Race and Neutrality in Queer Theory

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

Neutrality in Queer Theory DISSERTATION

submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in Comparative Literature

by

Michael Simmons

Race and Neutrality in Queer Theory

This fourth chapter addresses two deficiencies of my analysis so far. First, by foregrounding queer of color critics’ investments in neutrality or impersonality, and by only briefly mentioning black feminist standpoint theory, I too quickly glossed over the way that race acts as a significant stumbling block for queer neutrality. Second, by failing two translate the well-taken Afropessimist critique of gender into a meaningful commentary on public bathroom design, I could easily leave the reader wondering how Afropessimism is nevertheless a viable challenge to antisocial queer theory’s standpoint-pessimism. To address these issues, I first further note resistances to queer theory’s impersonality on the basis of the context of racial difference, and I add my own arguments that certain queer theorists of impersonality are implicated in tokenistic treatment of racial difference. Secondly, I further explain the Afropessimist critique of queer impersonality, and I add my own Lacanian argument that queer anti-identitarianism—particularly in the trope of masochism—may be normative and potentially implicated in white normativity. In this dissertation I am trying to give the reader compelling reasons both for and (especially now) against the validity of the notion of queer neutrality. This is supposed to balance the analysis, and it would be fortunate if providing this balance helps the reader think beyond my compromise formations that stall in terms of translating Afropessimist theory to the design of gender-neutral public bathrooms.

It will help to first review most of what this dissertation has said so far about race: The introduction to this dissertation showed that two important proponents of queer of color critique, José Muñoz and Roderick Ferguson, exhibit both an investment in queer neutrality and the

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identity politics of intersectionality. Women of color feminism may refuse to posit identity as a goal, and yet it recognizes the importance of the intersectionality of gender and race in our analyses of identity; queer of color critique sometimes advocates a subjectless, utopian humanism, and yet it recognizes the importance of strategic essentialism. The identity politics of intersectionality is not easily dismissed by theorists of queer neutrality. (The first chapter notes that even the English gender comes not only through the French genre but also through the Latin genus, as in kind, type, class, set, group, or race, and Freud used the German term Geschlecht, meaning sex, family, or race.)

In the context of these problems with queer theory, Patricia Hill Collins’s black feminist standpoint theory gives us reasons to resist neutrality in coalitional politics. Collins argues that we should place black women’s “oppositional consciousness” at the center of coalitional politics. A problem arises here because, according to standpoint theory, the notion of a central oppositional consciousness—perhaps the Lumpenproletariat, queerness, or blackness—is a limit of standpoint-intersectionality that exceeds the determinate self-consciousness necessary for sustained political agency. Different theorists elect different ostensible identity differences as actual failures of identity in general to the place of this general limit with a trajectory beyond intersectional identity. To this limit where identity fails in general, at times Marxists have elected class differences, queer theorists have elected sexuality differences (along the lines of sexual exclusivity vs. flirtation and cruising), and psychoanalysts have elected sexual differences (a major topic of my third chapter).

The second chapter provides Che Gossett’s Afropessimist reasons for electing racial difference to this place: racial difference is prior to sexual difference insofar as

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“the Lacanian ‘sexed body’ is always already a racialized body and a colonized body,” and “Black and/or indigenous peoples have always figured as sexual and gender outlaws to be disciplined and punished” (Gossett 2016). Che Gossett notes that gender nonconforming and trans people—especially of color—disproportionately experience the violence of policing binary-gendered bathroom lines. Racial difference props up the whiteness required for the intelligibility of sexual difference. Gossett’s argument turns on the constitutive role of European imperialism and antiblack slavery in the production of sexual difference. Racial difference is about the failure of identity in general because blackness is excluded by European imperialism from legitimacy in any formation of identity—gender, sexuality, class, or ability. Whereas Slavoj Žižek has suggested that queer and trans deviance always-already applies to all human life (which seems to elide some pretty important differences between those constitutively queer humans who accede to their queerness and those constitutively queer humans who do not), Žižek does not acknowledge that the afterlife of globalized anti-black slavery excludes non-European bodies from the domain of human life.

How is race a stumbling block for antisocial queer theory’s standpoint-pessimism?

Queer of color critique has repeatedly argued that antisocial queer theory’s neutrality and impersonalism is part of a white homonormativity. In “Queer Theory and Native Studies” (2010), drawing on Denise da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) to explain the indispensability of racial analysis, Andrea Smith explains that those “who do queer of color critique in particular have argued that within the field of queer studies, this claim to be ‘postidentity’ often retrenches white, middle-class identity while disavowing it” (44). One of

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Sarah Beresford’s conclusions in “The Age of Consent and the Ending of Queer Theory” (2014) is, “It would appear therefore that Queer Theory has become a methodology for white gay men; given these limitations, should Queer Theory be abandoned completely?”

For an example of queer theory being outlined with overwhelmingly white queer theory, Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory (2017) [Apocalissi queer: Elementi di teoria antisociale (2013)] marginalizes theories of the mutual constitution of modern sexuality and race, which is queer theory in all but name. Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses is a major contribution to efforts to legitimize queer theory in Italy, yet queer of color critique has only a token reference. Bernini’s reason for privileging white queer theory is privileging queer theory’s name over its meaning:

Different genealogies of queer theories are possible that pass through the histories of slavery, racial violence and critical race studies (Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers), but in the academic sphere, the first one to be generally credited with putting the adjective “queer” next to the noun “theory” is Teresa de Lauretis (1991), who in February of 1990 held a conference at the University of Santa Cruz (California) entitled “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities.” (4)

Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers are no less “antisocial”—anti-assimilationist—than the roster of white queer theorists in Bernini’s text, but they receive no attention from Bernini beyond the above acknowledgment.

In Cruising Utopia (2009), José Muñoz argues that Leo Bersani’s seminal work on impersonalism does not help us account for the intersectional relations of queer politics because Bersani uses a white racial frame, “The race, gender, and sexuality troubles in such a theory—all

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people of color are straight, all gay men are white—are also evident in his [Bersani’s] famous essay [“Is the Rectum a Grave?” 1987]” (34-35). Bersani’s impersonalism, according to Muñoz,

moves to imagine an escape or denouncement of relationality as first and foremost a distancing of queerness from what some theorists seem to think of as the contamination of race, gender, or other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference. (11)

What it means for sexuality to be a singular trope of difference—according to antisocial queer theorists like Bersani—is that the force of sexuality is self-disrupting, and so sexuality is not an identity but an anti-identitarian force, whereas the force of raciality is ego-reinforcing like a white narcissism. According Muñoz, Leo Bersani’s impersonality amounts to “wishful thinking” (11). Of course, this thinking is wishful for white normativity. White narcissism does not reinforce but disrupts your ego if you are not white, and a number of white queer theorists seem to want desperately not to own up to these criticisms of antisocial queer theory.

The problem becomes more navigable when we unpack Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987). In this essay, Bersani effectively argues that homosexuality is queerer than thou, and his argument encounters some of the major contentions that come to dominate the dispute between antisocial queer theory and Afropessimism, which I will address later. Bersani argues that “the power of blacks as a group in the United States is much greater than that of homosexuals” (emphasis in original; 9). What notion of power agrees with this, and which notion of power does not? Despite Bersani’s explicit attention to group identity (“as a group”), Bersani’s account curiously gives preferential value to black people’s privilege to be individually tokenized, “some blacks are needed in positions of prominence or power, which is not at all true

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for gay people” (10). In an antisocial queer theory of the politics of representation, queerness has no necessary representation (no need to be in a position of representational power).

Bersani explains how gay men’s antinormative sexuality—by way of GRID (Gay Related Immunity Disease) or HIV/AIDS—has participated in the exclusion of gay men from the human community, “There is no longer a rationale for the oppression of blacks in America, while AIDS has made the oppression of gay men seem like a moral imperative” (10). The queerness of sex— sex’s disempowering, self-destructive, and antiassimilationist capacity—testifies to a potential “ontological obscenity,” “a breakdown of the human itself in sexual intensities” (Bersani 29). Bersani is privileging the theoretical value of sex over any identity, including race. However, as José Muñoz recognizes, black American down-low culture, as well as the fact of the disproportional infection of black Americans with HIV/AIDS, severely undermines Bersani’s opposition between gay Americans and black Americans insofar as AIDS is as much as an issue of race as sexuality.

I would also turn around Bersani’s argument about the rationales and moral imperatives of oppression. Denise da Silva argues in Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007),

Because a guiding question here is why, despite its moral ban, the racial still constitutes a prolific strategy of power, it is also necessary to chart the symbolic terrain the racial shares with the other tools the narratives of history and science have deployed to carve the place of the subject. (xxxi)

That is to say, if the actual oppression of black people outlives the rationale for the oppression of black people, whereas the oppression of gay men is merely contingent upon a rationale or moral imperative (that will go away when we eventually cure AIDS), then we can ask Bersani why the sexual as opposed to the racial should be a privileged site of depersonalization or impersonality.

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According to Bersani’s own argument, blackness—unlike queerness—is not contingently but necessarily and irrationally excluded from ontology. We are beginning to ask why blackness, for example, would not be a better signifier for the liminal beyond of identitarianism.

In a resigned response to Bersani, in recognition of queer of color critique, Jack Halberstam’s “Queer Betrayals” (2014) tantalizingly calls on Bersani to abandon his own pillar of queer theory for Bersani’s own reasons,

Betrayal in Bersani’s work, like failure in my work, like ‘aberration’ in [Roderick] Ferguson’s work, and like violence in Chandan Reddy’s, does much more than just offer a perverse reading of the human; instead, Bersani’s version of betrayal unmakes the queer project itself and demands that we let it collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. (79)

Bersani’s impersonalism tends to a contradictory or ambivalent position about its self-destruction because impersonalism has obsessive, melancholic, paranoid, or fetishistic attachments to identity positions that it also wants to let go. Bersani does not want to give up sex’s centrality in antisocial theory, but his own impersonalism suggests that he should.

As we might expect, queer of color critique follows Edelman in the same manner that queer of color critique follows Bersani. Edelman’s queer theory has strongly white overtones that resist its non-identitarian ambitions. In No Future (2006), Edelman martials antisocial theory against the figure of the Child as a “humanizing” norm. In a rebuff of Lee Edelman in Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014), Juana María Rodríguez warns, “Today, norms, taboos, conventions, or protections designed to assert a protected status to children and their families, including LGBT families, may appear to be color-blind, but they are never race-neutral” (36). Rodríguez responds to Edelman,

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But by ignoring race, Edelman fails to consider how children of color function as the co- constitutive symbolic nightmare of our nation’s future. Rather than signifying reproductive futurity, African American male children represent racialized fears of criminality, violence, and sexual danger. (35)

Lee Edelman has responded to his critics at both the level of queer of color critique and Afropessimism. At the level of queer of color critique, when Ralph Poole asks Lee Edelman if Edelman, “relied too much on white, elite archives,” Edelman responds, “those critiques are identitarian critiques” (Edelman and Poole 2018). With respect to queer of color critiques of the race-neutral child, Edelman argues in “Learning Nothing: Bad Education” (2017),

many critics have written about the presumed “whiteness” of the Child in Western culture. While the figure of meaning and cultural promise in a racist and antiblack order will disproportionately find representation in images of the dominant racial class, the Child itself does not have any intrinsic relation to whiteness and can, where useful, be embodied, even by that dominant order, in (the image of) children of color as well. Antiabortion activists, for example, have used representations of black and Hispanic children to demonize abortion as a form of genocide and thereby to mobilize antiliberal agendas in communities of color. [...] The Child, therefore, has no qualities in itself, but will assume those qualities as needed in the context of a dominant social order. (166- 167n1)

Edelman is saying that the Child’s “representation in images” might be white, but the Child in itself is race neutral, and so the Child itself can be a norm even when represented by non-white children.

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The example undermines the claim, though. Let me break it down. Antiabortion activists argue that because we disproportionately abort children of color, the abortion industry de facto promotes the genocide of children of color. Therefore, abortion is racist, and we should save children of color by outlawing abortion. Edelman seems to infer from this that even children of color are the future (at the same time that he considers whiteness to be “the dominant racial class”). I disagree. Rather, should not we infer that there is a different logic of relation between these figures: the Child itself, actual children, and the image of children? Edelman’s racial neutrality and queer impersonality depend upon a dual placement of the Child with respect to representation, hence his parenthetical treatment of “(the image of) children of color.” The evidence for the anti-abortion activists’ claim is that actual children of color are being disproportionately killed or prevented from living, which seriously undermines the inference that, because the Child itself can be represented with the image of children of color, actual children of color therefore “are the future” as much as white children. What I am establishing here is a parallel in the way race forms a stumbling block for queer neutrality: Bersani’s and Edelman’s impersonality runs into a representational tokenism.

How is Afropessimism a viable challenge to antisocial queer theory’s standpoint- pessimism?

Where do we go from here? We cannot stop with a queer of color critique of antisocial queer theory’s white homonormativity because queer of color critique does not fully abandon anti-identitarianism. We already found that José Muñoz endorses a deconstruction of the

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positivism at the heart of identity politics. In “Queer Theory and Native Studies” (2010), Andrea Smith further notes,

what seem to disappear within queer theory’s subjectless critique are settler colonialism and the ongoing genocide of Native peoples. The analysis that comes from queer theory (even queer of color critique), then, rests on the presumption of the U.S. settler colonial state. (45)

The position of “even queer of color critique” is still ambivalent about identity neutrality. I balk at the presumption that queer utopianism can rely on anti-identitarianism to turn humanism into a disruption of the ossification of the human. For example, in “No Second Chances” (2011), David Marriott criticizes Muñoz’s humanism for remaining caught up in a teleology that ossifies the notion of the human. I mean, a bunch of white supremacists also theorize a utopian human that is not here yet, a weird Übermensch, and this does not necessarily disrupt ossification of the human. This is what Smith is talking about in her Afropessimist charge against queer of color critique.

Antisocial queer theory and Afropessimism are inheriting standpoint-pessimism in the singularity of the interstices of standpoints. Antisocial queer theory says that queerness is queerer than thou, and Afropessimism says that blackness is always already depersonalized. Antisocial queer theorists and Afropessimists have told us repeatedly (and conflictingly), queerness or blackness (respectively) is singularly the absent center of power. I noted in the introduction to this dissertation that the literature on queer neutrality has the model of “being singular plural” to bring this opposition together, and I try to enact this in the following review of race and identity neutrality in queer theory.

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Again, the problem is an ambivalence about identity and the power of an extreme limit of depersonalized standpoints. In The Wretched of the Earth (1963) [Les damnés de la terre, 1961], Frantz Fanon establishes the problematic affinity between Lumpenproletariat and revolutionary power. The Lumpenproletariat is the disorganized underclass. On one side, Fanon says the disorder of the Lumpenproletariat gives colonizers “the legal excuse to maintain order. Even if the Lumpenproletariat rebels against the colonizers, it is supposedly insufficiently organized for (lasting) revolution—the Lumpenproletariat rebels against itself and anyone in proximity in the struggle for resources. The Lumpenproletariat has insufficiently unified class consciousness because the struggle is too real for it to have any sustained focus on revolution. For example, the Lumpenproletariat also consists of petty criminals who are police informants against other petty criminals (on the ideological weakness of the Lumpenproletariat see p.137).

On the other side, however, this disorder makes the Lumpenproletariat always already a form of rebellion (115). Fanon says,

It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people (129).

How pointed can this spearhead be, though, if the stand it takes is so indeterminately pointed? There are surely ways in which in which the Lumpenproletariat may be represented cohesively. For example, in the U.S., the Black Panthers also looked to the Lumpenproletariat for revolutionary potential, and there was a Black Panther organization called “The Lumpen,” a funk band that regularly performed protest songs. However, the pointedness of the spearhead—

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beyond its mere representation by the proletariat—is indeterminate in practice. In Wretched (1963), Fanon notes,

The constitution of the lumpenproletariat is a phenomenon which obeys its own logic, and neither the brimming activity of the missionaries nor the decrees of the central government can check its growth. This lumpenproletariat is like a horde of rats; they may kick them and throw stones at them, but despite your efforts they’ll go on gnawing at the roots of the tree. (129-130)

What I am saying here is that this theory of the Lumpenproletariat is antisocial theory, and despite the hope for the revolutionary potential here, this underclass might really lack the cohesion necessary for sustained revolutionary consciousness. This is partly how we can understand why antisocial queer theorists like Lee Edelman have theorized a queer pessimism that does not embrace politics, coalitional or otherwise. There is certainly ambivalence in Fanon’s account of the Lumpenproletariat as having both “spontaneity and weakness.”

We need to take Afropessimism seriously because queer of color critique, despite its criticisms of antisocial queer theory’s white universalism, participates in white universalism through its affinities with humanism. In Nobody’s Supposed to Know: Down Low (2014), C. Riley Snorton invokes Frantz Fanon’s account of Europeans’ objectification and possession of anything they write as black, “For Fanon, black people are neither afforded subjectivity nor, within the logics of colonial racism, a body” (89). In Black Skin, White Masks (2008) [Peau Noire, Masques Blanc, 1952], Fanon argues that the consolidation of whiteness’ neutrality or “the closing of the postural schema of the white man” requires the neutering of the black body:

At the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man [...] with the Negro the cycle of the biological

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begins. [...] the Negro is castrated. The penis, the symbol of manhood, is annihilated, which is to say that it is denied. [...] it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked. It is as a concrete personality that he is lynched. (124-125).

(This neutering/neutralization is not limited to black men: see Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 1997.) Speaking of Antilleans’ dreams prior to exposure to whiteness in the context of Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage, Fanon says in Black Skin, White Masks (2008) [Peau Noire, Masques Blanc, 1952],

I contend that for the Antillean the mirror hallucination is always neutral. When Antilleans tell me that they have experienced it, I always ask the same question: “What color were you?” Invariably they reply: “I had no color.” [...] There is no reason now to be surprised that Mayotte Capécia [a black woman in love with a white man] dreamed of herself as pink and white: I should say that that was quite normal. (125n)

After contamination with the white mythology of blackness, the neutral, color-blind self-image Antillean becomes the neutered, invisible self-image, “The father [a black teacher] was given to walking up and down his balcony every evening at sunset; after a certain time of night, it was always said, he became invisible” (126n). One of Fanon’s key contributions to Afropessimism is the realization that “every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society [...] Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man” (82). However, adding to the confusion, Fanon also equivocates his position on humanism, opening Black Skin, White Masks with, “Toward a new humanism... Understanding among men... Our colored brothers... Mankind, I believe in you...” and then, “I will say that the black is not a man” (ellipses in original; 1).

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In the shimmering textile (for lack of a better term) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), Fred Moten coalesces an Afro-optimism out of Afropessimist accounts of ontology, standpoint-pessimism, anti-identitarian critique, and utopian queer theory. Invoking Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “queer performative,” Moten invites us to think beyond the “onto-theology of national humanism” such that,

What one begins to consider, as a function of the nonlocalizable nature or status of discontinuity, is a special universalization of discontinuity, where discontinuity could be figured as ubiquitous minority, omnipresent queerness. (69)

This becomes explicitly informative of standpoint-pessimism and its relation to Afropessimism when Moten argues in “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)” (2013),

What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the desire for a standpoint? What emerges in the desire that constitutes a certain proximity to that thought is not (just) that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to ontology; or, in a slight variation of what [Nahum] Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space. (738- 739)

The dialectic of identity standpoint, intersectional identity, and singular non-identity moves through a negation of identity continuity and then a negation of the intersection of identity discontinuity, providing only a singular non-identity (as opposed to multiple non-identities, which have been negated by antisocial queer theorists and Afropessimists differently). These

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collective anti-identitarian racial critiques form the background against which antisocial queer theorists like Lee Edelman addresses Afropessimist challenges to queer theory.

In “Lee Edelman in conversation with Ralph Poole: ‘Queerness,’ Afro-Pessimism, and the Aesthetic” (2018), Edelman contrasts identity with “queer nothing,” and he establishes his affinity with Bersani’s “ontological obscenity,” saying, “I don’t think that queerness is an ontological position” (i.e. queerness is excluded from ontology) and “queer is not something that someone can claim to be.” Explaining to Poole why he finds Afropessimism attractive rather than a threat to his own position, Edelman analogizes between the two positions with respect to anti-identitarianism,

The blackness of Afro-pessimism is not the articulation of yet another identity position that could be incorporated into a multicultural society. So, the reason it appears here is precisely because my prior work—work that I think has, in its own way—had perhaps some influence on the development of Afro-pessimism. The possibility of thinking about the correlation between the ways I’m looking at queerness and the ways that Afro- pessimists are understanding the relation between blackness and the subject position of black beings in the world. That seemed to me correlations that were productive.

In “Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity” (2015), James Bliss also makes an argument about the influence between antisocial queer theory and Afropessimism (three years prior to Edelman’s argument) but in the opposite direction of Edelman’s argument. Bliss tries “to find in the interventions called queer negativity—the critique of reproductive futurity, of the family, of the politics of hope—their prefigurations and alter-articulations within Black feminist theory” (83). Hortense Spillers is one example. Spiller’s highly influential work in this area, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An

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American Grammar Book,” was published in the same year—1987—as Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Spillers makes an argument about the politics of representation of blackness, saying,

First of all, their [African and indigenous people’s] New World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. [...] demarcates a sexuality that is neuter-bound, inasmuch as it represents an open vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as male/female. (67, 77)

Edelman ignores the ways in which Frantz Fanon and Hortense Spillers develop a queer theory—an anti-identitarian, antiassimilationist account of the power of sex and gender neutrality—based in an evaluation of race’s constitutive role in the production of sex.

When Edelman draws correlations between queer theory and Afro-pessimism, these correlations are analogies, “queerness and blackness, I’m arguing, are in the position of what Lacan calls the Thing, which is not articulable as such within the course of being” (Edelman and Poole). The analogies do not stop: “‘Woman’ is also a term that can figure into this, ‘Trans’ is a term that can also figure into this, so there is no master term that occupies the exclusive name for the excluded remainder of either aesthetics or civil society” (Edelman and Poole). This negotiation with Afro-pessimism falls short because Afro-pessimism holds there to be a “master term” for the abject of humanity, the term that the slave master’s terms make non-analogizable with any other form of oppression. In Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010), Frank B. Wilderson III calls the kind of thinking exhibited by Edelman,

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“the ruse of analogy.” Wilderson says that the ontology of sexual difference we see in many Lacanian feminist and queer theories is a thoroughly white construct, “There is no such narrative as political genealogy and there is no such entity as a ‘gender ontology’ unless the subject under discussion is not Black” (311).

In “Onticide: Afro-pessimism, Queer Theory, and Ethics” (2015), Calvin Warren extends Wilderson’s argument more directly to any queer theory that would see itself as an ally to Afro- pessimism,

Whenever we equate an ontological position [or para-ontological position] with an identity formation, we perform the very violence that sustains the antagonism. Put another way, ontological violence sustains itself through strategies of displacement, equivalence, and neutralization. In relating blackness to queerness, we can only speak in distorting similes—the rhetorical practice of likening one thing to another. (19)

In a revised version of “Onticide” for the journal GLQ (2017), Calvin Warren challenges intersectional analysis for its presumption of the commensurability of sexual difference with the “grammatical paucity [...] of antiblack suffering” (408), claiming that

scholars have attempted to reconcile blackness with sexual difference and sexual identity through logics of equivalence. This scholarship operates under what I call “the intersectional approach.” Although this approach provides intellectual space for contemplating and representing sexual difference and sexual identity, it often does so precisely by way of a structural adjustment. Thus it enacts a performative contradiction (between blackness and humanism) that it either ignores or neglects. (401)

Warren’s argument against queer theory’s impersonalism is that sex is a function of property relations that haunt the boundaries of the human.

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A person understood as “queer” could purchase a black-object from the auction block like his/her hetero-normative counterpart. In those rare instances where the black-as- object was able to participate in this economy and purchase a black-object as well, the black purchaser could, at any moment, become another commodity—if found without freedom papers or validation from a white guardian—the system of fungible blackness made any black interchangeable and substitutional. This movement between object and subject is not a problem for queerness, but is an unresolvable problem for blackness. (2015: 19-20)

For Warren, the fungibility of blackness separates it from queerness even in antisocial queer theory’s attempt to appropriate Afro-pessimism,

This, then, is the ultimate scandal or ontological violation of the New World: black flesh is reduced to devastating sameness, and becomes interchangeable, or fungible, within an economy of exchange. The violence of captivity expelled the African from Difference, or the Symbolic—the order of differentiating subjects—and relegated it to the vacuous space of undifferentiation. (2015: 9)

Because fungibility distinguishes sex and race in standpoint-pessimist theories, race remains a stumbling block for the reception of neutrality in queer theory. I might say fungibility is something tragic for blackness and comic for queerness. There is a difference between cruising for people and people cruising all over you, although they might potentially both be nomadic affirmations of an identity-disrupting Other (where one is an elective affirmation, the other coerced affirmations).

Despite the chain of fungible Things, there is a punchline to Edelman’s defense of queer superiority over Afro-pessimism in antisocial queer theory,

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For me, the use-value of queerness lies particularly in the fact that for the most part it is less strictly attached to an identitarian position or to a specific type of body or specific type of act than Woman or Blackness. (Edelman and Poole)

One way we might understand this claim is by recognizing that Afropessimism, unlike antisocial queer theory, also participates in queer of color critique’s ambivalence about humanism. In “Onticide” (2017), Calvin Warren’s continues to wrestle with an ambivalence about humanism despite his criticism of queer of color critique,

Because we lack a grammar outside humanism that would allow us to articulate “particularity,” “difference,” and “surplus violence” without getting trapped in a double bind, I propose a procedure of writing with and against humanism to address this problem. I call this procedure “onticide.” It uses the technique of erasure (sous rature) in relation to features of human difference that exclude blackness but are necessary to articulate the fracturing of fungible commodities. This approach departs from intersectional analyses that attempt to either reconcile blackness with humanity and its difference or conceive of blackness as ontologically equivalent with features of human difference. I suggest that the intersectional approach is inadequate to the task of articulating the particularity of violence Steen experienced, and that an onticidal approach (writing with and against humanist terms of difference) enables us to contend with the humanist double bind more productively. (394)

Nevertheless, we can still ask Edelman to pay attention to reception: Queerness as opposed to blackness is less strictly attached to an identitarian position by who? As I noted in the introduction to this dissertation, the passive voice in queer theory can mask the politics of representation in the reception of contentious issues. In “Variations on the Standard Treatment”

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[1955] (2006), Lacan argues that the phenomenon of transference should make us pay attention not only the way that the contextual relativity of interpretation determines what is said but also— due to the potential projection of the big Other—who said it. I think Edelman is projecting a white Other through which he understands Afropessimism. This chapter might then be concluded by thinking about the function of negation in queer theories of identity.

In an essay critiquing Lee Edelman, Tim Dean, Leo Bersani, and Adam Phillips, “No Second Chances” (2011), David Marriott reevaluates the status of antisocial queer theory’s anti- identitarianism against the background of recent minoritarian visions of futurity, including Muñoz’s criticism of antisocial queer theory’s normative white reproductive futurity. Unlike Muñoz, however, who is invested in impersonality and—Marriott insists—teleology, and strangely similar to antisocial queer theorists, Marriott approaches queer anti-identitarianism with careful attention to psychoanalytic accounts of the ego.

Marriott begins to untie antisocial queer theory by claiming that, on one side, it disavows the proximity of narcissism and identity, which it does through exclusively foregrounding all that is antinormative in intimacy. On the other side, it ignores the psychoanalytic understanding of the ego or identity as already in flux, destabilized. (Edelman actually does acknowledge this at the beginning of No Future, however, and yet Edelman still rails against identity.) The result is antisocial queer theory’s reliance upon a dialectic of identity that is more Hegelian than Freudian. Marriott suggests that antisocial queer theorists like to reveal the strangeness of intimacy more so than they like to accept the strangeness of intimacy, and this is what I would characterize as antisocial queer theory’s exhibitionism. These queer theorists like to point at instances of the ego’s supposed subversion (like masochism), but as Jack Halberstam points out in “Queer Betrayals” (2014), antisocial queer theory has performed very badly at abandoning its

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identity (especially racially, as I have also shown in this chapter), and we may need to allow antisocial queer theory to die in order to fulfill its implicit request that we betray it. In a real dig at Bersani et al., Marriott argues that antisocial queer theorists “want to shatter the category of identity without being threatened by the act of actual shattering” (110). Marriott’s argument pivots on an appreciation of Freud’s account of negation, wherein judgement splits the ego from itself in the process of defense. The antisocial queer polemic against the ego, then, may very well be an ego-negation that indirectly functions to reinforce the ego, and this seems to be the case with racial identity in antisocial theories of queer neutrality. Although Marriott’s essay ends with hardly a mention of the relationship of race to this critique (partly because his essay addressed this earlier through Muñoz), the ending of Marriott’s essay makes one clear reference to race when accusing antisocial queer theorists of unintentionally reinforcing “the so-called old relational modes,” which are identitarian and normatively white (113).

What can we learn from this and where might we go from here? In the chapter, “How to Fix Bathroom Signs,” I explored Lacan’s account of fixation and identity in the clinic in terms of the reproduction of racial identity, and I can round that gesture off with a further reflection on the relationship between the mechanisms of negation and the dialectics of racial identity. Although antisocial queer theory might seem to be at its strangest when desperately trying to explain how narcissism—that organization of self/same-love or homo-sexuality—is vital to anti-identitarian theory, I think that a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework suggests that what is most strange about antisocial queer theory is its superficial understanding of negation, which is precisely what Marriott is trying to point out with his reference to Freud’s account of the dialectics of the ego. Lacan is more helpful than Freud here, I think, because Lacan departs from the traditional reception of Freud’s account of fetishism.

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Let us go all the way back to Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987). In that text, Bersani inspires decades of queer theorists’ love of pornographic sadism and especially masochism as anti-normative, anti-identitarian forces. What Lacan helps us understand, in addition, is that masochism and sadism are normative. The key to understanding this is, as Marriott pointed out, the dialectics of negation and identity, which Marriott helpfully identifies in antisocial queer theorists’ rejection of identity categories rather than identity itself. I characterized this as an exhibitionism, which is a fetishism that illustrates the problematic normativity of masochism.

Basically, the organization of fetishism, for Lacan, is a condition of desire for a love or object that is unavailable and, therefore, unusable in the reflective formation of the ego, resulting in the subject’s demand for a real encounter with another (an other reduced to this desired object) to make up for this defect in the formation of the ego. In Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (1997), Bruce Fink provides a nicely condensed review of Lacan’s position on masochism in Lacan’s Seminar X (1963). Fink explains,

One of the paradoxical claims Lacan makes about perversion is that while it may sometimes present itself as a no-holds barred, jouissance-seeking activity, its less apparent aim is to bring the law into being: to make the Other as law (or law-giving Other) exist. The masochist’s goal, for example, is to bring the partner or witness to the point of enunciating a law and perhaps pronouncing a sentence (often by generating anxiety in the partner). (180)

This is the conformity of perversion. As an even more basic example, we say that neglected children act out to receive punishment because this punishment amounts to attention, which makes up for neglect. The punishing “No” or negation that the child receives is a boundary that

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the child uses to form its identity, much like the exhibitionist flashes their genitals to receive disapproving attention. In the case of masochism, punishment fosters love. It is not “anti-loving” like Bersani says. Freud’s dictum that there is no negation in the unconscious (“On Negation” 1925) has an analog in the neglected child’s realization that all publicity, even bad publicity, is good publicity.

So, when queer theorists perform their masochistic exhibitionism (displaying the subversion of identity) it is possible—within an Afropessimist and Lacanian-informed position— that what queer theorists are really asking for is a surprise reaction or even a spanking from queer of color critique and Afropessimism, which constantly reaffirm the identity of antisocial queer theory for it, namely reaffirming that antisocial queer theory is white queer theory. Lacan clarifies the structures of interaction here when he notes that a sadist is not satisfied by a victim who stoically refuses to reveal their pain—a victim who refuses to say, “No.” A masochist, similarly, only gets satisfaction at the moment when their partner says, “I cannot hurt you anymore, we have gone too far, this is enough.” Have not queer theorists in fact gone too far in their anti-identitarianism multiple times? A sadist and a masochist are not the perfect couple that we imagine them to be (one likes giving pain, the other likes receiving it) but are a match made in hell, wherein each one is endlessly frustrated in their wait for the other to give in, to say “No” and establish the boundaries of identity. It is possible that antisocial queer theory owes its identity to the boundaries that queer of color critics establish when they say that they are not antisocial queer theorists but utopian queer theorists, i.e. not white queer theorists. If race is evidently a thorough stumbling block for theories of queer neutrality, is it not possible that race is also a formative boundary for theories of queer neutrality?

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My concluding resignation here is that, even though I find the Afropessimist critique of queer neutrality entirely compelling, I still cannot figure out how to translate Afropessimism into a critique of queer neutrality in the specific case of gender-neutral public bathrooms, and this is part of why my first three chapters take queer neutrality so seriously despite its many problems.