On Nuance

Is it possible to restore critical thinking and dialogue to the stuck, melodramatic and sometimes just stupid conversations that now dominate sexual politics?

(Note: I throw these posts out into the substack void as half-baked thoughts I might consider polishing and publishing elsewhere later. I therefore welcome comments, pushback, elaborations, suggestions, and grammatical corrections! I sometimes get emails min response—which I love. But I would be delighted if there were comments responding to other comments etc. I realize most of my readers are not the commenting kind. But consider? This post in particular may make some of you mad? If so I hope you will say so…)

In 2017 I read a paper titled “Fuck Nuance” and I loved it. It wasn’t really the polemic that the title promised, but a fairly solid critique of the common call for more nuance and complication in U.S sociology. The paper resonated with me, though I am not a sociologist, because so many of those calling for nuance in my own fields of American and gender/sexuality studies are complacent liberals or milquetoast academics just looking to make an easy, thoughtless critique or to avoid taking a stand. Personally, I love me a strong polemic!

But I’ve reconsidered the political uses of nuance since 2017, as starkly melodramatic and reductive polemics have seized the field of sexual politics—as indeed they have so often in our long history of sex scandals and panics. We are now deeply mired in very stuck “debates” over queer and trans lives, and sexual harassment and abuse. The public discourses circulating around these issues have ramped up the noise while dumbing us all down in repetitive talking points.

This is happening across the board with political issues of race and indigeneity, citizenship and immigration, guns, climate and environment, Zionism and anti-Zionism, debt, taxes, elections and more. These are overlapping discursive focus points, where the most reductionist views often drown out careful research and thoughtful consideration. Debates over sexual politics join the melee with a specific kind of heat and noise at the nexus of the psyche and the cultural, the intimate and the social.

Two examples:

Trans Panic

The wave of transphobic legislation restricting the lives and resources available to trans people at school, in bathrooms, at the doctor’s office, in sports, or just existing in public have hit with astonishing force recently. Leaving aside for now all the political, economic, social and cultural factors generating this tsunami of hate and cruelty, it is striking that the public debate generally falls into two broad camps. The right wing and centrist proponents of restriction fear that transness is a recent contagion among the young, and seek to put a halt to cultural transmission of gender crossing and fluidity before the foundations of The Family are eroded. The focus on children is strategic not substantive—the desire to stabilize a hierarchical gender binary for all motivates the ideologues, though political opportunism also plays a conspicuous role. On the other side, pro-trans forces often invoke a “born that way” framework that depends on a fixed core gender identity. It isn’t hard to see why this is the favored move—it is a counter to notions of contagion and recourse to conversion. “You can’t convert us or erase us, we are born this way!” But this framing also puts a stop to deeper curiosity about how gender and sexuality are felt and understood.

For decades this impasse between notions of choice/conversion vs. fixed identity has defined the public discourse over queerness of all kinds. The gap between this framing and arguments of LGBT studies, queer theory and radical politics has been huge. Many radical activists and academics argue that gender and sexuality are socially and culturally constructed, variable across time and space and well as within individual lifetimes. The categories LGBT are viewed as located and contingent. But this view is almost incomprehensible in public debates, and often seems to side with the homophobes and transphobes by making choice, change and thus conversion seem possible, if not desirable.

During seasons of meanness, intervention in the dominant public framing can feel dangerous, as the threat of appropriation by the right wing looms. But intevention on the side of……yes, nuance and complication…..is not only important but necessary. On this issue, I would like to point to two amazingly productive interventions for all of us who care about trans lives to consider: Jules Gill-Peterson’s recent interview on The Dig podcast, and Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou’s new book, Gender Without Identity.

Gill-Peterson is a historian and author of Histories of the Transgender Child. On the podcast she does two seemingly contradictory things at once. She shows, through carefully articulated historical specifics, that transgender children are not a new contagion as depicted by transphobic forces. Yet at the same time she argues that gender variability does not take one form in time and space, over time and across race, class and nation. The interview is a tour de force that leads us out of the “born that way” dead end of empirically unsupportable assumptions of universal categorical fixity, while also rebutting any notion of recent “contagion.” This interview expands on the public intervention of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast, based on her sharp and often hilarious primer, Gender(s). Both Gill-Peterson and Stockton refuse not only to fix gender and sexuality, but they also draw on queer of color critique and postcolonial theories to show the deeply intertwined and mutually constituting nature of all social formations.

Pellegrini and Saketopoulou’s Gender without Identity is a gutsy intervention at the intersection of psychoanalysis and history. As I argued in my first CPQ post, most of the work in queer history and anthropology makes the case for variability as if there were no psyche. And much of the work in queer psychology and psychoanalysis proceeds without reference to historical or geographical context. There are some important exceptions! The work of Lara and Stephen Sheehi in their riveting book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, demonstrates an inherent relation of psyche and history via their engagement with the work of Franz Fanon, among others.

The work of academics in other fields, including Amber Musser (author of Sensual Excess: Race, Power and Masochism), also invoke psychoanalysis within a deeply social, cultural and historical frame. Pellegrini and Saketopoulou contribute a short, pointed and powerful argument (one that has encountered significant efforts to censor them from within psychoanalysis). They argue that gender and sexuality are not only not fixed, but that trauma can play a key creative (not only destructive or pathological) role in the formation of both normative and non-normative identities. This intervention draws on affect studies and queer theory, honing the argument for this political moment. (1)

MeToo

A recent article in the New Yorker by Lucinda Rosenfeld, My Adventures in Deconstruction, almost perfectly illustrates both (a) the importance and necessity of exposures of ubiquitous sexual abuse and harassment, as well as just garden variety sexist mistreatment, along with (b) the distorting and manipulative role of melodramatic narratives of evil and innocence that too often define and deform MeToo story telling.

Rosenfeld is a novelist with an excellent grasp of the melodramatic plot. She outlines her ugly treatment in the early 90s by an older male professor while an undergraduate at Cornell. It is a very familiar tale—too familiar. It features a vulnerable, exploitable young adult woman who can be taken advantage of by an older man with authority, as she seeks love and care through sex. She is ultimately betrayed and hurt by a predatory man who only wants sex, and thus is deceptive about his intentions. In this case the bad man takes her to his wife’s house to have sex. She agrees, but the violation of the wife is not her fault—she is led by the man! And she is grievously misled by her interpretation of what she calls “sex positive feminism” and “deconstruction”—which seem in this context to be magazine versions of girl bossism and so-called “postmodernism,” and not the actually nuanced and complicated writing of the 80s and 90s. (2) Her highly gendered version of the story reflects the full tragedy of normative heterosexuality within a hierarchical binary gender system—she even argues at one point that women are biologically the more vulnerable sex. (3)

BUT….. It is nonetheless apparent, if the facts Rosenfeld recounts are reliable, that professor X is a total jerk, passive aggressive asshole, and supposedly pro-feminist poseur. Any professor should know better than to have a sexual relationship with his undergraduate research assistant who offers him unreciprocated “love.” That is just dumb as well as exploitative. No way this can turn out well for the student. His obliviousness to 19 year-old Rosenfeld’s desires (expressed with the unreciprocated “I love you”) combine with his repeated violations of his wife’s boundaries. He even offers his undergraduate lover his unknowing wife’s old clothes. Talk about fucking two women at once! Not in a good way…. This is everyday patriarchy with its unequal distribution of pleasures and harms.

Since the emergence of MeToo in 2017, it has been nearly impossible to say two things at once: (a) Many of the narratives are contrived and manipulative melodramas driving outrage that is sometimes out of all proportion. Some prison abolitionists I know, admire, and agree with advocate bringing people who have harmed others, even violently, back into social relations. But then some of them also turn around to call for permanently shunning and terminating the employment of sexual harassers. The fixity of the gendered melodrama of innocence violated also proceeds uneasily against the long history of racial lynching—we should in fact not believe all women, or all supposed survivors, yes? (b) But on the other hand…..the sexual violation of others further down the social hierarchy (men of women, teachers of students, parents of children, guards of prisoners, bosses of workers) is a feature not a bug in the operations of patriarchal racial capitalism. Exposing everyday mistreatment in all arenas of life, not just the most violent attacks, is a crucial move in the dismantling of hierarchies across the board. It is very difficult to say both of these things in a public forum.

So I am coming out for nuance and complication! Because Fuck Fixity and Melodrama.

NOTES

(1) For more on the reimagining of trauma see Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2003), and Avgi Saketopoulou’s other new book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023).

(2) See for instance Carole Vance, editor, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Pandora Press, 1992). This is a canonical text in so-called sex positive feminism. It outlines, as the title says, both the pleasures and the dangers of female sexuality in the context of a male-dominated society. It bears no resemblance to the neoliberal magazine hyping of female sexual empowerment that this author seems to be referring to? For an excellent historical account of the work of melodrama in the history of sexual politics see the complex work of another “sex positive” feminist, Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (U of Chicago Press, 1992).

(3) Sexual harassment and abuse are not always gendered in the normative way, and not always recounted melodramatically. There are many cases involving women and queer harassers or male targets, and there are published accounts that are not distorted by melodramatic characterizations. But much of the public MeToo discourse is just standard gendered melodrama. It is also true, according to my own informal research, that queer and trans people are more likely to be the target of demonstrably false charges of sexual harassment, lodged by homo or transphobes or by confused young people—see Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story. In one case I know of (it’s hard to unearth these cases due to confidentiality requirements of Title IX, which protect institutions above all else), a queer professor was charged with sexual harassment for the content of his queer studies course. This was of course in Florida.