Filed under: supervalent_thought
Hi! There’s a new page here, to the left of this post, called “Untitled, Untilted.” It’s a paper about José and the Queer Sexual Avant-Garde, delivered at the NYU tribute to Cruising Utopia last September. I miss JEM. It felt good to keep thinking with him. I hope you find something to think with in the paper.
Also, it’s been so long since I posted, and WordPress has changed so much, I feel actually deskilled for my blog. I mean to post some other things soon, just to stay blog-literate.
Filed under: affect, Belonging, comedy, depression, economy, feminism, non-sovereignty, queerness, sexuality, supervalent_thought, trauma
“Pop!” from jakelikesonions.com
Al Franken has said he’ll resign. If so, he will be gone from the Senate not because he was a vicious predator but because there was a bad chemical reaction between his sexual immaturity, his just “having fun” with women’s bodies, and this moment of improvisatory boundary-drawing that likens the jokester to the predator. What’s going on?
Lots of people are worrying about this. Some are using the language of the “witch hunt,” which is a term people use when they feel women coming after men as though the worst guy is the typical one. Some queers are reviving the language of the “moral panic,” in fear that this moment justifies and amplifies erotophobia, an already pervasive hatred of sex that ends up harming women, LGBTQ-identified people—anyone whose sexuality or body or appetites have been historically disparaged by the state, the hygienic bourgeoisie and the religious.
Everyone has appetites: yet many people think their own aversion to sex or ways of managing desire are evidence of moral virtue. Nowhere is this more evident than in how they process the casual pleasures. Continue reading
Filed under: supervalent_thought
Around Thanksgiving Tavia Nyong’o asked me to write about the Big Man for the Social Text blog and so I sat there wordlessly for awhile then wrote this about his Big Sovereign Electorate (BSE), then edited it, then felt its belatedness, then decided to follow my own principle, which is that you have to show up with whatever you have to fight the unacceptable situation. This is what I had. http://socialtextjournal.org/big-man/.
Today I woke up writing protest slogans in my head, though, as though my genre flailing is on autopilot at this point. La Lucha Continua, people!
Also, for those unfamiliar with this site, on the left hand side of this page, under “Pages,” are conference papers for which people have asked –entire panels, including other people’s papers.
Filed under: affect, Belonging, economy, emotion, Ordinariness, Politics, sovereignty, supervalent_thought, teaching | Tags: Democrats, political_emotion, political_rhetoric, sentimentality, Trump
I wrote this column in case anyone’s going to be teaching the election this fall.
***
Trump, or Political Emotions
Dear America, if I read one more article about the Danger of Political Emotions in an election season, I might take my own life. If I do that and fail, will the state bring me up on charges the way it’s considering to do for Chelsea Manning, whose recent suicide attempt might be prosecuted?[1] If Obama has an ounce of decency in him he’ll make that possibility quietly go away.
If x had an ounce of decency, x would deliver justice. Such bad math, so emotional. But politics is always emotional. It is a scene where structural antagonisms—genuinely conflicting interests sustaining regimes of power and value—are described in rhetoric that intensifies the fantasy of vulnerable and possible worlds.
Here is the thesis of this piece, which is about the contemporary United States. People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social relations. It is hard for some to see that the “generous cushion for aggression” might conflict with the “general plane of okayness.”
When I listen to Donald Trump, I think he’s not wrong about some things, especially the awful neoliberal-Clintonian trade deals and bank deregulation that sold out the working class in the US because of a muddled idea that any wealth at all is a general social benefit. But Donald Trump is our current best exhibit of two other pretty solid truths about politics, thinking, and feeling.
One is: A Good Account of a Problem Predicts Absolutely Nothing About the Value of a Solution.
I am a professor. I have read three decades of essays that set up problems beautifully and then fall apart in the what is to be done section. Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism’s unfairness. Then what? Then Trump’s response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad. Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet—and this is key—the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what’s clear about it. The ways he’s right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he’s blabbing. Plus, apart from rebooting capitalism, nobody in mainstream politics is that visionary about what to do, because everyone has to be patriotic toward capitalism, since that’s come to stand for freedom.
Two: the second thing about Trump is that Trump is free.
You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. See the brilliant interviews on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, where RNC conventioneers say, over and over: We’re for Trump because he’s not politically correct, PC has harmed America, and you think, people feel so unfree.[2]
Let’s sit with that.
