INTIMACY
NOW!
BUILDING
THE QUEER COMMUNITIES WE WANT, WHERE WE WANT
Table
of Contents
It
was my first Pride, and i didn’t quite know what to expect. The day
before, i had driven up with some friends from Springfield, Il to
Chicago. Now it was the morning before, the sun was just showing
signs of the wonderful heat to come, and we were making a pancake
breakfast for what was sure to be a tiring day.
Rainbow
socks, water, glitter eyes make-up, eyelashes, leather, boas, mixed
drinks, beads. We were fucking gorgeous as we walked out of our
friends West-Side apartment towards the blue line to get over to get
over to Boys Town, where the party was to be. We were happily
surprised to find it before we arrived.
There
was nowhere to sit on the metro, and i wouldn’t have wanted it any
other way. Shiny, fabulous mermaids abound--Everybody seemed to be a
queer friend today! I was so grateful to be in this communal space,
to have the opportunity to exchange flirty eyes and have silly
conversations with many people from many different neighborhoods.
After, Pride takes place in public space and the fact that it sprung
from a police riot, mainly headed by queers of color, is no
coincidence. This public and frankly utilitarian venue always had and
has the potential for this type of collective friendship, community,
interaction. It was beautiful.
Arriving
at the parade, i was quickly disgusted. Bank of America, politicians
and others who gain power and privilege through exploitation seemed
to be what was left of the assimilationist, homonormative fuckers who
claim to represent a much larger community than they do. Fuck it! No
bank will liberate us. No politician will liberate us. All we need it
ourselves.
Luckily,
plenty of people were in agreement. One float declared “THE FIRST
PRIDE WAS A POLICE RIOT!” While others, including me, showed their
disaffection by wondering the side streets and being festive in
public space, itself an act with radical tendencies. I was walking,
drinking and thinking alone when I met Carl, a 30-something white
cis-man.
Carl
was laying in the fetal position in the little piece of grass between
the sidewalk and the street. Wanting to make sure he was safe, i
asked him if he was okay. He looked up, teary-eyed and managed a
“no.” I sat with him. We talked about how he felt alone in this
world, and that even his rather successful career as an opera singer
had left him unsatisfied. We hugged and shuffled into the alleyway
where we shard bodily intimacy, hooked-up. We walked, drank and
talked together for another 30 minutes. Carl left the scene feeling
somewhat better and i felt inspired by what has remained to this day
a powerful interaction. We exchanged numbers and sent a few
encouraging texts over the next week. That was it.
This
story is significant for many reasons. It was our privilege as white
cis-men to be able to engage in this type of public affection and to
be laying on the street in relative safety—even in the heterotopic
Pride festivities. While people of color or trans-folk are able to
engage in public displays of affection, they run greater risks of
violence, stigma as potential sex workers or people experiencing
homelessness. The right to occupy public space for our collective
benefit, for community building and for showing emotional
vulnerability, even in the form of bodily intimacy, is a right that
we all deserve. It is a simple, yet radical right that can truly make
life more pleasurable and lead to lasting political alliances.
These
scenes of public companionship illustrate the potential for learning,
for making community, for healing when we make more public our
intimacies. As we expand our intimacies, it is important to
understand that we are not neutral subjects simply coming together,
but that we carry with us our social baggage, our racializations, our
traumas, our preferences. Such considerations must be at the
forefront of any movement, especially one that calls for an
understanding of vulnerability, intimacy and community and are
considered in more detail throughout this work.
For
now, I’d like to compare these first scenes of public interaction
with the car ride out of Chicago after Pride. I was in the back seat
of a car, with two others in the front seats. All around us on the
deadlocked “free”way we saw rainbow flags, in back windshields,
bored and glittered faces in the back seat and angry eyelashed faces
driving. These emotions happen, and cars and their traffic are known
to cause them, but to me, the real problem is that with all of these
potential members of my community around me, I could not say hi, make
eye contact or entertain them through their boredom. We were
isolated, atomized by expensive metal encasings.
I
include these stories to demonstrate the potential of intimacy and
public space, the way cars and our built environment isolate us and
most importantly, that the world we want is happening now. For every
car that separates, there are twenty people on a bus, sharing space
and, hopefully, humanizing each other. Not everywhere, but somewhere,
always. It forms and dissipates into something even more potent. The
world we want is viral. It is up to us to create new bacteria and
spread it! Thus a few thoughts on how to get there, why we sexual
dissidents want it and what it means for our collective liberation.
An
ethics, instead of morality, is an engine for radical imagination.
Following Espinoza and Deleuze, an ethics is the discipline of what
is good for our bodies, of what extends our passions and connects us
with more bodies and more affinities. E.M. Forster’s “Only
connect” urges us to merge our daily lives with our transgressive
erotic desires AND to make bonds with people across social divisions.
These themes, of connecting parts of our own lives and with lives of
additional people, are intimately mixed. The main thrust of this
writing is to discuss why this work of love is both vital and
pleasurable.
“Liberational”
because this endeavor involves our collective consciousness freeing
itself. In every step of this adventure, we must nourish our
collective, thinking of the specific needs that we all have. None of
us is disposable. Liberational because like Michael Ende’s Momo
shows, our free time, intimate connections and pleasure therein are
directly oppositional to the culture of capitalism, where so many of
our chains are locked. Liberational because the connections between
queerness and anarchy are many and are ours for the exploring,
creating and implementing.
Intimacy
because of its emphasis on closeness, on care and understanding
ourselves and our communities holistically. Lynn Jamieson’s
critical definition is helpful here:
Intimacy
refers to the quality of close connection between people and the
process of building this quality. Although there may be no universal
definition, intimate relationships are a type of personal
relationships that are subjectively experienced and may also be
socially recognized as close. The quality of ‘closeness’ that is
indicated by intimacy can be emotional and cognitive, with subjective
experiences including a feeling of mutual love, being ‘of like
mind’ and special to each other. Closeness may also be physical,
bodily intimacy, although an intimate relationship need not be sexual
and both bodily and sexual contact can occur without
intimacy…‘Practices of intimacy’ refer to practices which
enable, generate and sustain a subjective sense of closeness and
being attuned and special to each other.1
Jamieson’s
idea of “practices of intimacy” is useful in the emphasis on
sustainability, and the wide array of possibilities of engaging in
intimacy. I would, however, change one thing: the idea of being
“special to each other” is both overly individualistic (while I
believe it is necessary, rather, to emphasize the creation of an
intimate community) and sets up reciprocity as a prerequisite for
intimacy. Intimacy can exist through adoration and need not be
problematic. As I will discuss later, sometimes this desire or
fascination can be pleasurable and a key motivation for continuing to
build our intimate community.
And the
values of this community matter. Focusing on intimacy, rather than
sex per se, allows for a wider array of genders, helps avoid
masculine bragging about sexual conquests, and holds space for people
with trauma and for family. Also, as Elizabeth Povinelli points out,
intimacy is a third-world technology, while separating sex from
intimacy is a specifically Euro-fuckery.
Bobby
Benedicto, in Under
Bright Lights,
argues that with the fallout of explicit scientific racial
categorizing, we have come to associate modernity with sexualities
unmarked but understood as white. Often “gay” is implicitly
understood as white, while sexualities considered less modern,
imagined by queer whites as strangled by tradition, religion and
family, are relegated to sub-queerdom. He was speaking specifically
about Manila’s gay scene, but his point is certainly transferable
to Seattle and elsewhere: our desires are part of how racism works,
how it continues to live and poison our communities, especially
harming people of color.
It is not
enough to respond with a list of partners of color, or of fantasies
you have. Many times, these relationships and fantasies may be
problematic. Being in an interracial relationship means examining
your desires to make sure you are not harming your partner or anyone
else. The damage one does can sometimes be sneaky. For example,
fetishizing is desiring a part of a person or an object instead of a
person as a whole. Examples of this may be exoticizing an immigrant
partner as essentially different due to national background. Rather
than understanding their story from the ground up, they become
defined by difference from you, and/or “the norm.” Seeing wealthy
and/or white people as the crowning jewel of beauty or being
exclusively or nearly exclusively attracted to Blacks as tops and
East Asians as bottoms can also be damaging, to the people you are
desiring and to the people who fail to meet racist and classist
standards.
However,
given that race is always present in the USA, it is important to
recognize how it is influencing your desires. It is important to
approach these questions with friends and partners, to create safe,
intimate spaces, where we can flesh it out. Do not fall for the trap
of color-blindness! Insisting that your desires are not tinted by
race and racism is categorically false, so no need to be ashamed in
admitting it, as long as we are all united in our search to see more
and more people as beautiful and autonomous.
I
believe intimacy is both an urgent solution and a route to long-term
solidarity. Creating safe spaces that are explicitly anti-racist,
feminist, queer, well, liberational, where we are encouraged to speak
truths, to listen and to care for each other, we have the opportunity
for important political change. Not only can speaking, listening and
being heard be revolutionary in the exact moment of it happening,
these moments of support and honesty can raise consciousness about
the intimate, what some may understand as otherwise “private,”
lives of members of our community.
Also, it’s
fun! Being together, and actually being together, listening,
laughing, touching, sharing. While by no means being the exclusive
way to build solidarity or political action, is certainly a great
route towards it. Who’s in?!
Have you
ever caught yourself while socializing, or walking home from the bus,
compulsively checking the time, or wondering what you’re going to
do later? Do you sometimes wonder why you feel rushed in your car,
even when you have great music and aren’t late? Have you ever
wanted to be a bit more present?
This
worried obsession with the future is closely tied with the centrality
of risk in US society. Will the stocks go up? What are the chances of
success in building a tunnel? In flirting with the cutest person in
the plaza? We have dangerously made the future into a scientific
endeavor, full of numbers and graphs and what ifs. Cultural and
economic imperialism spread these dangerous tendencies around the
globe.
This
particular conception of the future is a relatively new one,
according to Anthony Giddens’ Runaway
World.
Risk has replaced concepts such as chance, fate and divine
intervention. We have entered an age where we believe ourselves
capable of manipulating our future. This supposed power has corrupted
us. We are obsessed. Or, as Giddens puts it, we are addicted to an
ideal of autonomy.
Luckily
for us witches, the scientific approach to the future is flawed.
Financial speculation, a form of scientific futurism, leads to
deprivation; Tunnels run into unexpected water pipes; Middle Eastern
quagmires of imperialist and pre-emptive
war; Research on automobility suggests that many “accidents” are
actually part of the system. In other words, the unforeseen is
inevitable.
Not
only is it flawed, but our obsession with the future also takes away
from our quality of life. It prohibits our access to jouissance. How
could you ever really feel a kiss if you are thinking about how to do
it better next time? How can you really connect or flirt if you are
calculating how to find a better, sexier companion? How can we relax
if our only time to relax is strictly programmed just to return to
producing more efficiently?
Our
future orientation subtracts goodness from existing. It makes life
worse. It disconnects us. We have less sex because of it. We laugh
less deep because of it. We are less creative because of it. How
would our relations to and of intimacy change if we decided to stay
and chat instead of going to the gym? If we allowed ourselves to
arrive late? If we did the laundry tomorrow? What would change if we
valued connecting with people as much as our invented
responsibilities?
Our
GDP depends on our collective addiction to scientifically analyzing
our personal futures. Our happiness and solving the crises of
intimacy and solidarity in this national culture depend on recovering
from this addiction. Addictions are heavily ingrained. The structure
of our cities, our sexual relations and our lack of a social safety
net all bear heavily. I, however, have no doubt that we can take
important steps to change the attitudes of ourselves and our
communities, leading to, even if on a hyper local level, real changes
in our quality of life.
Another
way of framing this discussion is around the difference between
pleasure and desire. These two terms figure prominently in queer
theory: Jacques Lacan notes that desire is based on fantasy, and
therefore prefigures a lack of something. For Deleuze and Guitarri,
desire is not about a lack, but rather about the production of
reality. They see “the desiring machine” as a revolutionary
productive force that is unfortunately repressed by psycho-social
forces. While Rosemary Hennessy, in her sweeping critique of queer
theory as elitist, male- and euro-centric, argues that the desiring
subject has been falsely conceived as universal, with the state
acting as repressor, but that in reality, the desire for more, the
mentality of always lacking is cultural and suspiciously conducive to
capital accumulation.
An
important difference between desire and pleasure is their
temporality. They operate in different modes of time. Desire is
ever-delayed, always in the future. It is something to work towards,
to calculate how to get it and something for which we are willing to
make sacrifices. Desire has more potential to make us feel insecure
about lack of access to something, and can lead to internal shaming.
But what if
we decided, what if we were culturally wired differently. Pleasure is
present-focused. Pleasure feels good. A focus on pleasure allows us
to enjoy looking at lips while talking with someone. It allows us to
be satisfied. Enjoying the interactions, sexiness, sensuality, the
pleasure of it all relieves the pressure to always get more. In this
sense, it helps us resist the capitalist imperatives imposed on our
bodies to be a certain shape and
to
work 40 hours a week. If we feel less lack compared to what a
hypothetical future self could have, we can relax more, enjoy each
other more fully and can drop out of the never-ending race of profit
and privilege.
Lest I
sound naive, it is important to acknowledge that these changes are
not easy. They are difficult to imagine just how they would unfold,
and to what extent they are likely or possible. Indeed, a complete
erasure of desire is neither possible, nor, dare I say, desirable. Of
course, planning and improving are part of our community’s magic.
That is why I offer some exercises in Vital Praxis can help us move
in that direction. It is something that will be much smoother and
nicer if our values transition as a community. Propaganda and
communal, participatory, pleasurable events will be necessary in this
journey.
Also,
importantly, many people have to work 40 hours a week, and more, for
necessities, not desire. People in these conditions may benefit the
most from free, healing, empowering entertainment and interactions.
The community must be flexible in its ability to insist on meeting
the needs of the neediest.
The reader
may notice a seeming contradiction; how can I be arguing for creating
the community that we desire by arguing against desire. Indeed, it is
strange. As I argue for an increased focus on pleasure, as a way to
be present, I do not think that the future will disappear from our
minds, but that it should cease to function as a disciplinary
horizon. Additionally, desire and pleasure are not opposites, but are
closely intertwined. One can even find pleasure in desire! We should
be careful, however, when our desires begin to make us feel bad; our
desires should not discipline us; our desires should be free from
capitalist impulses. As we move towards the community that we want,
we should continue to actively enjoy the community that we have and
are creating.
An
important shortcoming of the gay civil rights agenda in the post-war
west has been developing a discourse obsessed with individual rights
and privacy. Demanding only the right to do what we want in our own
beds leaves out queer education, health care or queer perspectives on
our relationships to our jobs. In many ways, the movement abandons
many demands that could transform society more deeply and do more
than allow “us to have the same rights as the straights.”
Rosemary
Henessey, in Profit
and Pleasure,
shows that obsessing over individual identity has disguised the class
relations built into sexuality. Sexuality has been a bedrock for the
foundation of capitalism and the hyper-exploitation of biopolitically
designated women. By focusing only on how one was supposedly born, we
are arguing to be incorporated into a capitalist, imperialist and
racist society. If we, instead, focus on our sexual relations; if we,
instead, criticize the shame, fear and ignorance society generates
around sex; if we, instead, ask ourselves how inequalities are
maintained through our sexual mores, then we can start to truly live
in a more enjoyable and just society of our choosing.
Maybe
children should be private, so sex can be public. That might actually
change things! Sex has been designated as a private matter,
completely denying the fact that sex is socially constructed and has
social effects.
What
exactly is public is a changing target, depending on the historical
moment. Jeffrey Weeks, the British historian, notes that when Britain
legalized same-sex sex, they also criminalized a great deal of sex by
applying a very stringent definition of what is “public.”
The Sexual
Offenses Act of 1967 decriminalized male homosexual activities in
private for adults over 21. But its restrictions were harsh from the
start….It tightened up the law with regard to offenses with
“minors” and to male importuning. And it absurdly restricted the
meaning of “private”: for the sake of the Act, “public” was
defined as meaning not only a public lavatory but anywhere where a
third person was likely to be present…And in the next few years the
number of prosecutions actually increased.2
As is often
the case, when one right is freer from persecution, the hammer of the
state, rather than disappearing, falls elsewhere. We must be careful
about these sleights of hand. With such a ridiculous definition of
public and private, a threesome is considered an illegal act, as is
having sex even in the nuptial bed, as children have a tendency to
have nightmares and seek comfort and security with their parents,
who, in this case, would be engaging in public sex.
Another way
public sex has been disciplined is through what Ann Pelegrini calls
the “lesbian wedge.”
In this
either/or scenario, stereotyped images of lesbians get pitted against
stereotyped images of gay men. Sanitized and celibate, lesbian images
are fit for home consumption, with no parental advisory required. And
that's exactly the point. In the end, what these "positive"
images of lesbianism affirm is the wish that gay men be more like
lesbians and disappear even, or especially, when in public.3
This
example of how a harmful stereotype of one section of our community,
in this case lesbians, is used to belittle another, supposedly
worse-behaved portion of our community, in this case, gay men
reinforces the need to be inclusive in the formation of our intimate
community. We cannot continue to let society’s pervasive sexism
find home in our community. This sterilized version of lesbianism is
assimilationist, reductionist and therefore harmful to queer women.
The fact that it is used as a disciplinary device to reducing sexual
activity for queers in general is evidence that we can best move
forward together.
So much of
the hysteria around public sex seems to assume that people are
fucking on benches in the plazas. It’s actually best understood as
semi-public or semi-private sex. Most “public” sex actually takes
place with quite a bit of cover and care not to be interrupted by a
suburban family, their whining children and barking dogs—either
behind a bush, in a car or in a bathroom or movie theater stall. The
sex is only public in the sense that the barrier of participation is
lower.
And there,
my friends, is the beast of it. That’s exactly why it is dangerous
and vital. The low barrier to participation is, however, exactly why
we must create these possibilities. It allows sexual dissidents to
sweat life into alleyways, bathrooms or into each other. For our
community members, especially immigrants, the working-class and/or
people of color, who may live with more people or with their family,
or who may live farther away from the nightlife in the city center,
or who may be less keen to show a new acquaintance their pauperized4
dwelling. The prohibition of public sex maintains an unequal
distribution of pleasure, which in turn maintains economic and
symbolic privilege. Opening up the possibility of sex in public and
semi-public spaces is one way to make a sex-positive culture more
inclusive.
A somewhat
simple, autonomous solution would be to open up private homes to
collective intimacy. Inviting friends over with this purpose, asking
each other questions while holding hands, reading to each other while
spooning can provide a moment to create intimate community with low
barriers to participation, safer from police violence and from the
capitalist impulse to spend money. These spaces need to be specific
and active in their trans*-centric (or at least inclusive),
all-bodies-are-beautiful and anti-racist perspective. Care of the
self. Care of ourselves.
These and
other spaces of public could also expand our community’s practice
of consent. One reason that sex crimes are so often un-reported and
un-prosecuted is due to the misconception of sex as a private act. It
is often difficult for survivors to understand this trauma as
collective, as Beverly Haviland contends it is. Because the majority
of rape is committed by someone close to the survivor, the lines of
consent can be blurry, and when they’re not, there are often no
third-party witnesses. If sex were conceived as public and took place
in public, our collective experience with pleasure and, yes, the
violence of sex would come to light.
Public sex
disrupts the geography of life and death, of desired and
untouchables. When this recourse is freed, the myth of scarcity
dissipates. Making sex more available lets us have more sex and
allows us more easily to fulfill our needs for intimacy and
connection. Touch is healing. We need more of it in more egalitarian
ways. Expanding the geography of intimacy to outside of expensive
bars and into (semi) public space is a key to doing so.
The threat
that public sex poses to our drives to go shopping, upon which
dickhead CEOs and capitalism itself depend, is made clear by looking
at the history of New York’s Times Square. As Michael Warner points
out in The
Trouble with Normal,
Times Square was, up until Bill Clinton and Rudy Guiliani, an
important center for public sex and queer culture. People from rural
areas, from down the street and from around the world came to Times
Square to buy porn or watch a peep show. This all changed when the
Business Improvement District (BID) of Times Square pushed to zone
“adult” entertainment out of the area. The New
York Times,
part of the BID, editorialized seven times in favor of rezoning, and
Disney said it would only join the efforts if the sexy stores were
zoned out. And thus Times Square was transformed from a sex public, a
place for (queer) sexual citizenship into a giant outdoor shopping
mall.
What do we
lose when these places are dispersed or eliminated altogether? A lot,
it turns out! Anyone having witnessed the decline of their local
gayborhood (we could make a long list) has also witnessed a rise in
hate crimes in that same neighborhood. Hardly a coincidence.
A public
sexual culture is also important for the accumulation and
distribution of knowledge. Safer sex campaigns have long depended on
spaces where people have sex. In Brazil, where HIV/AIDS rates are
shockingly low, the government employs sex workers to distribute
condoms and safer sex information. Any research or activist will tell
you: abstinence-only approaches never worked for teenagers, and it
won’t work for anyone else either!
But we lose
more than this nuts-and-bolts knowledge--our sexual imagination takes
a blow. (or, maybe, never gets blown again) When a partner touches
me, or whispers an emotional memory in my ear, we are accumulating
and distributing experience, knowledge, identity. Queer identities
cannot proliferate if we are confined to the state-regulated and
privatized wedding bed.
Making sex
more public also has great potential to eliminate myths and norms
around sexuality. As of now, our idea of sex and the images we have
of naked bodies comes heavily from the porn industry. Many
anarcho-feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin have documented how this
industry represents and perpetuates violence against women. Also, it
doesn’t take a scientist to see how these images reinforce body
standards and shame. These images rarely reflect the true diversity
of body types and are almost always racist and sexist. Making sex
more public makes sex more real.
Deterritorialize
your sex. We can undoubtedly see a relationship historically with the
bourgeoisie family and house structure, and the bourgeoisie
sequestering of sex from every aspect of our lives; how when its
physical presence is made illegal except in one space, its symbolic
presence is assumed absent except when having sex. This isolating of
sex into the (missionary, heterosexual) sex act has been key to the
creation of sexuality (and the people who “have” specific
sexualities) as a thing to be examined and categorized.
While many,
such as Moya K. Mason in Canada or Yunxiang Yan in rural China, have
examined how changing floor plans have altered privacy and gender,
none have done so with implications to our intimacy and sexuality. A
need for further research in this area exists. Colonialist accounts,
such as those of people in the Philippines sharing space and having
sex in their homes, but casually in view of others, are great
inspiration for us to understand the ways the geography of sex has
been a way to increase shame, secrets and, quite frankly, lies, while
reducing understanding and intimacy.
Sexual
Geography has huge implications for how we live our sex and how we
form community. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss some of the
beautiful complications that arise upon forming an intimate
community.
Consent,
Community and Intimacy
In my time
as a sex-positive activist, I have noticed that people can get
nervous. Sometimes these nerves can be nice and tingly; sometimes
they can lead to inaction. I believe that as a community we can use
communication to prevent a large part of any unwanted side effects
and further enjoy the breathlessness of encountering another being,
as mysterious as ourselves.
In a
community that encourages intimacy as a route to social change (and
as a goal of social change), we run into two conundrums: 1) Who is in
this community? What shape does it take? When does it (do we?) come
together? 2) What if I don’t want to be intimate with someone? How
do we reconcile this humanity that we all share that says we deserve
and will benefit from intimacy with the fact that some of us will
have very legitimate reasons for wanting distance from everyone or
from specific people?
We cannot
go one more word without emphasizing the need for consent—for fully
informed consent. For any community to be affectionate and cohesive,
it must be formed and operate on voluntary participation and consent.
What exactly are the boundaries of consent has been a much debated
issue, both among activists, academics and, well, people.
One key
aspect of the debate has pivoted on whether consent stops when
someone says or expresses “no,” or is consent starts when someone
says or expresses “yes.” In other words, is a silent slightly
hesitant person giving consent? Or is it necessary for both parties
to agree enthusiastically to having sex? This second model is often
called the enthusiastic model of consent or the collaborative model
for sex.
The debate
between these two normally does not center on which one is
preferred—the collaborative model for sex enjoys seeming consensus
as more pleasurable, safer and less violent. The arguments against it
are based on its supposed infeasibility: they seem to have trouble,
understandably so, imagining a world where sex can be so relaxed,
honest and exciting for all involved. They often ask “Who asks for
explicit consent at every step? Won’t that make it awkward?” We
are here building the intimate community of our dreams, not one
constrained by heterosexual violence.5
Therefore, we should aim for the most open, enthusiastic consent.
Activities for developing and practicing consent within your
community in Vital Praxis
Also, as we
talk about consent in a collaborative model, we will also be talking
about our pleasures. Talking about what we like is sexy. Talking
about what we like with more people breeds creativity and inspires
others to action. Expression of our sexual fantasies and pleasures is
an important route to making sex more possible and pleasurable, as
well as important to forming an affectionate and intimate community.
Another
debate within discussions on consent has been who is capable of
consent. The new ecosexual movement begs the question of consent with
plants, earth and animals. Foucault famously fought for the removal
of the age of consent law in France. NAMBLA goes as far as to argue
for the possibility of consent with pre-pubescent people. It seems
abundantly clear to me that pre-pubescent people are not informed
enough to understand the full implications of engaging in a sex act,
even if they appear to be giving consent. However, the “magic line”
of the age of consent in the US, wherein an 18 year old is
automatically raping a 17-year old because they are temporarily on
either side of the age of consent is ridiculous. The State may not be
able to handle much more ambiguity than that, but luckily, our
community is made up of all kinds of fabulous queens who are much,
much more flexible.
Our
community will be building alternatives that work against rape
culture. Oftentimes deciding if rape occurred is for purely punitive
reasons, and happens, by definition, after the fact. A better route
would be prevention through culture building. Rape is culturally
created, and can therefore be erased through culture. By operating on
a collaborative sex model, and by not having sex with people who have
not passed onto the other side of puberty, we can take sexual
violence seriously from the outset, so it is incorporated into the
community we are constructing every day.
When people
argue that the power difference inherent in age difference makes
consent impossible across the magic line of 18 years old, they are
forgetting that society’s most prized sexual relation happens
across the very real and violent power dynamic of gender. Dworkin has
criticized both pornography as inherently sexist and violent and
heterosexual sex as coercive and degrading to women. While I think
that pornography is salvageable (see the postporno movement and Annie
Sprinkle for some examples), heterosexual sex, I agree, is not.
Currently,
the semiotics of penis-vagina intercourse degrade women. Even if
these two heterosexuals manage to overcome centuries of sexism and
rape culture in their collaborative sex, the symbolic value of their
sex is degrading to women, as evidenced by our jargon for vaginal
intercourse (pound, drill, screw, hammer, beat it). Indeed if
vagina-penis intercourses manages to avoid these pitfalls, it ceases
to be straight sex, and moves into the welcoming world of queerdom.
As it stands now, penis-vagina “intercourse
is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for
women,"6
and until that ceases to be the case, heterosexual sex must also
stop.
It
is the responsibility that comes with living in a privileged group to
be aware of one’s positionality. Through this awareness we can form
stronger bonds and communities to enjoy now and for further struggle.
Since
1969 Native American activist/scholar Bea Medicine has begun her
public speeches with the greeting, "All my kinspersons, with a
good heart, and strong hands, I welcome you."1
The
aim of this greeting is to interpellate connection-byaffinity: to
call up the proximities-of-being that can ally individual
citizen-subjects into collectivity. These are coalition politics, and
they function on a profoundly different register than those politics
that similarly network and link citizen- subjects in the great global
exchange of capital.7
Capitalism
has divided us. Our productive desires of intimacy have been
frustrated and redirected into the 40 hour work week. While many
violent divisions, such as racism, (cis)sexism and sexual
discrimination have been purposefully constructed to undermine
collective solidarity, other forms of hyper-atomization may simply be
the result of a mentality focused on the individual and privatization
of the commons.
In
Caliban
and the Witch,
Federici convincingly retells the history of witch hunts. According
to this classic, capitalism entailed the forced separation of the
economic from the domestic—think going to work at the factory
rather than farming—and because people were indeed forced into this
new system called capitalism,8
there was quite a bit of resistance. Whole cities, often anarchic and
matrilineal, were formed by dissidents of the system, seeking to
create new societies. Due to this massive resistance, the workers had
to be divided and conquered.
Women lost
power with capitalism, and therefore were (and still are) the
fiercest resisters of this system. Whole systems of legal practice
disproportionately harmed women and sustain(ed) capitalism: men were
to be given the wages, while women worked for free and were dependent
on a man’s wages. Bio-medicine masculinized birth and
contraception, and herbal doctors were made illegal. Cities across
Europe opened government-run brothels and essentially legalized rape
of poor women. Women were forbidden to congregate, destroying
circuits of knowledge and power. Witchcraft, while sometimes existent
and hardly ever Satanic, became a catch-all for the original war on
women and the creation of heterosexuality. Federici then goes on to
describe how the European conquest of the world led to the spread of
heteronormativity, sexism and capitalism, in the Americas and
currently in many parts of Africa.
This
division was made violent as a route to sustaining capitalism. It is
thus vital to return our hearts to anarchy, to recognize all genders
and smash heterosexuality. Healing these historic and present-day
traumas inflicted on bodies harmed by heterocapitlism will be key for
the creation of intimate community and the dismantling of capitalism
and hierarchy.
As with
gender, a similar story can be told with race. During the early
colonial period, many blacks were in the USA as indentured servants,
and not only as slaves. While they were in a lower social position
than poor white, the conditions among them were similar enough to
incite rebellion against the plantation elite. Bacon’s rebellion
took place in 1675, uniting slaves, with black and white indentured
servants to attempt to overthrow the planters. The rebellion did not
accomplish its goal, and several rebels were hanged.
After the
failed revolution, the planter class changed strategy. They imported
more slaves from Africa, who were less likely to speak European
languages and form alliances with whites, and they slowly eliminated
the existence of indentured servitude, thus allocating whites to wage
labor and blacks to slavery. To further solidify their dominance,
The planter class took an
additional precautionary step, a step that would later come to be
known as a “racial bribe.” Deliberately and
strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor
whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black
slaves. White servants were allowed to police slaves
through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that
free labor would not be placed in competition with slave
labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of
future alliances between black slaves and poor whites. Poor
whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence of a
race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had not
improved by much, but at least they were not slaves. Once
the planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to the
logic of their situation and sought ways to expand their racially
privileged position.9
Race, while
not created at this specific moment, was solidified through the
crisis of Bacon’s rebellion. A social division was created as a
means of ensuring economic hierarchy. This social division did not
only exist on the large, sociological scale, but one could also see
these divisions in day-to-day interactions. Whites and blacks no
longer occupied the same spaces, dinner tables and conversations.
Whites had symbolic and economic incentive to be racist. The
breakdown of this particular solidarity was not only economic, but
also involved the day-to-day separation of and animosity between
whites and blacks.
These
histories of strategic divisions in order to solidify domination
should guide us. We can see how important it is in our strategically
intimate community to be welcoming of as many bodies as possible,
especially considering issues of gender, race, class, ability and
sexuality. These divisions are not the only ones, and new ones can
appear at our current or future historic moments. In order to build
the community we desire, we must actively fight racism, ableism,
(cis)sexism and heteronormativity
These
divisions have so multiplied that many, including myself in my study
of automobility in Buenos Aires, that we are living in an age of
atomization. In this era, we tend to live alone, drive in our cars
alone to a cubicle. The destruction of public spaces, especially in
US cities and compulsory automobility are key factors in isolating
each one of us from each one of us.
In The
Empire of Love,
Elizabeth Povinelli discusses this hyper-individuality as autological
worldview, as opposed to genealogical. Povinelli’s autological
subject consists of “discourses, practices, and fantasies about
self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom
associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual
constitutional democracy and capitalism. By genealogical
society,
I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about social
constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of
inheritances.”10
She discusses the modes of intimacy among radical faeries and
indigenous groups in Australia in light of these two modalities.
While
stopping short of criticizing either group, her work helps us
understand the dangers that come with insisting on individual freedom
as the only or main lens through which to view a sexual ethics.
Povinelli also argues that this supposed split, of choosing one or
the other, is false and was only invented with the European conquest
of the world as a way to differentiate “civilized” from “savage.”
Indeed she cites many African and Native American scholars who
demonstrate centuries of thought concerning individual freedom in
addition to social concerns. If we fail to see the genealogical
aspects and potential of our intimacy, we are ignoring continents and
centuries of knowledge in favor of European enlightenment
individuality. Both are present, and both are pleasurable.
A more
direct critique of how the autological worldview discourages our
intimacy comes from Henry Giroux. He argues, in line with me and
Povinelli, that our idea of freedom is defined by neoliberal
capitalism “according to narrow notions of individual self-interest
and limited to the freedom from constraints. Central to this concept
is the freedom to pursue one’s self interests independently of
larger social concerns. For individuals in a consumer society, this
often means the freedom to shop…”11
Returning to the concept of “shopping” as central to how we
socialize sexually as discussed in the first chapter, we can
understand how our individualized ideas of freedom have inhibited
intimate community formation.
Giroux does
not stop there! Citing truly alarming statistics on homelessness,
prison population and the growth of fascism in the United States, he
urges us to take note of the “correlation between the growing
atomization of the individual and the rise of a culture of cruelty.”
He cites the growing commercialization of public space as responsible
for “the pathology of individual entitlement and narcissism.”12
See VItal Praxis for the role of non-commericalized public spaces in
the creation of an intimate community.
We have
seen both how we have been divided on purpose to prolong our
domination, and how these divisions have led to destructive
individualistic myopia. This cycle of division, othering and disgust
must be actively thwarted. The path towards our community and way
from capitalism is the same, and must be taken intentionally and
while considering both economic and cultural domination. By
instilling community concerns in our ethics of intimacy, we can
restore life to people that zombie capitalism has cruelly written
off. This is both a way to live the revolution starting NOW and a
concrete step towards building solidarities to do away with
capitalism.
Intimacy
as Revolutionary
What is
this impulse to consume? Why is it? Is it good for me to resort to
shopping, sitting in a café or otherwise going through exploitation,
in order to spend money on more trash, on more spectacle? US society
is heavily focused on consumption, either at restaurants, at clothing
stores or the alienating spectacle of “culture.” So infrequently
do we experience; We are always consuming.
In
Argentina, culture is more focused on production as a transformative
experience. This is evidenced by working-class struggles, pride and
solidarity, as well as linguistically in the word “laburar,” (to
labor) a commonly used alternative to “trabajar” (to work) used
to show love and respect for laboring. Argentina is a less
future-obsessed country as well—hardly a coincidence that cultures
that can enjoy the present are also less compulsively consuming as a
way to calm their nerves.
Intimacy,
as a form of being present, also diminishes consumption, and all the
exploitation of the people of color, women and Earth needed to
sustain this trash-creating habit. The resources our bodies offer are
nearly infinite and certainly renewable.
In the
hetero-normativizing regime of the Couple and of Romantic Love, we
are taught to reserve our intimacy for one person. As if a zero-sum
economy existed, and if I were to stick a dildo in my ass, then
suddenly, there won’t be room for someone else to fuck me. Add to
one column, subtract from the other. Luckily, we fabulous sluts never
really understood economics very well. We understand a world where
sex creates more sex. Where good sex creates more good sex. Where
intimate bonds snowball—ahem—into more bonds. We see building
awareness of our body, connecting with ourselves and with others as a
near infinite source of radically productive fun.
Intimacy is
also potentially revolutionary in its capacity to make hierarchy
absurd. David Graeber’s essay “Manners, Deference, and Private
Property: Or, Elements for a General Theory of Heirarchy” details
avoidance relationships and their relationship to hierarchy across
impressively varied times and cultures. Avoidance relationships are
“full of stipulations about how the inferior party must not speak
first, must never touch the other first or touch them at all, and so
forth. Almost always, the inferior party must steer clear of
reference to or display of such bodily functions as eating,
excretion, sex or physical aggression.”13
These relations are an important basis for hierarchy, based on
private property and state-based power. These relations are
contrasted with joking relations, in which equals are expected to
tease each other about farts, sex and engage in tickles, hugs and
other touching.
Graeber
then raises an important question: why do these two types of
relationships, avoidance of bodily functions and joking, constitute
hierarchy in early modern Europe, the Indian caste system and
Polynesia? The answer can be found in his discussion of two terms:
taboo and carnivalesque.
In many
Polynesian languages, tapu
or
taboo means sacred, or set off from the human world. In this
particular case, this other worldly status even applied to leaders’
possessions. They were designated as other-worldly, abstract, without
a body, without bodily functions and, therefore, worthy of their
valued position.
Carnivalesque,
or grotesque, are terms invented by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe how
people outside of the court were imagined in Early Modern Europe.
They were seen as more connected, as open bodies through which could
enter and leave objects and bodies. They were disparaged as more
connected to each other and to nature.
The body
swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world…the bowels
and the phalluss…Next to the bowels and the genital organs is the
mouth, through which it enters the world to be swallowed up. And next
is the anus. All these convexities and orifices have a common
characteristic: it is within them that the confines between bodies
and between the body and the world are overcome. 14
In other
words, the disparaged people were seen as embodied, and the reality
of their basic impulses connected them to animality, to each other,
to the world. The lack of shame around their bodies was evidence of
and justification of hierarchy.
Norbert
Elias in The
History of Manners
traces how the “threshold of shame and embarrassment” was
maintained and expanded through his study of centuries of school
books. What body parts to cover and when; what to eat with hands and
what with utensils; to fart in front of another; to mention farting
in front of another. One of Elias’ truly frightening findings is
the geography of manners, and the obligation to polity and away from
the bodily carnavalesque spread: originally one need only be careful
in front of superiors, then eventually within the court even among
equals, and then finally, even when alone. The implications are
dramatic for how the newly invented bourgeoisie class saw itself in
relation to the more bodily connected masses.
The
grotesque and carnavalesque of our community should be celebrated.
Its aesthetic should appear in our arts, music and parties. Let us no
longer play into manners and the divisive hierarchy they maintain by
denying the existence of our bodies!
Federici’s
Caliban
tells us just how entrenched these divisions are in seemingly
unrelated thought. She shows how the horribly erroneous but still
relevant mind/body split in Western though emerged with capitalism.
At the same time, political scientists were engaging in biopower and
the control of the masses, justifying it with metaphors of the
mind/body split. The masses, and women especially, were seen as
bodies to be controlled by the state, understood explicitly as the
mind. The rational control of the masses is a key component of
heterocapitalism.
The
reunification of our whole selves, our ability to be our full bodies
and to tear down the thresholds of shame are historically relevant to
the fall of capitalism. Hierarchy is based on the illusion of the
disappearance of our bodies. Remember, everybody poops, no matter how
much they act like their shit don’t stink. Menstruation, defecation
and sex all reveal our interconnectedness with members in our
community, and with nature. Our bodies, ourselves, are to be
celebrated
Vital
Praxis: Let’s make this shit happen!
-
Spend more time with more people. Avoid bourgeoisie, white, boring ways of being alone. Exercise by playing games or dancing instead of running. Go to the library instead of the coffee shop. Sit in the park instead of your yard. Take out the headphones. Put away your phone. Ride the bus, walk or bike.
-
Eye contact is an important way to make intimate our daily interactions. Perfectly reciprocal. You might be surprised by the positive reactions you get and by how fulfilled you can feel even after potentially mundane conversations. When driving in a car, one cannot make eye contact, which is, after all, the only thing one needs to initiate cruising, to establish a common understanding or laugh. As Roland Barthes says “Mere eye contact…eroticizes.”15
-
Being present is an excellent way to build intimacy and experience pleasure. In fact, it may be the only way!
-
Express emotions. We should experience no shame in being sad, silly, or giggly. Being honest with your emotions can be disarming and encourage honesty in return.
-
Share food. All of it. Cook with friends. Invite your neighbor. Avoid restaurants and other coded relationships of servitude.
1
Intimacy as Concept, pg. 1
2
Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming
out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to
the Present.
London, Melbourne and New York: Quartet Books, 1977, 177.
3
Queer Globalizations, citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism
4
I use this Word to point out that their dwellings are not
objectively impovershed, but rather have been “pauperized”
culturally.
5
Even homosexual rape is heterosexual violence. Rape is about power
through sex, about feminizing the victim. For a detailed history on
how the rise of rape and the invention of heterocapitalism are
intertwined, see Caliban
and the Witch.
6
http://faculty.cbu.ca/sstewart/sexlove/dworkin.htm
7
Chela Sandoval in Queer Globalizations
8
The first instances were in Ireland when peasants were kicked off of
land (self-subsistence) and forced into cities (wage labor and
exploitation). Some call this “original accumulation” because it
was the first capitalist accumulation project. David Harvey suggests
that because these enclosures of the commons are still happening,
either in the cities or on the internet, it is better named
“accumulation through dispossession.”
9
The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarnation in the Age of Colorblindness by
Michelle Alexander (New York/London: The New Press, 2010) pages
25–26
10
Povinelli, 2002. 4.
11
Zombie politics pg 9
12
Zombie Politics 12-3
13
Possibilities, pg 17
14
Bakhtin 1984, 317 rabelais and his world
No comments:
Post a Comment