Que(e)rying Sex Ed

Each year, I teach a course on gender and sexuality to a bunch of second year uni students. It’s focussed pretty firmly on challenging heteronormativity, in a way that most of the students, even those who are queer in some way, even those who claim (over and over, sometimes!) to be ‘totally cool’ with ‘gayness’, at some point in the course find confronting. And that’s mostly because we work really hard at unpacking the heteronormativity of spaces they’ve never really thought about.

The wonders this image has done for my sex life... (not!)

One of those is sex ed, and I have to say, as a resource for clarifying how wide, deep and broad heteronormativity (and I take this to include sexism, because heterosexuality and masculine and feminine gender roles are intertwined) is in our culture, sex ed just can’t be beat. Most people have some kind of an experience of learning about sex. But have you ever thought about your experiences of sex ed in detail? About how they construct sex and sexuality for us?

Here’s a reconstructed outline of how these exchanges kinda work (this could be self-indulgent and tl;dr, if so, skip down to the asterixes! Also, for the record, I’m not quite this directional in class; usually we have various stories about sex ed told along the way which we interrogate together as they come up…)

Q: What did you learn about when they said you were learning about sex?

A: About sex!

Q: What kind of sex?

A: (pause) Well, heterosexual, i guess.

Q: What kind of heterosexual?

A: (starting to get it, and remember this is a queer theory course…) Well, penis-in-vagina missionary position. (Sometimes, depending on how far through the course we are, followed up with:) Reproductive! In a marriage! Between two goodlooking, able-bodied white people! A man who is masculine and dominant, and a woman who is feminine and subordinate.

Q: Anything else? Any other kinds of sex?

A: No! But one student asked once about oral sex. The teacher blushed/refused to answer/gave a definition but didn’t really describe it.

Q: But was it really treated as ‘really real’ sex? Or something that might be a step along the road?

A: Just a step.

Q: Hmm, so I wonder where teenagers get the ‘must hit the finish-line a.k.a. have PIV sex!’ idea from… Not really going to lend itself to ‘do what feels good for you both’ sex, is it? Okay, and what else did you learn about?

A: Well… about condoms.

Q: Ah yes, I practiced putting one on a banana at school. Very lifelike [Need that sarcasm font; I use sarcasm a lot in the classroom!].

A: Me too! (or) We used zucchinis/cucumbers! (this generally leads to some ribald humour about which is most lifelike, and once, a bit of hilarity about me thinking someone meant telegraph cucumbers rather than Lebanese ).

Q: And did you learn about dams?

A: (some) No! (some) [confused]

Q: That would be the name for the barrier that makes oral sex performed on women safe sex, and oral-anal sex performed on anyone safe sex… And did you learn about how to slice a condom to make a dam?

A: [confused look/laughter]

Q: You can, you know, if you’re desperate, though you need to be pretty careful with that one. So not so much on the ‘how to have any sex at all, if you and your partner happen to be the same sex’, then, huh?

A: Not really. Although they did say gay men have anal sex!

Q: Woo! Because of course gay men never have any other kind of sex. [Yes, there's that sarcasm again, generally followed by pretend anxiousness that they didn't get it, and:] Because you know that of course, there are lots and lots and lots of different ways that gay men and everyone else have sex, right? And anal sex, not just for the gay men. Straight people too! And lesbians even! I know! Amazing! And sometimes even straight men receive anal sex! Bend over, boyfriend! The world crumbles! [Wow, writing this out makes me realise how much sarcasm I use!] We shall talk more about this later. But, small piece of advice: lube! So, anything about girl-on-girl sex?

A: Ummm… no…. (generally with smirks from the queer women in the class).

Q: Ah yes! Lesbians are invisible again! And bisexual women! What are they?! Excellent! Anything about trans people at all ever?

A: Nope!

Q: Ah, of course, for as we all know, they do not exist! [yeah, more sarcasm] Except, of course, when they do. But what else did you learn about at school? What was most of sex ed about?

A: About, like, the insides. You know, where the uterus was, and the semen and the sperm… and all of that. And the clitoris!

Q: Ah yes! We did that too! And I’m sure many women are grateful people know where the clitoris is. And did you ever find that knowing where your fallopian tubes were improved your relationships? Or your ovaries improve your sex life? Because I know that for me, that has done almost nothing…

A: [laughter] No…

Q: And I don’t know about you lot, but I learnt that stuff in biology as well, so… And what about working out when to have sex? Whether you should have it? Or whether to say no? And how to say no?

A: [this one varies a bit] Well, we were told to always say no. I went to a Catholic school./Well, we were told we should always respect it if someone said ‘no’./Well, we were told we could say ‘no’ if we didn’t want to have sex, but not really how, or how to know when.

[That last one, I usually probe a bit more, to get into the complexity of consent, by saying something like: 'And anything about working out whether you really did want to have sex? Or how to say 'no' without just yelling 'no!' in someone's face? Because it can be a bit hard, if, say, the person you're with, who you really care about, wants to have sex, and you're not sure, and you kinda want to please them, and you're not positive you don't want to have sex. And then it slips too easily into not wanting to be rude and 'would it be so bad to really give them what they want,' where you're not really thinking about what you want, just about whether you're sure enough that you don't want it to yell 'no!' at someone. Which obviously, can lead to the bad, especially for women. So any of that covered?' Generally, the answer is 'No'.]

Q: In fact, have a think about your sexual relationships, or those you wish were sexual. The things that you find hard about them, or complex, or those moments when you’re not quite sure what to do about them… you know, if you want to hit on or even come out to a friend you’re interested in, or want to say ‘no’ without it being a big deal, or want to try something new but can’t tell if it’s going to be a problem, or where you want to have sex but are worried the other person might think it means more than it does, or might think it means less… were any of these ever covered in sex ed?

A: Well… no, not really…

**

Okay, sure, I know, from my perspective, it’s really easy to pick on school sex ed, and I know that lots and lots of schools and teachers have a hard time negotiating the line between what they think sex ed ought to be, and what parents do, for example.

But here’s the question: how do you think sex ed ought to work? I’m not just talking about school sex ed, but sex ed in general? Should it happen in the info-dump form that it does at schools now? How do you think we ease up on the heteronormativity? How do we help girls feel both entitled to their own pleasure and entitled to not have sex? How do we encourage boys to recognise their own sexual pleasure (rather than the ’social’ pleasure of being able to say you’ve had sex/the ‘achievement-all-hail-the-conquering-hero’ grossness) and learn how to negotiate sexual encounters without being unethical—whether that refers to various forms of coercion, violence or even simply being self-absorbed in a sexual encounter (obviously, I don’t think these are equivalently problematic, but they are connected, I think)—given that it’s so easy to learn those unethical behaviours from contemporary mainstream sexual cultures? How do we equip both boys and girls with the skills they need to negotiate their way around sex? How do we shift sex from being conceived of as so special, or as so natural an instinct we never need to discuss how and where and why it happens, or the kinds of power relations that are involved?

(For more thoughts on this, and for more of me being long-winded and opinionated, see The Divine Ms. S’s post about this topic, and the awesome comment section. And for those who haven’t heard about that pretty spectacular resource for teens, any further circulating of the wonder that is Scarleteen can only be a good thing.)

(Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town)

 

HealthBase Cures All Ills

(cross-posted at Hoyden About Town)

Especially if your ills include a distinct lack of laughter at the hilarious outcomes of semantic search engines.

HealthBase was recently unveiled by NetBase, and it is designed to give you a nice broad sense of current medical knowledge about any condition you might be wondering about. Theoretically, it is supposed to trawl through authoritative sources of medical data to come up with the best medications and drugs, treatments and (randomly) food and plants for a given condition. It’s meant to offer you the pros and cons of given treatments, complete with links so that you can check them out yourself. Theoretically.

As TechCrunch points out in a post entitled NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt, this semantic search engine has come up with results that range from the hilarious to the offensive, with a fair few in between. (See also David Rothman’s take). But NetBase seems to think that they’ve cleared up most of the problems…. I… think not.

Some highlights with my commentary in brackets (please note the database seems to be chopping and changing, so if you don’t get the same results, that’ll probably be why):

Diabetes: Treatments for Diabetes include: Transplantation (of the diabetes, perhaps? I suppose that would help…), Transplant, Mouse (I… don’t even known?) and Pancreas (Um? With some fava beans and a nice chianti, perhaps?)

Depression: Treatments for Depression include: Great Depression (Um? We should time-travel? Because being economically depressed will help?),  Beck Depression Inventory (Because when I know how depressed I am, I no longer will be…?), and Questionnaire (Questionnaires are a cure-all on this site, listed for the vast majority of mental illnesses I checked… Who knew?!)

Myalgic Encephalitis: There is only one treatment available for this condition, and it is… Suffering (Yes, this is for real). And when we look into the pros and cons of suffering, we find that first and foremost on the pros list, it purifies the soul. There are a number of cons, though, which include: Suffering (circular reasoning, you think?), Torment heart (very poetical), Brandtson (Huh?), Coleman (… I got nothin’), Dennison Marrs (?!), Fine China (I should tell my nan…), Fold Zandura, Hideous Thieves (Well, that would be a con, suffering and being stolen from by ugly people…?), Kat Jones (Yeah, still nothin’), The Lassie Foundation (Um? Reruns are painful, but…?)

Sex Addiction can apparently be treated with: Acupuncture (which I have to say gets a look-in a fair bit as a cure…!), Animal Model (I… don’t know, and I don’t think I want to know!), Diagnostic Criterion (…Really?), Evidence Based Medicine (Who knew that revamping medicine would cure Sex Addiction?), and NicVAX (which, it would seem, multitasks as a treatment for nicotine addiction…)

Schizophrenia is due to abnormality and treatable with Deficit, LSD and Perceived Impact, has complications including Expression and Experience, and one of the cons of schizophrenia is researcher and scientist. Treatments for Fetish include Latex, Spandex, Magazine and Condiment. One of the causes of Chlamydia is, apparently, Kevin, but treatments are easy: Screening and Testing. And the sole known cause of Transsexuality is Wish, whilst a recommended treatment is Dick Lyon’s POV. Some, of course, are not funny, but more potentially insidiously damaging: in addition to Rothman’s AIDS-is-caused-by-Jews example cited at TechCrunch, Transsexualism suggests Early Intervention as a treatment, and links to a page which pathologises ‘extreme boyhood femininity’.

Please, everyone, do yourself a favour, go over and find out exactly how to treat all known illness. Share the highlights below. Because laughter might not be the best cure, but it’s still fun!

Hat tip to Ms-almost-Dr Pepperell of Rough Theory.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/02/netbase-thinks-you-can-get-rid-of-jews-with-alcohol-and-salt/

 

Spec(tac)ular pop culture I: The conceptual appartus of Dollhouse

I started this post an age ago, but I need to post it before I post the others I have drafted. So forgive the oscillation between only-knowing-ep-1 and knowing-entire-season-so-far, would you please? This is, of course, always in dialogue with what Fuck Politeness has written, given that we’re watching and discussing them together each week. More to come!

As you may already be aware, Joss Whedon has produced a new concept and a new series: Dollhouse. It stars Eliza Dushku as a young woman, once known as Caroline and now, within the Dollhouse, as Echo, one of a number of ‘Dolls’. The dolls have had their memories and personalities wiped away, and these can be replaced at any point with any imprint the technician wants. They are, in some sense, the ultimate in contemporary personhood; perfectly flexible to every context, able to learn anything with the flick of a switch (Matrix-like). It seems that even muscle memory is erasable and re-code-able by Topher, the ’science nerd’ character of the series. Topher is a young man with a flexible set of morals, and in the first episode, he voices a number of justifications for the questionable ethics of erasing people’s memories. We’ll come back to that. The Dollhouse is run by Adele, terse and tightly-wound, but not entirely cold. She’s mostly efficient, it would seem, but in the opening of the series as a whole, it is she who is ‘convincing’ Caroline to give herself over to the Dollhouse. Caroline, it would seem, feels she has no choice; the implication seems to be that Caroline could either give herself to the Dollhouse or go to prison (but I am way reading into this…). Echo’s handler, Boyd Langton, is less certain about the morals of the Dollhouse, and it is his discomfort that helps to draw attention to the problematic nature of the Dollhouse.

Scene set.

For me, there’s much to be excited about in even this minimal scene-setting. I want to talk about a couple of things in particular: the creation of the perfect object, the question of consent, coercion and choice, and finally the troubling of an essentialist model of subjectivity. Today I’ll talk about the first of these.

So: the first. In the conversation over at Hoyden About Town, some concern was expressed about the objectification of Echo in the first episode. She rides a motorbike and dances around looking ecstatically happy, in a teensy tiny dress that just promises to flick up a lil to reveal her knickers (but, sadly for some, never quite does. Who doesn’t love a tease?). The camera dwells on Echo. This particular section is topped off by a young man saying something about how much fun he’s had with her that weekend, giving her a lil heart pendant, and then, as she walks off into the middle of the night, tell his buddy that the clock had struck 12 and she had had to leave. The evocation of the fairytale is self-conscious, here:  it’s pretty clear he’s pretty taken with her, and not least because she’s pretty taken with him. She’s not reduced, simply and utterly, to the object of her body, as we might be accustomed to identifying objectification. She’s the princess the prince wants, and when the clock strikes twelve, that’s what she’ll cease being. Indeed, this is the complexity that the series allows us to access: the complexity of what Luce Irigaray calls ’specularity’.

Specularity, as Irigaray (one of the ‘French feminists’, who isn’t actually French) describes it, is related to objectification. Objectification is the process where women are reduced to mere objects of male use and desire; not people at all. Historically, this has been associated with forms of feminism which are invested in a mind/body split, and thus objectification is often thought to be the reduction of a thinking, emoting woman to her body; all else is made irrelevant. The conceptual violence done here is the refusal to acknowledge that women think and feel ‘just like men’. Specularity does something slightly more deconstructive: it observes that man and woman are categories defined in relation to each other. More specifically, man is taken as the yardstick by which woman is defined, and inevitably found wanting: they are less rational, less strong, less able to control themselves and so on and so on and oh god so on. Indeed, it is precisely because woman is defined as derivative, as lesser, that man is recognisable as the norm, as the yardstick itself (and yes, that would be Irigaray’s slightly naughty  but pointed sense of humour, indicating the phallomorphism of language, which sees ‘erect’ and ‘yardsticks’ as positive things). Woman is specular: she plays the mirror that reflects man’s image of himself (as strong, rational etc) back to himself, made to be a mirror that affirms his superiority.

Echo’s name is no accident. Echo is specularity made impossibly spectacular: she is a woman who can be made into whatever is desired of her. She can be moulded, refit, reshaped, to become whoever it is that the ‘client’ wants of her. Indeed, this is perhaps most evident in the interchange she has with the ‘client’ early in the episode. He wins the motorbike race, probably because she let him. And she accuses him of cheating, all sass and fire. This is intriguing, because she’s clearly not a mere object at this moment: she’s more than a passive body for his use. But she reflects back to him precisely what he wants to believe of himself: that a smart, sassy, gorgeous woman will teasingly fight with him, maintaining the illusion that he won straight up, partly to raise the heat between the two of them. She is a mirror, spectacularly.

But to just return to Irigaray for a moment: along with this particular branch of third wave feminism, Irigaray isn’t interested in simply proclaiming the inaccuracy of these truths, and pointing out that women are ‘just not like that’. For this, of course, would presume that women already are something beyond who they are in the social. Rather, she draws a constructionist bow: men and women are constructed through precisely this logic of what she calls sexual indifference (indifference because women are not permitted to be actually different, just derivative, just lesser). In other words, men and women are produced through the social figuring of them in relation to each other. Through (in)difference, woman becomes specular, only ever what man needs of her to remain man, to remain superior.

In this sense, Echo’s position within the Dollhouse becomes a literalisation of the situation of women within patriarchy: specularised even when they are not straight-forwardly objectified. But this, of course, is not the end of the story, as both Irigaray and Whedon know. What is fascinating, already, about Dollhouse is that even when Echo is made precisely what is ‘required’, she always exceeds. She exceeds her specularity, even if she remains within the ‘parameters’ of her job. This happens over and over: it happens when she refuses to simply be the fuck-prey of the hunter in episode 2. To be clear, it’s not that some of the ‘real’ Echo shows through; that, I think, is too simplistic a model of subjectivity for what’s going on. It’s that the woman that she is ‘imprinted’ to become shifts and changes with the situations she is confronted with. She might be specularised, but she is never just that.

And this, too, is Irigaray’s point. Women will always exceed the specular economy, always exceed their definition as not-man, as the inversion, the mirror of men. This isn’t because there’s an underlying ‘truth’ to women that is not done justice to in the specular economy. Rather, it’s because the specular economy itself is shaped through disavowals: disavowals of women’s strength, of women’s capacity for rationality as well as irrationality, of women as other than what the specular economy would have them be. This is the hidden underside of the specular economy. And this is why the Dollhouse-rs are so concerned about Echo’s continual exceeding of their expectations: it testifies to the uncertainty of their control, of their capacity to decide who she is. They think they make her what she is, and she remains static, a mirror. But Echo takes their mirror, shifts it, turns it a little sideways, becomes more and other than what they expect, demonstrates that their control is never complete; and it’s not incomplete because she is someone else ‘underneath’, because each of the women she is produced to be inevitably finds the holes, the gaps, the spaces in which to become more than the Dollhouse ever thought she could be. For Irigaray, this is the unique attribute of what she calls the ‘feminine’, the disavowed underside of the specular economy. Specular woman might be the mere reflection of man, but women are always more than this, because in order to produce them as specular, the economy of specularity must also produce the feminine, an uncertain, deconstructive excess to itself. And this is why women constitute such a threat to phallocentric logics: women are never merely specular, but always more, and that ‘always more’ reveals the inconsistencies, the foolish fantasies, that which must be disavowed in the constitution of such logics.

This is why I’m describing Echo as an ‘everywoman’ figure, and why I think she’s such an important figure in current TV. Every week, she is made a mirror, a reflection to get the job done. And every week (if not with every imprint), she exceeds her mandate. Every week she testifies to their lack of control over who she can be, simply by living out the imprint given her. She refuses to be the hunted; she refuses to accede to a fundamentalist logic which would see death as the only good end; she refuses to allow the patriarchy to retain its grasp on her sisters… Each of these refusals does not take place outside the imprint created for her, but within it. This demonstrates that within every woman, produced as she may be as the specular mirror to reinforce male privilege, she always exceeds this, and the simple living out of this excess—which often occurs unconsciously, and often occurs because of her bonds to others (such as the Rihanna-stand-in, or Boyd, or the other cultists)—has the capacity to upend the phallocentric system. The real threat to patriarchy, then, doesn’t come from without, it comes from within. In other words, yes, Dollhouse does depict objectification. It depicts specularity. But in so doing, it demonstrates that these never do and never can contain women; that there is always resistance possible by turning the system back in against itself. And women have unique access to the excess that can do this (well, women plus Victor, perhaps, in the Dollhouse universe!). When women are more than mirrors, they trouble not only the supposition that they are only the reflection of men, but that men’s superiority is anything more than a illusion.

 

Grief

Marking, marked, again.

 

Book Review: Dancing Around Obsession

I haven’t read Davis’ book, but I do work in a similar area. The question for me is, in the diagnostic category of ‘causing marked distress’, what, precisely, causes the distress? Some would say OCD, and yet even Agin observes that if your obsession earns you money, it’s unlikely to be a psychiatric symptom. Thus what makes something a symptom is not given by the symptom itself, nor by the brain, but by how particular behaviours are situated within a given culture. What defines something as a symptom is not, in the end, a psychiatric matter. Which means that psychiatrists really need to be able to engage with the context within which that symptom occurs; what makes a particular behaviour problematic? Yes, severe distress, but what produces that distress? A mismatch between the expectations of the context within which the person works, and that person’s behaviours.

You might say that none of this matters, but as has already been pointed out, the use of psychiatric drugs is already re-setting the bar for what counts as ‘normal’ within our cultural context. As a result, more people are falling outside ‘normal behaviour’ and this, then, causes the distress which is apparently key to rendering something a psychiatric symptom. Thus ipsychiatrists need to begin to engage with understandings of the world which do not treat the brain as if it occurs in a vacuum, because to do otherwise is to reproduce and expand the very problem they are supposedly seeking to address.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

 

Aqueous Chastity Belts and Goblin Halls

Potentially it was foolish to attempt to revivify this poor lost blawg when I was about to go into full time work. For those of you full-time full-timers, doubtless this seems like the whinge of a spoilt child. But nontheless, my body clock has needed a teensy bit of tweaking, leaving me with little time to spend on selfish pursuits. But I could not neglect you all for too long, lest you think I would not return. So I wanted to share with you the spectacular works of a friend of mine, Patrick Boland. For those of you who have ever been even mildly drawn to the mysterious machines of steampunk, or to the magic palimsest of industrial remnants, or to the scary-glee of ancient robots, or to the hard, soft lines of sandstone cut by prisoners…. or, for those of you who are Sydney-siders, like me, if you have been enchanted by the bizarre and extraordinarily rare density of history you can find at Cockatoo Island, check out the gorgeous photos Patrick has taken (some of these are trimmed, thank you so so much, WordPress…). Find the Rool Thing over here:

The Goblin Hall:

It’s comin’ ta git cha!

Greys go gorgeous…

Enjoy, kidlets. I shall return at some point, carryin’ on about the Whedonverse, or potentially about Sydney Festival stuff I have been indulging in!

 

Hoofering

Just in case you’re wondering what I’m up to… I am going to dance in public (well, all things being well, and my apparent inability to recall an entire sequence of steps being properly remedied). And what kind of dance will this be? Well… let’s just say that it’s potentially the most unusual dancing you’ve ever seen. Wish me luck finding a taffeta 80s dress…

 

The World Out There

O I’ve mentioned already that I’m adoring my students this term, and for the most part, this is true. There’s a couple of points, though, at which I’m banging my head up against a brick wall with a couple of them. Now before this sounds like a straightforward bitch about students, I want to say that that’s not quite it. It’s actually that the whole experience is making me reflect on how tenacious a particular conception of ontology and epistemology is. It manifests itself in these particular students as a complete resistance to the idea that there might not really be such a thing as ‘the natural body’; or rather, that ‘the natural body’ is just as much a construction as anything else. It echoes through the week on disability (’some people just are disabled’) and fatness (‘but some things just will make you fat, and fat is bad!’) and so on. But all of this is premised on a really particular understanding of the world: of the world as something out there, something at a distance. Something static, immoveable, unchangeable. Something which has been there, just less well comprehended, for those who came ‘before’ us in history. Something firm; something foundational; something to anchor the world.

This isn’t rare, not at all. And it’s a hard conception to shift. Our commonsense sense of representation works this way too: there’s the thing itself, and then there’s the word for the thing. It’s echoed by truth: truth is thought as the adequation of knowledge to the thing itself. The thing itself, though, is ‘out there,’ existing all by its lonesome, unchanging and forever just the way it is.

What’s intriguing, I think, is the hard work it takes to sustain an alternative conception, at least for a while. I have seen students grasp the complexity of, say, the idea that the body doesn’t exist prior to culture and then enter into it, but only becomes a ‘body’ within a given cultural context. Then, the next week, they’re back to arguing that this conception doesn’t make sense. Most often, these claims are premised on the assumption that in order for what I’m teaching to be ‘true’ (and it needs to be true, for them; some even stick with calling what we’re learning ‘objective’) it needs to cohere with what ’science’ (and this, I think, has less to do with science itself, which is often much more circumspect about such claims, and more to do with the authorisation of what has become commonsense).

There’s also some funny stuff that happens about not just the idea of truth, but the comfort of the idea of truth. I’ve watched a few students get wider and wider of eye, and I can see what’s happening. They’re falling for what I call ‘dumb existentialism’ (which by the by the mainstream media seems to think postmodernism is all about) in which the moment we lose a big-t Truth, the world slowly starts to dwindle into chaos. Meaning is gone. The world is everything and nothing. It’s all very deep, and I remember those conversations over beer when I was an undergrad.

(Hilarious side point: I remember talking to one particular guy. He was hot, he knew it (but unfortunately the hot faded, potentially because of this conversation). We talked cultural studies and I was taken that he was taken with it. Then I suggested that ‘who I really am’ isn’t so much given by some essence, but by the people around me (my attempt at a less depersonalised sense of ‘context’). He suggested that this was because I felt the demands that other people made on me too much, and that what I needed to do was go off to a Buddhist retreat like he did. Coz he found himself. He really did; he found some core, deep deep down, you know, just himself, his real self… and I thought of Foucault… and I thought of Butler… and I thought…OMG. Pretty or not, it was so hard to hold my tongue, coz man it was going to be biting.)

But back to my existential crisising students. What they usually forget, of course, is that ‘discovering’ there’s no big-t Truth is not the same as losing big-t Truth. When they freak out, they freak out as if now there’s no meaning. But the same significances still exist for them, just as they always did, because they never did depend on a big outside Truth. All it shows is that truth is given within a context, by a set of shared discourses; not that it’s any less true. But you know, that’s kinda less sexy than the artistic soul’s pit of despair on discovering that nothing means anything.

In other words, there’s a semi-willingness to challenge ideas of Truth. But there’s a less sustained attention to how and why particular things are made to count as truth, or why we might live as if they are, and so on. It’s like the stories about postmodernism the mainstream media likes to tell: it just destroys everything. They miss the construct in deconstruct; and they miss that deconstruction is not about making things false, it’s about highlighting their contingency. This issue comes up a lot: it’s like deconstruction has to be set back within a world view in which it is possible for things to be true or false, and deconstruction will tell us which is which. Strange, but it happens a lot. In conversation with someone online a while ago, I suggested that there were strategic ways that one could attempt to tell big-t-style Truths as a way of negotiating with the political efficacy of big-t Truth, whilst at the same time critiquing and deconstructing both the ‘truth’ and what let it count as truth, and the fact that it was politically effective. My interlocutor commented that this was disingenuous: to claim things were true because it was politically efficacious, but not thinking them actually true was to be, in essence, false. This line has been kicking around in my head with all this other stuff for a while now, and it just intrigues me how notions of authenticity and truth seem to remain throughout a critical approach. My interlocutor was very far from foolish, and grasped much of poststructuralist theory. But nonetheless, this theory was implicitly, it seems, set back within an ontology and an epistemology: in which there was a world out there that we couldn’t really touch but could use words that were adequate to it, represent it, and that that adequation bore with it a political and moral responsibility.

I don’t have much of great profundity to say about this. It does, though, seem to point out how thoroughly our habitual styles of being-in-the-world are inflected by these ontologies. My students come to class, and for some of them at least, their perception is shaken up. Yet they leave, and go and order coffee, and sit with friends, and chat and read and catch the bus and sleep and cook and work… and when they come back to class, their perception has settled again. There are those, of course, for whom the shaking up is too exciting to leave alone. They prod the ideas, turn them over, return to them; maybe even do what I as an undergrad used to do, which is talk endlessly about them to my friends. For them, poking and prodding and turning their own assumptions, their own habits around in their hands becomes… fun, addictive, exciting, terrifying… There’s nothing quite like discovering that the world is not out there. It’s in always already here, intimate of intimates; and you’re out there, too, distant and dreamt-of.

 

Conclusion

In opening this thesis, I situated suffering in relation to the imagining of the body politic. Suffering, I suggested there, is positioned as the uprising of the chaotic ‘state of nature’ into the rational, civilised calm of the structure of the state. As we have seen, however, it is, in fact, that suffering is constitutive of the state: it plays a key role in the techniques of biopower, ensuring that contemporary forms of subjectivity are invested, viscerally, in the reproduction of normalcy, and thus in both the reproduction of both a “proper” individual body, and the reiteration of the particular image of the body politic. Suffering, I have argued, is not a natural occurrence but bound up with the subject’s production as subject. It is thoroughly contextual, a result of the bodily tolerances engendered by contemporary styles of being-in-the-world, and the tacit knowledges—knowledges particularly about the value of different bodies—they bear with them. These bodily tolerances are never merely individual. They shape and are shaped not only by what I have called the incarnatory context, but by one of the key ways that this context is imagined: in, through and as the body politic.

Moira Gatens’ discussion of Hobbes’ Leviathan, which I alluded to in the introduction, suggests that the imagining of the body politic as a literal body is not an innocent metaphor (Gatens , 21-28). Rather, she suggests that it is in and through the metonymic and metaphorical construction of the body politic as male that the worth of women is so undermined. I would add to this that in fact Hobbes’ imagining of the body politic is far more specific than this: it is white, male and thoroughly able-bodied; more, it is envisaged as a sovereign, rational individual. It is maintained through the echoes of this model of subjectivity and sovereignty in the individuals which makes it up: the body politic’s sinews, according to Hobbes, are the contracts binding (male) citizen to (male) citizen. In imagining sociality in the image of the contract, and in the maintenance of the ideal body (politic), the devaluation of particular bodies is both essential and concealed. It is, as Diprose has so eloquently drawn to our attention, the memorialising of the generosity of some, and the forgetting of others that structures this body, what is valuable to it, what can count as property, proper bodies and proper subjectivities. The memorialising of the value ascribed to particular bodies thus functions to reiterate the privilege—the standard, the norm-ideal—of the white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied male. It is also, as Gatens suggests, what enables the forgotten incorporation—the ‘swallowing’—of the gifts and generosity of all those whose ‘corporeal specificity marks them as inapprorpriate analogues to the political body’: women, immigrants, those racialised as other than white, those of classes other than middle class, and of course, those whose bodies are considered not ‘able’ (Gatens , 23).

The meaningfulness of these bodies—these “too-specific” bodies—is produced through the extraordinary discursive strength of medicine, also equipped to render them less specific, better ‘analogues’. The body that Hobbes envisaged did, indeed, risk sickness: civil war was the disease he sought to inoculate Leviathan against (Hobbes 1998, 19), the breaking of the social contract. But in fact our discussion here has shown us that this body politic, for all its apparent impermeability, all its apparent invulnerability, is a dream wispy and frail, threatened by the inevitable presence of all that it must constitute as disavowed: bodies ‘disabled’, of colour, female, transitioning, intersexed, ‘disfigured’, working class and so on. Medicine, a technique of biopower, as Foucault has noted, plays its part in this economy of bodies in the reproduction of normal citizens; thereby also maintaining (the value of) the white, able-bodied body politic, in whose image all value is medically, legally and economically calculated. Medicine is not, of course, a monolith, and nor is it to be thought of as an evil: it offers us the means for recovery when we sick, heals us when we have accidents, gives us capacities we might never have had, and gives us a way of understanding all these transformations, the world, and ourselves. Yet the extraordinary legitimacy of science means that truth-effects attach to these constructions, be they the constructions in the appearance and experience of flesh as made by knife, needle and thread, or pharmaceuticals; or in those less recognised but no less significant ways: in the construction of perception, comportment and styles of being-in-the-world more generally. Thoroughly imbricated in the liberal humanist individualism which grounds Hobbes’ imagining of the Leviathan, medical science plays a, perhaps even the, key role in the modification and (re)production of proper subjects, proper desires, proper bodies: it constructs and reconstructs normalcy as natural so that these bodies—and the body politic in whose image they are made—may remain unremarked and unremarkable. Suffering, then, has a dual effect: anatamopolitically, it produces subjects who suffer their “abnormalcy,” experiencing the (medically assisted) achievement of normalcy as a home-coming, as an achievement of who they “really” are; and biopolitically, it reproduces the normal body of the population, the ideal of the body (politic) as free from suffering.

It is, as we have seen, in the (im)possibility of aneconomic generosity that this unjust and economic imagining of the body politic is troubled, shaken and undone. Hobbes’ imagining of the bodies’ sinews as lying in the various ‘pacts and covenants’ (Hobbes 1998, 19) of its citizens—of some kind of social contract—is laughably simplistic in the context of the complex and unpredictable generosity of embodied, intercorporeal and intersubjective subjectivity and sociality. These gifts, the gifts that constitute us as inevitably intertwined with others are bonds that we cannot recognise without simply appropriating these gifts, thieving them into a careful re-membering of the Leviathan, its articulation as a body whose ties lie only within: joints, ligaments, nerves, muscles.

Yet even this destruction of the gift can never be total: the giftness can never be completely swallowed into the calculation of economy. The gift may always be foreign to the circle of economics, but it is nonetheless essential to it. And as I have described in the final chapter of this thesis, the embodied subject is always more than the perfect citizen: she is both rational and irrational, cognitive and corporeal, calculating and responsible. This means that whilst the subject cannot recognise the gift (for to do so is to render it not a gift), responsibility is nonetheless possible: there are means of engagement with the gift which allow it to remain aneconomic. In this responsibility, I have suggested, lies the possibility of a tacit, corporeal acknowledgement of the generosity of others—of the intertwining of the subject with the generous other, an intertwining that always exceeds the contractual, the rational, the calculated. This ‘acknowledgement’ means that the very tolerances that constitute not only “individual” subjects, but the body politic itself, are troubled, shifted, the sediment of entire histories stirred, altered and recast. Thus Leviathan is revealed to be not singular and contained, made impermeable as if by the selvage edge of a piece of fabric, where the weft binds it only back to itself. Rather, responsible styles of being-in-the-world not only testify to the gifts of others but also to the knotty mass that Leviathan already is—a Leviathan indeed, made not in the reductive image of a man, but as something unimaginable—monstrous, unfinished, messy, uncontainable and never entirely present. It is this that bears out the promise of another time, one never simply present, and the promise of that which Lévinas dreamt of: an anarchic moment of ethical justice. A justice born in those alterations to come.

…[gulp]…

 

Loss

Marking five years…

These will never be enough, but…

the spray of post-it notes sticking out of books he lent me; lightning-fast dance of references, gathering knowledge; a head—shaved, curly—bent over a book; the ecstatic, overlapping discusison of films, art, novels, theory, people; the putting up of—and putting a hole in—a tent; struggling, hands held, through sand; arguments about who took whose hand and started it all; writing excellent, completely illogical philosophy whilst utterly drunk; relationship and non-relationship.

We have all been marked by G— in some way—touched, impressed, etched. I speak today because G— loved me, and I love him. His marking of me has been incredible. He is etched into every part of me and my life. He is the background to my every thought and act. He has marked me—body, mind, heart, blood. We shared so much, and he gave me so much of this world, so much joy. His life made me ever more open to the world and all its infinite possibilities, infinite, infinite riches. Beyond surface, beyond depth, beyond anything I can ever say he touched me. He loved me—as I did him—into being. So when I say that G— was—and is— mine, I don’t mean I possess him. I mean that he is etched into me. He has marked me, carved me—all of me. I carry him with me forever, forever beloved scars too much a part of me to ever lose.

I read something different at the funeral, aloud, to and for others; this was for us, with rose red:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                                    i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keep the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Or as you yourself put it, with characteristic passion and sparseness,

Words are all I have

And they are insufficient

Lacking you, and tears.