, if I want to ask other people to encounter the uncomfortable texts I like and am familiar with.

Actually, the strangeness and un-comfort seem key, and maybe low theory can share that with high theory: the text is a challenge, and what seems simple should be read with more complexity, and the reading is making a map of how you found your way through that text. The accidents, puzzles, problems, and even mis-readings can be playful; fun. Jack’s reply put the point on it this way:

Low theory never needs to dispense with high theory, it merely takes up a different relation to it.

Replying to an audience question about the overtly political Gaga, of gay marriage and DADT, Jack argued that “we haven’t made those [more radical] critiques available,” and that’s why they may only be articulable in high theory. Obviously, incubating those critiques is an important function, so high theory is a kind of sacred realm for me. But the dissemination of those critiques is also important, and maybe that’s the rhetorically inventive job of low theory: making more arguments available.

So, maybe a high theorist like me should be asking how I can make low theory for certain critiques that our culture could use a lot more of. Yet, I think there’s something problematic about planning to address oneself to a “wider audience” because they ought to need you, especially if they already don’t—another reason I like the world of theory: the contributions I make there matter. The question ought to be about how to take up a different relation, and perhaps it is that relation that engenders an audience, or we should say, an audience that engenders a different relation for me.

So what do you say, internet: theory ARG?

The Marriage of Fun and Serious Writing

An Arizona friend sent me to this DFW letter on the occasion of his birthday. My short reflection on his yearning to do both excellent and satisfying work:

I can’t help but believe Wallace would have benefited from a little bit of Limited, Inc.

I think one reason why I ask you this (though I know you not at all as a person, of course) is that your own fiction seems to me to marry Fun and Seriousness in a profound way, somehow — a sense of Play that’s somehow even Funner because it’s not sophomoric or self-aggrandizing or childish or even childlike.^1

Derrida would say no simple logic separates serious/fun, and that the marriage Wallace longs for is not simply a felicitous speech act, but a performative, and if (when) it mis-fires or fails, something *else* is always produced. I also can’t help but think Wallace would have benefited from some instruction in rhetoric, since it seems to me both philosophy and creative writing are so vulnerable to a romanticized view of writing, as if you can just reach in and pull either Knowledge or Art out of your fundament.

1 DFW in a letter to Don DeLillo, http://networkedblogs.com/uf0A5

Halberstam — part 1: masculine of center

Here are some things I set aside to write about before Jack Halberstam’s visit to UT two weeks ago, based on this interview^1:

start-anywhere:

• the relationship of academics to theory and “high theory” v. low theory
• learning through failure
• butch parenting
• going by transgender butch
• critiquing the term “masculine of center” (yep)
• the relationship of categories and community, and what that means for naming (one’s) identity

The easy place to start is critiquing the term “masculine of center,” since Halberstam’s answer is about the presumption of a center, read as an ideal or norm, and but also the relevance of masculinity as a vector (for one’s identity) where it crosses sexuality and desiring. That is to say, gender as such isn’t the most important thing to everyone; but I think interestingly, gender “as such” is at once constitutive of certain sexual modes and desirings even as we understand it (gender) to be (re)shaped by our desires. In an intensely individualistic and identitarian culture, we want so badly for what we want to be the thing that defines who we are.

It would be easy to say this is because we’re being sold stuff for desires that marketing creates — but then what’s the basis for alternative desires? The more psychoanalytic read, perhaps, is about that excessive desire clipped off by being subjected to language: and that maybe it is between desire and jouissance that whatever is specific (but not unique) to a person is forged. And certainly it is reforged every time it is repeated: which would mean that desire, like gender, is performative. And anyway the point is wtf is the center?

Where MOC has some cultural capital, though, is where it earns a place in the queer lexicon. Halberstam’s next answer in the interview, about umbrella terms, is I think a little daring: “But each and every person’s own understanding of self doesn’t deserve a name.” She’s^2 arguing that while labeling (in language) one’s identifications is a highly contingent business, gravitas accrues to a term through its use in community. There is a challenge embedded here to the reckless relativizing of gender, as if every gender were wholly subjective, which I’d argue stems largely from terribly incompetent readings of Butler. Performativity does not simply mean that gender is a performance, not in the stable agentive sense that “performance” commonly conveys. One does not simply go to the closet each morning (or night) and select one’s gender for the day, nor invent it by magic out of the thin air of imagination. All genders come from thickly historied citational chains, which is not to say there’s never something new—only that the umbrella term will make its exclusions, as certainly as the terms it meant to collect and/or critique.

More to come.

1 Halberstam, Jack. Interview by Sinclair Sexsmith. “Queers Create Better Models of Success.” Lambda Literary, 2012. Web. 1 Feb. 2012. http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/02/01/jack-halberstam-queers-create-better-models-of-success/

2 My department chair used she/hers, and since I don’t have much of a relational context to shape what pronouns I use for Jack, I’ve been following that.

this is misogynist

a passage from Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity (from ch. 19 Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism, §4 The Ramifications of Artificializing Femininity)

So why has the artificializing of femininity

[here Serano refers to the preceding section’s interpretation not so much of Butler but of unnamed “many other deconstructive feminists” who, she says, read Butler to reduce gender to “a ‘performance’”—Serano wraps it in scare quotes. who these feminists are or why the opinion Serano attributes to them would be deconstructive, or what relationship they’d bear to Butler’s actual writing, Serano does not account for. the reduction of gender to “a performance” is what she means by “the artificializing of femininity.”]

So why has the artificializing of femininity become a preoccupation for many feminists over the last several decades? I believe that it has to do with the fact that many of the women who have most strongly gravitated toward feminism are those who have found traditional feminine gender roles constraining or unnatural.

[okay, maybe—why not feminism for women whose gender has no place in the popular vocabularies of femininity? maybe.]

In many cases, this is due to their own inclinations toward exceptional forms of gender expression. Because their personal experiences with femininity felt uncomfortable and contrived in comparison with their experiences with androgyny, masculinity, or other gender expressions (which they found more liberating and empowering), they mistakenly projected their own experience and perspective onto all other women.

now, this is simply fucked. these “many cases” of women feminists whose genders bend the limits of (traditional) femininity’s possible are being positioned through a psychologizing explanation (projection) of their theories, beliefs, and practices as essentially too unfeminine to think straight. she is replicating, in fact, exactly the hermeneutic of suspicion that she goes on to criticize, you know, someone for, although this hermeneutic sounds a lot more like marxism than deconstruction, in her accounting.

what genders Serano claims must be “more liberating and empowering” than (traditional) femininity—“androgyny, masculinity, or other”—may very well be external to the traditional femininity Serano says some feminists found constraining, but i don’t think this entails that other genders are external to all femininity. Serano’s failure to articulate alternative genders within the terrain of “femininity” certainly seems like begging the question: the scapegoating of femininity.

Serano misses this: the feminist rejection(s) of traditional femininity can be productive, not only of new masculinities and other genders, but also productive of new femininities. or perhaps not new, but revised. such a rejection is not a psychological sign of discomfort with traditional femininity; it is an intellectual critique. discounting revisionist femininity, or discounting nontraditional femininity as nonfeminine, is a far more intrusive form of police work than “artificializing” femininity, as if even that were what deconstructionists were up to. such a gesture says that feminism is or has not been feminine because of the personal (gendered, nonfeminine) feelings of (unspecified!) feminists. and what if some of those feminists do and did articulate feminine genders?

colossally inadequate reading of deconstruction aside, Serano is attacking the straw feminist on the basis of her (non)femininity. and now we come to the problematic that perhaps Gender Trouble most significantly has opened up: is misogyny simply a hatred of women (no matter their gender), or is misogyny somehow also a hatred of femininity (in men and women, straight people and queers, in theory, in oneself, etc.)? to which formulation does one give priority, and why?

or, is there a move available in which one acknowledges the enormous constitutive power that accrues to femininity in defining whose body will be read as a woman in the first place, and from this acknowledgement, criticizes the differential formations femininity wrights and has wrought, wheresoever they engender misogyny? it’s not available to Serano—her misreading of deconstruction can’t really be left aside: if one simply, self-transparently feels one gender, and feels around it until one also feels liberated and empowered, then on what basis should any gender be more or less liberating and empowering than another? one’s “personal experiences”. and if this feeling is not structured ideologically or even post-structurally but simply natural, on what basis should any gender ever change or evolve?

none. without what Serano thinks of as “artificializing” gender/s, there is no revision. only intuition. that gender is an artifice is the only route or opening into the machinery of misogyny operating at gender’s—so many genders’—heart.

(originally posted at start-anywhere)

revisionist masculinity

dear noteasybeingred,

what i mean by a revisionist masculinity is that one must always repeat in order to revise. this is a consequence of what butler sometimes calls citationality.

i think this might help explain the feeling you wrote about where adopting a more masculine gender at first felt expansive, an escape from hegemonic forms of femininity, whereas now masculinity “seems to have cemented in a way i was not expecting.” the process of any practice, especially gendered ones, sedimentation over time is intrinsic to gender, and probably any practice at all. as a queer rebellion against a received femininity, masculinity is an escape. but the question then becomes, into what other territory has your flight taken you?

i think it can be fair to say that masculinity accrues certain privileges even in queer spaces, as you do, arguing that “in many ways those privileges are based in a hatred of the feminine because misogyny is hegemonic.” while i think it’s true that misogyny informs most or all masculine privileges, i think it’s possible that in queer spaces, some privilege accrues to the visibility of masculinity on the historically feminized body. that argument is not simple: it’s cut in a hundred ways by race and class in particular. what i’m gesturing toward is the privileged position masculinity holds for people who want to “genderfuck,” when the gendered practices they adopt are at minimum also readable as a form of masculinity.

perhaps the visibility itself comes from misogyny, too. but it’s complex. when femininity shows up, let’s say in queer spaces, it shows up almost exclusively through its excesses. these are notoriously hard to notice, and i would argue that seeing queer femininity, in the context of a misogynist world, is a skill that takes deliberate practice. on the other hand, approaching (however asymptotically) a seamless femininity is a matter of survival for many queer people, and so the visibility traces of masculinity or of feminine excess may be quite threatened and perhaps unwanted.

but so you said you wanted “to feel more freedom to play” with gendered presentations, and while play is i think central to a certain disruption in the sedimentation of gendered practice, it is also very much a part of the sedimentation itself. it is perhaps the part that revises, playing up the difference involved in the repetition, exploiting the failure the subject, and even the gendered practice, to be simply self-identical. this theory of gender, which gender trouble broke so much ground for, is rooted in theory of performativity advanced by jacques derrida, especially in signature, event, context. play is important, but freedom? not quite so much. to cite derrida, “intentionality does not govern the scene of the utterance.” the trope of intentionality has somehow survived the queer turn in queer theory, and it dominates how most of us talk about our own genders.

i have tried carefully not to call my butch masculinity intentional. in many ways, probably all the most important ways, it is not. butchness is not a swagger i adopt when go out the door; not a suit of clothes i put on to become butch. or, it is those things but “I” am not the agent that executes these actions according to my will. what “I” intends for (my) gender is never simply transparent, not even to me. and perhaps worse, my very serious intentions are always already infected with the possibility and the exclusion of their opposites. it is quite possibly the operation of this exclusion of something already inside (and the inclusion of something quite external) that produces masculinity/femininity as a binary pair, anyway.

so but now, you had a questioner recommend julia serano’s book whipping girl, which i haven’t read all of, but do have a caution about. serano’s gotten what seems to me to be a great deal of currency in queer spaces for what is ultimately a very ungenerous misreading of deconstruction and post-structuralism, and for her refutation of the straw person she sets it up to be. you can see any number of these passages from her book if you search tumblr for her name. i think she advances some dangerously essentialist premises and makes some quite reactionary moves in the service of recuperating her version of femininity. but primarily i think all this stems from a very bad reading of the theory of performativity and its debaters, including j.l. austin, derrida, butler, and eve sedgwick, to name a few.

serano’s model of what gender is and how it works does not allow, it seems to me, for the kind of revision i am figuring. only a performative practice of gender has even the potential to take out of masculinity some of what is toxic in it. there is much more to be said here about about how misogyny is constitutive of masculinity, and about how butchness can be a deconstructive intervention, which kind of the question i think you meant to ask. i have a short paper from last spring on those subjects and i’ll be writing more of them in a week, so pieces of drafts will show up on tumblr soon, too. so, more to follow…

(originally posted at start-anywhere)