(Sort of) Live Blogging Re-thinking Sex: FOMS vs. FOHBT

Wednesday night, March 4, 2009

So: there I was, sitting under the astonishing rotunda of the Harrison Auditorium of Penn’s Museum, waiting for Gayle Rubin to speak—and so kick off the much-tooted “historical,” state-of-the-field” conference on Re-thinking Sex. I had the bright thought to follow Laura’s shining example and live blog the conference, but there are a number of obstacles to realizing my vision→a guy behind me saying “are you keeping that computer open through the whole talk?…because it’s really very distracting.” Not to mention the lack of access to wifi.

So: I took notes and then transcribed some of them here.
Not quite “live,” but…as close to it as I can manage….

So: there are SIX introductions before Rubin gets to the podium. All of them speak quite movingly of the ways in which Gayle Rubin modeled, for them, doing academic work “seriously grounded in her own body, her own experience.” And all of them are funny, sexy, lively. Some slices:

Heather Love speaks of the condition of “FOMS” (“fear of missing something”), from which she has suffered all her life, and as a reason for her organizing this conference. Tonight, she assures us, none of us will be missing anything.

But Gayle Rubin later describes her own counter-condition: “FOHBT” (“fear of having been there….there are too many theres to which I have been”).

She talks about the shift in technology in the production of academic work (her ground-breaking essay written on a typewriter, literally cut and pasted w/ scissors).

Rubin says that “every paradigm has its inconvenient facts that have to be attended to” (is this like “every metaphor has its limits”?).
Her talk is a history of the emergence of activist and academic work on sexuality, illustrated with slides of the “Diary” of the infamous ‘82 Barnard Sex Conference: it was “graphically rich.” But I am finding myself impatient with the belaboredness and the datedness of the history, though for many members of the audience this is all new; much of it happened before they were born…

As she describes the ways in which her later work was “quarantined” by feminists, because they thought it didn’t accord w/ what she’d written earlier, Rubin says, “I thought of changing my mind as part of the scholar’s craft: as I learned more, I modified what I had to say.”

Rubin says she based the distinctions she made between sex and gender—as conditioned by, and acted on, by one another, but not identical—on the work that Mar Weber did on the relation between “the social and the economic order”: class is not the same thing as status/privilege. But they are certainly related.

She reminds us of what Foucault talked about in History of Sexuality: “the shift from kinship and alliance to sensations of the body.”

She gives a troubling account of the increasing focus of white supremacist groups on homosexuality.

She ends by talking about what she would do differently, if she were writing “Thinking Sex” now, knowing what she knows now (and knowing that this is an impossible imagining…one “never reads the same book twice”). She was “too sketchy” about sex work, about the sexuality of children, and about transsexuality. As Kate Millett has said, “it is difficult to imagine the sexual emancipation of children”: they are forbidden sexual experience with themselves, with others, and with adults; yet they are treated by adults “as sexual resources.” “We were all children once and—if we are good—are children still.”

“A wonderful thing: sodomy laws gone–in my lifetime.”

On the attrition of gay urban enclaves: they can’t compete in the real estate crash.

She is proud of the “proto-queerness” of her article: moving beyond single constituencies, to address cross-identifications.

The problem with economic depression is that it sends folks “looking for someone to blame.”

Sex work, labor migration and coercion need to be pulled apart….

Thursday morning, March 5, 2009
Homay King moderating a panel on “Intimacies”
Leo Bersani, “Father Knows Best”
“would we move toward the world if we were not motivated by destructive impulses?” (a question in response to Freud on hatred as a self-defensive impulse: repudiation of the world/”unpleasure provoked by objects”)
psychoanalytic formulation of bond to the world: subjects to objects
originality of psychoanalysis to this history:
inherently negative quality of this interaction
does not question assumption of subject-object difference/dualism
philosophical inquiry, per Richard Rorty, has been heavily biased
as a discovery of knowledge (with detriment to the care of self)
psychoanalysis focuses on affective pressures on search for knowledge
once the entire world is received as a signifier,
the search becomes to know the object, and destroy difference itself:
the thought is that differences of being can be overcome by knowing
early Lacan: aggressiveness inherent in the imaginary
the other is always on the point of adopting his original place of mastery
further specifying of Freudian antagonism to the world
inevitably condemned as a paranoid rationality
affective basis of a logically coherent strategy of defense
desire to know the other inseparable from desire to master
per Foucault; to know the other is to know the other’s desires
most powerful pre-Freudian imagining of this concept: Hegel’s master-slave relation
desire is human only if one desires the desire (=the recognition) of the other
basis of the analytic cure/analyst’s gift: recognition of the desire of the analysand
dualism recreated within the subject: subject-mind/object-mind
psychic ground of divided self
world seen as differentiated otherness, projection of otherness w/in self
(see Proust’s analysis of Albertine: “all jealousy is self-jealousy”)

countered by recent studies of the visual arts,
seeking correspondences between self & world:
various modes of similitude: deconstruction of project of knowledge
psychoanalysis has led us into misbelieving that
knowledge of self and others is conducive to personal intimacy
elaborating a concept of impersonal narcissism as an alternative to
harmful assumption that intimacy depends on
knowledge of others’ personal psychology

“is there a non-sadistic type of knowing”?
consider film about French Legionnaires, ethnically orphaned men
(Billy Budd is its source text)
no community outside unengendered community to which they are expected ot have a fierce loyalty:
“The Legion, not France, is our homeplace.”
the Legion constitutes its own community
identities tested in this context
film’s contrastive juxtaposition of two types of mobility
psychic story that doesn’t need time to unfold:
foreignness as the cause of foreign desire: but who/what is foreign?
intrinsically violent desire: in search of an object:
it has to be objectified, but how it is objectified is a matter of indifference
their very difference is invented, to make another difference visible:
difference w/in character himself: “we all have a trashcan within”
that trashcan travels, taking on social/sexual disguises,
but no body can ever embody the alien world within the self
but there is nothing to know/to master
psychoanalysis breaks decisively w/ the vocabulary of depravity
a void constitutive of subjectivity itself
the unknown inaccessible imaginary self enacted as failed appropriation
desire is motiveless: seeks to remove fantacized obstacle to desire

film juxtaposes this violence of desire w/ movement in which desire is absent:
dancing women, not individualized psychologically
cf. w/ energetic pairing of legionnaires: non-purposive pleasures of touch
formal mobile community of repetition
men not masking violence, but engage in shadow theater of violence,
achieve dance of mere gesture, thereby evacuating meaning
per Foucault, a new affective mode: contentless affectuality
violent restlessness of desire is stilled
in the film’s final sequence, the protagonist dances alone, spasmotically
in final moment, actor steps out of his role just before filming stops
abruptness emphasizes fantismatic nature of the plot
gratuitous violent family drama
obscene destructiveness of “trashcan within” can be ameliorated
momentous possibility of film’s end:
stand up and leave the family tragedy, which has oppressed the west since Oedipus
leave the violence of a desire for a father or a son, that transforms into fratricide
this exercise witnessing: exalted collaboration w/ the children refusing the family game imposed on them, insisting on their determination to remain orphans in that foreign game

Responses:
Nancy Bentley:
what if intimacy is found not in knowledge but in movement,
not from talking cure/prestige of knowledge, but
pursuit of knowledge can sharpen an antagonism w/ the world
what if this antagonism is unnecessary?
requires a psychic rebirth into a new sociality
how hard to think in alternative to familiality
in film: experiments in bodily relatedness that link knowledge to mastery
film imagines release from need to master destructive self-difference
watching the future for an alternative story
but re-consider Melville’s plots:
narrative diagrams of violent search for/annihilation of object
cf. famous ballad ending of Billy Budd: verbal image of collective life

David Kurnick:
is there an alternative to sociality guided by difference?
title “Father Knows Best” acknowledges that
alternative awareness can still drive us to murder:
plot re rivalry for father’s love: powerful jealousy
stylized movement of bodies redirect us from the foreground
reverse relation between formal elements, as de-dramatize dramatic elements:
drama unsettles, shows how fragile are the formal experiments:
shows its inescapability
rehearse @ level of theme the scripts the form is bent on destroying
(catalogue of Bersani’s work that asks us to look @ the side of thematizations,
with stunning formalisms, asking us to look again @ texts we know)
texts Bersani likes thematize the contents he doesn’t
Legionnaires didn’t welcome this representation of their collective life
does the choreography of the film need us to notice its sexuality, etc?
what stands between its sense of achievement?

Q&A:
where do the Africans figure in the circuitry of the film?
how does this “other humanity” passing by work in the film?
what difference does race make in the collectivity of the Legionnaires?
“nature” is just inanimate, mysterious, there as a kind of unwatching spectator
it’s difficult to know what is being attributed to the Africans:
the possibility of already being:
some kind of foreignness to what is being enacted by the Legionnaires
suspiciousness; detached possibility of humanity watching two forms of violence:
enacting, and dancing out of it
Africans empty yet very portentous

impersonality has genres, too:
thinking about torturers, who have to disidentify w/ affect
work of being a soldier: learning to detach…
so: re-read ending not as triumphant,
but compulsive training of self not to be expressive, not going elsewhere
genres of detachment, not movement towards,
but training in inconsequentiality in intent and affect
film trains us not to be watchers who are learning,
but watchers who are not learning
transvaluation of non-inflated subject
desire for a narrativity that you don’t touch:
not leaving a structure, but continued training
every scene a scene of training
film never denies other possibility:
stripping away of violent intentionality could also be
thought of as disciplining into it
trashcan is always there, no matter how many ways you design to dance out of it
ambiguous vehicle: violent history of the Foreign Legion—really dirty work
inserts w/in its movements a break—while acknowledging continuity

not contentless…
content gets reduced by the form:
can we think of it in the opposite direction?
re-think sequence of the presentation
reliably, contents are militarized
even the best dancers: look where they are!
that dancing no literal image of a viable sociality, but interesting because of purely formal suggestion of something that is not formalistic
uses formal means to suggest that any movement could fall back into militaristic use, but scenes have traumatic effects: form produces a trauma in our vision that separates what’s going on from any usefulness that could plausibly be made of it

Second Thursday morning panel:
Jennifer Terry, Steven Epstein, Carole Vance

Terry: how does war against terror feed sexual panics?
“Objectum-Sexuality”: an orientation toward/desire for objects
orientation arises from animism–belief that all is animated:
what attracts is the form
cf. this “strange love” w/ Rubin’s caution re:
moral pieties about proper objects of desire
problem for object-sexuals to find privacy for intimacy
(pleasure of coldness: exchange of energy between diff. temperatures)
two explanations for object-sexuality as source of comfort and security
that people can’t supply: Asperger’s and childhood abuse
(survivor discourse: “I am the Berlin Wall, made, then rejected….)
cf. love of cars, t.v.s, shoes….

Epstein on the “great undiscussable: HPV vaccination”
sexual/biological citizenship jointly claimed and contested
implications of non-knowledge production, and
how linked to the “biomedically excluded”
undiscussed queer issues generated in relation to Gardasil, etc.
popular understanding of target market: women w/ cervical cancer
’07 new sense of target: gay and bisexual men taking vaccine
to ward off anal, penile cancer also caused by HPV
(no published data: structures, tissues, anatomy differ; not covered by insurance)
discourse: “vaccine meant for women, now used by men”—>
deep gender intentionality built into vaccine?!
strong push toward universal vaccination raises questions re:
invasiveness/over-intrusiveness of biomedical practice
but also a story of those left out, and fight to gain access to biomed practice:
demand for full citizenship part of epistemic issue:
politics of “undone science”:
under what conditions do certain topics remain unstudied?
counter epistemology w/ agna-tology: what we don’t know, and why:
“ignorance is political”
gay men merit screening comparable w/ that encouraged for women
w/ HIV receding as public emergency, new gay male health movement emerged, seeking comprehensive health program for gay men
technology! computer’s “error message” when ordering pap smear for man
“hole health”: on the evidence base not catching up w/ desire for anal paps
causal pathways between HIV and HPV
HPV and men now a small part of health conversation,
comes together interestingly w/ Merck’s marketing strategy:
aiming for “herd immunity” (protecting women by vaccinating boys)
difficulty of including (not-yet-out) youth in studies:
how include them as biomedical citizens?
(vaccinate 12-yr-old boys “in case they become gay”?)
linking discussion of biomedical citizenship and
non-production of scientific knowledge

Carole Vance on Magic and State Power:
how do you foment a sex panic, under conditions of globalization?
how do global subjects get transmuted into zombies,
w/out speech or free will (=women trafficked into sexual labor)?
series of films, including Born into Brothels
vast sensationalist spectacle of so-called documentaries/reports
(=production of non-knowledge) spans the world
major actors in dramas are evil men, lustful desire, innocent women
narrative of forced labor converted into a narrative of sexuality
trafficking refers to illicit smuggling
in international law until 2000,
trafficking always meant the movement of women into prostitution,
whether coerced or not→ any facilitation
changed w/ two new laws in 2000,
International Convention and US Trafficking Victims Protection Act,
both acknowledging that all kinds of people might be trafficked,
into any labor sector;
does not acknowledge all prostitution as trafficking;
only exploitation is prosecuted
on the books: looks promising!
problem even before law gets on the street:
trafficking doesn’t encompass all/most exploitation
very complicated, for crime to rise to the level of trafficking
many resources made available, but hard to prosecute
on the streets, law has gotten both smaller and bigger
U.S. attention has focused unduly on women trafficked into all prostitution
overwhelming depictions of trafficking as engine that drives a
not-totally displaced social justice concern w/ victimization of trafficked people
but most reports ride on technique of melodrama,
w/ trafficking expanded to all prostitution
emphasis on young innocent girl, rescued (by NGO?) from sensationalized danger
villain always male, victim always female
enduring staple of sex hierarchy:
sex for money degraded, outside the charmed circle
toggling back and forth between exploitation and degradation
(how evangelicals and feminists speak to one another)
bottom line is always rescue from the brothel
not a rights-based remedy, but a fantasy
maybe women have chosen to be smuggled
exploitation becomes a sexuality issue
a rights-based intervention would think hard about the structural indicators/frame that causes these abuses to happen, and works on that change; it looks for multiple remedies/different restitutions, devised w/ collaboration from victims/violated, w/ results of intervention evaluated (many rescue programs have had huge colltoral damage)

have to cut out here, to go teach my course @ BMC….
return in a few hours, to catch the end of
the first afternoon’s panel: Rethinking Intersectionality

on the need to distinguish between friendship and solidarity
be more Graumsian/poststructuralist in looking where our interests lie
be mindful, as we move, of the incompleteness of our ideas of interest

Second afternoon’s panel on Hope and Hopelessness
Lisa Duggan and Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Performance: “How we Feel”
(@ podium of “Amazonian proportions”: gay puppet theater)
a therapist said, “Hope is the worst thing:”
the past cannot be repaired/cannot be
what is the temporal register of political hope?
how does it feel/what can it do?
American political hope based on nostalgia, etc.:
what we on the left organize to demolish
suspicious of the political valence of hope: groupthink/normative compulsion
“queer leftist” associates hope, happiness, optimism=privilege
affective reward for comformity
favorite diagnosis: “normontic”=embrace domination as freedom
can collective hope, without illusion, generate possibility w/out expectation?
what can it mobilize? can political hope of some trample others?
–work has become the dominating character of human life: need to erode it
how carry out “exodus” from “worker-ism”? “escapology,” legal border crossing?
willfully romantic: temporary utopian moments such as lesbian separatism
bad sentiments can be critically redeployed, function as refusals of social mandates
“educated hope”: not in straggled binary w/ “bad hope”
utopia: education of desire to want something else, beyond control of late capitalism
not abstract hope: linked to affect, feeling that current situation unlive-able
“revolutionary consciousness”: imagining going off-script together
thinking beyond the narrative of world today as “not enough”
concrete utopianism: praxis—moving toward a goal
hope is a risk; to change the world, we must risk hope
–don’t understate meaning of risk
terrifying risk of forsaking ossified forms of security
fear attached to hope: a reaching out to something that will fail
what resources for educated hope that takes fear and risk seriously?
modes of expansive sociality: produce energy for participatory politics
a particular basis for queer hope
gay respectability politics do not lead us anywhere else (into marriage, the military)
can communities of the politically embittered lead us into revolutionary force?
not if we cling to the “paranoid schizoid position”
regression to infantile demands can be vitalizing:
queer claims to anti-development/normalizing can be
sideways move out of impasse
from the depressive position:
acknowledge uncontrollability of political world
breaking out requires negative energetic force
hope and hopelessness exist in a dialectic;
its opposite: complacency, the affective of normativity
hope the energy we use to smash
–need to live w/ the negative, w/ failure
face reality as disappointing world
queer: identification w/ the negative
a politics oriented towards means, not ends
“B.A.”=bad attitude s source for sociality
most important part of title : “and”
friendship a condition for writing
we write from an “and” of queer feelings,
a world that thrives because of a negative

Q&A:
Is the project of hope one of decolonizing the future?
futurity can always be taken away, corrupted—re-territoralizing?
embarrassment about revolutionary consciousness:
do we replace big goals w/ friendship, sideways goals, no big end
we are in a stark moment of radical unknowing
not giving up on big transformation, but how to imagine it
queer politics have something to say about the way we relate,
build alternative forms of intimacy outside
the state-sponsored couple form and its domestic isolation
(cf. push toward “good citizenship” among gay people)
imagine alternative democracies, economies,
@ moment we’re being closed down on
yet opening, as vocabulary of neo-liberalism collapses
we have that resource of contribute
sideways step out of developmental logic, conventional political organizing,
growing up
speaking across identities, as African American queer
Black hopelessness about Obama’s election: seemed sensible
once it happened, hope seemed grounded
how to be in conversation w/ other positions of hope/hopelessness
fetishization of non-normativity: it is not always chosen
consequences of risk can be life-threatening
but even in those circumstances, there are resources:
how to generate hope out of conditions of real deprivation?
question re: American imperialism, colonialism deep in us
anxiety about losing the place of privilege as queer American citizens in the world?
how theorize relationship to China, Israel?
(not part of collective cheerfulness re: Obama’s election)
“we” is of course a problem:
large segments of g&l movement have imperialist aspirations
no “lgbt political we”
imagining alternative political sociality rejecting hetronormative politics
how does the medium w/in which hope is expressed affect the project?
privileging face-to-face socialities?
transition of affect, transmitted differently: sonic, different modes of perception
ethical dimension of how we interact w/ each other
in university structures, so many norms of behavior work against sociality
how can we think about ethical interactions w/ one another?
the university stokes bitterness
foreground how we live within institutions: our own comportment,
how we choose to occupy, step to the side of assigned positions

Last panel of the day: Susan Stryker, Sharon Holland, Judith Halberstam and
Joanne Meyerowitz on “Rethinking Sex, Rethinking Gender”

Stryker: I feel awkward. I often do.”
relation of transgender studies to history of 80’s-90’s lesbian sex wars:
couldn’t get a word in edgewise, because didn’t have a speaking position
sex wars made clear who the enemy was:
transgender people got thrown into the pot w/ other stigmatized groups
that structure is where transpolitics came from
as Gayle said, she got the transsexuality question wrong in ‘84
can’t be subsumed w/in the sexuality framework
“one of the main goals of Rubin’s argument is to challenge hierarchies
set up by some schools of feminism;
she characterized transgender as a practice, not an identity
transgender posed a challenge to queer sexuality,
as queerness did to feminism: was a new frame of reference required?
for a decade, transpeople fought identity issues:
“the hair ball problem”: is it l&g, how aligned w/ feminism? w/ queerness?
increasingly, transgender studies developed a
coherent critique of hetronormativity, hetronationalism
called attention to how gender normativities were powerfully @ work
taking on monstrosity, the feminist negativity: mobilizing affect important all along
where things are going: seeing transgender as a problematic category,
working hand-in-hand w/ all sorts of normativities
not yet an exhausted category, but original framing as
all possible varieties of difference is
one way of imperially mapping all forms of human being from one position
important to take on ethics of relating to those different from oneself:
on the cusp of a new institutionalization (courses, journals, readers)
need to step up ethical responsibility to how we are working

Holland:
“Thank Heather Love for being tight like that.”
my work here a homecoming:
bridging the work of black insurance companies and transgender death
few prosecutions for many transgender deaths
“why is the entire discussion of gender diversity signaled by desire?”
racial ambiguity does not animate the anxiety that gender ambiguity does
“what I got you got to get to put it in you” (?)
black transsexuals stand in for the inhuman
suspend the category of human here, and focus on loss?
the human right to inhumanity?
other communities that have wrestled w/ the human/animal divide
“perishment”=natural death=fragility of human (esp. slave) life
humans die, while animals perish (=Heiddeiger)
perishment, once reserved for the animal, is reanimated
in slaveocracy, everyone perishes
when marginalized groups appeal to the human: what group, what category?
Patricia Williams’ Alchemy: Jim-Crow mentality applied to gender
“mind’s enhancement of the body’s limitations”
embody the body, erase its materiality
“he/she/it can literally bleed off the page”

Halberstam: “Unthinking Sex”
Rubin + Berstani + children’s animation films
Rubin wondered why the moralistic strain of feminism had been privileged
“if sex is taken too seriously, sexual persecution is not taken seriously enough”
Rubin’s diagrams tell a different story than the essay/its legacy, which
relegitimizes the hetero/homo hierarchy
counterintuitive groupings: politics of sex could
operate in terms of unlikely alliances:
postmenopausal women and butch lesbians (=not attractive)
the asexual and hypersexual
the lonely and socially difficult
people for whom sex is always surveilled (welfare, teens, etc.)
always better to work towards the whimper, rather than the bang
(bang always to the speaker’s benefit….)
compelling, wrong myth of plucky queer as heroic fighter’s
remarkable emergence from repressive regimes
sex is always political, but no guarantee what form it will take
“think sex” in every context; examine our own investment in these narratives
where might political resistance take a surprising form?
how might we replace those comfortable terms?
a queer femininity that reshapes politics, a la Linda Hart:
an anti-heroic disintegrating subject
children’s animated film: “We either die free chickens, or we die trying.”
“Are those the only choices?” (freedom or death):
how about evacuation, refusal, negation?
requires a new voice, potentially the passive voice?
very definition of freedom and humanity
limited slaves’ ability to think outside of racial terror
freedom defined as property, place, productivity might not be wished for
to be free: temporarily eluding order
more symbolically redolent than materially transformative
cf. descriptions of masochism, failure: subject incoherent, passive→
a better escape route than heroic stories of fulfillment, achievement
cf. Bersani on others setting off the shattering mechanism of getting off
Love on moments of failed or interrupted connections: impossibility of love
impossible desire, broken intimacies, unmastery, unbecoming as source of politics
exs: radical masochism, passivity, alternative to being the master
Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography refuses to be wife, mother, woman,
speak her mother’s story, become her mother:
legacy of colonialization is to pass down non-story to next generation
(she refuses, evacuates, unbecomes)
The Piano Teacher: refusal to be played @ the other end of the power scale
pulls back from fascist complicity, demands sexual mistreatment by student:
masochism, self-violation:
to kill Austrianness w/in self: taste, emotional responses, etc.
Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”: audience members cut off pieces of her clothing,
leaving her increasingly unprotected: what kind of feminism is this?
think about feminism, like queerness:
ongoing commentary on fragmentation, sacrifice:
anarchism that speaks a different language of refusal
stillness is the point of the performance:
her passive waiting, unacting, unbeing, unbecoming
quiet masochistic gestures that unthink sex as alluring connection

Meyerowitz:
a wholly stimulating (and exhausting) day
1918 “Autobiography of an Androgyn”: self-proclaimed female brain in male body:
condition of “innate, unfortunate, pitiable, and unchangeable fairy”
strange adventure story w/ porn overtones
“there’s scholarship, if that’s your preference”
revisit text to make 4 quick points:
* feminism was theory of gender oppression; sexuality peeled off in new directions
but now we are thinking both sex and gender differently
feminism doesn’t explain gender transgression of anti-femInist A/A
persistent inequalities shorn up by conventionally-understood gender
looking @ transgressive positionalities shows how
gender-normative ppl are accorded privilege, males and females both constrained
feminism doesn’t adequately theorize sex or gender
*really can’t separate gender and sex: deeply, inextricably intertwined
ex: dyke today=transgender tomorrow (same person)
see Valentine’s “Imagining Transgender”
*categories of sex and gender, separated or intertwined, aren’t enough
what to make of persistent infantilization in A/A: fantasy of age-crossing?
(age just as performative as gender?) confounding, so queer that it’s swept aside
don’t just focus on conceptual categories we already have: what don’t we know?
*current categories don’t do justice to text:
historical texts useful, pull us away from the familiar,
allow us to anachronize the past and present
past reminds us of contingent, strange, changeable quality of
our ways of seeing the world

Q&A:
presentations opened up the state of the field
anarchism as a masochistic stance: trying not to centralize order
anarchism as a disordering logic, that pays attention to the local=
sadomasochism
politics of radical passivity as place where sex/gender cross over
question concatenating w/ masochism:
not failure, impotence, but pleasure, tumescence of sexual dynamics
shorthand for failure that becomes impotence retains the heroic
you only want to disconnect masochism from passivity
if passivity is not the place to be: make it into being category that has possibilities
go to seemingly-unlive-able categories
much of masochism has to do w/ control: but in order to achieve passivity

Friday afternoon panel on Globalizing Sex:
David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, Lisa Rofel, Martin Manalansan, Neville Hoad

Eng: are queer bodies/studies too attached to their liberal reference?
historicize queer studies in colonialisation and globalization
new kind of intersectionality:
“having sex travel does strange things to it”
“these are the rock stars of global sex”

Gopinath, “Archive, Affect and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Re-Visions”
place Thinking Sex in juxtaposition w/ the
not-much mentioned “This Bridge Called My Back”
Thinking Sex reconceptualizes both queer sexuality and politics:
what are good, important, politically salient objects of analysis?
no easy identity between traumas and place-time disjunctions of
slavery (Ghana) and indentured labor (Kenya)
yet “intimacies of continents,” labor of bl/br bodies provided conditions for nation
affiliation from being descendants of slaves→non-blood based, routed through  and aware of difference—useful as queer lens: transitory relationality, new ways of conceptualizing self and others
diasporic sensibility of Hartman, deSouza: commonality, and impossibility of return
irredeemable loss saturates the text:
does melancholy define the tribe of the middle passage?
reconstructive or ironic attitude to the journey back?
engagement w/ archive leads only to blankness
searching for ancestors, finds only base matter: shit, blood, dirt
failure of the archive to raise the dead, restore their humanity
waste, excess existing outside official memory unites different texts
destruction, amnesia, annihilation-> impels into imaginative memoir,
to recreate what is missing
bodily detritis is generative: waste speaks to imagined history
deSouza overlays old family photos w/ debris of daily life:
refuses to consolidate into utopia of nationalist projects
centrality of normative family unit to construction of modern nation
Hartman grants fictional stability to others, who have unfixed relation to time, place:
“whose ancestral connection is undubitably real?”
“ideologies of discreteness” denies linkages between various sites; cf.
Ganesh’s “Index of the Disappeared” (of immigrant men post 9/11)
central to production of alternative archive: a “warm data-base”
website w/ “warm data questionnaire,” aimed @ all detained, tortured:
“what is your favorite food, music, earliest memory, etc?”
aim to collect “data considered “useless” to official interrogators
what material is rendered useless, in the gathering of information?
warm data has capacity to reverse process of reducing humanness:
create affective response that enlivens other times, places:
the stray detail that doesn’t stay in place is a stand against
the monumentalism of state terror
recreating lives that have lost the luxury of the mundane
in anti-terrorist dragnet
“we only become aware of the everyday when we miss it:
it is anti-catastrophic”
this is doing what Halberstam calls “low theory in popular places”
anti-monumentalism suggests alternative imaginaries
transformative effects of the mundane
“I don’t care what you say. Those are not tourist’s photographs, and as an American citizen, I demand you stop taking them.”
Who is allowed the tourist’s gaze? For whom is the mundane effaced?
“UFO”=unidentified flying/foreign? Object
mundane transformed into a potentially murderous object
Hartman hears song of diaspora: “here it was, my song, the song of the lost tribe”
allowed to touch the past not via material archive or triumphal narrative
but via non-material, transitory, inconsequential, tangential
forms of knowledge and affiliation

Rofel, “The Traffic in Money Boys”
(drawing on Rubin’s earlier essay on “The Traffic in Women”)
Chinese colloquialism re unsettling commodification of gay sex
cosmopolitan, desiring subjects in context of recent
neoliberal transformation of China
neoliberal invitation to HAVE desires…
hoary debate in queer studies re: “merely cultural” vs. “the material queer”
ambivalence in China re: homosexuality
central to public discussions re: proper, improper desires
how to be both cosmopolitan and appropriately Chinese?
money boys a threatening part of the market economy
they themselves reported that they were not selling sex for money
contradiction between fluidity of desire (cosmopolitan market economy)
and long history of dual gender roles (=male polygamy)
naturalization of gay and national identities
more than one way to be a gay subject
film questioning entire apparatus of normalization in Chinese:
money boys take full charge of their lives, while boring others try to normalize them
makes the normal perverse, the perverse normal
those to be pitied are not the hustlers,
who suffer largely from hypocritical desires of hetronormative world
calls attention to the tension between sex work and desire
inextricability of sex, desire, bodies, labor
labor the highest good in capitalism;
whole person becomes commodity in neoliberal world: f
fostering desires and robbing ppl of them

Manalansan, “Servicing the World:
Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life”
gender universalism constituted through reproductively active women
Hochshild/Ehrenrich re: “global heart transplant”→propping up domesticity
alternative narrative re: performance of disaffection
emotional distance and disloyalty to regimes of power and authority:
strategic refusal to display emotions publically:
suggests possibility of moving on, toward “elsewhere,”
despite appearing “unmoved”
contradictory non-maternal feelings, desires emerge in domestic labor:
an alternative politics, as figured in film Paper Dolls
restrictions  on Palestineans resulted in Filipino migration into Israel
enabled by escalation of Palestinean-Israeli conflict
foreign laborers are the symbolic “wall” that
physically prevent Palestinean movement in Israel
disaffection suggests way out of universalist affective regimes

Hoad, “Critical Native Informants:
“Thinking Sex’ from South Africa: Then and Now”
my fantasy of how SAfrican nationalists would put essay to work
death of nation states and neoliberalism have been somewhat exaggerated
policing and surveillance have been heightened
transferring to SAfrica two famous images of the essay:
pie chart of the “charmed circle” and walls of “sexual hierarchies of sexual value”
enforcement and access spectacularly uneven in different national context
fuzziness of that epistemological view

Q&A:
disgust as a mode of producing subjectivity: “I am not that”
Rubin’s reiteration that announcements of death of neoliberalism is “premature”
importance of talking to real people when studying them

Second afternoon panel
(–to me: the best! punch line! of the whole conference!)
Lee Edelman and Laura Berlant, “Sex without Optimism”

so many of us want so much from sex, and from the study of sex
so many of us want relief from rage….
overlapping not identical polemics re: futurity, negativity
(which magnetizes many things: “sex that undoes us”)
general interest in affect:
how make a claim to generality?politics of the archive?
–to start w/ story: implies a direction, a movement toward some pay-off,
profit, closure, manageability, leading from/out-of @ root of education:
producing  sense of sense, orientation toward a future, which bestows value
(refusal to live it while one could?); optimism inspires a finish:
“pan-glossian,” regulatory discipline: pan-optimism”
alternatives to narrative knowledge, leading into mastery, sovereignty
no shared identity or reified differences, no shared outcomes or control
sex: a willingness to experience corporally the
shock of discontinuity, an encounter w/ non-knowledge
–sex undoes its subject: jouissance, libidinal unruliness
“anti-social/”socially awkward”: how to flourish, beyond survival?
subjects not shocked, but don’t like, incoherence of self or world
experiences of multiplication of knowledges that crowd each other out
sex as a relief from not knowing how to live
she de-dramatizes, he dramatizes the sexual subject
sex as a threatening cause of precarious life
curating a montage of examples
–difficult to locate representations of sex w/out optimism
distinctive undoing in sex:
not productive, moving toward synthesis or overcoming difference
the domestication of what can never be domesticated, doesn’t fit
question ground of/desire for possibilities,
rooted in willful management of intensities
familiarity of incoherence can be a way of denying, normalizing it
sex a site for experiencing intensified encounter w/ accustomized ways of being
bound to non-futurial insistence of sex: not toward realization in time,
divorced from chain of meaning-making
negativity of sex its defining, enabling condition…
Western cultures think of sex as negative force:
if only it lived up to such a description!
most intensely felt, sex offers something different from pleasure;
it takes us to a limit, is that which breaks us
–sex disorganizes assurances about what we want,
guarantees nothing but confusions
when in a romance someone has sex, and says “you make me feel safe,”
she is trying to neutralize the risky experience
Berlant’s making friends w/ (inevitable) mis-recognition:
will crack you open and give you back to yourself
sex part of a comedy of mis-recognition; and tragic comedy of inflation, de-flation
affective and political
Wittig’s Third Sex: de-dramatize gender,
refuse to reproduce prison house of the norm
intense project of remaining durable
only seeing dramas in their ordinariness will prevent the squad from punishing
make the non-normative benigh
becoming undone by wanting something: sex
in the “imaginary OED of the appetites”: what is sex w/out optimism?
encounters w/ the sexual, the limit: taped the archive of the adorable for our exs.
–sex rationalized, instrumentalized, endured:
prospect of an encounter w/the sublime: economy of danger
shifts of scale can reorganize value, or empty it out
inseparable from the aesthetic, which shields against it
Lacan: “beautiful the final barrier in the field of desire”
the adorable invokes the privilege of bland normativity→
what’s expendable, because easily replaced: anesthesizes feeling, protects against  it smiley-faced representation
imperative of optimism: happiness regime
“every definition of man based on happiness is nihilist”: brutalization
good, happiness promised by social norms
optimism linked to violence of desire to overcome
resistance to sex as regularity mechanism of social cohesion
anti-anesthetic space: recuperate the undoings of the sublime
contradictions of willing against ourselves what we ourselves impede
in comic misrecognition of sex: queerness beyond it
no claim to the good, proper, substantial ground for redress
but claim to self-definition: resistance to omnipresent pan-optimism
our belief is that pan-optimism precludes what it opens
fantasy of escaping loss in difference: pursuit of armored happiness
what happens when hope turns against itself? disaffection, depression, immobility
politics of resistance to the norms, emulsified happiness
–just a little bit of improv here
the adorable: a little promise to interrupt the anesthesia
how people manage their aversion to life, in place of their desire for it
most fantasies to repair the world:
terms of staying bound to the uncontrollable world
never had the option of maintaining our equilibrium
“Me and You and Everyone We know”: everyone wants to be lighter
a conversation: as a desire to remain “game”
so much waste and waning, dissolution, shrinkage of mobility
fantasy shrinks too: knew orientations needed
what tone to take toward the jouissance that drives them?
even the curator comes to be affectively undone
witnessing waning of fantasies of attachment
–sexual optimism: staying bound to what is
unbinding as release from cathexis, and from subjects
resistance to futurial dispensation, while enacting repetition compulsion:
can’t resolve or make peace with
negativity: no feeling, insists on, stays bound to descent from
normative structures to which we are committed
Johnson’s image, “Donkey”: uncertain relation between image, hand, eraser
illegible intimacy: what is the eraser doing?
What is relation between drawer and eraser?
an unfulfilled desire for intersubjectivity? a desire for a single consciousness?
images sexual non-relation: unmasterable intersection
encounters carry constant possibility of rupture
adorability attempts to aestheticize the site of disgust
negativity we never encounter w/out ambivalence
self-estrangement of being open to what’s unknowable:
resists translation into value: no obvious telos
constant unpredictable negotiation
on trying to be game to the circuit of such exchanges
what our undoing has done…what remains to be done?

Q&A:
particular interest in the aesthetic gesture that tries to uncover the undoing,
by finding some ordering device
your performance enacts both undoing and recovery,
in logic of structured dialogue: registering possibilities of recuperation
bedeviled from first moment: making an artse/art of selves
the aesthetic is always a projection of something harmonious
a queer aesthetics a paradox: resisting a normalizing order
abstract formalization of what is messy:
the queer/the shit gets written out
cannot hold onto the shit w/out aestheticizing:
what’s dangerous turn “rethinking sex” into conviviality, friendship
where there is sex there is dislike and disgust:
to write it out is to write out queerness
so: how produce a kind of politics?
on being “good, giving and game”
attempt to stay in synch w/ what one would rather avoid
compromise between shaped, open dialogue:
what degree of pacing/on being undone can we bear?
what are the forms available for queer scholars,
for staying in the room w/ what we desire?
how to be always game for the challenge that sex will always provide?
“what did the pregnant pencil say to her boyfriend?”
“what ever happened to the rubber?”
to contextualize the image of the “Donkey”: geneology of animation stills
(ref. both to Daffy Duck, being erased by Bugs Bunny;
and corpse of donkey in Bunuel’s film, Land without Bread)
question very old fashioned concept of art as harmony, resolution:
many 20th-21st century artists involved in destructive acts:
cf. “Mayhem”’s destructive irresolution: audience doesn’t like discontinuity
most exs way outside the avant-garde: hard to talk about, irresolute:
energy w/out end: “if @ the beginning of 20th c,
we were given theories of relativity, and if
audiences still uncomfortable with uncertainty,
then artists still have work to do”
form neither resolves or not
representing something is not monumentalizing
modernist avant-garde film disorganizes the senses,
while allowing you to stay in the room w/ it: double-pleasure
looking for an aesthetic experience: want to be undone, but….(like sex!)
the aesthetic always presupposes a sort of unity, harmony
(could be an aeshetic of disharmony)—>
enters into manageable, readable story:
gives you an experience you can master
framing is a way of negotiating or managing
irresistibility of adorability?
convergence of optimism and happiness leads to resistance (to normalizing)
unresolved, open beingness not often available in narrative cinema:
what if kids got to open up the spaces?
borders pushed back, and people left alone
they claim the space, because their parents are stretched, can’t do for them
literally: a breathing space
interest in friendship: on being left alone together
driving need to be something you don’t understand
clarifying question from a humble undergraduate:
what would the adorable/the beautiful look like in sex?
attraction is a fantasy: can’t separate it out of your sexual encounter
when looking for images/representations,
a reading always proposes itself that renders it optimistic
there is no such thing as negativity w/out optimism
the negative is the hopeful: the “no” to what is

Final Friday panel: Pedagogy
Maria Belausteguigoita, “An Imaginary Classroom”:
built out of sticks in the dirt…keeping a prisoner alive
Rubin: “nothing comes in one piece: we are all stitched together”
construction of meaning, always inserted into some type of captivity
what type of signification is produced, as an effect beyond captivity?
what kind of captive space is our university?
insertion of color into an ominous space: prison
“women who were suffocated, could not stand the containment….
came up w/ the idea of painting a mural on the spiral stairs,”
where loved ones ascend to visit, and they descend to leave
what are the possibilities of interfering, revising, reconfiguring their space as a text
survivors in a captive reality: prisoners cannot see the shape of the whole
a walking memory that captured their vision and voice
how to construct monumentality and fragility?
“muralism”: art for the masses (Rivera, Orozco, etc.)
two functions: educating and giving pleasure
“Murals need to be looked @ with the legs.”
what material spaces are opened, what subject created?
deep meaning of spiral in indigenous cultures:
reordering of the world through centripetal and centrifugal patterns
to create the subtext for the spiral: focus on their memories, in workshops
common origin of their presence in prison: men (triangles of betrayal)
female inmates much less visited than men: family doesn’t want to face them
two motions: one of descent, one of ascension
–“but what do we do w/ our men?”
given drawings of Freida Kahlo and Judy Chicago
–subjects may be transformed by discourse, by things said
women began to think differently because engaged in an imaginary space
re-ordering of disciplinary regimes
tendency of the spiral to reorder signification
mural a border-crossing: transgressing
biggest border between U.S. and Mexico
cf. the minaret seen in Iraq: a call for prayers, the spiral of liberty
queering the classroom: a repeating movement of ascension and descent

Deborah Britzman, “Examination Dreams”
two pieces of advice, and one warning, from
psychoanalytic training, that apply to pedagogy:
“you must take everything personally”
“treat the session as if it were a dream”
(pointing) “why did you do that?”
Freud’s notion of “typical dreams” presents three technical, existential problems
1) not (as per classic dreams) unique, unintelligible, uninterpretable
2) resist associations: already say what they mean
3) dream the human condition: that we learn=are punished
Freud named 3 typical dreams:
being naked and ashamed;
being with the beloved object;  and
the examination dream (which combines the other two)
exaggerated quality of our ridiculousness
favorite character: those who are “wrecked by success,” unsure that they are okay
wish to examine and being examined: “epistemophilia”
examination dreams contain some vague, unidentifiable educational purpose
they all place us in some illegible school
they signal, Freud says, a residue of infantile sexuality, a fear of losing love
Jane Gallup re “infantile pedagogy” now replayed in university:
teacher charged by her charges, in a cruel game with harsh lessons
needing help=being punished
big paradox of pedagogy: there isn’t a lesson to be learned, you can’t save yourself
clinical fragment re patient: professor w/ panic attacks
anxiety erupts when one’s question is meant w/ absolute silence
the thing that we love the most is the thing that makes us the most anxious
when things are going well, he dares the enemy to strike,
stands guard against himself
“he can’t stand teaching”
“a theory is where you play”
big question: how is our theory useful to whom, and why?
could find no precipitating factor: no useful story of origin
panic an automatic anxiety that comes from nowhere
therapy itself a bad classroom
inviting his thoughts on teaching: entering into fantasies of pedagogy
there isn’t a pedagogy w/out a fantasy
(teacher as authoritative figure who always knows what to say:
a perfect narcissistic, never awkward…)
fantasy chastises him for his uncertainty while teaching
Freud called teaching “one of the impossible professions”—it really is impossible!
teaching and learning occur in emotional contact:
that we are affected by the act of learning drives us to ignorance
bodily affects not seen as relevant to learning
something about being educated that is hard to admit:
feelings of abjection, fragility and loss
anxious whether we have the right to teach: puzzled by feeling so overwhelmed
terrific idealizations
spatial ambivalence: inside/outside/pleasure/pain
barriers to learning experienced as punishment for what we lack
education may render us helpless by its disavowal of our feelings of helplessness
in analysis, if all goes well, we don’t know what’s going on–
but we can go on dreaming together; it’s nonsense
pedagogy can begin here: with the unconscious

Concluding Comments by Heather Love
interesting, symptomatic utopian/dystopic couplet replayed again
fantasies of pedagogy–Heather gets to go last!—are always disappointing:
here we are, in the underworld of the conference

Could it be that the pedagogical process is always a promulgation of ignorance?
It’s often too late when we realize the resistance:
try it my way, if you are going to teach me;
or, I have something more important to teach you, than you have to teach me.

always knew that final panel should be about pedagogy, largely conceived
and should have been Eve Sedgwick, who is ill,
who (among others) made the world in which I now live,
a very different world than the one I imagined, as a child

many productive engagements here w/ not-knowing:
sustained questioning of empiricism, illegible intimacies, spirals….
planned conference as attempt to celebrate what Gayle Rubin has taught us,
and also her pedagogy: constant reminder of all we are bound to forget
both failure and not learning are part of our everyday life in the classroom
the best thing we can do is teach ignorance
is teaching a practice of friendship (is friendship possible?) or of solidarity?

Q&A:
Gayle Rubin’s thanks to Heather, and to all…

evoking Foucault’s spirals of regulation and pleasure
the disciplinary scene of the prison, and of the classroom
conviviality, intensification and vulnerability
risky practices intensify and make pleasurable
thinking about subjects produced by statistics of risk
the important thing is disorganization: when you make different
what are the lines of flight that allow you to escape organization?
the university is a type of incarcertation: how to disorganize it?
Deleuze took up Foucault’s move to disaggregate disciplinary site
self and other are never fixed positions
conviviality not about sharing a comfortable common space,
but coming together around vulnerabilities,
then dissolution…
push away from prognostic subject and population categories
in tracing relation between feeling and intensities,
see Jameson’s worry about end of politics/beginning of politics of affect:
that modern subject is losing capacity for depth;
worrying about surface intensities: more scattered, fragmentary vulnerabilities

appreciate ending w/ pedagogy panel on what we don’t know…
French film “Class,” trying to teach curriculum that will reproduce Frenchness
end by saying what they have learned…exercise to feed his ego,
to feel as though the scene of teaching has been successful
“I am sorry, but I have learned nothing.”
our fantasy: that we will make a difference
universities keep aloft the fancy that by teaching we will learn
we are uncomfortable with the idea of our ignorance

“I appreciate your depth, and your audacity….”