Entanglements and Weavings: Diffractive Approaches to Gender and Love 2020918921, 9789004441453, 9789004441460

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Entanglements and Weavings

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger

volume 358

Social Philosophy Editor Andrew Fitz-Gibbon (State University of New York, Cortland)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs

Entanglements and Weavings Diffractive Approaches to Gender and Love Edited by

Deirdre C. Byrne Marianne Schleicher

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Side by Side. Sara Davidmann, 2013. From the Ken. To be destroyed project. Pigment print. 25 × 30 cm. © Sara Davidmann. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020918921

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 ISBN 978-90-04-44145-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44146-0 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Deirdre C. Byrne and Marianne Schleicher. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Notes on Contributors  ix

Introduction  1 Deirdre C. Byrne and Marianne Schleicher

Part 1 Reflections on Theory 1

Effects of Materiality in Israelite-Jewish Conceptions of Gender and Love: On a Necessary Synthesis of Constructionist and New Materialist Approaches  11 Marianne Schleicher

2

For Love of the World: Material Entanglements in Ecosexual Performance  34 Louis van den Hengel

3

“Yet the old woman will not sleep”: Reading Motherhood in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Writings  54 Deirdre C. Byrne

Part 2 Materiality in Creative Texts 4

Butch: A Cartography of Desire  79 Kelly Gardiner

5

Materiality and Agential Women in Animal Bridegroom Fairy Tales from Europe and Bengal  103 Amrita Chakraborty

6

Becoming-Woman in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve  122 Wernmei Yong Ade

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Part 3 Fluid Identities in Heterotopic Spaces 7

Ferzan Özpetek’s Cinema: A Post-constructionist Approach to Gender and Love  141 Dikmen Yakalı-Çamoğlu

8

Love and Monsters: Gender, Autonomy and Desire in Modern Golem Literature  159 Alana M. Vincent

9

Drinking, Dancing and Hooking Up: Young Adults in Sexual Pursuit in the Mainstream Nightlife in Denmark  175 Mie Birk Jensen

Part 4 Social Relata 10

Love in Different Climates: Love, Care and Practices of Intimacy among Women in Hong Kong and Britain  205 Stevi Jackson and Petula Sik Ying Ho

11

New Arrangements of Embodiment, Materiality, Love and Gender in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party  220 Mustafa Kemal Topal

12

Bound and Entangled: Masculinities, Embodiment and the Materialisation of Gender in the Sexual Field of the BDSM Club  243 Serena Petrella

Part 5 Afterword 13

Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights  267 Sara Davidmann

Index  277

Illustrations 2.1 Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s performance wedding party for the Venice Biennale. Gigi Gatewood (photographer), August 28, 2009  48 By courtesy of Gigi Gatewood 4.1 Robert Gardiner (photographer): Family photograph, 1964  80 By courtesy of Robert Gardiner 4.2 Robert Gardiner (photographer): Family photograph, 1964  80 By courtesy of Robert Gardiner 4.3 Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919) First woman army medical officer (Civil War); suffragette and dress reformer, 1912  85 Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C., USA Rights: No known restrictions on publication 4.4 James Henry Lynch (lithographer) after Mary Parker (later Lady Leighton), 1828: The Rt. Honble. Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby, ‘The Ladies of ­Llangollen’, circa 1833–1845  91 Repository: Wellcome Collection, UK Rights: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) 4.5 Brown, Barnes & Bell (photographers): Vesta Tilley. Published by The Philco Publishing Co, early 1900s  96 Matte bromide postcard print 5 1/2 in. × 3 3/8 in. (139 mm × 85 mm) overall Repository: Photographs Collection, National Portrait Gallery, UK Rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 4.6 Howard Coster (photographer): Radclyffe Hall, 1932  97 Half-plate film negative 7 1/2 in. × 9 1/2 in. (191 mm × 240 mm) Repository: Photographs Collection, National Portrait Gallery, UK Rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 13.1 T and Lucille. Sara Davidmann, 2008  270 C-type print © Sara Davidmann 13.2 Adrien. Sara Davidmann, 2008  271 C-type print © Sara Davidmann 13.3 Nat and Francis. Sara Davidmann, 2008  272 C-type print © Sara Davidmann

viii 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7

Illustrations Jason and Tracey. Sara Davidmann, 2008  273 C-type print © Sara Davidmann Kitty. Sara Davidmann, 2008  274 C-type print © Sara Davidmann Tracey and Ali. Sara Davidmann, 2008  275 C-type print © Sara Davidmann Gerry and Gary. Sara Davidmann, 2008  276 C-type print © Sara Davidmann

Notes on Contributors Wernmei Yong Ade is Assistant Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she lectures in feminist studies, critical theory, and love. She recently guest edited a Special Issue on Love for the Southeast Asian Review of English (SARE). She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Becoming Lovers: The Uses of Love in Contemporary Women’s Writing. She is cofounder and steering committee member of the International Society for the Study of Gender and Love, in which capacity she co-edited Fluid Gender, Fluid Love (Brill 2018) with Deirdre C. Byrne. Deirdre C. Byrne is Professor of English Studies at the University of South Africa. She has served for more than a decade as the editor of the academic journal Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa. She is co-investigator of ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), and co-founder and steering committee member of the International Society for the Study of Gender and Love, in which capacity she co-edited Fluid Gender, Fluid Love (Brill 2018) with Wernmei Yong Ade. She is currently involved in research on Ursula K. Le Guin’s poetry, as well as South African women’s poetry. Amrita Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of English at Jamalpur Mahavidyalaya, University of Burdwan, India and is in the final stages of submitting her PhD thesis. She has been researching the gendered history of the development of the literary fairy tale and folktale tradition in nineteenth century colonial Bengal, and has presented in conferences both at home and abroad and published articles on the subject. Her research interests include gender studies, popular literature and culture, and South Asian folk-cults. Sara Davidmann is an award-winning artist/photographer. From 1999-2013 Sara took photographs and made oral history recordings in collaboration with UK transgender and queer people in the communities to which she belonged. Her recent project, Ken. To be destroyed (Schilt 2016) was edited by Val Williams and exhibited internationally. Sara has received numerous awards for her work, including a

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Philip Leverhulme Prize, Fulbright Hays Scholarship, AHRC awards, Association of Commonwealth Universities Fellowship, and a Wellcome Trust grant. Sara is a Reader in Photography at University of the Arts London and she has a PhD in Photography from London College of Communication. Kelly Gardiner is Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing, English at La Trobe University, Australia. Her research has appeared in The American Book Review, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Conversations with Biographical Novelists, TEXT, the Australian Journal of Crime Fiction and Fluid Gender, Fluid Love (Brill 2018). Her novels include The Firewatcher Chronicles (2018- ), 1917 (2017), Goddess (2014), The Sultan’s Eyes (2013), and Act of Faith (2011). Her short fiction, reviews, essays, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Southerly, and numerous anthologies. She is co-founder and steering committee member of the International Society for the Study of Gender and Love. Petula Sik Ying Ho is Professor of Social Work and Social Administration, University of Hong Kong and works on gender and sexuality based on qualitative research and cross-cultural comparative studies. Her recent work includes Sex and Desire in Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press 2012; co-authored with Ka Tat Tsang), I am Ho Sik Ying, 55 years old (2013), Everyday Life in the Age of Resistance (2015), and Umbrella Politics Quartet (2015; co-author). In addition, she uses documentary films to explore the integration of arts and scholarship, as in 22 Springs: The Invincible (2010); The “Kong-lo” Chronicles and The Umbrella Movement: A Collaborative Focus Group Analysis (2016); Doing Qualitative Research Together (2018) and Carrie Lam Bring Out Your Freedom Pussy (2020). Stevi Jackson is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of York, United Kingdom. Her work includes Heterosexuality in Question (SAGE, 1999), Theorizing Sexuality (Open University Press 2010; co-authored with Sue Scott) Gender and Sexuality: Sociological Approaches (Polity Press 2010; co-authored with Momin Rahman) as well as numerous articles and chapters on gender and sexuality. Her new book, Women Doing Intimacy: Gender, Family and Modernity in Britain and Hong Kong, co-authored with Petula Sik Ying Ho, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in July 2020.

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Mie Birk Jensen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. The chapter in this book originates from her PhD ­project on gender, alcohol intoxication and young adults, which was completed in 2019 at the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University. Her research interests revolve around gender, sex and sexuality, particularly in relation to the consumption of intoxicants and medicine. Grounded in feminist theory, she has worked on subjects such as sexual consent, flirting, alcohol, Viagra and the medicalization of masculinity. Serena Petrella is Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender and Women’s Studies at Brandon University, Canada, specialising in sexuality studies, the evolution of relational norms, erotic dissidence, sexual regulation in the Law, polygamy, and polyamory. Her current research projects are varied and focus on kinky sexualities, the regulation of sex in the Law, and food security movements as a form of grass-root movement organising for social resilience. She edited Doing Gender, Doing Love: Interdisciplinary Voices (Interdisciplinary Press 2014) and Erotic Subjects and Outlaws: Sketching the Borders of Sexual Citizenship (Brill 2019). Marianne Schleicher is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark where she works on individual and collective uses of scripture, its materiality and intra-action with bodies, gender, and sexuality. Her publications include Intertextuality in the Tales of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (Brill 2007), “Constructions of Sex and Gender: Attending to Androgynes and Tumtumim through Jewish Scriptural Use” (2011), “Gender and Love in Jewish Religion” (2013), “Androgyny: General Entry” (2018), and “Attitudes to Deviation from Gender Norms in Israelite and Early Jewish Religion” (2018). She is co-founder and steering committee member of the International Society for the Study of Gender and Love. Mustafa Kemal Topal has recently received his doctorate from the Department of People and Technology at Roskilde University (RUC), Denmark. The chapter in this book originates from his Ph.D. project. He holds an MA degree in Psychology and International Development Studies. He has worked in different municipalities with socially vulnerable groups, but extensively with forced marriages and migrant

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marriages. On a more activist level, he participates in public debates with articles on radicalization among young people, integration problems, feminism, and the role of women in emerging movements. Louis van den Hengel is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. His current research examines the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary performance art from feminist, queer ecological, and decolonial perspectives. His scholarly work has been published in journals such as Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and the Dutch Journal of Gender Studies. He also has contributed book chapters to edited volumes such as Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (Routledge 2017) and Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (Routledge 2018). Alana M. Vincent is Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Religion, and Imagination at the University of Chester, United Kingdom and serves as current president of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture. Her most recent monograph is Making Memory: Jewish and Christian Explorations in Monument, Narrative and Liturgy (Pickwick Press, 2014). Other publications include Jewish Thought, Utopia, and Revolution (Rodopi 2014, co-edited with Elena Namli and Jayne Svenungson) and Culture, Communication and Recovery: Tolkienian Fairy-Story and Inter-Religious Exchange (Cambridge Scholars Press 2012). Dikmen Yakali-Çamoğlu is currently a Research Affiliate at COMPAS, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, where she explores gender in the self-narratives of the members of the Turkish diaspora in the UK. Her previous research and teaching have focused on the history of Western civilization, cultural theory, gender, and communication theories. In 2010, she initiated the Inter-Disciplinary.Net-project “Gender and Love” that developed into the International Society for the Study of Gender and Love, of which she is co-founder and president. At the early stage of this project, she edited On Gender and Love: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013).

Introduction Deirdre C. Byrne and Marianne Schleicher Most scholars in the fields of gender and love agree that these two human experiences are intricately intertwined. Their entanglement deepens through recursive and mutually shaping processes, fluctuating in and between the arena of social interaction and the embodied intrapsychic dynamics of personal identity. For example, love is often said to be a function of relationship. It is experienced and enacted in interaction with the self and other/s in ways that affect individual experiences of gender. Each person’s identity and performance are brought into the relational space of love, but never as a fixed attribute or essence. Rather, gender seems to emerge through participation in culture’s iterative acts, including loving exchanges involving human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic, cultural or material agents in- and outside the body. Gender is also a power structure that is socially conditioned and structuring. It is apparent from even a cursory investigation of the relationship between gender and love that they overlap, intersect and porously affect one another in complex ways that cannot be definitively traced, measured or summarised. The present volume is the result of a collaborative attempt to write about some of these complex interweavings that we describe as “entanglements and weavings.” The title’s resonance with new materialist accounts of the world is deliberate and represents a decision on the part of the contributing scholars to interrogate theoretical paradigms for researching gender and love. We position our scholarly contribution at the point where constructionist ideas are losing support from researchers, and we ask whether these notions still hold some value for the study of gender and love or if supplementing or different approaches are needed. The constructionist account of sociality, including gender and love, has found extraordinarily able champions, particularly in Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler who (albeit with different emphases) argue for the cultural constructedness of gender and love. Foucault’s “archaeological” and “genealogical” approach to knowledge, truth, and power leads him to conclude that these three things are connected in explicit and implicit ways. The regime of power necessitates the production of truth to bolster its claims to legitimacy, and for Foucault, truth is less a matter of a connection to “reality” than of concurring interests of hegemonic forces (e.g. Foucault 1978, 11–12). Gender and love scholars have found Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976; English translation 1978) to contain valuable insights into the way

© Deirdre C. Byrne and Marianne Schleicher, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_002

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s­exuality and gender, are constructed, regulated, and received according to their degree of conformity to various discursive interests in reproduction and biopolitics within a given culture. With his interest in the discourses of biopolitics; that is, the technology and techniques that are used to govern human life processes, and with his claim that subjects are always already permeated by discourse in its access to the world, it comes as no surprise that Foucault’s interests do not lie in the effects of materiality. He does assert that bodies may resist discursive attempts at construction and regulation, but he rarely invests in analysing or clarifying how bodies react to discursive attempts at construction and regulation. Two exceptions in Foucault’s work point forward to new materialist concerns with the effects of materiality, though. In Foucault’s “Introduction” to his edited publication Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (1978; English translation 1980), he contrasts constructed truths to nature, designates the bodily conditions of hermaphrodites as “anatomical anomalies” (Foucault 1980, ix), and addresses Barbin’s “indeterminate anatomy” provoking the intervention of a doctor and a priest (Foucault 1980, xi). In these few pages, Foucault presents nature and anatomy as anchor points for discursive strategies, but nevertheless reckons with the bodily limits, or rather excess, that condition discursive attempts at constructing a single true sex in each individual. Yet, Foucault’s primary interest is still to present Barbin’s memoirs, her dossier, and the medico-social reception of her body, her life story and suicide as symptomatic of intensified cultural investigations in the 1860s and 1870s “to establish the true sex of hermaphrodites but also to identify, classify, and characterize the different types of perversions” (Foucault 1980, x-xi). Foucault’s investments in Barbin thus serve to argue, as he did in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, that gender, just like sexuality, is constructed, regulated, and received according to its degree of bodily and performative conformity to various discursive interests in reproduction and biopolitics within a given culture. The other example of Foucault’s reckoning with materiality pertains to his neologism “heterotopology,” coined in a radio program in 1966, when he argued for a new analytics for spatiality with reference to insights into spatialisations from his thesis on Madness and Civilization from 1961. In 1967, he wrote a lecture on architecture with the French title Des espaces autres that introduced the concept of “heterotopia” and this became one of the most influential terms in his work. Foucault did not edit the lecture any further, yet consented to its full publication shortly before his death in 1984. It is available in English as “Of Other Spaces” (1986). In this article, we can read how Foucault exemplifies heterotopias of the 20th century as psychiatric hospitals, prisons, cemeteries,

Introduction

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t­heatres, gardens, markets, festivals, holiday resorts, and bathhouses. These places are like all other places, but are related to other sites “in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect[. They constitute] a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” (Foucault 1986, 24). As such, heterotopias are discursively constructed to serve societal functions and adapt to new situations in the course of history. But they are also physical, situated and entangled in local networks of relations, and Foucault stipulates the locally varied form as a framing ground for such contestations. The written lecture is brief, but in one instance, he invests his analytical skills in the concrete and local frames of the cemetery as a heterotopia that has evolved along the lines of history. Until the eighteenth century, cemeteries were places in the centre of the city or village, with dead bodies being hierarchically organised in the order of how close the deceased “deserved” to be to the sacred centre of the church. Foucault then emphasises how nineteenth-century France brought about the bourgeois right of every individual to be buried in his/her own designated space in the cemetery. The shift occurred at a time in history when the belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul was on the wane and most likely necessitated a reminder, for the living, of the body’s ephemerality, by means of a very concrete relation to processes of decay in the soil. The shift coincided with the transposition of cemeteries from the city or village centres to the outskirts of inhabited places, due to the fear of a premature onset of death through a contagious relation to bodies that served as hosts to mortal illnesses. As heterotopias, these cemeteries would remind each family of life’s finitude, and, hence, its inversion (Foucault 1986, 25). Heterotopias thus constitute a second example of Foucault’s reckoning with the framing effect of materiality. Foucault’s insights into the archaeologies of power-knowledge as primarily discursive strategies tally well with Derrida’s yet stronger focus on discursivity. Derrida’s famous axiom, Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (“there is nothing outside the text” or, more accurately, “there is no ‘beyond-the-text,’” (1976, 159)) places discursivity squarely in the centre of theory-making. Derridean deconstruction is a philosophical method that highlights the binary oppositions that structure Western thinking, including self/other; male/female; speech/writing; and text/ supplement. These binaries have rightly occupied an important place in scholarship on gender and love. Numerous feminist scholars have used Derrida’s deconstructive methods to explore the relationship between masculinity and femininity, including investments in analyses of the neglected second pole of the binary: woman. Derrida’s neologism that re-spells difference as différance with an “a,” emphasises how the French verb différer can be used to address

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how pre-linguistic multiplicities of meanings both defer and always differ from the effects of discursive signification (Derrida 1978, 75). The so-called différance feminists, such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, developed their contributions to studies of gender and love around Derrida’s concept of différance, but associated it with women’s complex experiences prior to patriarchal representations (e.g. Irigaray 1985, 191–202). Contemporary studies of gender and love still draw upon Derrida’s methods of deconstruction to address how discursive representations have exclusionary effects on neglected and marginalised poles of various binaries. Judith Butler is one of the most influential of the current gender theorists who have utilised Derridean deconstructive methods. She is famous for her theory of performativity and for her political thoughts on precariousness and grievability, enabling nuanced explorations of gender and love, especially for marginalised identities. In Gender Trouble (1990; second edition 1999 with a new preface), Butler applies insights from Foucault and Derrida to argue that, contrary to popular thinking, biological assumptions about sex are not “given,” but constructed and naturalised, just as much as cultural gender roles, in accordance with the needs of a society to regulate itself in discursive ways. Butler did not share the enthusiasm of différance feminists about access to multiplicities of meaning prior to discursive signification. She realised that these multiplicities would amount to a constitutive “outside” to social-discursive constructions that she, following Foucault, could not believe accessible (e.g. 1999, 3–4). Nevertheless, Derrida’s thoughts on iterability, exploring how repetition of a phenomenon in a different context would always contain some trace of difference from the originary instance, enabled her to supplement Foucault’s constructionism with a theory of how gender identities can be expanded and even subverted. Butler explains how gender identities are created, become intelligible and naturalised within culture’s iterative acts, along lines that are strongly shaped by social requirements, and within relationships. By means of Derrida’s approach to iteration as a vantage point for variation (Derrida 1982, 307–330), Butler argued that every participation in cultural acts would entail some kind of repetition of a cultural norm. Since, however, no repetition, no copy, can be exactly identical to what it imitates, repetition always implies a variation on, even a potential subversion of, this norm and this explains why gender identities are never stable (1999, 198). Any attempt to consider gender a stable essence has accordingly become obsolete in the wake of Butler’s argumentation. The insights of Foucault, Derrida, Butler and other theorists whose work can be considered as based in the “discursive turn” have undoubtedly exerted a shaping influence on the field of gender and love studies. Nevertheless, in recent decades, scholars have argued against the tendency of constructionism

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to insist on an immanentist approach to constructions. They hold that one cannot expect exhaustive knowledge from a study of discourse alone. Instead, one should invest in developing new methodologies that enable scholarship to include the effects of nature, materiality, the body and other entities that constructionists tend to associate with the inaccessible realm of a constitutive “outside.” Biologist Donna Haraway was the first to insist on not giving up on knowledge production with regard to biological aspects of gender and love. Haraway insists on the effects of materiality and also on the agency of non-human, even non-organic entities (Haraway 1988, 591–593). Physicist Karen Barad draws on and extends Haraway’s work by means of Niels Bohr’s quantum theory. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), Barad provides a new paradigm for gender and love scholars to study matter and meaning, not as two separate domains, but as entangled at a basic ontological level. Human beings are the only species on the planet to be preoccupied with meaning; nevertheless, Barad argues, matter (whether sentient or not) possesses agential qualities and affects human beings and their endeavours to create meaning in intra-action with what they encounter. Meaning is therefore a co-creation between and within different agents in an encounter. It is an intra-active manifestation on immanent grounds as the result of material and discursive phenomena being entangled and interwoven. This explains why Barad at certain points proposes to stress the relational character of phenomena by replacing the term phenomenon with relatum (pl. relata). “Things,” Barad argues convincingly, are not actually discrete or stable units, but emerging within networks of intra-action and agential behaviour. Barad thereby justifies how it is possible to take matter seriously without succumbing to static essentialism. Her approach of agential realism, where matter is constantly co-emerging and transforming in networks of relations, places her in line with philosophies of becomings such as that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In fact, Barad opens several of her chapters in Meeting the Universe Halfway with quotes from Deleuze and Guattari, who more directly inspired a network-oriented approach to becomings of gender and love in the work of, for example Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, and Elizabeth Grosz. Network-inspired approaches to gender and love as becomings have emphasised the agency of not only human, but also non-human and non-­ organic entities. They have affirmed the entanglement of human affairs in the material, and have helped scholars to understand that concept and reality are two sides of the same coin. The chapters that follow include reflections on how to balance and approach discursive and material effects on gender and love in various local ­contexts. Scholars from various parts of the globe comment on and test both

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constructionist and new materialist/posthuman theories based on insights from concrete, focussed, yet very different analyses. The title of our publication promises “diffractive approaches to gender and love.” Within new materialist and posthuman approaches to gender, Donna Haraway was also the first to apply the physical concept of diffraction from physics to counter the representationalist ideal in science of presenting the world objectively as an undisturbed reflection (Haraway 1992, 300). In physics, however, diffraction denotes the splitting and disturbance that results from a wave, for example a light wave, passing through an obstacle. Here, the apparatus itself prevents an undisturbed reflection of what is measured, which is why Haraway and Barad prefer diffraction as a more honest and realistic account of scientific representations. To complicate matters, Barad uses diffraction in a twofold way. First, it designates how our theoretical and methodological apparatus becomes a point of resistance, provoking splitting and disturbance in the becomings that we are to measure or analyse (Barad 2007, 84–94). Second, Barad chooses to let her own understanding of how matter and meaning are entangled become the point of resistance, splitting, and disturbance to Foucault’s understanding of power and to Butler’s theory of performativity, in order to rehabilitate their dynamic approaches to identity for studies that insist on taking matter seriously (Barad 2007, 56–57; 64–65; 149–151). As editors, we appreciate the constructive tone that Barad’s technique generates for positioning oneself up against previous or contemporary scholars. We therefore decided to encourage the authors of this book to take inspiration from it in their attempts at grappling with questions of how to approach material and discursive elements in their empirical material, drawn from their own research interests. The volume thus represents a selection of diffractive approaches to relata as apparently diverse as poetry and bdsm, performative ecosexuality and liberation soldiers. In the first section, entitled “Reflections on theory,” Marianne Schleicher, Louis van den Hengel and Deirdre C. Byrne take up the theoretical considerations touched upon in this introduction and elaborate on or supplement them to assess and apply them for analyses of gender and love in ancient ­Israelite-Jewish society, ecosexual performance art, and the writings of Ursula Le Guin. The second section, “Materiality in creative texts,” includes contributions from Kelly Gardiner, Amrita Chakraborty and Wernmei Yong Ade. In their analyses of butch identities, effects of revulsion against certain bodies in Bengali folktales, and alternative gender identities in Angela Carter’s literary production, the verb “weaving” demonstrates its versatility by aptly expressing individual and collective strategies for survival, adaptation and unfolding. The emerging webs of dynamic entanglements woven by these chapters take into

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account the bodily effects, differences and preferences in individuals and collectives that may contribute to explaining local variations of gender and love. The third section on “Fluid identities in heterotopic spaces” consists of chapters by Dikmen Yakalı-Çamoğlu, Alana Vincent, and Mie Birk Jensen. These three authors all apply Michel Foucault’s term “heterotopia” to such diverse contexts as gender and love in Ferzan Özpetek’s cinema, Jewish Golem literature, and mainstream nightlife in Denmark. All three of these contributors analyse how local centres frame human bodies in intra-action with or without non-human agents in their contestations or developments of hegemonic and heteronormative conceptions of gender and love. The fourth section on “Social relata” includes three chapters; the first by Stevi Jackson and Petula Sik Ying Ho, the second by Mustafa Kemal Topal, and the third by Serena Petrella. The chapters engage with the question of how gender and love materialise between mothers and daughters in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, in the mountainous military camps of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (pkk), and in performances in bdsm clubs. While not all of these authors are willing to admit to matter being agentic in and of itself, they still address how discourse and materiality co-emerge, co-create and intra-act within social relata. The afterword, entitled “Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights,” was written by artistic photographer and Reader in Photography, Sara Davidmann. Also inspired by Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, she reflects on the material and discursive effects of her photography studio where she composed the included photographs—so amazing, wonderfully queer and thought-provoking with regard to how gender and love can entangle. In addition to the photographs in her creative “Afterword,” Davidmann has generously contributed to the cover of this book with her artistic photograph “Side by Side” from her Ken. To be destroyed project (Davidmann 2016). As editors, we invite you to share our enthusiasm for these committed and poignant chapters that all grapple with questions of what diffracting lenses to apply to their diverse empirical materials. We would run counter to our complex, sometimes compatible, sometimes disharmonious theoretical apparatus if we claimed any definite answers, but we shall present situated, agential cuts that may surprise you with how gender and love can exhibit so many new forms of weavings and entanglements. References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning. Duke University Press: Durham.

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Butler, Judith. 1999 (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Davidmann, Sara. 2016. Ken. To be destroyed. Edited by Val Williams. Amsterdam: Schilt Publishing. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Sussex: Harvester Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Introduction – Herculine Barbin.” In Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Translated by Richard McDougall, vii–xvii. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16(1): 22–27. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. Haraway, Donna. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” Cultural Studies. Edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Part 1 Reflections on Theory

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Chapter 1

Effects of Materiality in Israelite-Jewish Conceptions of Gender and Love: On a Necessary Synthesis of Constructionist and New Materialist Approaches Marianne Schleicher Abstract This chapter wishes to understand the mechanisms of how conceptions of gender and love developed in ancient Israelite-Jewish culture without leaving the effects of material aspects of gender and love beyond analytical commentary. To do so, it synthesises Foucault on power’s investment in points of resistance, Butler on the premises of subversion, Haraway and Barad on the effects of materiality in diffraction patterns, and Grosz on individual impetuses to resist discursive pressure. With this theoretical apparatus, biblical and early rabbinic texts are analysed to assess when genderqueer bodies and deviating practices of love affect in/-tolerance and/or ex-/inclusion.

Keywords new materialism – constructionism – inclusion – tolerance – subversion – intersex – infertility – Judaism – Hebrew Bible – Rabbinic Literature

When analysing gender and love in the Hebrew Bible and early Rabbinic literature, legal material and narratives testify to effective connections between discourse and embodied material protests against normative gender and love in ways that call for a combination of both constructionist and new materialist approaches. Constructionist approaches, represented in this chapter by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, are still adequate in accounting for various cultural regulations of gender and love. Constructionism is, however, reluctant to address the effects of materiality because it holds that materiality is alwaysalready embedded in discourse when addressed. Yet, Israelite-Jewish texts on

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genderqueer bodies and love testify to materiality affecting adjustments in terminology, in discourses on gender and love, in emerging tolerances of deviating bodies, and even in occasional instances of their inclusion. These effects of materiality have the potential to add to our understanding of how cultures develop and of how conceptions of gender and love develop. In this chapter I argue that such material effects are too valuable for scholarship to be left beyond analytical commentary. The chapter therefore opens with a theoretical section that selects constructionist insights from Foucault and Butler, which are important for explaining certain aspects of gender and love in the IsraeliteJewish texts. The section will also point to their limitations and suggest supplements from the new materialist thinkers Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz that enable us effectively to address materiality in IsraeliteJewish conceptions of gender and love. After the synthesis of constructionist and new materialist approaches, a brief section follows that establishes the methodological consequences of the synthesis to be applied in the last analytical section to Israelite-Jewish texts on genderqueer bodies and love. 1

Synthesis of Constructionist and New Materialist Insights

Differences between genders have been the central object of gender studies since its academic inception in 1949 when Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex. Beauvoir analysed the social and cultural causes and consequences of the different degrees of access among men and women to representation. During the 1970s and 1980s, différance feminists, including Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, followed Jacques Derrida in deconstructing how especially the Western symbolic system reflected male interests, experiences and understandings of human existence in a way that ignored or devalued differences in and between men and women. The postcolonial voices of other writers such as Edward Said, Audre Lorde, and Gayatri Spivak, however, deconstructed the blindness of différance feminism to its own situatedness in a white, Western, middle-class, and heteronormative context, ignoring how different cultures construct gender differently under the influence of differing intersecting factors. Simultaneously, constructionism argued against essentialism with the consequence that it rendered questions about biological differences in bodies beyond analysis because biological differences would alwaysalready be embedded in discourse when observed. Accordingly, constructionism left materiality aside and directed its analytical focus to how culture constructed differences and conceptions of the material. In contrast, new materialists disagreed and refused to give up the pursuit of what Donna Haraway called

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“authoritative biological accounts of sex” (Haraway 1988, 591; see below) for two reasons. First, they looked for new epistemologies and ontologies to address material differences and their entanglements with the immaterial, including the discursive. Second, they disagreed with constructionism’s focus on human-made culture because it rested on a Cartesian divide between culture and nature, human and non-human, organic and non-organic. They found this transcendence of culture problematic because such ontological divides covered up a residue from humanism that considered the human mind the originating point of all agency. Due to this last disagreement and infused by concerns about the human exploitation of the Earth, many new materialists share concerns with posthumanists.1 In this chapter, I shall draw forth constructionist insights that I consider valuable to explain some aspects in the conceptions of gender and love in Israelite-Jewish texts and their cultural developments and point to the strengths and limitations of the constructionist positions before I turn to what I consider the necessary supplements from new materialist approaches. Among various constructionists, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler continue to attract my attention because I consider the methodological consequences of their theoretical understandings very effective in analysing how cultural norms become naturalised as a way to regulate the thoughts and actions of individuals. Historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, has as his premise in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge from 1976 (published in English in 1978) that all manifestations of sexuality, both normative and “perverse,” are accessible only as constructs. They are always-already “the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures [… and the] implantation of perversions is an instrument-effect” (Foucault 1978, 48) that functions to regulate the normative boundaries in a specific context. Various discursive strategies construct “natural” sexuality in a specific context; in Foucault’s study, the context is France from the seventeenth century onward. In French history, Foucault detects four strategies that constructed and naturalised normative sexuality. The first was to label women hysterics and in need of treatment if they were unwilling to bear, nurture, and educate children. The second strategy was to invest in pedagogical knowledge about children’s sexuality as both “precious and perilous, dangerous and endangered” (Foucault 1978, 104), meaning that it needed investment, but also protection against “­perverse” influences. The third strategy depended on economic and social 1 In this chapter, I shall refer to them as new materialists, not because I do not share their ontological and ecological views, but because my analytical concern is how to address the effects of materiality.

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i­ncitements and restrictions that encouraged regulated procreation such as child allowances and contraception. The fourth strategy was to pathologise “perverse” pleasures and to invest in corrective measures including psychotherapy, medicalisation, and incarceration at psychiatric institutions (Foucault 1978, 104–105). Foucault does not reckon with an essence of, for example, gender or sexuality in individuals that could explain the choices that one makes in life. Individuals are subjected to constructions, including those that concern gender and sexuality, that act through them (Foucault 1978, 155). Behind Foucault’s understanding of the cultural construction of sexuality lies his thesis that cultures gather knowledge about their populations and their doings in order to be able to govern. His understanding of a culture’s “governmentality” rests on his dynamic interpretation of power and biopower. Foucault refuses to understand power as something that certain institutions hold thanks to ratified laws and constitutions (Foucault 1978, 82). Instead, he argues that the juridical understanding of power must be replaced by a dynamic one that sees power as everywhere, “a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (1978, 93) that links oppositions with the overall intention of ensuring, maintaining, or developing the life of the society (1978, 136). The “rationality of power is characterized by tactics which […] end by forming comprehensive systems” (Foucault 1978, 95). Points of resistance “are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite […] producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings” (Foucault 1978, 96). These very regroupings are also Foucault’s explanation of what enables revolutions. Power makes strategic investments in differences, including deviations from the norm, because such deviations might show themselves to be potential assets with regard to adaptation to future circumstances. Adaptation is central and linked to Foucault’s concept of biopower, introduced as a cluster of “force relations” that aim to discipline the body, regulate its biological processes, and optimise its capabilities with the overall purpose of securing life (Foucault 1978, 92–102; 138). Consequently, power, including biopower, invests in differences and multiplicity by providing “for relatively obscure areas of tolerance” (Foucault 1978, 101). Foucault exemplifies tolerance of something oppositional by pointing to the slow development in how Western knowledge about sexuality transformed conceptions about same-sex relations from crimes into a level of intelligibility in the 1870s as a pathological variation of normative sexuality. Around a century later, same-sex sexuality was no longer considered pathological, but merely a variant sexuality. Intelligibility through signification and representation rested on the neologism “homosexuality,” which eventually allowed “homosexuality […] to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be

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­acknowledged” (Foucault 1978, 101). In other words, a man’s unruly preference for the body of another man, contrary to hegemonic discourse on gender and love, is in fact recognised and eventually tolerated to a certain extent as long as this kind of sexuality, indirectly, rather than directly, contributed to increasing life at an overall societal level. While materiality and deviations in Foucault’s work are always-already imbedded in discourse, he thus indicates in the cultural will to knowledge an unpremeditated effect of intelligibility on material and immaterial phenomena that have been previously unintelligible. This adds to our knowledge of how cultures develop. Philosopher Judith Butler takes Foucault’s constructionism into the field of gender studies proper. In line with Foucault, Butler demonstrates how discursive violence strikes people of deviating gender identities at an attempt at both construction and regulation; that is, Butler follows Foucault in looking at perversion and deviation as “instrument effects” (see above), constructed in order to regulate. Concerning the suicide of Herculine Barbin, a French 19th-century intersexed person, Butler writes: S/he is “outside” the law, but the law maintains this “outside” within itself. In effect, s/he embodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law’s uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will – out of fidelity – defeat themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected, have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis. (Butler 1999, 144; see also 1999, xx-xxi)2 Butler’s reading of how culture orchestrates the misery of Barbin could lead to the impression that her constructionist theory of performativity is deterministic. This, however, would be to miss her most interesting point; that is, that rule-generating practices also “enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility” (Butler 1999, 198) that culture might tolerate or even include, but only on certain premises. Butler specifies that the gathering of knowledge and subsequent signification does not bring deviating identities to intelligibility and inclusion automatically. According to her theory of performativity, intelligibility and the acquisition of identity become attainable only through participation in rule-generated practices. Since all instances of 2 Butler’s grave and very Foucaultian reading of Herculine Barbin in fact corrects Foucault’s own introduction to Barbin in his publication of journals relating to Barbin, where Foucault forgets the powers of discourse and asserts access to Barbin’s “happy limbo of a non-identity” (Foucault 1980, xiii), a prediscursive libidinal multiplicity prior to h/er forced male identity (Butler 1999, 130–131; 138).

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a­ gency/participation imply a matter of repetition that cannot be completely identical to the former, variations will emerge and obscure the discursive attempts at instituting the very boundaries of what is intelligible (Butler 1993, 187–188). This is why access to repetitive acts within culture are so important. In Gender Trouble, Butler therefore analyses what variations will be met with discursive violence and mentions as an example Barbin’s multileveled refusal to conform to one of the bipolar genders, just as she analyses what variations will be tolerated, maybe even included. The principle that Butler detects is that culture may be open to subversion if the subverting actor works for cultural coherence and future life-increasing adaptations from within culture. Butler points to rituals and rule-regulated, iterative acts as the generating core of culture, and if someone, even a deviator, participates in these repetitious acts, culture is likely to recognise the mere participation as a testimony of people’s loyalty toward culture and subsequently tolerate and include them (Butler 1999, 198–201). This explanation also subtends Butler’s understanding of how cultures develop; that is, through tolerated and included variations of loyal, iterative acts. What Butler and Foucault consider impossible is to analyse materiality outside of what culture has made intelligible through discourse. They do not comment on the effects of materiality. They are not claiming that an extra-­discursive reality does not exist; for example, they do not ignore Barbin’s genderqueer body. They consider, however, the observer, the tools for observation, and thereby the access to objects as always-already embedded in discourse. Consequently, they do not move beyond construction to explain in what way matter resists construction, in what way material factors prevent access to iterative acts, or if material factors could drive an individual to try to subvert the norms. As such, they do not reflect on materiality as affecting variation. To Foucault, variation, for example in sexuality, is an effect of the discursive production of proliferate sexuality and a possible domain of investment (Foucault 1978, 47– 49; 101). To Butler, the extra-discursive is a contested field, circumscribed by conflicting discourses (Butler 2001, 635). As such, Butler limits her explanation of subversion by an individual to shifts in discourse and refuses to consider any kind of material agency. In the remaining part of this theoretical section, I shall turn to new materialist thought because I consider Foucault’s and Butler’s constructionist explanations in need of supplement in order to account for the agency of materiality that I detect in my empirical data. Constructionist theories cannot offer an explanation of certain phenomena. These include: why gender discourse in Israelite-Jewish texts has developed from not recognising the existence of

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g­ ender-nonconforming individuals, such as intersexed people, to tolerating them, and to sometimes even including them despite their lack of a cultural advantage. I am not convinced that culture constructs gender-deviant sexualities or Herculine Barbin’s refusal to behave recognisably as a univocal male at the end of h/er life simply to have something to define norms up against. I am not convinced that culture is teleologically oppressive when it chooses surgically to transform intersexed babies into recognisable males or females, despite scientific knowledge of the subsequent scars, bodily impairments, and 19% attempted suicides among intersexed people (Jones et al. 2016, 121). In the writings of both Foucault and Butler, changes in discourse are produced by discourse, and the effects or limitations of materiality, multiple and differentiated, are left beyond their analytical commentary. The constructionist paradigm makes it as good as impossible to investigate the empirical phenomena of the natural sciences as anything but matters of linguistic signification and discursive construction. One of the first gender scholars to react against constructionist silence on the effects of materiality was biologist Donna Haraway, who refused in the article “Situated Knowledges” (1988) to see bodies as blank pages awaiting social inscription: [T]o lose authoritative biological accounts of sex, which set up productive tensions with gender, seems to be to lose too much; it seems to be to lose not just analytic power within a particular Western tradition but also the body itself as anything but a blank page for social inscriptions, including those of biological discourse (1988, 591) Haraway’s belief in biological accounts should not be mistaken for a naïve expectation of easy access to an immediate object. Culture has an effect, but so do our objects of knowledge and our mapping practices. Accordingly, she asks that our objects of knowledge be reckoned as agents as soon as we enter into a relation with them (Haraway 1988, 591–592). They are “boundary projects” (­Haraway 1988, 595), and research results only represent “situated knowledges,” appearing at the boundary between the observer and the object at a specific time and place (Haraway 1988, 595). In gender studies, Haraway’s defence of biological accounts also entailed a Bruno Latour-inspired break with the humanist aspects of constructionism that focus solely on human-based culture and its regulation of humans, completely ignoring non-human and non-organic agents. In “The Promises of Monsters” (1992), Haraway clarifies the epistemological consequences of her

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posthumanist worldview. Scholars ought to refrain from anthropocentric ­approaches that underestimate the effects of animals, organic and non-organic matter. Instead, focus should be directed at how our boundaries […] materialize in social interaction among humans and non-humans, including the machines and other instruments that mediate exchanges at crucial interfaces and that function as delegates for other actors’ functions and purposes. “Objects” like bodies do not pre-exist as such. Similarly, “nature” cannot pre-exist as such, but neither is its existence ideological. (Haraway 1992, 298) From this epistemological perspective, Haraway agrees with constructionism that objects are only accessible as always-already embedded in the social, but the contrast lies in her insistence that scholars must also venture an account of materiality in its interaction with the social. One may capture this interaction, she says, by looking for diffraction: “Diffraction is a mapping of interference […]. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear” (Haraway 1992, 300, original emphasis). Diffraction has since become a key methodological concept in new materialist analysis because it prescribes what to look for. Haraway is an important precursor to physicist Karen Barad, who agrees that phenomena only “exist” in relations as they are being observed. Barad therefore suggests that we understand phenomena as relata (Barad 2003, 812; 815). Relata constantly change as an effect of their entanglements. It is the very intra-action where the object, the observer, and the tool for observation all affect each other that brings about observable effects and developments. Research can move beyond constructionist silence on the effects of materiality by offering what Barad calls an “agential cut” (2003, 815) that accounts for this intra-action. While Barad criticises constructionism, including Foucault and Butler, for having assumed matter’s passivity, it does not prevent her from rehabilitating Butler’s most important concepts of performativity, agency, and subversion by reading them in what she calls a diffractive way. She agrees with Haraway to look for diffraction patterns in empirical analyses that illuminate “the indefinite nature of boundaries – displaying shadows in ‘light’ regions and bright spots in ‘dark’ regions – the relation of the social and the scientific is a relation of ‘exteriority within’” (Barad 2003, 803). Similarly, Barad applies the notion of diffraction at a theoretical level to develop Butler’s key concepts through the prism of her more physical account of relata. In Barad’s diffractive light, performativity comes to signify how observations and measurements of materiality

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are iterative performances, through which the boundaries of objects become intelligible (2003, 816; 823). Agency is defined as the intra-action between object, observer and tool of observation that brings into relation matter and meaning (2003, 817). When it comes to rehabilitating Butler’s concept of subversion, Barad explains how the employment of apparatuses for observations and measurements are “re-constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings” (2003, 817). The potential for subversion runs through the dynamic reconfiguration of established practices. Barad thereby explains how deviating or reconfigured matter can affect change by its mere participation in established practices, and also explains how scholars overlook important relations and effects by ignoring the entanglement of matter and meaning. Barad describes her thinking as “a relational ontology […] to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming” (2003, 812). Yet, Barad refuses to take things as ontologically basic entities in a pursuit to explain causality. Causality cannot amount to more than a detection of effects emerging from constantly changing, dynamic intra-actions and connections, constellations of different material and cultural agents. As such, Barad’s relational ontology is not so much an ontology, but more an epistemological reflection on best scientific practices similar to that of Haraway. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz tries to push new materialist thinking beyond mere epistemology into ontology proper by arguing that there is no transcendence about culture including scientific practices. Nature and culture exist on the same immanent conditions. Grosz relies on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and two of his co-writers. In her article “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics” (1993), Grosz adopts Deleuze and Parnet’s ontology of everything being made up of three types of immanent lines: molar, molecular, and nomadic lines that connect all phenomena. Molar lines enable segmentation of existence into recognisable entities (material or immaterial); molecular lines are constantly changing flows that connect all kinds of entities; and nomadic lines search beyond molar and molecular lines to experiment and expand, reach out, explore, mutate and disaggregate molar and molecular structures. These lines are all immanent and operate in entangled ways on the same, immanent conditions (Deleuze and Parnet 1983, 69–72). To explain the entanglement of these lines, Grosz borrows the term “rhizome” from Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari, who proposed rhizomatics as the name of their method (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). A rhizome is a biological phenomenon, known from how fungi manifest themselves. A rhizome is “made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions. […] The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. […] The

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rhizome is acentered, non-hierarchical, non-signifying system” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21). Grosz applies rhizomatics as a methodology to her field of gender studies and the question of sexual difference by approaching the body, not in opposition to consciousness or a constructing culture, but “analysed and assessed more in terms of what it can do, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes and the machinic connections it forms with other bodies” (Grosz 1993, 171). As Grosz points out, rhizomatics “does not study the coagulations of entities, the massifications of diverse flows and intensities, but lines of flow and flight, trajectories of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization” (Grosz 1993, 173). The methodological consequences of distinguishing between these lines are not to limit analysis to the molar lines, the typical focus of constructionism, but to detect and include the effects of molecular and nomadic lines of unfolding, and investigate how all types of lines intra-act in flux. To enable gender studies to continue analysing power and suppression of differences in gender in a way that takes biology and matter into account, ­Grosz reads Foucault’s dynamic understanding of power diffractively through Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the Deleuzian understanding of concepts. Grosz explains how concepts and theories are “techniques by which we address the real” (2011, 77). From the beginning of evolution, there was a materiality of chaos, bifurcating and experimenting with everything’s difference, resulting in variability and increasing complexity through differentiating effects. Concepts and theories are how […] the living address and attempt to deal with the chaos which surrounds them […]. Concepts emerge, have value, and function only through the impact of problems generated from outside […]. They are the production of immaterial forces that line materiality with incorporeals, potentials, latencies: concepts are the virtualities of matter, the ways in which matter can come to be otherwise, the promise of a future different from the present. (Grosz 2011, 78, original emphasis) Concepts and theories are immaterial, connecting forces that set off alternatives to chaos. Grosz thus enables a reterritorialisation of Foucault’s dispositifs and discourses, not as constructions that suggest something transcendent to nature, but techniques that operate on the premises of everything immanent. Given how feminists have associated Darwin with normative or teleological/deterministic approaches to evolution, Grosz takes time to correct this misunderstanding in “Darwin and Feminism” (2008), where she explains how

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evolution implies “a systemic openness that precludes precise determination” (2008, 45). In Darwin’s writings, Grosz sees how effects/developments depend utterly on the actualised connections of different entities. In Becoming Undone from 2011, her approach to gender rests on her Darwinian understanding of difference, including sexual difference, “as the generative force of the world, the force that enacts materiality (and not just its representation), the movement of difference that marks the very energies of existence” (2011, 91). Becomings may, however, become chaotic in the Deleuzian sense, which is why there are […] limits to tolerable, that is to say, sustainable variation: ‘monstrosities,’ teratological variations, may be regularly reproduced, but only those that remain both viable and reproductively successful, and only those that attain some evolutionary advantage, either directly or indirectly, help induce this proliferation. (Grosz 2008, 31) In other words, to react to and regulate the chaos of proliferation, concepts and theories will be produced, including with regard to gender. Grosz emphasises that Darwin never limited such reacting and regulating “lines” to consist of natural selection only. Darwin operated with both natural and artificial selection as immanent forces at play (Grosz 2008, 33–34). Here, Grosz exemplifies artificial selection with the notion of individual impetuses, including sexual preferences and how they interfere with natural selection, thus allowing for other kinds of adaptation than mere survival (2008, 34). Her willingness to discuss individual impetuses to react against chaos as well as actualised molar, molecular, or nomadic lines stands in contract to constructionist silence with regard to explaining what brings individuals to subversion and self-transformation. According to Grosz, it is the very struggle to exist and unfold that explains individual impetuses to go against the norms (Grosz 2008, 40–41), which again adds to our understanding of how cultures develop and how conceptions of gender and love develop. 2

Methodological Consequences of the Theoretical Synthesis

My methodological approach rests on Grosz’ Deleuzian-Darwinian thesis that culture, an immaterial aspect of immanent life, protects itself and evolves by means of molar, molecular, and nomadic lines. I agree with Foucault and Butler that the gathering of knowledge about complex reality enables governmentality, for example through biopolitics, and that investments in tolerance of

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loyal subversive variations offer highly plausible explanations of the premises of cultural evolution. I shall therefore look for deviating relata within the domain of gender and love, the forms of discursive violence that hinder their intelligibility or the small steps that lead them from unintelligibility over first significations to its eventual tolerance or even inclusion. I shall look for such investments in “relatively obscure areas of tolerance” and for the repetitive acts within a culture that grant intelligibility and that may allow for loyal attempts at subversion. However, culture is no transcendent entity that prevents our recognition of materiality and its effects. Effects are always connected to specific points in time and place and emerge on immanent premises either to ward off chaos, suggest alternatives to chaos, or improve our possibilities to exist and unfold. I shall therefore look for chaos and try to decipher the defence mechanism that chooses some variations and discards others. In line with this, I will also reflect on why immaterial, yet immanent culture adapts to materiality, including bodily deviations. In this way, I subsume the Foucaultian and Butlerian insights under the diffractive perspective that such regulations are immanent only and as such an effect, not of transcendent discourses, but of immanent agents, be they human or non-human, organic or non-organic. In my brief analysis below, it follows that I also look at Israelite-Jewish texts as diffraction patterns; that is, effects that testify to entanglements of all sorts of agents, as Haraway and Barad encourage. I shall, however, also push the concepts of diffraction and entanglement into Grosz’ ontology and look for the effects of molar, molecular, and nomadic lines at play in their intra-acting entanglement. 3

Analysis of Genderqueer Bodies in the Hebrew Bible and Early Rabbinic literature

As I have argued elsewhere, the Hebrew Bible promotes five gender norms in particular to ensure reproduction, social cohesion, and national boundaries as means to secure the survival of Israelite culture (Schleicher 2011, 2013). These norms carved out Israelite gender as bipolar (Gen 1:27–28), as hierarchical in that women were subordinate to the decisions of their fathers or husbands (Gen 3:16; Num 30:6, 9), as regulated toward heterosexuality (Lev 18) that again was legitimised within the frame of monogamous or polygynous marriage (Ex 21:10), and as favouring the eldest sons in matters of inheritance of the paternal land and property (Deut 21:15–17). I mention these norms, functioning as molar/segmentary lines, warding off chaos, as background information to understand my exemplifying case on gender and my exemplifying case on love.

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My exemplifying case on gender in this chapter pertains to genderqueer bodies and begins in the void of the Hebrew Bible3 that has no reference to intersexed bodies at all. Except for the mention of men with crushed ­testicles— often translated as eunuchs—infertility, mostly in women, is the nearest we come to a reference to a deviant, yet invisible feature of a material body, cf. Gen 20:17–18; 1 Sam 1. To explain the biblical silence on intersexed bodies, one could include Butler’s notion of unintelligibility and consider the silence as a matter of violent exclusion. Or one could include Foucault’s perspective on the gathering of knowledge, in this case as being in too incipient a state for culture to know or to distinguish from what the Hebrew Bible categorised as the eunuch’s or the barren woman’s reproductive disabilities. Constructionism, however, is seriously challenged with regard to explaining the more tolerant sides of culture in the light of how the Hebrew Bible addresses reproductive disabilities among Israelites. Several texts in the Hebrew Bible encourage empathy with and care of childless widows by ordering their inclusion into the family unit of the deceased husband’s brother, if he had any (Deut 25:5–10). If not or if the family-in-law was unwilling to include the widow, her father was expected to offer her a place of belonging (Gen 38:11). Widows with or without children were specified as God’s particular concern (Ex 22:21–23) and accordingly, they had privileged access to the alms distributed by the Levites (Deut 14:28; 26:12). Sterile women were allowed to stay in their marriages as long as they accepted that their husband took an additional wife to ensure the reproduction that he was obligated to (Gen 16; Gen 29–30). Such relative tolerance would definitely not appear positive today in a liberal, individualistic context; yet, the circumstances almost 3000 years ago were different. These laws and traditions carved out a safe haven for women against the chaos of not belonging to an extended family and of not being able to acquire food for themselves and their offspring. Similarly, such relative tolerance allowed extended families to prevent another form of chaos; that of cutting bonds of love and affection to infertile family members. In all of these biblical adjustments to bodily deviation from expected gender 3 The Hebrew Bible/the Old Testament consists of three parts. Roughly speaking, Torah (The Five Books of Moses) was edited c. 400 bce, Neviim (the Prophets) was edited c. 200 bce, and Ketuvim (the Writings) was edited c. 200 ce. I am aware that I have not specified to what redactional layers the different laws and narratives belong. This is because I prioritise questions of how the biblical norms were received in the longue durée; that is, the long-term evolving structures of Jewish culture from the Hebrew Bible until today. In this chapter, I limit the scope to cover developments from the Hebrew Bible to the Babylonian Talmud. References to the Hebrew Bible are to the Jewish Publication Society’s English translation in The Jewish Study Bible (2004).

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performances, it is also worth noticing that the gender of the infertile women is never questioned. Their disability may exempt them from certain obligations, but with the narrative portrayals of deviating bodies, the Hebrew Bible supplements its gender norms with knowledge of men and women who deviate to some extent and it subsequently carves out lines that secure their inclusion. Something similar is at stake in the Book of Isaiah: […] let not the eunuch say ‘I am a withered tree.’ For thus said the Lord: ‘As for the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths, and hold fast to My ­covenant – I will give them, in My house and within My walls, a monument and a name better than sons or daughters. I will give them an everlasting name which shall not perish.’ (Is 56:3–5) The Book of Isaiah advocates the inclusion of men with crushed testicles when it associates righteousness in a reign of a God-fearing king to include the fame and social elevation of such sterile men. The vision of a future inclusion indicates a contrast to the demotion of sterile men in Deuteronomy 23:2 where it says, “No one whose testes are crushed or whose member is cut off shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord.”4 The Akkadian loanword “saris,” applied in the Book of Isaiah, designates men with crushed testicles and was probably incorporated in the Hebrew vocabulary due to experiences in the Babylonian exile in the 6th century bce where the exiled part of the population experienced how their neighbouring cultures castrated boys and men as either a punishment or a requirement to serve a king in a prestigious position. Some scholars believe that the last part of the Book of Isaiah prepared the people of Israel for the return of skilful, yet castrated men from exile and thus encouraged an annulment of the excluding verse of Deuteronomy 23:2 (Smith 1995, 53–54; 187). I see in this tolerance an attempt at preventing the loss of something valuable to Israelite culture; that is, variant bodies, and preventing a moral chaos or dissonance if these returnees had been excluded. Genderqueer bodies move from unintelligibility to signification in early rabbinic literature. The Mishnah (c. 200 ce) attracts the attention of gender scholars because it introduces four terms to address four variations of gender that 4 “The Congregation of the Lord” in the Hebrew Bible can refer to the group of priests officiating at the temple, the governing body of Israel, or simply the people of Israel. Its meaning depends on the context, and due to the concern of Deuteronomy to discourage castration of boys as a means to enable employment at royal, often foreign courts, it is most likely that the Deuteronomistic application of the expression designates all of Israel.

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did not conform to the gender binary of the Hebrew Bible. The Mishnah used the terms saris, aylonit, tumtum, and androgynos for the four variations. While the term “saris” was already applied in the Hebrew Bible to signify a man with crushed testicles, the Mishnah now distinguishes between a saris hamah— sterile since he first saw the sun—and a saris adam – sterile due to human intervention, whether this be due to an accident or deliberate castration (mYev 8:4). In the Mishnah, the masculinity of both types of saris is not questioned, but in the Tosefta (c. 325 ce), the saris hamah comes to connote something effeminate (tYev 10:6). Similarly, the neologism “aylonit,” meaning a ram-like woman, came in the course of developments from the Mishnah to the Tosefta to connote masculine traits in women defined by a quasi-scientific list of specific bodily features (Lev 2007, 309). The Tosefta’s description of the confluence of male and female traits enabled a detection of what the rabbis considered infertile men and women, thus warning their readers not to expect reproduction through their bodies. The exclusionary effect of such discursive regulation is obvious and in line with a Butlerian approach that takes discursive violence into account. Still, rabbinic literature also took trouble to define in what, albeit limited way a saris or aylonit was still admitted the possibility of marriage and thus inclusion to the central societal unit at that time. A saris could practically marry any woman except for his widowed sister-in-law because his chances of offering his deceased brother a child would be as good as non-existent (mYev 8:4–5). An aylonit who was open to her prospective husband about her infertility, was entitled to marriage including a marriage contract that would protect her in case of her husband’s death or in case he should divorce her (mKetubah 11:6). These specifications reflect an adjustment of immanent discourse and an expansion of conceptions of gender and love based on the gathering of knowledge about materially deviant bodies. “Tumtum” is another neologism invented to designate people of doubtful sex because of a skin membrane from the lower ribs to the thighs, covering the otherwise external genitals. Great anxiety in the early rabbinic sources exist as to h/er identity, and some take precautions by disputing the binding character of h/er marriage contract, if s/he had one, just as some rabbis included thoughts of having h/er operated upon to reveal h/er “true” sex (tYev 11:1). Constructionist gender theory can easily explain this and point to the idea of surgical intervention as a matter of violent regulation with effects on materiality. Butler’s theory of performativity can also explain why the early rabbis were open to let the one of doubtful sex marry either a woman or man in that h/er mere participation in marriage as a cultural performance would confer an intelligible gender identity back onto the individual, even if the gender identity conflicted with h/er material complexity. Still, this brief analysis shows that the ­materiality

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of a deviating body has agency to force Jewish religion to react, which is why constructionist accounts need supplement. The most enlightening example of how genderqueer bodies affected early Jewish literature stems from textual passages that signify and thus make intelligible people with intersex characteristics.5 As mentioned already, the Hebrew Bible did not have a word for it despite the fact that one in 1500 live births results in a child with an intersex condition (Blackless et al. 2000, 161). Something changed at the beginning of the Common Era. In their efforts to rethink Judaism on the now temple- and landless conditions, intersex challenged the biblical gender binary and the biopolitical efforts of the rabbis to divide their religio-legal system into gender specific performances that led to the construction of male or female Jewish identities in order to ensure life under new circumstances (Fonrobert 2007, 283–284; 288). In the Tosefta, the early rabbis attempted to synthesise emergent opinions from the Mishnah on the legal status of the intersexed into a categorical discussion of the gender of the intersexed, referred to with the Greek loanword androgynos (tBikkurim 2:3–7). Based on the very material ability of the androgynos to both menstruate and produce semen, the Tosefta discusses whether the androgynos should be conceived as a man, as a woman, as both a man and a woman, or as neither. The problem is that they consider the first three categories equally true with some striking contradictions as a result. On the one hand, it prescribes a legally sanctioned protection of the intersexed against violence and ridicule. On the other hand, the tractate states that an intersexed person cannot mingle with groups of women, nor groups of men, which practically renders the intersexed a social outcast. Economically, the intersexed would stand a poor chance of earning a living in that most work required cooperation in same-sex groups. The tractate also forbade an intersexed to live off an inheritance or maintenance unless s/ he was an only child. Yet, the androgynos is entitled to marry a woman. In this way, s/he could not impede the reproduction that a man was obligated to. The suggestions of the majority of the rabbis are strikingly contradictive, but what surprises even more is that they do not pay heat to Rabbi José’s final remark that the “androgynos” is one of a kind; that is, beyond male and female; that is, a third gender. In line with a constructionist paradigm, I find discursive violence against intersexed because they fail to conform to bodily norms and as such incarnate a bodily chaos. However, it cannot explain why the rabbinic text takes as its point of departure the very bodily fluids of blood and semen from the genitals. Nor can it explain why a material variation invites one r­ abbi’s 5 My presentation of intersex in early rabbinic Judaism is an elaborated version of my previous publications on the topic, especially Schleicher 2011, 2017.

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suggestion of a new gender category, or why Jewish discourse protects the androgynos against physical violence and ridicule and includes h/er in the culture by allowing h/er to marry a woman.6 To explain the molar lines of categorisation that sometimes exclude, but sometimes also lead to an increased intelligibility and inclusion of deviating bodies, I will turn to Grosz’ Deleuzian notion of how such lines ward off chaos, but also to her Darwinian notion that incitements to go against the norms are motivated by the prospects of securing existence and the unfolding of what is unique to those involved. After the year 135 ce, when the Jews lost Judea, their material living conditions changed and Jews were dispersed into exile. This often implied that Jews lived in small family units, sometimes without Jewish communities to lean on in times of crisis. Every Jew was needed. At the same time, there would have been an acute awareness of how infertility would endanger the immediate survival of this smallest societal unit. This is why I venture the explanation that gathering knowledge about signs of infertility led to Tosefta’s biopolitical, quasi-scientific lists of signs as in the case of the saris hamah and the aylonit in order to detect dangers to reproduction. Yet, infertile men and women were most likely also beloved family members whom the family tried to protect. Molecular bonds of love, affection, and empathy thus intra-acted with molar lines to create a safe context on a more individual level of unfolding within the family units of Jews living in exile well aware of the material constitution of their genderqueer bodies. 4

Analysis of Lines of Love in the Hebrew Bible

Everything indicates that the word “love” in the Hebrew Bible designates a contractual, segmentary relation and not an emotion as we know it today. The word for love, ahavah, and cognates are used 252 times in heteronormative contexts. In all cases except for five, love defines something a man does. He may say, “I love you” to a woman, but never does he hear in return “I love you, too!” Only four times in the Song of Songs and once in the First Book of Samuel does a woman love. The example from the First Book of Samuel is a typical exception that proves the point. The female lover is Michal, the princess daughter of Saul, who expresses her love for David at a time when he was still a shepherd boy (1 Sam 18:20, 28). These findings along with God’s love for Israel have led some scholars to conclude that love in the Hebrew Bible designates the doings of the hierarchically privileged and that love is synonymous with 6 For more on the tolerant sides of culture, see Schleicher 2019.

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protection in return for loyalty (Ackerman 2002; Wolde 2008). Such protection was a social strategy to protect the physically weak. Within the segmentary lines of contractual love, sexuality was heavily regulated. Leviticus 18, the central biblical chapter that regulates love involving sex, reflects that three aspects of cultural survival are threatened to such an extent that they need regulation; these are reproduction, social cohesion, and national boundaries. Should a man waste his semen through intercourse with other men or animals, cause strife in the local community by having sex with the neighbour’s wife or have sex with a woman connoting foreign cultures, he and his companion in crime would be queered and met with legal sanctions, mostly death by stoning (Mohrmann 2004). Segmentary lines, however, do not account for all lines of love warding off chaos or directing material life to a future different from the present. The word for love is applied in two biblical narratives that make intelligible deep affection in same-sex, yet asexual, molecular relations. Upon Jonathan’s death, David mourns his friend and says, “You were most dear to me. Your love was wonderful to me more than the love of women” (2 Sam 1:26). Similarly, in the Book of Ruth, the Moabite Ruth declares her loyalty to her Judaite mother-in-love Naomi by giving up her past relations to Moabite culture to choose Naomi as her life companion and adopt Naomi’s Judaite culture instead (Ruth 1:16–18). Past and present entanglements line the molecular bonding between David and Jonathan as well as Ruth and Naomi. Biology ties Jonathan to his father Saul, the Judaite king, but the narrative intends to explain the necessary advancement of David to the Judaite throne, and so the narrative needs allies within the court and points to Saul’s own children. Their bonding, or protagonistic love as I have called it elsewhere (Schleicher 2013), makes the narrative proceed to the desired result and simultaneously encourages a shift in the listerner’s/reader’s allegiance from Saul to David: a Foucaultian shift in the complex, yet immanent field of force relations. Naomi’s bereavement of both a husband and two sons and Ruth’s status as a foreigner, widowed before she could give birth to an heir that would have secured her livelihood on Judaite soil, condition their molecular bonding to ward off chaos; or to be more concrete: the unprotected state of two women, who are no longer protected within the segmentary lines of a patriarchal family. Instead, molecular lines of bonding enable the survival of Ruth and Naomi and even enable the unfolding of their family line. Some nomadic experiments may lie behind what later turn into molar and molecular lines of love as they are presented in the Hebrew Bible. I have in mind that Sarah’s narratively applauded handing over of her maid to Abraham as his second wife may be the narrative effect of nomadic practices where

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c­ ouples had to experiment with an early version of assisted reproduction to secure the future of the family unit. The same pertains to Jacob’s marriage to both Lea and Rachel despite the prohibition against marrying two sisters when both are alive (Lev 18:18) and the introduction of the handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah as third and fourth wives (Gen 29–30). Assisted reproduction through handmaids and polygyny in general may have originated in improvised, nomadic bonds, stirring the more molar lines in an attempt to compensate for very bodily challenges to reproduction and thus secure the unforeseeable future. The Hebrew Bible also testifies to the effects of nomadic lines of love, of bodily arousals, passions, drives, and psychological states of infatuations and obsessions, that were met with sanctions because a majority deemed them unviable; that is, counterproductive to the biopolitical concerns of the Hebrew Bible. I have in mind the narrative about Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Lea, who went outside the village where she met the Hivite Shechem: “Being strongly drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob, and in love with the maiden, he spoke to the maiden tenderly” (Gen 34:3), upon which they had sex. The narrative presents the sex as rape, but Dinah left her own town unaccompanied, and Shechem asks his father to arrange for their marriage even though Israelite law specifies that rape automatically requires of the rapist that he marry the raped woman with no rights to refuse or to obtain a divorce in the future (Deut 22:28 29). Several scholars have suggested that this narrative portrays the effects of love and physical attraction between two people of different ethnicities (e.g. Bechtel 1994). The subsequent slaughter of the entire Hivite village of Shechem invites the diffractive use of a Butlerian explanation through the prism of Deleuze: a molar commandment against intermarriage was more vital to ethnic survival than the nomadic attempt at subversion, by stepping outside the iterative marriage procedures in Israelite culture, moving outside the town, acting upon bodily drives and not waiting upon the possible brokering of their fathers. My final example of nomadic lines of love transgressing the limits to biopolitical tolerance stem from two narratives about King David. The Second Book of Samuel relates how David, despite the prohibition against coveting one’s neighbour’s wife (Lev 18:20), desires to unite with the beautiful Bathsheba, married to his neighbour Uriah the Hittite. David gets his way with her and they have sex, upon which she becomes pregnant (2 Sam 11:2–5). David’s desire expands beyond carnal sex, and so he orchestrates a mission for Uriah that will get him killed (2 Sam 11:15), which enables David’s marriage with Bathsheba and the birth of his offspring inside his own household (2 Sam 11:27). The following chapter extolls in explicating how God punishes David for his trespass,

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and the punishment includes the death of his and Bathsheba’s son (2 Sam 12:18). To emphasise the point about the dangers of unruly sex, an additional narrative portrays how Amnon, son of David, rapes his half-sister Tamar. He refuses her advice not to trespass the laws of Israel, and so “he overpowered her and lay with her by force” (2 Sam 13:14). He even refuses to marry her after the rape as a rapist should (Deut 22:28–29). Tamar confides in her full brother Absalom and tells him about Amnon’s crime. Eventually, Absalom revenges her sister by arranging for the murder of Amnon (2 Sam 13:29–33). David’s nomadic bonding with his neighbour’s wife, passed down to his son Amnon in the latter’s untamed sexuality and subsequent rape of his half-sister Tamar, testifies to the endangering of life that follows from undisciplined sexuality, narratively visualised by David’s grave fate of losing two sons. Not all lines of love are deemed viable. 5 Conclusion Motivated by my wish to include explanations of how materiality affects developments in Israelite-Jewish conceptions of gender and love, I have argued for a synthesis of constructionist and new materialist approaches. Constructionist approaches like those ones of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are productive when it comes to accounting for various cultural regulations, often by means of discursive violence. Theoretically and methodologically, I hold on to Foucault’s encouragement to look for discursive strategies that establish phenomena as natural and to understand power, including biopower, as a dynamic strategical situation that invests in differences including deviations from the norms. I am convinced by Butler’s analysis that subversion is possible as long as the subverting agent demonstrates h/er loyalty toward culture by participating in rituals and other rule-regulated, iterative acts. Both Foucault’s analysis of investments in differences and Butler’s analysis of cultural tolerance of loyal attempts at subversion have pronounced explanatory value with regard to elucidating why cultural conceptions of gender and love have developed in time. However, their insights need supplement as well as a paradigmatic shift that enable an immanentist approach to culture and an address of the empirical phenomena of the natural sciences as more than matters of discursive construction. While I agree that our approach to objects of cognition are alwaysalready influenced by culture when we relate to them, I follow Haraway when she emphasises that both human, animal, organic, and non-organic objects still have a detectable effect, diffracted as it may be. I pay heed to Barad’s understanding that phenomena, or relata as she explains them, constantly change

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as an effect of dynamic entanglements with both matter and meaning. I also value her pioneering efforts in rescuing important constructionist concepts such as Butler’s performativity, agency, and subversion for continued use within a new materialist paradigm. Barad’s diffractive rehabilitation of Butler’s thinking introduces, for example, the understanding that deviating or reconfigured matter by its mere participation in iterative acts can affect subversion of norms. Finally, I followed Grosz in insisting on an immanentist ontology that considers both nature and culture immanent phenomena and therefore analysable on the same level. Grosz’ Deleuzian worldview that molar, molecular, and nomadic lines connect everything in this world, be it material or immaterial, enable such analysis. Whereas Haraway and Barad were reluctant to speak of causality, Grosz integrates a nuanced Darwinian evolutionary theory with which she explains the causative production or development of connections, be they material or immaterial, in that this activity enables living beings to address the real, to set off alternatives to chaos, to ensure the existence and the unfolding of both individuals and collectives. Methodologically, the synthesis of constructionist and new materialist insights enabled me to address how Israelite-Jewish texts on genderqueer bodies and love testified to materiality affecting adjustments in terminology, in discourses on gender and love, in emerging tolerances of deviating bodies, and even in occasional instances of their inclusion. I looked for attempts at regulation either through discursive violence against deviant genders and loves or investments in those who try to subvert norms of gender and love through participation in the repetitive acts from within culture. I also looked for molar, molecular, and nomadic lines, asking about their entanglement with matter and meaning, what they addressed, warded off, and what existence and unfolding they secured. Based on these theoretical and methodological considerations, I detected that surely central texts in the Hebrew Bible carve out Israelite gender by means of five gender norms promoted along molar lines that reprove deviation. Despite the biblical silence on intersexed people and their subsequent unintelligibility, it is nevertheless possible to find tolerance and inclusion of, for example, people with reproductive disabilities, something very material that has affected legal and narrative texts to adjust and expand their circles of inclusion. New terminology to signify variations in gender beyond the gender binary are produced in early Rabbinic literature where the concrete living conditions necessitated a carving out of gender-specific performances in an attempt to redefine male and female Jewish identities in exile. The bodily deviations of people with immature, indeterminate or mixed sexual characteristics testify to the agency of material relata to affect cultural change and even to

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admit to their existence, even to their relative integrity, as is evident in the laws that protected them against violence and ridicule and granted them some rights to ensure their survival despite overt adaptive disadvantages. Love also testifies to developments along molar, molecular, and nomadic lines, even though not all nomadic attempts are allowed to subvert molar and molecular lines. While love is biopolitically regulated to secure cultural survival, bonds of love and affection evolve to forge alliances, just as love is a category that protects against the chaos of not belonging. Some nomadic attempts at subverting molar lines of love such as intermarriage, adultery, and rape of siblings are prohibited to warn against what directionality not to pursue. Brief and based on a very limited number of Israelite-Jewish texts, I nevertheless conclude that effects of both the material and the discursive can be detected, which again serves as my argument for combining constructionist and new materialist approaches to gender and love. References Ackerman, Susan. 2002. “The Personal Is Political: Covenantal and Affectionate Love in the Hebrew Bible.” Vetus Testamentum 52(4): 437–458. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understand of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801–831. Bechtel, Lyn. 1994. “What if Dinah Is Not Raped? (Genesis 34).” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 62: 19–36. Blackless, Melanie et al. 2000. “How Sexually Dimorphic are We? Review and Synthesis.” American Journal of Human Biology 12: 151–166. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2001. “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality”. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 7(4): 621–636. Butler, Judith. 1999 (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 1983. “Politics.” In On the Line. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by John Johnston, 69–115. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1983. “Rhizome.” In On the Line. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by John Johnston, 1–65. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva. 2007. “Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender.” In The Cambridge Companion to the

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­ almud and Rabbinic Literature. Edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin T S. Jaffe, 270–294. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Introduction – Herculine Barbin.” In Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Translated by Richard McDougall, vii–xvii. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1993. “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics.” Topoi 12: 167–179. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. “Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance.” In Material Feminisms. Edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 23–51. Minneapolis: Indiana University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. Haraway, Donna. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” Cultural Studies. Edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York, Routledge. Jones, Tiffany et al. 2016. Intersex Stories and Statistics from Australia. Cambridge, U.K.: Open Book Publishers. Lev, Sarra. 2007. “How the ‘Ailonit’ Got Her Sex.” AJS Review 31(2): 297–316. Mohrmann, Doug C. 2004. “Making Sense of Sex: A Study of Leviticus 18.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29(1): 57–79. Schleicher, Marianne. 2017. “Androgyny/hermaphroditism: Early Judaism.” In Oxford Biblical Studies Online. Edited by Julia O’Brien, n.p. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schleicher, Marianne. 2011. “Constructions of Sex and Gender: Attending to Andro­ gynes and Tumtumim through Jewish Scriptural Use.” Literature & Theology 25(4): 422–435. Schleicher, Marianne. 2013. “Gender and Love in Jewish Religion.” In On Gender and Love: Interdisciplinary Explorations. Edited by Dikmen Yakali-Çamoğlu, 19–40. ­Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Schleicher, Marianne. 2019. “Violent or Tolerant Attitudes toward Deviation from Gender Norms? Insights from Israelite and Early Jewish Religion in the Uneven Distribution of Vulnerability.” In Fluid Gender, Fluid Love. Edited by Deirdre C. Byrne and Wernmei Yong Ade, 9–31. Leiden: Brill. Smith, Paul Allan. 1995. Rhetoric and Redaction in Trito-Isaiah: The Structure, Growth and Authorship of Isaiah 56–66. Leiden: Brill. Wolde, Ellen van. 2008. “Sentiments as Culturally Constructed Emotions: Anger and Love in the Hebrew Bible.” Biblical Interpretation 16: 1–24.

Chapter 2

For Love of the World: Material Entanglements in Ecosexual Performance Louis van den Hengel Abstract This chapter discusses how ecosexuality, an emerging sexual identity and social movement that links the struggles for sexual and environmental justice, takes love and love studies beyond the human subject. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist new materialism and new materialist environmentalism, the chapter argues that developing non-anthropocentric approaches to the study of gender and love is epistemically and politically necessary in the context of the current environmental crisis. To substantiate this argument, the chapter examines selected works of American artist couple Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, who have pioneered the ecosexual movement by staging multiple weddings to nonhuman nature.

Keywords Annie Sprinkle (1954-) – contemporary art – ecosexuality – Elizabeth Stephens (1960-) – entanglement – environmentalism – feminist new materialism – intra-action – Karen Barad (1956-) – love studies

1 Introduction On a hot summer day in August 2009, a colourful group of artists, ecologists, porn stars, poets, activists, academics and a couple of blue-tailed mermaids gathered by the edge of the Adriatic Sea in Venice to declare their love to the Sea, and to each other, in celebration of the personal, social and spiritual connections between themselves and the more-than-human material world. It was the sixth performance art wedding produced by American artist couple Annie M. Sprinkle and Elizabeth M. Stephens, who for the past eighteen years have been working together with various creative and activist communities, as well as with a range of nonhuman natural beings, to develop “projects that

© Louis van den Hengel, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_004

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explore, generate, and celebrate love” (Love Art Lab, n.d.). Sprinkle and Stephens are known as pioneers of what has been termed ecosexuality, an emerging transnational grassroots movement where sexual and environmental concerns converge around a desire for more mutual and more sustainable relationships between human and more-than-human lifeworlds. Their “ecosexual” Blue Wedding to the Sea, staged as a one-day event during the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, was part of a larger sevenyear project entitled The Love Art Laboratory, initiated by Sprinkle and Stephens in 2004 as a response to “the violence of war, the anti-gay marriage movement, and our prevailing culture of greed” (Love Art Lab, n.d.). The artists asked for no material contributions, but invited people to co-create the wedding through theatrical performances, ritual, poetry, story-telling, and various forms of explicit body art. By nightfall, the group assembled under the lead of philosopher, curator and transgender activist Paul B. Preciado, sporting a Viking helmet with large blue bunny ears. In a ceremony evocative of the ancient Sposalizio del Mare (Marriage of the Sea), a ritual during which the whole city of Venice would marry the Sea, the congregants promise to love, honour and protect the Sea as an intimate partner and as a living ecosystem from which no life on Earth can be divorced. In recognition of Sprinkle and Stephens’ creativity and commitment, this chapter situates their ecosexual art and activism in the context of current scholarship on love and intimacy. I aim to explore and affirm the potential of their collaborative work to take love – and love studies – beyond the figure of the human and into the more-than-human material world. I pose two main questions. First, how and to what effect do Sprinkle and Stephens express and enact love for human and nonhuman lifeworlds through their ecosexual art and activism? And second, what does this imply for the development of new understandings of love in contemporary gender and feminist studies? Drawing on current scholarship at the crossroads of feminist new materialism and new materialist environmentalism, I will argue that thinking with ecosexuality, as a non-normative practice of love and as what Karen Barad (2012a, 48) would term “active theory formation,” supports the development of post- or non-anthropocentric models for studying gender and love in the Anthropocene, the current historical moment in which human activity has altered the planet on a geological scale.1 If, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, the burgeoning 1 First coined in the 1980s by freshwater biologist Eugene Stoermer, the term “Anthropocene” was popularized in 2002 by Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. Whereas mainstream accounts of the Anthropocene sometimes reconfirm rather than challenge the traditional image of “Man” (anthropos) as a dominant species, the concept has been reframed more

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field of love studies can help us cope with some of the most urgent challenges of the contemporary world, including climate change and other global environmental concerns, it needs to rise to the challenge of thinking about love in ways that can account for the complex interplay of human and nonhuman intimacies in the twenty-first century. Love as a subject of academic scholarship has seen a remarkable resurgence in interest since the early 1990s, and especially after the turn of the millennium, with the introduction of new interdisciplinary fields such as “critical love studies” (Burge and Gratzke 2016) and “feminist love studies” (Ferguson and Toye 2017). What distinguishes love studies today, as Anna Jónasdóttir (2014) has suggested, is that love is increasingly being considered in its own right, rather than being translated into other terms (such as labour, care, romance or trust), while at the same time it attempts to go beyond established critical approaches that have, for the most part, restricted love to its negative and oppressive dimensions. Feminist theorists, in particular, have often been reluctant to engage with the subject of love, especially romantic love, beyond the scope of social and epistemological critique, focusing instead on the manifold ways in which love operates as a mechanism for “seducing” women and other marginalised groups into systemic social subordination (Ferguson and Jónasdóttir 2014, 2). The harmful aspects of romantic love, as a discursive and ideological formation intimately linked to the construction of gender, race, sexuality and other categories of social differentiation, have been convincingly demonstrated. The current “turn” to love, by contrast, increasingly draws attention to love’s productive and positive possibilities. Thus, while continuing to examine the normative aspects of love, recent theorists have foregrounded love as a “unique creative/productive power” (Jónasdóttir 2014, 21), as “connecting energy or capacity” (Ferguson and Toye 2017, 5), or as a source of revolutionary political action (Hardt 2011). It is my contention that, despite these developments, most previous understandings of love have been too human-centred and therefore do not address how love itself is constituted in relation to the more-than-human material world. This is something love scholars cannot afford to overlook in an age of increasing ecological destruction and environmental injustice. In the introduction to their special issue of Hypatia on feminist love studies, Ann Ferguson and Margaret Toye suggest that twenty-first century love studies must “include more thinking about love in relation to nonhumans, including animals, other c­ ritically in feminist and environmentalist scholarship, for example by Stacy Alaimo (2016). Other concepts have been proposed in addition to the “Anthropocene,” most notably the “Capitalocene” (Moore 2016) and the “Chthulucene” (Haraway 2016).

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species, [and] the environment” (2017, 16). With the possible exception of research into divine love, most scholars have indeed tended to consider love predominantly, or even exclusively, as a distinctively human emotion; a social force considered as comparable with, but not reducible to, human labour power (Jónasdóttir 1994), an experience arising from the relational dynamics of human bonding and framed by the economic demands of consumerism and “emotional capitalism” (Illouz 2007), or as a “leap of faith” amounting to nothing less than “the birth act of humanity” (Bauman 2003, 78). While building on these earlier approaches, current love scholarship is breaking new ground by studying love and intimacy through emerging non-anthropocentric paradigms, including new materialism and object-oriented ontology (Malinowska and Gratzke 2018), posthumanism and critical animal studies (Pettman 2017), and feminist affect theory (Toye 2018). I situate my present contribution alongside this recent theoretical work, while at the same time forging new alliances between love studies, new materialism, feminist environmentalism and contemporary art. The chapter has six sections. The first is this introduction. The second section situates the work of Sprinkle and Stephens in relation to the wider practice of ecosexuality as a strategy for environmental sustainability as well as an expanded concept of sexual intimacy. The third section examines how Sprinkle and Stephens express their love for nonhuman nature by creating ecosexual actions and performances that respond to matters of social, sexual and ecological injustice. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the philosophical, political and ethical implications of ecosexual love by bringing the work of Sprinkle and Stephens into conversation with current scholarship in feminist new materialism and new materialist environmentalism. As a whole this chapter seeks to develop a radically non-anthropocentric approach to contemporary love studies based on a new materialist ontology of love as a matter of intra-active becoming. In this way, it seeks to contribute to the ongoing development of contemporary love studies as a field of scholarship prepared to reckon with the specific conditions and challenges of the Anthropocene. 2

Ecologies of Desire

The word “ecosexual” emerged around the beginning of the twenty-first century as an online dating term used to describe persons who identify their sexual identity and/or dating preferences in terms of environmental values and ecological consciousness (Stephens and Sprinkle 2016, 315). It has also been branded as a method to increase awareness of the environmental impact of

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human sexualities and sexual acts. In her book Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable published in 2010, Stefanie Iris Weiss traces the ecological implications of current sex products and practices, including the impact of used-condom refuse on landfills, the chemical effects of birth control medication as it is flushed into waterways and ecosystems, the use of toxic, carcinogenic plastic for sex toys, and the impact of reproductive choices on the environment. This “green sex guide” invites readers to “renew your passion for the environment while you recharge your love life” (Weiss 2010, back cover) and promotes the use of eco-friendly products such as fairtrade condoms, bamboo bed linens and low-impact lingerie. Sustainability and environmental awareness have also informed the marketing strategies of local sex toy shops and erotic boutiques. Environmental and social justice activist Kim Marks, for example, has been running the eco-conscious, green and gender-inclusive pleasure shop “As You Like It” in Eugene, Oregon since 2012. Described on its website as a “leader in Eco-Sexuality” (As You Like It 2017), the store encourages consumers to minimise their impact on the biosphere by choosing “non-toxic sex toys, lubes, massage oils, and many other eco-sexy treats.” More broadly, ecosexuality is a term that acknowledges that human sexuality is always already entangled with the entire material world, since all human life is intrinsically and inextricably connected to nonhuman nature. Ecosexuality thus shifts the modern Western understanding of sexuality as a property of distinct human bodies and organisms towards a more complex and holistic view on erotic desire as an irreducible intermeshing of human and nonhuman intimacies (Morris 2015; van den Hengel 2017). Ecological consciousness in this way becomes essential to the way humans engage with the physical, social and cultural dynamics of sexuality, while, in its turn, sex is reconfigured as a crucial vector of ecological justice. In recent years ecosexuality has been mobilised as a new paradigm for environmental thinking across different social movements, intentional communities and activist spaces to bring together a broad range of individuals and groups around the shared vision of sustainable practices of love for the one partner we all share: planet Earth. In this context, ecosex refers both to the strategy of using sex and sexuality to raise awareness about global environmental concerns and to “the act of partnering with the Earth and treating the Earth with the respect and care of an intimate partner” (AnderliniD’Onofrio and Hagamen 2015, 305). Since 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens have pioneered ecosexuality as a strategy to make the environmental movement “more sexy, fun and diverse” (Stephens and Sprinkle 2012, 66) by using tactics of civil disobedience, artistic activism,  theory, humour, sex-positive feminism and crossgenerational queer

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c­ ommunity building. They have written an Ecosex Manifesto, organized several international symposia, and co-founded the E.A.R.T.H. Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they produce experimental environmental art, workshops, “ecosex walking tours,” performances, and documentary films that explore and enact their ecosexual vision. As ecosex activists they pledge to “save the mountains, waters and skies by any means necessary, especially through love, joy and our powers of seduction” (Sprinkle and Stephens 2011). They thus avoid the austere, and often ineffective, ethic of self-restraint frequently associated with sustainability discourse, and replace it with an abundant sense of pleasure, eroticism and sexual energy: We make love with the Earth. We are aquaphiles, terraphiles, pyrophiles and aerophiles. We shamelessly hug trees, massage the Earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants. We are skinny dippers, sun worshippers, and stargazers. We caress rocks, are pleasured by waterfalls, and admire the Earth’s curves often. We make love with the Earth through our senses. We celebrate our E-spots. We are very dirty. (Stephens and Sprinkle 2011) By shifting the metaphor for human engagement with the planet from Earth as mother to Earth as lover, Sprinkle and Stephens invite us to engage our physical and emotional intimacies in acts of environmental preservation without reducing “nature” to a mere background or resource for the human subject. In this way they seek to entice others to cultivate more mutual relationships with the material world in which all life is immersed and upon which all life depends. After all, unlike the figure of the Earth as a mother who will love and care for her children unconditionally, lovers are more likely to leave us if we do not treat them well (Stephens and Sprinkle 2016, 314). In their efforts to challenge dominant Western articulations of nature, gender and desire, Sprinkle and Stephens work both within and against a long history of portraying nature as female. As feminist ecocritics have long argued, the image of nature as a “mistress or mother for a desiring or needy male” (Alaimo 2010, 37–38), or as a “virgin resource” to be exploited or “raped,” persistently conjoins the domination of nonhuman nature with the historical devaluation of women and femininity (Merchant 1980; Roach 1991). Moreover, as Greta Gaard (1997, 131) has noted, “when nature is feminized and thereby eroticized, and culture is masculinized, the nature-culture relationship becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality.” Sprinkle and Stephens, by contrast, break down the conceptual linkages between nature and femininity that have been used for centuries to justify practices of social and epistemic violence against women, queer and trans persons, persons of colour and indigenous people, as

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well as a range of nonhuman animals, plants, and what Val Plumwood (1993) has called “earth others.” By turning “Mother Earth” into the non- or potentially poly-gendered figure of “Lover Earth,” Sprinkle and Stephens challenge the enduring naturalisation of inequality through intersecting oppressive structures such as racism, classism, sexism, homo- and transphobia, ageism and ableism, and at the same time they posit a more “radical relationship with environmentalism that is nonheteronormative and nonhuman centered” (Stephens and Sprinkle 2016, 319). Ecosexuality, then, entails a radical sexual and environmental politics with a non-anthropocentric perception of love, or eros, as the ecology of life itself. As environmental feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo (2016, 86) notes, Sprinkle and Stephens offer “playful, erotic, environmental performances in which queer desire is not contained by heteronormativity or the human but affirms sensual, passionate interconnections between humans, trees, rivers, rocks, and more.” By insisting on the sensual interchanges between bodies, selves, and the material forces and substances of the world, Sprinkle and Stephens suggest that human sexuality – and indeed, sex itself – is always intermeshed with the more-than-human environment. Ecosexuality, in other words, approaches the physical and emotional intimacies of love and lust as an entanglement of, rather than an interaction between, human and nonhuman bodies and lifeworlds. In what follows I will demonstrate that this ecological conception of sexuality not only encourages a new materialist understanding of the self as “perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” (Alaimo 2016, 112), but will also allow us to take love – and love studies – beyond the figure of the human and re/connect it to the world in its differential becoming. 3

The Matter of Ecosexual Love

In an ecosexual worldview, all life – both human and nonhuman – is part of an interdependent web of existence where the material, social, political and spiritual dynamics of living and loving meet in co-shaping motion and being. In this section I will explain how Sprinkle and Stephens express this worldview by creating actions and performances that respond to specific issues of social, sexual and ecological injustice. This sets the stage for the next sections, where I illuminate the philosophical and political implications of their work by bringing it into conversation with Karen Barad’s agential realist account of matter and material agency. What is at stake in this discussion is the development of a non-anthropocentric approach to the study of gender and love. Displacing

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the centrality of the human, or what Rosi Braidotti (2013, 81) calls a “shift towards a planetary, geo-centred perspective,” is imperative if contemporary love studies wishes to respond adequately to the current global ecological crisis. If, as Dominic Pettman (2018, 20) argues, “no romance or passion today can afford to ignore its context in the Anthropocene,” then love studies must indeed embrace modes of inquiry suited to the task of confronting anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric affection. To convey their love for the world, Stephens and Sprinkle creatively appropriate and transform the social and cultural script of marriage, and the accompanying ideas of romantic love and coupledom, through staging elaborate weddings to nonhuman nature. They initiated their Love Art Laboratory in the context of continuing legal and social battles over same-sex marriage in the United States, using the “most iconic of love rituals” – the wedding – as “a platform to challenge restrictions regarding who is human enough to own the right to legally marry or engage in other forms of public love” (Stephens 2010, 13). Inspired by the long-durational work of performance artist Linda Mary Montano and its focus on spiritual energy states, Sprinkle and Stephens staged a series of annual performance art weddings loosely based on the colours and functions associated with the seven primary chakras of the human body in yoga. The project started in the city of New York in 2004 with a Red Wedding, the colour connected to the root chakra, dedicated to the themes of security and survival. These topics continued to inform their work throughout 2005. In 2006, the artists again married each other, and their communities, in an Orange Wedding in San Francisco, celebrating the themes of creativity and sexual pleasure linked to the second (sacral or orange) chakra. In 2007, Sprinkle and Stephens became legally married during the Yellow Wedding in Calgary, Canada, celebrating power and courage. For the fourth year, the green year, Sprinkle and Stephens decided to marry the Earth. Green is the colour associated with the fourth chakra – the heart chakra – but also refers to the environmental movement and “green” politics. With the Green Wedding, which took place in the magnificent redwoods of Santa Cruz, California, the artists became selfdeclared “ecosexuals” and began making ecological vows in addition to exchanging vows of love and commitment to each other (Morris 2015, 481). Over the past decade, Sprinkle and Stephens have produced twenty-two public “ecosex weddings” in nine countries, during which they have married both each other and various nature entities, including the Earth, the Sky, the Sea, the Moon, Snow, and the Appalachian Mountains.2 These large-scale 2 For an overview of most of the weddings see https://loveartlab.ucsc.edu (Accessed 8 June 2020).

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c­ ollaborative events not only served to celebrate the beauty, joy and resilience of queer love in all its forms, but also constituted new modes of environmental activism and community engagement. The Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, for example, was performed in Athens, Ohio, in 2010, to protest the practice of mountaintop removal mining in the area (Stephens and Sprinkle 2012). This form of surface mining uses explosives to extract coal seams from the summit ridge of the mountains, while the remaining toxic debris is dumped into neighbouring valleys. To date, mountaintop removal mining throughout the Appalachians has destroyed more than five hundred mountains; more than one million acres of forest have been decimated, and close to twenty-five hundred miles of headwater streams and rivers have been buried beneath mining waste, while many more have been irreversibly polluted by toxic acid overflow. The Purple Wedding, documented in the independent film Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, aimed at “de-normalizing state practices of environmental destruction,” whose damaging effects go well beyond terrestrial terrain (Stephens and Sprinkle 2012, 64). For example, earlier in the same year, Sprinkle and Stephens created a Purple Wedding to the Moon in response to the news that nasa was “bombing” the Moon to prospect for water. Marrying the mountains was an attempt to raise awareness about the devastating environmental and health impact of the coal industry, but it also should be seen as a ritual affirmation of love and intimacy as ecological interconnectedness. Contrary to what the legal regulation of marriage implies, the exchange of ecosexual vows by the artists and their audience is not about establishing new partnerships. Rather, it acknowledges that humans are constitutively entangled in worlds of inhuman intimacy: we are always already wedded to the beauty and suffering of the Earth, because the very matter of the world and the matter of human bodies only come into being through dynamic processes of mutual entanglement. By promising to love, honour and cherish the Earth “until death brings us closer together forever,” Sprinkle and Stephens (2011) clearly poke fun at the opponents of same-sex marriage who have complained that, if gays and lesbians are given the right to marry, people will want to marry anything and everything. But at the same time, they take the normative institution of marriage beyond its human-centric form and redistribute it across polyamorous networks of entangled agencies, “emergent worlds of desire” (Alaimo 2016, 60) in which humans and nonhumans mutually constitute one another through the material dynamics of intra-activity. In describing the work of Sprinkle and Stephens in terms of “entanglement” and “intra-action,” I am following feminist quantum physicist and theorist Karen Barad’s use of these terms as key concepts within contemporary new

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materialist feminism and the broader field of new materialism (Barad 2007; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010a). Although Barad’s work has received little attention in contemporary love studies,3 I find it particularly useful for thinking through the materiality of love, where matter is no longer imagined as “a massive, opaque plenitude but is recognized instead as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways” (Coole and Frost 2010b, 10). In the next section, I will demonstrate how a new materialist approach may illuminate the philosophical implications of ecosexuality, as a critical concept and situated practice of loving, for our understanding of love in contemporary gender and feminist studies. Specifically, I argue that Barad’s theory enables us to deprivilege the human in current love scholarship in order to relocate the subject of love within the more-than-human material world. This will, in turn, help contemporary love studies reckon with the unique challenges of the Anthropocene, where the advent of the human as a global geophysical force has muddled conventional distinctions between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, self and other. 4

Towards a New Materialist Ontology of Love

In her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Barad uses the work of Niels Bohr to call into question the foundational dualisms of modern and postmodern Western thought. Barad’s purpose is not so much to “deconstruct” these binary oppositions by questioning how one term is privileged over its ostensible opposite; rather, it is to show how pairings such as mind and matter, soul and body, culture and nature, knower and known, are themselves produced in what she calls “intra-action.” Barad uses this neologism, in contrast to the traditional “interaction,” to signify “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad 2007, 33, original emphasis). Whereas “interaction” presumes the existence of distinct entities or agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of “intraaction” challenges the belief in such individually constituted agents. Individual entities, or “relata” in Barad’s terms, do not preexist relations; rather, “relatawithin-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions” (Barad 2007, 140). In other words, the world’s phenomena come into being through processes of intra-active relating, in which the boundaries and properties of the elements 3 Notable exceptions are Tomasz Sikora’s chapter on photography as a medium of love in the recent essay collection The Materiality of Love (Malinowska and Gratzke 2018) and Susan Pyke’s contribution (on cross-species love) to the same volume.

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that compose any phenomenon become determinate. Barad therefore describes phenomena as the material entanglement – that is, the ontological inseparability – of intra-acting agencies: “relata” that do not preexist as such but rather materialise through “the world’s ongoing intra-activity, its dynamic and contingent differentiation into specific relationalities” (Barad 2007, 353). Entanglement, or intra-action, does not simply refer to the interconnectedness of things, but rather points to a relational ontology where nothing exists that precedes relations. The concept of intra-action thus entails a fundamental rethinking of the traditional notions of causality and agency (where one or more causal agents are assumed to precede and produce an effect) and, more generally, rejects what Barad (2007, 393) refers to as “the metaphysics of individualism.” If individuals do not preexist their interactions as separately determinate entities, then intra-action indeed “goes to the question of the making of differences” rather than identities, that is, the dynamic processes of relating through which “individuals” are intra-actively materialised (Barad 2012b, 77). Barad’s ontology, moreover, shows us that materiality itself is “an active factor in processes of materialization” (2007, 183). Contrary to traditional mechanistic views of matter as passive and inert, a mere resource for human use, Barad formulates a compelling model of material agency that “allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming” (2007, 136). This dynamic conception of matter as active, generative and self-transformative – a “shifting entanglement of relations, rather than a property of things” (Barad 2007, 224) – not only undercuts the traditional Western distinctions between subject/ object, culture/nature, discourse/matter, human/nonhuman and animate/ inanimate, but also reveals the agentive possibilities of the material world in all its “radical aliveness” (Barad 2007, 33). In Barad’s account of “agential realism,” the materialisation of the world is neither an objective reality that exists independently of human thought (as in traditional accounts of scientific realism) nor is it merely the passive product of linguistic and discursive acts (as assumed in many social constructionist and postmodernist paradigms). Barad does not separate culture from nature, language from reality, but instead demonstrates how these seemingly opposing terms come to matter through inseparably material-discursive practices, that is, the ontological entanglements of matter and meaning, word and world. Her work thus provides us with the conceptual tools necessary to articulate and understand, not only how ecosexuality “works” as an environmental activist strategy, but also how it reworks conventional understandings of love and intimacy as matters of human and nonhuman agency. Understanding the more-than-human material world as an active and agentive erotic partner disturbs the traditional conception of agency as the exclusive capacity of human

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beings to make autonomous decisions, as linked to human intentionality and subjectivity, as well as “the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature” (Coole and Frost 2010b, 10). Like Barad, Sprinkle and Stephens take the material world seriously as “a doing, a congealing of agency” (Barad 2007, 336), which means that they refuse to reduce the matter of nature to a static and passive object waiting to be acted upon by a desiring human subject. In fact, in an ecosexual world, there are no clear distinctions between subjects and objects of desire, since both come into existence only within a relation of mutual entanglement. I suggest that it is within this entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies that we need to situate the matter of love, not merely the materiality of its embodiment in human form, but the material dynamism from which all phenomena, both human and nonhuman, emerge in their inextricable interconnectedness. Recognising the agency of the more-than-human world, or what Jane Bennett (2010, 5) calls the “vitality of matter,” is essential for contemporary love studies to think through and respond to the condition of the Anthropocene, a state of ecological crisis in which, as Alaimo (2010, 21) notes, “elaborate, colossal human practices, extractions, transformations, productions, and emissions have provoked heretofore unthinkable intra-actions at all levels.” Rethinking agency in terms of “material entanglements” (Barad 2007, 91) or “agentic assemblages” (Bennett 2010, 107) allows us to break away from the image of lifeless matter that feeds human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to nonhuman nature, while at the same time enabling us to reconceptualise love as a vital aspect of our ongoing intra-action with the world. New materialism, then, not only expands the theoretical vocabulary for understanding how ecosexuality performs the “cultural work,” to borrow Jane Tompkins’ term (Tompkins 1985), of negotiating what it means to live and love in the Anthropocene, but also reveals new possibilities for studying love as a matter of intraactive world-making and world-breaking. In bringing the work of Sprinkle and Stephens into conversation with Barad’s new materialist thinking, I am suggesting that ecosexuality epitomises a new materialist ontology of love as intra-active relating, a dynamic process of connecting human beings, not only to each other, but to the vital materialities of the more-than-human world. Conversely, I also contend that the new materialism of Barad and others entails, however unwittingly, a critical affirmation of ecosexual love. The new materialist understanding of matter as something that “feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers” (Barad 2012a, 59), as what “reads and writes, calculates and copulates” (Kirby 2011, 95), suggests not only that matter is agentive but that it is in fact connective, passionate and sexual. Matter, in this sense, is both a medium for the flow of sexual desire and a desiring force in and of itself.

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If, as Barad asserts, the very nature of materiality entails an “exposure to the Other” (2007, 392), then the openness of matter – the indeterminacy of its capacity to connect – is always already erotic, if not downright eco-sexy. 5

Love in the Anthropocene

Ecosexuality, as we have seen, entails an ecological perspective on love and intimacy as the mutual implication of human and nonhuman bodily natures. It challenges us to rethink the very substance of the sexual self as not being separate from the wider material world, but coextensive with it. In the previous section I have discussed the philosophical implications of this ecosexual worldview, in which both humans and nonhumans are constitutively entangled in the world’s intra-active becoming. Barad’s agential realist account of matter was used to propose a new materialist ontology of love in which subjects and objects of affection do not preexist, but only come into being through the material entanglement of intra-acting agencies. In this section, I will explore some of the political and ethical implications of this ontology for environmental thought and action by tracing how the enactment of ecosexual love in the work of Sprinkle and Stephens grapples with the ways in which “one’s own bodily existence is ontologically entangled with the well-being of both local and quite distant places, peoples, animals, and ecosystems” (Alaimo 2016, 131). This will also allow me further to develop a non-anthropocentric approach to the study of gender and love in the troubling context of the Anthropocene. First, though, I want to return to the Blue Wedding to the Sea. What does it mean to marry a marine environment? The idea of being wedded to water, to bodies of water, at first sight appears to evoke the traditional image of water as the primordial, yet ever-shifting, origin of life: the “liquid ground,” in the words of Luce Irigaray (1991, 37) that, like a maternal womb, is essential to life on Earth. But Sprinkle and Stephens, as noted earlier, playfully resist the feminisation of nonhuman nature and the gender stereotypes and hierarchies it reinforces. In their artists’ statement, Sprinkle and Stephens situate their project in a “performative history of weddings between Venice and the Sea” (Morris 2015, 491). The wedding specifically evokes the traditional Marriage of the Sea ceremony, used since medieval times to symbolise Venice’s maritime dominion. Originally established as a ritual of placation, the ceremony was transformed into an annual nuptial rite in 1177 on the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of Venice. Legend relates that the Pope, as a sign of his gratitude for Doge Sebastiano Ziani’s involvement in negotiating peace with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, presented the Doge with a golden ring to throw

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into the water every year, declaring that Venice “must marry the sea as a man marries a woman and thus become her lord” (Morris 2015, 491). Considering the contemporary religious right’s insistence that marriage can only be between a man and a woman (a heteronormative and anthropocentric belief that Pope Francis, in a recent interview, reiterated as “the nature of things”), it is a delightful irony that weddings to an environmental entity have been performed under papal sanction for centuries. Sprinkle and Stephens highlight this irony through their intentionally humorous, yet seriously parodic, repetition of familiar wedding routines, as well as by undermining the conservative gender dynamics in which dominant males are assumed to “rule” over all kinds of feminised “others,” including women and the unruly forces of nonhuman nature. Establishing a radical sense of kinship and continuity with the material world, Sprinkle and Stephens provoke a fundamental rethinking, not only of the male/female dichotomy that is routinely used to naturalise heterosexual marriage, but also of the traditional conception of romantic love as a sustainable communion of intimacy. From an ecosexual point of view, marriage does not entail a sacred and life-giving union between two people (who are assumed to be human), nor does the wedding signify any human mastery over an externalised “environment.” In the context of the Anthropocene, marrying the Sea is a much more toxic affair, one that literally messes up the boundaries between humans and nonhumans as partners in an interlocking network of ecosystems at increasing risk from the global threats of ocean acidification, microplastic pollution, deep sea mining and drilling, industrial overfishing and the politics of nuclear waste disposal. Preciado, the Blue Wedding’s appointed “Anti-Priest,” clearly acknowledges this in the “Homily” written for the occasion: To marry the Sea today, in 2009, is to embrace a sick being. The Sea we are going to marry is, as we ourselves are, polluted, sick, but alive and historically charged. During the last two hundred years the human species has contributed to poisoning the water, killing fish and water mammals, threatening the health of the Sea and therefore putting at risk the survival of the planet. For this, we come here today, to Venice, a city made of water, to ask the Sea for forgiveness. We are here to give our love back to the Sea. (Preciado, n.d.) By affirming their partnership with a sick Sea, Sprinkle and Stephens stress the mutual entanglement of human, oceanic and other watery bodies in global networks of risk and harm. In this way they reconfigure the “purity” of love and

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Figure 2.1 Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s performance wedding party for the Venice Biennale. Date: August 28, 2009.

marriage as a matter of environmental contamination, while at the same time they shift the traditional sense of the human as a self-contained subject towards what Alaimo (2016, 155) refers to as a “trans-corporeal conception of the human as that which is always generated through and entangled in differing scales and sorts of biological, technological, economic, social, political, and other systems.” This shift not only locates a radically non-anthropocentric perspective on human and nonhuman intimacies at the heart of contemporary environmental politics and ethics, but also has profound implications for thinking about love in the Anthropocene. Alaimo describes trans-corporeality as “a posthumanist mode of new materialism and material feminism” (2018, 435), that is, an embodied and embedded way of accounting for how humans are always already intermeshed with nonhuman creatures and the flows of material agencies across bodies, places and environments. For Alaimo, who has developed the concept of trans-­ corporeality in conversation with Barad’s notion of intra-action and other new materialist theories, acknowledging the agentive power of matter, in its

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e­ ntanglement with human-induced toxic environments, forms the root of a ­non-anthropocentric environmental politics and ethics, one that embraces “a sense of being embedded, permeable, and profoundly interconnected with climates, landscapes, and nonhuman lives” (Alaimo 2016, 82). Barad likewise advocates what she calls a posthumanist “ethics of mattering” or “worlding” (2007, 391, 392), in which humans and nonhumans are responsible to others, “not through conscious intent but through the various ontological entanglements that materiality entails” (Barad 2007, 393). Ethics, Barad argues, is “not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (2007, 393). Responsibility, in this view, does not proceed from the human subject, nor does it arise from the metaphysics of individualism on which most traditional humanist understandings of morality and ethics are based; rather, it emerges from within the world’s differential becoming, the dynamic and unpredictable processes of intra-active relating that we can now simply call “love.” By understanding ecosexuality from the material feminist and new materialist environmentalist perspectives developed by Barad, Alaimo and others, we can recognise how ecosexuality, as an emerging practice of intimacy in the twenty-first century, advances a trans-corporeal ethics of love that displaces the humanist notion of the subject as ontologically distinct from what used to be known as “nature,” and instead relocates the subject of love within what Barad calls “differential patterns of mattering” (2007, 140). This is a critical post-anthropocentric shift that focuses attention on the mutual entanglement of human and more-than-human lifeworlds, while at the same time recognising that humans and nonhumans, including those marginalised groups who are diminished to “the less than human status of disposable bodies” (Braidotti 2013, 15), are not situated equally within the material-discursive entanglements that constitute the Anthropocene. In inviting others to nurture love for the Earth by marrying its polluted waters, mountains and other places, Sprinkle and Stephens do not simply reiterate the idea that “everything is connected,” nor do they fetishise the idea of a “pristine” nature to which human beings can supposedly “return.” Instead, their performances call for reflexive moments in which individual humans can re-evaluate the effects of their actions (or apathy) within the specific networks of environmental exploitation in which we are all constitutively entangled. Ecosexual love, then, entails an enlarged sense of ethical accountability based on an acute awareness of the radical equality of all beings, of self and others, including the multitude of earth others and environments through which both human and nonhuman subjects are intra-actively co-constituted. It thus mobilizes a posthuman ethics of responsibility that rejects established

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notions of moral agency, including the humanist commitments to moral universalism and liberal individualism that have historically reinforced rather than disrupted the domination and exploitation of nonhuman nature. If, as Barad maintains, agency is “a matter of intra-acting,” that is, “an enactment, not something that someone or something has” (2007, 178, original emphasis), then traditional notions of moral culpability or human intentional action will not help us become more accountable for our part in the world’s differential becoming. To intra-act responsibly as part – and partner – of the world is an ethical obligation that involves “taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish” (Barad 2007, 396). It is precisely to the extent that humans are capable of recognising and, as I have tried to do in this chapter, theorising our own entanglement within the ecologies of life and death known as the Anthropocene – an endeavour that necessitates questioning who is included in the anthropological “we” – that one can begin to address the question of how to live and love with nonhuman and more-than-human forms of life. 6 Conclusion The central aim of this chapter has been to explore and affirm the capacity of contemporary ecosexual art and activism to take the subject of love and love studies beyond the human and into the more-than-human material world. To this end, it has considered how the work of Sprinkle and Stephens expresses and enacts love for the world as a matter of human and nonhuman affection. I  have discussed how ecosexuality entails an ecological perspective on love and intimacy that encourages a rethinking of the human subject, not as a determinate individual that interacts with the world, but as a relational entity intra-actively entangled in the world’s ongoing becoming. Barad’s agential realist account of matter and material agency was used to demonstrate the philosophical implications of the ecosexual worldview, in which subjects and objects of love do not preexist, but rather come into being through the material entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies. Finally, I have explored how performing ecosexual love, in its mutual implication with gender, sexuality and other categories of social differentiation, provides a radically nonanthropocentric framework for contemporary environmental politics and ethics. In bringing the work of Sprinkle and Stephens into conversation with the burgeoning fields of feminist new materialism and new materialist environmentalism, this chapter has tried to elaborate a non-anthropocentric approach to the study of gender and love in the twenty-first century. Specifically, it has

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developed a new materialist ontology of love as intra-active relating that I propose as a new paradigm that displaces the centrality of the human in contemporary love studies in favour of a more egalitarian approach centred on the mutual entanglement of human and nonhuman intimacies. In this way, I hope to contribute to the positioning, or repositioning, of contemporary love studies in relation to the specific conditions and challenges of the Anthropocene, where environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, ecological destruction and species extinction demand a fundamental rethinking of the conventional distinctions between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, self and other. Scholars of love must become “worthy of our posthuman times” (Braidotti 2013, 150) and redefine both love and desire in terms of ecological principles grounded in a transformative ethics of sustainability, that is, a materially embedded sense of responsibility for the world’s pains and pleasures. If love, as Sprinkle and Stephens demonstrate, has the capacity profoundly to alter human beings’ relation to the world, to create more responsibility for the planet’s future, then love studies is in a unique position to invent new modes of struggle for social, sexual, environmental and ecological justice. References Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2016. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2018. “Trans-corporeality.” In Posthuman Glossary. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 435–38. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman (eds). 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Anderlini-D’Onofrio, SerenaGaia and Lindsay Hagamen. 2015. Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love. Puerto Rico: 3WayKiss. As You Like It. 2017. “As You Like It: The Pleasure Shop” and “About Us: Our Values.” https://asyoulikeitshop.com (Accessed 8 June 2020). Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Barad, Karen. 2012a. “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers. Interview by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin.” In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Edited by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, 48–70. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Barad, Karen. 2012b. “Intra-actions. Interview by Adam Kleinman.” Mousse 34: 76–81.

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Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Burge, Amy and Michael Gratzke. 2016. “Special Issue: Critical Love Studies (Editor’s Introduction).” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 6. http://jprstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SICLS.4.2017.pdf (Accessed 8 June 2020). Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds). 2010a. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010b. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 10–43. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Ferguson, Ann and Margaret E. Toye. 2017. “Feminist Love Studies: Editor’s Introduction.” Hypatia 32 (1): 5–18. Ferguson, Ann and Anna G. Jónasdóttir. 2014. “Introduction.” In Love: A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Anna G. Jónasdóttir and Ann Ferguson, 1–10. London/New York: Routledge. Gaard, Greta. 1997. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” Hypatia 12 (1): 114–37. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael. 2011. “For Love or Money.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 676–82. Hengel, Louis van den. 2017. “Sexecologies.” In Gender: Matter. Edited by Stacy Alaimo, 329–44. Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference USA. Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Irigaray, Luce. 1991. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press. Jónasdóttir, Anna G. 1994. Why Women Are Oppressed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jónasdóttir, Anna G. 2014. “Love Studies: A (Re)New(ed) Field of Knowledge Interests.” In Love: A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Anna G. Jónasdóttir and Ann Ferguson, 11–30. London/New York: Routledge. Kirby, Vicki. 2011. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Love Art Lab. n.d. “Home.” https://loveartlab.ucsc.edu (Accessed 8 June 2020). Malinowska, Anna and Michael Gratzke (eds). 2018. The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice. London/New York: Routledge. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row.

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Moore, Jason W. (ed.) 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press. Morris, Michael J. 2015. “Orientations as Materializations: The Love Art Laboratory’s Eco-Sexual Blue Wedding to the Sea.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Edited by Nadine George-Graves, 480–503. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettman, Dominic. 2017. Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Pettman, Dominic. 2018. “Love Materialism: Technologies of Feeling in the ‘Post-Material’ World (An Interview).” In The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice. Edited by Anna Malinowska and Michael Gratzke, 13–24. London/ New York: Routledge. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London/New York: Routledge. Preciado, Beatriz. n.d. “Blue Wedding to the Sea Homily.” https://loveartlab.ucsc. edu/2016/06/21/blue-wedding-to-the-sea-homily-by-beatriz-preciado (Accessed 8 June 2020). Roach, Catherine. 1991. “Loving Your Mother: On the Woman-Nature Relation.” Hypatia 6 (1): 46–59. Stephens, Elizabeth. 2010. “Becoming Eco-sexual.” Canadian Theatre Review, 144: 13–19. Stephens, Elizabeth and Annie Sprinkle. 2011. “Ecosex Manifesto.” http://sexecology. org/research-writing/ecosex-manifesto (Accessed 8 June 2020). Stephens, Elizabeth and Annie Sprinkle. 2012. “On Becoming Appalachian Moonshine.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17 (4): 61–66. Stephens, Elizabeth and Annie Sprinkle. 2016. “Ecosexuality.” In Gender: Nature. Edited by Iris van der Tuin, 313–30. Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference USA. Tompkins, Jane. 1985. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790– 1860. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toye, Margaret E. 2018. “Love as Affective Energy: Where Feminist Love Studies Meets Feminist Affect Theory.” In Feminism and the Power of Love: Interdisciplinary Interventions. Edited by Adriana García-Andrade, Lenna Gunnarson and Anna G. Jónasdóttir, 75–94. London/New York: Routledge. Weiss, Stefanie Iris. 2010. Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

Chapter 3

“Yet the old woman will not sleep”: Reading Motherhood in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Writings Deirdre C. Byrne Abstract This chapter explores well-known fabulist Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing about mothers. Le Guin is celebrated for her science fiction and fantasy, but her poetry is comparatively neglected. In order to remedy this situation, the chapter examines both fiction and poetry, with greater focus on the latter. Julia Kristeva’s theory on mothers’ role in children’s language acquisition and subject formation as well as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s matrixial theory are employed to illuminate the ambivalence towards mothers in Le Guin’s creative work. While Le Guin often portrays mothers as deficient in emotional presence, particularly in her fiction, her poetry contains traces of a matrixial relationship in which the material, as embodied touch, brings mother and daughter closer together than can be explained through a constructionist model alone.

Keywords Ursula K. Le Guin – poetry – motherhood – Julia Kristeva – Bracha Lichtenberg ­Ettinger – the matrixial – ambivalence

1 Introduction Mothers are conventionally perceived as the source and object of the purest love known to humanity. They generate and sustain life, and they offer children their first experiences of education and socialisation. Within many religious discourses, mothers are venerated, even apotheosised as icons of pure love for the unconditional and self-sacrificial acts of love they perform for their children. At the same time, and contradictorily, the figure of the mother is also an object of profound and passionate ambivalence. Mothers are seen as clinging, restrictive, and as making endless and unrealistic demands. Either way, they are figures of considerable biological, psychological, cultural and social power.

© Deirdre C. Byrne, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_005

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The difficult ambivalence of the mother-figure is a founding problematic within psychoanalytical theories of identity formation that, in turn, provided key ideas for différance feminism, such as that propounded by Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Différance feminists hold that the infant’s relation with the mother, who is immutably either of the same sex or a different sex from the child, shapes the subject’s sexed and gendered self-concept. The ambivalence of the mother’s position in the nuclear family is echoed by her ambivalent social status. As has been noted by many feminist theorists, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir, motherhood is both biological and social. My chapter will explore the “intra-action” of these two realms that are inextricably woven together. Poet and feminist, Adrienne Rich’s influential Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, explains: […] the power of the mother has two aspects: the biological power or capacity to bear and nourish human life, and the magical power invested in women by men, whether in the form of Goddess-worship or the fear of being overwhelmed and controlled by women. (1977, xv) Rich’s “magical power” is not only the social power that patriarchy accords to mothers: the word “magical” alludes to magical thinking, which holds that wishes and thoughts can bring about material results. Similarly, the “magical power” invested in women ascribes supernatural and superhuman powers to them. Rich perceptively notes the ambivalence of this power, either as a benevolent Goddess or a devouring one. While the maternal relation, indissolubly both concrete and emotional, physical and social, is famously one of love, it is also a powerful vortex of emotion. This weaving together of the biological and the social makes its way into the writing of celebrated fabulist Ursula K. Le Guin, who has written fiction, poetry, drama and essays. While there is no evidence that she has read or was influenced either by différance feminism or by psychoanalysis,1 many of her works foreground the family and its complex, emotionally loaded, entangled relationships as well as the effects of these dynamics on subject formation. Le Guin’s biography reveals close and loving family relationships between siblings, children, parents and partners. Nevertheless, in her writing, she depicts 1 Le Guin alludes to reading “modern feminism” in “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” and refers to Freud and Jung in “The Child and the Shadow,” asserting that “Jung saw the psyche as populated with a group of fascinating figures, much livelier than Freud’s grim trio of Id, Ego, Superego” (1993, 59). Aside from these two remarks, there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that her writing was influenced by différance feminism or psychoanalytical theory.

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difficult and contradictory relations between mothers and children, especially daughters. This seems strange, but offers the starting point for my investigation of her fiction and poetry here. In attempting to account for these entanglements and weavings, I draw on insights from Julia Kristeva’s theory on the role of the mother in processes of individuation and Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory of matrixial relationships, not to suggest that Le Guin follows either model, but to illuminate the dynamics at play in her representation of motherhood and on how mothers, children and language are all entangled in a complex and interwoven dance. 2

Theoretical Frameworks

Both Kristeva and Ettinger presented their thoughts on the behaviour of mothers at a time when conventional expectations of mothers (such as self-sacrifice, nurturing and prioritising emotional connection) were understood as constructed through sociality and discourse rather than being natural. Many constructionists, including Helene Deutsch (1973) and Nancy Chodorow (1978), built on Freudian insights into subject-formation to conclude that mothers learn nurturing behaviour, often from their own mothers. Semiologist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva uses object relations theory to explore the maternal in several essays, including “Stabat Mater” and “About Chinese Women.” In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) she links depression and melancholia to the loss of the maternal love object: “While acknowledging the difference between melancholia and depression, Freudian theory detects everywhere the same impossible mourning for the maternal object” (1989, 9, original emphasis). Mourning for the love and unity the infant once experienced with the mother that could restore the subject to a sense of wholeness, is impossible, Kristeva asserts, in cases where the subject has not gone through a successful process of individuation. Such a subject transpones his or her longing for the lost mother onto another object, because there is both “intolerance for object loss and the signifier’s failure to insure a compensatory way out of the states of withdrawal in which the subject takes refuge” (1989, 10, original emphasis). The depressed or melancholic subject cannot abide the fact that the mother – the originary love object – is irreversibly lost, and at the same time, the symbolic order, which might have been presumed to be a source of cathartic expression, fails to bring the subject out of lethargy and withdrawal. The potent metaphor of the black sun points to a loss that blinds the subject, but is all that he or she can see, similar to an emotional black hole sucking all the subject’s energies into the void.

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Kristeva’s theory played a central role in our understanding of the role of the mother in processes of individuation. Here, I want to supplement it with Ettinger’s theory of matrixial borderlinking because she enables new ways of thinking about the creative effects of the relationship between the mother-tobe and late uterine foetal development, as well as in mothers’ later relations with their grown-up daughters. Ettinger’s theory of the matrix (a word that is derived from the Old French matrice, meaning “uterus, womb”2) contains three ideas that underpin my reading of Le Guin’s poetry about her mother. The first is fascinance, which Ettinger differentiates from Lacan’s fascinum. Both fascinum and fascinance are gazes that establish an encounter between the self and other. Fascinum is equivalent to “the evil eye […] that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, killing life” (Seminar xi, 118). Fascinance means a healthy love attachment between the mother and her nearly-adult daughter, where the younger woman is fascinated by and learns vital lessons from her mother.3 The mother and daughter share space and communication in an atmosphere of “compassionate hospitality.” This, Ettinger suggests, is a more enduring effect of maternal relations than the estrangement between mother and child that is often presumed to lay the foundation for a successful transition into adulthood. Ettinger’s notion of copoiesis allows for the possibility of aesthetic cocreation, the making of artwork between the mother and daughter, and a recognition that these artworks serve ethical and affective purposes: an appropriate recognition for two writers such as Theodora Kroeber and her daughter Ursula le Guin. “Borderlinking” is Ettinger’s term for an interpersonal encounter that is devoid of constructs of self and therefore of the rigid distinction between “I” and “not-I.” In borderlinking, the two parties cognise the presence of the other and reach across the border that separates them, to touch or link with each other, without asserting their own selfhood in a defensive reaction. Ettinger argues that the capacity for borderlinking derives from late uterine existence, when the developing infant begins to sense the presence of the m/ Other, but without language or concepts, and accordingly, with only an awareness of ­co-presence. At the same time, the mother develops a shared awareness with the developing infant that lays the foundation for post-birth intimacy and care. Ettinger’s emphasis on “copoiesis” as part of matrixial borderlinking is helpful in directing our attention to the intra-action of art and relationship: 2 The Online Etymological Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/matrix (Accessed 8 June 2020). 3 For more, see Pollock (2006, 61).

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The painting [or artwork] gives rise to affects of wonder and awe, languishing and compassion, grace and solace, anxiety and fragility – responses that enable one’s own transformation and testify that the painting has opened a new vulnerability. (Ettinger 2006, 152) Similarly to making art (which Ettinger calls “artworking”), mothers also create new human beings in collaboration with their infants. In this chapter, I read Le Guin’s literary art with Kristeva’s and Ettinger’s ideas of the infant’s primary bond with the mother. This is not to imply that she read or was alluding to Kristeva and/or Ettinger, or to enshrine either theory or literature as having privileged insight into the entangled maternal relationship. Rather, they provide different, but overlapping, ways of thinking creatively about motherhood. In this way they participate in what Ettinger calls metramorphosis.4 She defines this as: […] specific routes of passability, transmissibility, transitivity, temporary conductivity, and transference between various psychic strata, between the subject and several other subjects, and between subjects and composite hybrid objects – routes through which “woman,” which is not the preserve of woman alone, is inscribed in a subsymbolic web, knitted justin-to the edges of a symbolic universe that cannot appropriate her in its preestablished signifiers. (2006, 94) Metramorphosis is specifically a feminine effect, but is not thereby limited to (biological) women. It enables images and affects to pass between subjects.5 Through its capacity for entangled, interwoven and mutually permeable interaction, it inscribes “woman,” defined as whatever does not fit into the “symbolic universe,” into a web of not-quite-signification, similar to the position that Le Guin’s speaker occupies in relation to the figure of the mother in her poetry. It is also a space of “transgressive borderlinks that transform, simultaneously and differently, co-emerging partial-subjects, partial Others, partial-objects, and tracing elements” (Ettinger 2006, 65, original emphasis). The borderspace that develops in the late uterine period between the not-yet-infant and the not-yetmother participates in both of their emerging subjectivities, and yet belongs to neither of them; affective gestures towards what the emerging subject only senses as “non-I” create borderlinks that transgress the space of difference. 4 Ettinger has substituted the Greek root metra- (referring to the uterus) for the prefix meta(“beyond” or “more comprehensive”) to create metramorphosis. 5 Judith Butler cautions that “[Ettinger] is [...] asking us to reformulate the very relation between the subject and its other, and to ask what precedes this encounter [...]” (2004, 98).

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Ursula le Guin’s Biography

The name of Le Guin’s mother, Theodora Kracaw Brown Kroeber Quinn (hereafter “Theodora”), testifies to the identity shifts that she experienced in living a life that was delineated by marriage and children. She married three times: first to Clifton Spencer Brown, then to her anthropology professor, Alfred Kroeber, who was more than 20 years her senior, and finally to John Quinn. She bore two children, Ted and Clifton, with Brown, and they were adopted by Kroeber. She bore two more children (Ursula and Karl) with Kroeber. Ursula was her only daughter, and they shared a close and loving relationship. For example, when Ursula met Charles Le Guin in Paris and decided to marry him despite her parents’ absence, Theodora did not berate her daughter for undertaking this quintessentially familial act at a distance. Rather, she noted that this was an unusual agential choice, wished that she could be there for this defining moment in her daughter’s life, and sent daily handwritten letters discussing intimate “womanly” matters such as the wedding dress, Ursula’s make-up and appearance, while arranging to celebrate on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Theodora chose to support her daughter’s unconventional choice of marriage locale and reaffirmed the maternal bond. In this way, she diverged from the script of social expectation that would have required her to demand that the young girl marry near her parents’ home. In addition to emotional intimacy, Theodora and Ursula also enjoyed professional closeness as writers. Theodora (affectionately nicknamed “Krak” or “Krakie”) was the author of an acclaimed biography of the last member of the Yahi tribe in North America, entitled Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1961), whilst her daughter went on to become one of the most well-loved authors in North America. The many endearments and expressions of love in Theodora’s letters to Ursula certainly express what Griselda Pollock calls “compassionate hospitality” (2006, 61). The irreversible loss of the mother (postpartum as well as after the mother’s death) provokes compassion, while the artwork of poetry and fiction creates space for metramorphosis, allowing for the mutually transforming flow of affective material between subjects – a notion that is particularly pertinent to Le Guin’s shifting figurations of motherhood, her mother, and her own sense of the feminine. Kristeva and Ettinger hold that both connection and trauma characterise the relations between subjects and their archaic maternal others. Since both theorists cherish the notion of the subject, they present anti-constructionist arguments for subjectivity that, in my view, hold considerable explanatory power. The experience of birth inaugurates a separation that will eventually entail renouncing the phantasy of complete union and symbiosis with the

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mother.6 In Ettinger’s understanding, the moment of birth gives rise to the archaic trauma of separation from the non-I. The emerging subject does not know that the non-I is a distinct other since it is connected to the I through borderlinking. The deeply felt trauma of losing the m/Other recurs, and Ettinger demonstrates how these compulsive repetitions assist the subject to develop awareness of self and other, I and non-I, in relations of “jointness-inseparateness” (Ettinger 2006: 85). In the matrixial, there is no contradiction between jointness (or union) and separateness (or splitting): it is a situation of both-and rather than either-or. Mother and infant are both implicated in becoming subjects through their awareness of each other, not as Others, but as non-Is. During late uterine existence, Ettinger proposes that “[p]artial-subjects co-emerge and co-fade through retuning and transformations” (2006, 84). My chapter draws on Kristeva’s account of the loss of the mother as a founding event in the development of the subject together with Ettinger’s theory of matrixial borderlinking in an attempt to unravel the entanglements and weavings of love, expectation, loss and maternal unattainability in Le Guin’s writing to contribute to post-constructionist understandings of the maternal love relation through an intertextual reading of Le Guin’s biography, fiction and poetry. 4

Le Guin’s Fictional Mothers

As early as The Dispossessed (1974), Le Guin penned a rejecting mother in the form of Rulag. The novel’s protagonist is Shevek and his earliest recounted memory is of his father, Palat, telling a matron in the nursery: “‘The mother’s been posted to Abbenay […] . She wants him to stay here’” (1974, 29). In the anarchist society where they live, Rulag, an engineer, is posted to another station to work and chooses not to take her infant son with her, even though this would have been acceptable. In effect, she transgresses traditional expectations of motherhood and chooses work over parenthood – a choice that apparently scars Shevek for life. Le Guin’s unfolding of Shevek’s relationship with Rulag implicitly criticises the woman for making an unnatural choice. We read: “Shevek had learned how to wait […]. He had first learned the skill waiting for 6 Ettinger does not place temporal limits on the duration of the co-dependence of mother and infant, since her argument is that matrixial borderlinking provides a supportive substratum for the subject throughout life. For Kristeva, the symbiosis between mother and child lasts until the child’s entry into the Symbolic with the acquisition of language. This symbiosis, however, has long-lasting effects and enables most relations of trust and love later in each individual’s life.

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his mother Rulag to come back, though that was so long ago he didn’t remember it” (1974, 33). She returns to Shevek’s life when he has a collapse from overwork, and Le Guin portrays their encounter in the hospital in surprising terms: “he shrank away from her in unconcealed fear, as if she were not his mother, but his death” (1974, 106). Here Shevek responds to the “magical power” that has accrued to the maternal through his deprivation of Rulag’s presence. Like object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, follow Kristeva and Ettinger in affording mothers a central role in their children’s subject-formation. Kleinian theory divides the mother’s breast, as an early object of desire, into a “good breast” and a “bad breast”: The infant splits both his ego and his object and projects out separately his loving and hating feelings (life and death instincts) into separate parts of the mother (or breast), with the result that the maternal object is divided into a “bad” breast (mother that is felt to be frustrating, persecutory and is hated) and a “good” breast (mother that is loved and felt to be loving and gratifying). (Melanie Klein Trust n.d.) Shevek’s meeting with Rulag in the hospital exemplifies the way a child, exposed to a bad mother who fails spectacularly to nurture, protect and care for her infant, perceives the mother as threatening his death. In both The Dispossessed and Kleinian object-relations psychoanalysis, the maternal figure can become a harbinger of non-being. Rulag is associated with the death drive for Shevek because she is the origin of his non-existence as well as of his existence. As a child, he felt as though he did not exist while in a liminal zone,7 waiting hopelessly and endlessly for her return, unable to enjoy the sense of security that a stably present mother would have provided. After the visit, when Rulag tells her son “‘I don’t suppose I’ll be back’” (1974, 109), Shevek does not contradict her, and this is the last time mother and son meet. This scene has two simultaneous connotations: on the one hand, it depicts the centrality of maternal nurturing in shaping a healthy adult man; and on the other, it reinforces the dark connotations of motherhood in a depiction of “bad” mothers as psychologically wounding their children. Le Guin’s fiction portrays both the good and bad sides of motherhood, with mothers exhibiting both nurturing and abandoning behaviour. Isako, the 7 My use of the terms “liminal” and “liminality” refer deliberately to Victor Turner’s anthropologically-inspired theory of liminality and initiation, which Le Guin knew and appreciated. For example, in “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” she appreciatively cites Turner’s antithesis of structure and communitas (1989, 88).

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mother of time-travelling Hideo in “Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” offers one of Le Guin’s most unequivocally positive representations of motherhood. Isidri recounts Isako telling her “that a mother is connected to her child by a very fine, thin cord, like the umbilical cord, that can stretch lightyears without any difficulty” (1994, 188). Isidri asks whether this causes pain and she replies: “‘Oh no, it’s just there, you know, it stretches and stretches and never breaks’” (1994, 188). This invisible “very fine, thin cord” overlaps with Ettinger’s account of matrixial borderlinks, derived from the archaic bond with the child in late intrauterine existence. Like the corporeal umbilical cord, it does not cause pain when it is cut, but rather maintains love and shared joy in connection. Isako’s happiness in her children may be the closest fictional representation of Le Guin’s relationship with her own mother, Theodora, which is revealed by the letters to have been loving and unrestrained. Unlike Isako, some mothers in Le Guin’s fiction foreground the dark side of the maternal relationship. These include Willow/Towhee in Always Coming Home and Amata in Lavinia.8 Both of these mothers complicate their relationships with their daughters through their problematic sexual choices and desires. Willow/Towhee chooses a man from the militaristic Condor people, thus endangering Stone Telling’s sense of belonging (Le Guin 1986, 29). Similarly, Amata’s obsessive desire for her daughter Lavinia to marry Turnus verges on the incestuous and finally unhinges her sanity as well as driving Lavinia into Aeneas’ arms. Both of these mothers damage themselves and their children. Shevek, Stone Telling and Lavinia are all depicted as scarred by their mothers’ withholding, controlling, and restricting behaviour. In these narratives, Le Guin demonstrates her awareness that the maternal relation is not only one of love, but also a site of emotional contestation and violence. 5

Poetry in the Maternal

Shortly after Theodora’s death in 1979, Le Guin wrote “T.C.K.B.K.Q.: Telluride 1897-Berkeley 1979,” in which she articulates the painful ambivalence of her ongoing relationship with her mother. The poem opens with the lines: 8 Book 7 of The Aeneid, serving as an intertext for Lavinia (see Byrne 2012), relates that the Fury, Alecto, stirs Amata up to incite war with Turnus when Aeneas sues for Lavinia’s hand in marriage. Le Guin’s Lavinia, by contrast, attributes Amata’s actions to instability brought on by pathological relationships to masculinity and to men, thus ascribing her insanity to psychological factors rather than supernatural ones and allowing her behaviour to be analysed from the point of view of object relations theory.

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I try to get my mother back, With difficulty. I have to scold her – Why did you do that? Why were you like that? Fragments. Glances. The delicate halfmoon of the nail. There! for a moment I hold her – a woman of forty […] (1981, 71) The initials of the title gesture towards an identity that can only be abbreviated, not fully apprehended. The desire to “get [Theodora] back” testifies to a Kristevan yearning for the lost mother as love object and is a thread that runs through all Le Guin’s poetry about her mother. The speaker uses emotionally intense “scolding” to ask “why” Theodora behaved in particular ways. This fretful wish to understand the mother gives voice to the daughter’s desire for her mother. The desire of a younger woman for an older one is not sexual, but lovingly desirous of embodied connection. Kristeva and Ettinger both perceive the loss of the mother as traumatic, but for Ettinger it opens up the possibility of fascinance, and this allows “a working-through of the Girl-to-M/Other matrixial feminine difference” (Ettinger and Pollock 2008). The “difference” has been entrenched through Theodora’s death, but because the maternal relation is enduring and encompassing, the daughter can still experience “diffused matrixial affects […] like those of awe, alertness, astonishment, or compassion, which move us beyond sentiments of ‘love’ or ‘hate’” (Ettinger 2006, 65). Le Guin, like Ettinger, writes of relations that are not reducible to the binaries of self/other or love/hate; they encompass more subtle intersubjective affects. Later in the poem, the speaker gives voice to her fascination/fascinance with her mother’s shifting identity: But the brothers and shadowy father cling to her. She was many, she always comes bringing the others, the husbands, the sons, myself. I don’t want them. I want her, […] Not hearth-warmth, bed-warmth, breast-warmth, but the mortal light revealed. (1981, 71–72)

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M/Otherhood is defined in terms of connections and relationships, most often with men,9 so it is natural that Theodora is accompanied by “the others,” most of whom are men, inscribed in the patriarchal symbolic. (Since Theodora only had one daughter, only one of “the others” is feminine: “myself”). But the speaker wants “her,” the M/other as she was/is. The poem moves away from depicting motherhood in terms of object relations with and for others, as seen in Theodora’s relations with men and children. Similarly, it turns away from the traditional understandings of motherhood, represented by the different three types of warmth: hearth-warmth (the creation of a home); bed-warmth (sexuality) and breast-warmth (nurturing and giving). In effect it transgresses both constructionist and object-relations ideas of motherhood, seeking to create borderlinks with a m/other who can no longer be reached. The poem’s project – “to get her back” – is doomed to failure, and yet, through its artworking, Theodora is evoked. Kristeva describes melancholia, a response to the loss of the mother, as “the somber lining of an amatory passion” (1989, 5). For Kristeva, psychological development is predicated on the loss of the mother, who is the child’s first love object. It is as though, for her, the child who has successfully emerged from the traumatic birth passage now has to face a second separation in the renunciation of the mother. In “T.C.K.B.K.Q., Telluride 1897-Berkeley 1979,” there is a third, even more final separation through death. These emotions of painful loss are evident at the end of the poem: If I begin to let go will I glimpse one moment the shining deep there in earth, the unmined silver, or high, far, oh, above her birth before the daylight, snow on those peaks where a river starts in a long glimmering falling through dark air? (1988, 72) The poem’s final stanza pushes the speaker towards an act she cannot yet contemplate: letting go of her mother. Caught in the paradox of simultaneous longing and loss, the daughter hopes that she may catch sight of her mother’s 9 Cf. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead’s Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (1981), which uses a constructionist paradigm to analyse the way sexual and gender relations are mediated through patriarchy.

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essence at the point where she says a reluctant goodbye to her. The appealing radiance of the images (“shining,” “unmined silver,” “snow on those peaks”) is counteracted by their remoteness from the speaker as well as by the “dark air” that recalls all disfiguring transformations, including the Edenic Fall. The contradictory emotions attendant on encountering the mother through partial glimpses, and only at the moment of severing loss, characterise Le Guin’s poetry about her mother. The situation appears to point towards Kristeva’s melancholic/depressive state, where the subject cannot tolerate the loss of the mother, and cannot find any solace in the signifier. But Le Guin remains robustly creative in the face of this wounding, continuing to write poetry and fiction (about mothers, among other themes). The mother disappears in nature-imagery that evokes stored personal memories and culturally received memes (a mine, a waterfall and melting snow). But perhaps the poet has already conjured her mother through the poem—what Freud calls “dreamwork” and Ettinger “artworking.” Both of these creative acts enable the speaker to address and accept her dependency on the mother as well as the trauma of separation. In “Song of the Torus,”10 Le Guin identifies herself as a torus. This is a topological shape roughly equivalent to a doughnut with two-dimensional and one-dimensional holes (Lamb 2014). Le Guin writes: I am a torus No bull no no but torus with an O, beloved of the topologist of me beloved moren 30 year agone11 But not reciprocal no no. A hollow lad he was but I am hollower having had the very womb excised and being void in the middle, not the heart of hearts, but there, where you came from, darling, Reader dear. Including me. Reciprocal. (1988, 67)

10 11

“Song of the Torus” appears, like “T.K.C.B.K.Q., Telluride 1897-Berkeley 1979,” in a section entitled “Women” in Wild Oats and Fireweed (1988). This is a demotic version of “gone more than 30 years ago.”

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The “hole” that makes the speaker “void / in the middle” is a reference to Lacan and Kristeva’s “Thing”: “the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated” (Kristeva 1989, 13). It is also linked to Ettinger’s account of subject-formation as “fatally intermingled with lacking psychic objects, ‘holes’ in the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic” (2006, 40). When the speaker/singer of “Song of the Torus” says that she is “void / in the middle” she points to the origin of life (“where you came from, darling”). This “hole” or “void” inside is experienced by the mother and, more painfully, by children who long for her. This, Kristeva argues, is the condition of Marguerite Duras’ melancholy women protagonists (1989, 244). But Le Guin’s poem goes further than Kristevan depression, moving beyond the mother’s abandonment. It draws on the torus as a topological shape with both one-dimensional and two-dimensional holes (Lamb 2014), to assert that, unlike her adolescent unrequited love, this “void” is “Reciprocal.” Because everyone comes from a “hole” (the womb), everyone experiences lack and is unwhole; but the reciprocity and permanence of the maternal relation is, according to Ettinger, a source of creative metramorphosis. “Song of the Torus” ends on a note of qualified redemption: I’m not unmothered yet; although I brought her ashes home upon my lap, and took the knife and cut the bleeding part away, yet the old woman will not sleep. She mates with bears and stars to find what may a wombless woman bring to term and suckle with the mind’s sweet milk and rock, and sing to, sing the lullaby. (1988, 68) The mother has died, but the speaker is not “unmothered” because having a mother is a fact of human life. The “bleeding part” may be the placenta, but also could refer to the entire body; it alludes to the comprehensive lack suffered by the daughter in (twice) losing her mother, and points to the Thing that cannot be signified, whose lack is the source, for Kristeva, of melancholia. Yet this poem does not evoke depression. The dead mother is continually engaged in mothering and nurturing – she wants to bring something to life even if it is fathered by “bears and stars.” These nonhuman fathers refer to Le Guin (Ursula means “little bear”) and to disembodied imagination. The mother who gives birth to a creature “fathered” by stars is a reference to mythic narratives of the origin of life as the product of mating between “Mother Earth” and “Father

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Sky.” The mother has become a version of the Native American figure of “Grandmother Spider,” who creates the world by weaving a web of her thoughts (referred to in the poem as “the mind’s sweet milk”). Besides being a daughter, Le Guin was also the mother of her daughter Elisabeth. In “Song for a Daughter,” she evokes the double-sided joy and trauma of the mother-daughter relation: Mother of my granddaughter, listen to my song: A mother can’t do right, a daughter can’t do wrong. […] So are we knit together by force of opposites, the daughter that unravels the skein the mother knits. One must be divided so that one be whole, and this is the duplicity alleged of woman’s soul. (2012, 48) Here Le Guin re-cognises and balances the duality that structures motherdaughter relations. There are several oppositions in the poem: being right and being wrong; knitting and unknitting; division and wholeness; heaviness and lightness. Each polarity binds the mother and daughter’s contrary energies and being. The mother sustains the daughter, but at the cost of her own self-division; the daughter undoes whatever the mother undertakes. The poem ends: Nothing you do will ever be right, nothing you do is wrong. (2012, 48) The closing lines return the poem to its opening bifurcation of right and wrong. These are relative terms, Le Guin implies, because they refer to the social judgement of mothers as either “bad” or “good.” “Nothing you do will ever be right” is addressed to Elisabeth as a mother (“Mother of my granddaughter”), acknowledging what is expected of mothers, including the often painful necessity of orchestrating their daughters’ individuation. “Goodness” and “badness” are associated with social discourse that creates the mother-figure as either

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impossibly ideal or inherently culpable. The mother/Goddess invoked by Rich (1979, xv) as one pole of the dichotomous patriarchal view of motherhood is an impossible ideal, closest to the Virgin Mary (Kristeva 1989, 29; 1986, 168). But “nothing you do is wrong” interpellates motherhood as connection. The mother is the child’s originary love object, but the child is also a love object for the mother, and though this relation may go wrong (as Le Guin shows in her representation of deficient and damaging mothers), it also leaves more sustaining traces: Matrixial affects index a transformation and an exchange, and matrixial phenomena, like knowledge in/by the other accompanied by affects of compassion or even something like telepathy, testify that such a passage has taken place and that a minimal meaning has been created. (Ettinger 2006, 65) “Song for a Daughter” attests, like Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial borderspace (2006), to the lasting positive effects of attachment to the mother as the basis for relationship. Its deceptive simplicity and chiasmus attest to the mutuality and reciprocity of mothers’ and daughters’ being, their being-for-eachother and their co-emergence in the maternal and filial relation. These poetic strategies are also evident in “Anon,” whose title’s evocation of “in a little while” refers to the circularity of the mother-daughter relation, returning constantly to the identity of the mother and to her as a love object. This poem, like “Song for a Daughter,” follows a tight circular structure: Who is my mother, the mother asks. What do I call her? I never knew her. She was the sky and the story teller. I tell the stories that I knew through her but I cannot say her. Who was my mother? The mother asks. No one can tell her. (1999, 57)

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The mutual but unequal reflection of mother and daughter here is similar to Irigaray’s “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other” that asserts: “I would like us to play together at being the same and different. You/I exchanging selves endlessly and each staying herself. Living mirrors” (1981, 61). The title suggests a generic identity, authored by no-one and everyone, since the maternal ­relation is ubiquitous, and gestures towards a near future where the maternal relation is endlessly repeated and re-evoked.12 Le Guin’s capacity for revisionist mythopoeisis (Byrne 2014, 18–21) is evident in identifying the “mother” as “the sky / and the story teller.” She is not a historical person, and specifically not Theodora: she is an overarching transpersonal being who covers the earth. The sky’s transcendence and capacity for nurturing life through light and water depersonalises mothers’ conventional role as sustaining life. “The mother” is also, in a complex reversal of Kristevan and Lacanian psychoanalytical views of language as the domain of the father, “the story teller.” Stories hold a central role in Le Guin’s fictional and critical oeuvre. In “Some Thoughts on Narrative” she writes that “Narrative is a central function of language […] a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society” (1989, 38).13 In “Anon” she equates this function with the generative maternal; the mother is not only the source of life, but also of verbal artworks. As Ettinger reminds us: “Art is the processing of a Thing that engenders the becoming into subjective existence of an-Other” (2006, 164). The mother in “Anon” is not only inaccessible in her embodied, personal incarnation, but she is also beyond the reach of the poem’s signifying practice. In this way she recalls Kristeva’s Thing that exceeds signification, the impossible “black sun” that nevertheless blinds the subject. The poem points out that, no matter how hard the speaker tries to regain her mother, the search will not succeed, because “mother” is a de-individuated principle rather than a person. Given the reciprocity of metramorphosis and matrixial borderlinking, the unconscious trauma of separation probably affected Theodora as well. In a letter dated 14 January 1979 (six months before Theodora’s death), she wrote to her daughter of a dream in which she escaped with her children (Ursula and Karl) via a big black circus tent, from which she hung Ursula in a black bandanna. The connotations of mortality are clear in the violence inflicted on the daughter and in the colour black. Theodora’s comment to Ursula that “You have to discover where this hooks into you” uses an unusually brutal image 12 13

Women’s capacity to bear children has inspired many différance feminists, such as Irigaray, to think about the maternal relation and the way it shapes the subjectivity of both mothers and children. This idea later found fictional expression in “The Shobies’ Story,” where the intercultural crew of a stranded space-ship tell stories to restart their churten drive (1994, 81–114).

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(“hooks”) to connote interpretation and identification, but also injury, recognising implicitly that the mother-daughter relationship holds the potential for wounding. In her final year of life, Theodora may have fearfully revisited the passage from non-life into life that marks the matrixial birth passage, but in reverse. These fears are given voice in a letter written later the same year, including a poem: To my children You, candid, smile my younger smile. You, joyous, flaunt my early reds. You, subtle, command my elder (older?) guile. And you, sweet, taste my pleasures and my dreads. Beloveds, when I am gone These are enough for memory. I ask, in death, oblivion. You are my immortality. In her 80s, Theodora addressed each of her children in turn, aware of the ephemerality of life; she also, conventionally, figured her identity as through and for them. Theodora Kroeber is still recognised as an illustrious author of anthropological works, so the poem is inaccurate to locate “immortality” only in her children; but the poem salutes and clings to the power of M/Othering. Each child retains a small but significant trace of the mother. The colours and visuality attached to the children make the poem an instance of Ettinger’s ‘link a’ or “touching gaze” (2006, 86). The traces and touches in the poem and in matrixial theory are instances where the poet and philosopher, in different ways, insist on the material and materialising effects of relations between mothers and children. Ettinger’s “link a” elevates the matrixial borderlink to a universal condition, similar to Lacan’s “objet petit a,” but its connotations are strikingly different. Where Lacan’s objet petit a is irreducibly unattainable, Ettinger’s “link a” emphasises that every human subject has experienced multi-sensory material contact with an other. Being both universal and foundational, this early experience of connection provides a material basis for subjectivity in contradistinction to more abstract ideas of construction through discourse. Theodora “looks” towards her children and sees that they have each retained a trace of her, but no more than that. Le Guin echoes her mother’s awareness of the slightness of contact in “A Meditation on a Marriage,” where she writes that she and Charles each occupy separate countries, and can bring each other only small natural objects from their own domains, such as

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a feather a flake of mica a willow leaf that is our country, ours alone. (1988, 87) Each of these items is small but material, similar to the traces Theodora sees of herself in her children six months before her death. Le Guin’s collection of poems, Sixty Odd (1999), is divided into two sections: “Circling to Descend” and “The Mirror Gallery.” The second recalls a number of mirrors, including the split subject that, according to Lacan, the infant sees in the mirror-stage. It begins with a poem about Theodora entitled “You, Her, I.” The poem opens: Oh but I cannot give you up. Oh but I cannot twist away among the corridors of the words the corridors reflecting corridors and never come and never come to you. Oh but I cannot come to you. (1999, 96) The deictic function of the titular pronouns “you, her, I” ensures the poem’s focus on the weavings and entanglements of the mother and daughter. The repeated negatives (“cannot,” “never”) in these lines testify to the speaker’s simultaneous obsession with the mother-figure and the impossibility of reaching her: a classic case of Kristeva’s melancholia, caused by mourning for the archaic M/ Other-Thing. The corridors recall passages, passing, and the birth canal; there is a trace of a mirror in the reflection of the corridors. In the mirror-stage, the child sees itself – the ideal-I – and knows itself different from the image perceived in the mirror. The poem also figures a labyrinth, which, for Le Guin (as in Tombs of Atuan14), is a tortuous site of self-discovery through convolutions of being and identity. The speaker strives to re-create her mother, to reconnect with her, through art, she experiences “metramorphosis,” shifting away from a fixed egoic 14

Tombs of Atuan (1970) is the second volume in The Earthsea Trilogy, with the first being A Wizard of Earthsea (1969) and the third being The Farthest Shore (1972). Tombs of Atuan recounts a young girl’s psychological journey towards maturity and independence from an oppressive religion.

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“I” towards the relation of borderlinking where the mother can be simultaneously met and not met, cognised and uncognised. These states of paradoxical jointness-in-separation are aptly captured in some later lines from the poem: Shall I evade you all my life and call it looking for you? Words would never hold you. To whom does an old woman say Mother, let me come to you? (1999, 96) As in Theodora’s poem in the year of her death, the persona – now an “old woman” – faces the reality of the passage from life to death. Evading the mother turns cyclically into “looking for you” in a circular repetition of the enduring archaic trauma of being separated from the mother at birth. The poem ends on a paradox that is typical of the mother-daughter relation: How can I come to you who never left? Bereft, ungrateful, I must turn away to make the mythic distance true. (1999, 98) These lines encapsulate the enduring difficulty of coming to terms with the condition of having been mothered. The mother “never left” because motherhood leaves traces in the daughter’s psyche, as Le Guin recognises, like many object-relations theorists. But simultaneously, the daughter “must turn away” so that she can experience the “mythic distance” between herself and her mother. This alludes to the myth of Demeter and Persephone that is also referred to in “Song for a Daughter.” The mother and daughter experience union in the womb, but even this most intimate of relations is founded on imminent separation. The drive to separate from the mother resides in the daughter, whose developmental path leads her to “turn away.” The paradox of Ettinger’s “jointness-in-separateness” (2006, 85) is that, as Le Guin recognises here, it is only through distance that relationship can be experienced. While this is traumatic (“bereft”), it is also both literary and generative (“mythic”). 6 Conclusion Le Guin’s fiction and poetry about mothers and motherhood contains a curious, dislocating dichotomy between recognising the primacy of the mother

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and registering her absence. The child, and especially the daughter, experiences repeated separation from the mother through individuation and later through death. For Kristeva, motherhood can bring about enduring trauma, leading to melancholia and depression, particularly if the subject does not adequately process her separation from the M/Other. The depression that Kristeva writes about in Black Sun does not, however, appear in Le Guin’s writing about mothers, daughters and motherhood. Rather, her fiction, and particularly her poetry, reveals an energetic, though deeply ambivalent, creative engagement with her mother. The poems date from after Theodora’s death in 1979, suggesting that the mother has been introjected and that the poetry addresses, not the historical woman, but the traces she left in her daughter’s life. These traces, memories and affects are similar to Ettinger’s account of the matrixial and of metramorphosis. In Ettinger’s view, the matrixial, prior to the phallic, is “a concept for a transforming borderspace of encounter of the coemerging I and the neither fused nor rejected uncognized non-I” (2006, 64, original emphasis). In my view, Le Guin’s poetry about her mother participates in Ettinger’s transforming borderspace that leaves traces of affective interpersonal links in the developing subject. These, Ettinger writes, constitute a “beyondthe-phallus feminine field related (in both men and women) to plural, partial, and shared unconscious, trauma, phantasy, and desire” (2006, 64). The emphasis on “both men and women” means that what Kristeva and Ettinger call “the feminine” is not restricted to biological women and is thus specifically not allied to the essentialism of différance feminists such as Cixous (1976) and Irigaray. It is a capacity for ethical creativity: Femininity […] transforms from within what it means to be a subject, for it is the kernel of ethical being, the ultimate measure of the ethical relationship: “[I]t is that human possibility that consists in saying that the life of another human being is more important then [sic] my own.” (Ettinger 2006, 189) Le Guin recognizes that connection brings ethical responsibility in her acknowledgement that “the image of the other’s pain is the center of being human” (1986, 184). These connections are powerfully articulated in the shifting pronouns of “You, Her, I,” where the addressee is simultaneously her mother, Theodora; the feminine principle articulated by the undifferentiated “her”; as well as being a part of “I” and an “I” for herself. Through these creative gestures, Le Guin partakes in the co-poeisis (making together) of a transformative encounter with the M/Other. Her poetry cannot be read as “less theoretical” than the work of object relations or matrixial thinkers; it offers a different, but no less complex register for working-through the subtleties of the maternal

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r­ elation. The emphasis in the poetry on complex, embodied relations and intra-actions between mothers and daughters, when “plugged into” Ettinger’s understanding of the matrixial, focuses our attention on the centrality of these relata for all subject formation. In this way, the chapter extends and adds depth  to the representationalism and discursive focus of constructionist approaches. References Butler, Judith. 2004. “Bracha’s Eurydice.” Theory, Culture & Society 21 (1): 95–100. Byrne, Deirdre. 2012. “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia: A Dialogue with Classical Roman Epic.” English Academy Review 29 (2): 6–19. Byrne, Deirdre. 2013. “What is Not Owned: Feminist Strategies in Ursula Le Guin’s Poetry.” Foundation 114: 10–30. Chodorow, Nancy J. 1999. The Reproduction of Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. 2nd Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4 (1): 875–893. Deutsch, Helene. 1954. The Psychology of Women. Vol. 2: Motherhood. New York: Grune & Stratton. Ettinger, Bracha L. 1993. “Woman-Other-Thing: A Matrixial Touch.” In Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Matrix-Borderlines. Edited by Pamela Ferris, Rosi Huhn and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, 11–18. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art. Ettinger, Bracha L. 2006. The Matrixial Borderspace. Edited and with an afterword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Irigaray, Luce and Hélène Vivienne Wentzel. 1981. “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1): 60–67. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lamb, Evelyn. 2014. “What we Talk about When we Talk about Holes.” Scientific American blog, 25 December. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/whatwe-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-holes/# (Accessed 8 June 2020). Le Guin, Ursula K. 1974. The Dispossessed. New York: Panther. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1986. Always Coming Home. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1988. Wild Oats and Fireweed. New York: Harper & Row. Le Guin, 1989. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. London: Victor Gollancz. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1993. The Language of the Night. Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Wood. New York: HarperPerennial.

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Le Guin, Ursula K. 1994. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. New York: HarperCollins. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1999. Sixty Odd: New Poems. London and New York: Shambhala. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2008. Lavinia: A Novel. London: Gollancz. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2012. Finding my Elegy: New and Selected Poems 1960–2010. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Melanie Klein Trust. N.d. Paranoid-Schizoid Position. http://www.melanie-klein-trust. org.uk/paranoid-schizoid-position (Accessed 8 June 2020). Rich, Adrienne. 1976 (rpt. 1995). Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton.

Part 2 Materiality in Creative Texts

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Chapter 4

Butch: A Cartography of Desire Kelly Gardiner Abstract This chapter is a work of auto-/biography and a mapping of the literary and cultural history of one form of female masculinity. From early crossdressers to 1950s sharp suits, from 1990s androgyny to tomboy chic, how has butch represented the material and fluid, overt and covert, performer and spectator, gender and love? Taking a broad view of materiality, it traces ways of being visible in the world, exploring the physicality of rebellion and of desire. It attempts to map events and entanglements, not to force them into relationships with each other, but rather to recognize the cultural work of queer resistance.

Keywords butch – female masculinity – literature – crossdressing – desire – queer – lesbian – fashion – history – female gentleman

When I was a child, my body had a shape – a smaller form of this shape – and so did my self. The two things fitted together, making perfect sense to me, always, but not to other people. This is what my body means. I am three years old. It’s summer. The house is new – everything around it is dust. I’m helping in the garden. My mother makes my clothes – the odd boyish shirt, but more often dresses. They’re making me grow my hair. I run through the bush, barefoot. I watch and learn. If you’re masculine, the world revolves around you. Everyone loves you. Men are your best mates. Women adore you. You are a hero. Seriously, why wouldn’t you choose that? They try to tell me that those lessons only apply to boys, but I don’t listen. I teach my little brother everything I’ve learned about the world, except the things inside me that nobody knows.

© Kelly Gardiner, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_006

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Figure 4.1 This is what my body means

Me as I was. As I still am. Finding a shape for my self. I was already exploring different forms of gender and disrupting gender. I was a teeny-weeny tomboy and I always will be. But here is the self other people imagined for me.

Figure 4.2 Three years old, in hot pink shantung and prosthetic bun

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I don’t remember that day but I do remember having to practice wearing my hair like that – running over a tree trunk that crossed the creek, jumping, splashing, covered in mud, but with that bun fixed firmly to my scalp. Three years old and already in drag. I was very small but never straight. Born in this body as it was then, as it is now. In between, through many ­regrettable fashion moments and unfortunate haircuts, through many loves, there was one constant path, even when I denied it or didn’t realise it – I – was there. One word. Butch. Ivan Coyote says it best: Butch fits like my favourite boots, like my oldest belt. Other words have been thrown about and some even stuck for a while, but butch persists. It is the only thing I have always been. (Coyote and Sharman 2011, 24) 1

Defining and Redefining Butch When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you, and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from the joining – I’m broadening the joining – … (Audre Lorde 2012, 11)

Who are we? Butch is a form of masculine woman, embodying masculinity ­outside the male body; usually identifying as a woman, and desiring other women (it takes other forms, but that is the working definition for this chapter). The body, the flesh, is female; the layers beyond the skin and the self inside it may be ambiguous perhaps, masculine at most; an embodiment of the binary that threatens and entwines it. It is a gender of its own, but also a sexuality of its own. It is gender and sexuality. Butch is gender and love, gender and desire. As we shall see, it is also described by many women as a narrative of authenticity, revealing the true self, as a revealed encoding and as metaphorical armour. This chapter explores the idea and experience of butch as a personal narrative, offers frameworks in which it can be understood, and sketches its rich cultural and literary history.

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The word emerged in San Francisco in the 1950s.1 We have new words for it now: we can call it genderqueer; we say it’s dapper, swagger. But it has always reflected that “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and […] responsibility in their construction” that Donna Haraway describes (2006, 104). It questions gender, just as it questions heterosexuality, and the stability of both – perhaps even, by extension, the stability of categories of humanness. Butch, as I map its genealogies here, is experienced differently from identifying as a man, transitioning into masculinity, or becoming transgender,2 or passing as a man, although all of those things may happen in the same body at the same or different times. Gayle Rubin’s broad definition is a useful beginning: The term [butch] encompasses individuals with a broad range of investments in “masculinity.” It includes, for example, women who are not at all interested in male gender identities, but who use traits associated with masculinity to signal their lesbianism or to communicate their desire to engage in the kinds of active or initiatory sexual behavior [sic] that in this society are allowed or expected from men. It includes women who adopt “male” fashions and mannerisms as a way to claim privileges or deference usually reserved for men. It may include women who find men’s clothing better made, and those who consider women’s usual wear too confining or uncomfortable or who feel it leaves them vulnerable or exposed. (2011, 467) Carol A. Queen defines butch as: “a version of masculinity reflected in a wavy mirror, masculinity where our culture tells us not to look for it: in women” (1994, 23). But it is more than both of these statements suggest. It is a cultural and historic identity that has evolved over time, in the face of discrimination, dismissal, and violence, through the connections and disruptions of literature, culture, and a visible, if coded, aesthetic. It is an ongoing conversation between individuals, bodies, performativity, materiality, gender, and sexuality. It is an element in our emerging nonbinary vocabularies. If, as Eves reminds us, queer

1 The Oxford English Dictionary (1961) notes the first recorded usage of the word in this sense: 1954 News (San Francisco) 10 Sept. 1: Then some of the girls began wearing mannish clothing. They called themselves “Butches.” 1954 Observer 26 Sept.: The homosexual Stoics with their crew-cuts and “butch” behaviour. 2 Halberstam suggests the term “transgender butch to signify the transition that the identity requires from female identity to masculine embodiment” (1998, 146).

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theory has “reconceptualized sexual identities as shifting and unstable, as positions offered by discursive structures rather than properties of individuals” (2004, 481), how do we now explain the persistence of butch as a seemingly stubborn and fixed identity steeped in its own history, at the same time illustrating the instability of categories of gender? Does it render the traditional lines between genders more or less fluid? Kristiina Jalas suggests we consider “butch as a ‘threshold effect’ [that] has highlighted the paradoxical nature of gender as sometimes fluid, sometimes solid, hovering between tangibility and authenticity on the one hand, and masquerade on the other” (2005, 57). Butch is not a masquerade, but it is reflective of past theatrical masquerades. A masquerade of masculinity is seen in other forms, like the drag kings who perform parodies of different extremes of masculinity. Butch is something else. Elizabeth Stephens claims that the very ideas of “fixed” and “fluid” have been constructed as a binary of their own – “the ‘fixed,’” she says, “is invariably aligned with the conservative and normative, while the ‘fluid’ is associated with the positive, progressive, and resistant” (2014, 186), and therefore often valued in queer and feminist theory. So if we value fluidity and other non-hierarchical frameworks of understanding, what do we do with butch – an identity that at first glance seems fixed in amber, born in an inner-city bar in the 1950s? Can we, perhaps, map its cultural and literary manifestations at various places and in different times, and weave a queer genealogy of influence? Many women, across cultures, report that their butch identity is a revelation of some undeniable aspect of themselves. So the narratives about butch lives display this complexity: on one hand, a discourse that questions gender and sexual binaries, and enables societies to rethink what gender means; and on the other, a familiar lexicon: a metaphorical and literal suit of clothes that just feels right, and a life that means both safety and vulnerability. This set of contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves, and about ourselves, highlights the individual process of identity formation alongside the collective process of discovery, connection and culture creation, and manages to encompass both the essentialist stories of those who believe they were “born this way” and the cultural identities in which women find meaning. In Thailand, for example, Tom [butch – from tomboy] and dee [femme – from lay-dee] subjectivities are embedded in the performative politics that construct gender as a system. The binary of masculinity and femininity in the context of tom and dee relationships has the appearance of being natural and self-­ evident, but an exploration of the ways this gender duality is deployed reveals that it is contested, performed, and often ambiguous. (Sinnott 2007, 134)

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This identity, then, holds meaning – not identical but related meanings – alongside this complexity operating across cultural traditions and across centuries. In the UK, Alison Eves’ research with lesbians suggests that butch and femme identities: […] draw on visual and aesthetic gendered discourses to construct subcultural spaces and counter-hegemonic discourses. It was possible to distinguish between the ways in which butch and femme narratives drew on interpretative repertoires of “authenticity” (unchosen, real, fixed, innate), “choice” (reflexive, conscious, fluid) and “performance” (provisional, situated, subversive, dramaturgical) and combined apparently contradictory discourses in specific ways. (2004, 487) Eves found that the women she interviewed placed enormous importance on butch identity as their true self, as revealed, while also recognising the potentially transitory possibilities of identity and community. That sensation of discovering a core truth, recorded by so many women – as a coming home, rather than a coming out – is, importantly, one of connection. The outsider, the other, the tiny tomboy, discovers, perhaps, a photo of a Hollywood star in a tuxedo or two older women on a beach, or a text in which her life dances before her eyes on the page, then not only one other person just like her in the entire world, but a network of outsiders. The kernel of resistance, of rebellion, of selfhood, of otherness, that has allowed her to withstand years of familial and social pressures to present as traditionally feminine, blossoms or hardens – or both. She becomes another branch of a found family history: a web of stories and names and places that are both distant and connected, hidden and revealed. The stories these women told Eves reflected a “repertoire of authenticity,” and […] interweave elements of essentialism, in which sexual identity was conceived as a truth waiting to be uncovered as a core element of identity, with an emphasis on fluidity and reflexivity that acknowledged the situated and provisional nature of identities and the plural and fractured nature of lesbian communities and spaces. (2004, 485) Butch is all of these elements, I think, and not necessarily in binary opposition to each other: familiar performative identities of both gender and sexuality,

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and also a form of being that turns borders and lines into liquid. Our bodies, our genders, and the aesthetic in which they are cloaked, seem to me to be both changing and fixed – at least in this moment. Butch questions the ways in which female bodies are expected to present to the world and enables individuals to find ways of doing gender that feel “authentic” to them. It may not be inherent in any essentialist sense, but it feels that way, and the stories women tell reflect this. I suggest that butch is (and there may be other things that can also be described in this way): a learned gender, forming before consciousness of identity, that also subverts gender performance; an identity at the intersection of gender/s and sexuality; a diverse culture that is defined by those identities; an aesthetic that enables a way of moving through the world; and a literary and historical lineage with roots in antiquity. All of these things can be true, and contested, and past and present – at once. This then is the meaning my body holds – the many meanings all these bodies hold – and live and fear and breathe and walk. This is the talk we walk.

Figure 4.3 Dr Mary Edwards Walker served in the US Civil War. 1912.

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Becoming Butch

So, where do we come from? Can you learn to be butch without being a tomboy? How else do we find strength to ignore the stares, laugh off the mistaken elderly folk, make ourselves smaller and unnoticed in the women’s toilets? To take what we can get and make it our own – scraps of data, scraps of desire – and write ourselves into stories because nobody else is telling our truths? At the traumatic moment when we are supposed to grow out of it, when they sit us down and tell us unequivocally that our lives are all wrong, tomboy becomes another story; a choose-your-own-adventure. Not all tomboys become butch and not all tomboys are queer. Some are baby butches, disguised as tomboys. Tomboys in books often complain, like Jo March in Little Women, that they wish they were boys – it’s a cry of longing for freedom, for adventure, for childhood. Butch is more specific than that, more than an adult tomboy. We are tomboys, yes. Jack Halberstam (1998, 8) says tomboy narratives, particularly those of the past, represent futility, but as Hiestand and Levitt report, as a result of their extended research in a North Florida lesbian community, all the butch respondents considered themselves as tomboys or “like boys” as children, survived confusing puberty and high school years, and then adopted butch culture as adults, where previously they may have seen it, as presented by the world around them, in a negative light: Coming to terms with being butch was described as a process closely linked to developing a sense of pride in being (and looking like) a lesbian. […] Their exposure to butch – femme flirtation and social dynamics helped them re-construe butchness as a sexually desirable aesthetic. As most of the women had coded their gender difference as undesirable and struggled to minimize it most of their lives, this insight initially took many of the women by surprise. (Hiestand and Levitt 2005, 75) We may be tomboys, happily, for years, nursing silent inexplicable desires and feeling as if we had to pretend to be someone else or something else. Then we discover that a pair of boots and a belt feel like our true selves, and we develop a new awareness of gender and of ourselves. We embody female masculinity, after years or decades of being told it was unattractive, and have to remake it in our own shapes to fit us. We are publicly queer and masculine, and privately queer and female. For individuals, this can hold lasting and conflicting implications for the way we feel about our bodies as opposed to our physical presence in the world, as we see in the isolation of the stone butch (Feinberg 1993),

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in the tension between wanting to hide our flesh but strut our stuff (Nestle 1992), or in the joke that when we dress as women – for work, or for family events – we’re in drag (see, for illustrations of all of these, the oral histories recorded in Kennedy and Davis 1992). But often, we most clearly see our butch selves in relation to femme bodies. With desire, with our opposite, with our twin. Elizabeth Grosz, paraphrasing Deleuze, frames desire no longer as a condition of lack, but thus: Desire is what produces, what makes things, forges connections, creates relations, produces machinic alignments. Instead of aligning desire with fantasy and opposing it to the real, as psychoanalysis does, for Deleuze, desire is what produces the real; instead of a yearning, desire is an actualization, a series of practices, action, production, bringing together components, making machines, making reality. (1993, 171) In this shift from tomboy to butch, or heteronormative to queer, identity only becomes clear with desire. We are then positioned as butch in relation to femme, like Monique Wittig’s “M/y (J/e),” or coupled self, in The Lesbian Body (1975). Of course, some butches desire butches or people who are androgynous or trans or something else altogether. But, says Judith Butler: For the most part (but not exclusively) butches are deeply, if not fatally, attracted to the feminine and, in this sense, love the feminine. […] Why shouldn’t it be that we are at an edge of sexual difference for which the language of sexual difference might not suffice? (2004, 197) The emergence of an overt butch identity enraged some feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, and often meets with public abuse and violent attacks, from police officers raiding 1960s bars, against Pride marches in some countries today, and from random men anywhere. The very queerness of the butch/femme partnership, its cultural impact and visibility, and its perceived threat to traditional concepts of male masculinity, are its strengths and also its vulnerabilities. There is no binary like butch and femme. It takes the binary and fucks with its head. “A butch/femme couple is queer […] In fact, the more gender differentiation in their relationship, the queerer they are” (Queen 1994). Perhaps butch and femme are the most conscious pairing of love and gender, for they only become in the presence of each other. Desire, says Halberstam, has a terrifying precision (1994, 212). So, butch gender identity has emerged over decades, perhaps centuries, in connection with a very specific desire. But it also exists as a cultural identity

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beyond desire. It may not be a continuous process of identity formation, or even a consistent one. Its reality, as seen in the historical record or more recently in living memory, is diverse and sometimes sporadic. It is far from universal across cultural traditions. But butch is a subculture – or, rather, many cultures with a common set of signifiers – a visible, material presence, a knowingness, a category of desire, a way of doing gender. Butch is resistance. Butch and femme grew up on the streets in the 1940s and 50s, in big cities like London and New York, in small cities like mine on the other side of the world, in country towns all over the world. How did that happen, in the decades before the web, in the years before any but the very wealthy travelled for fun? How did word spread? How did we all know to wear perfectly pressed pants and button-down collars? When did the dress code memo go out? I wonder. 3

Weaving Butch Genealogies

How did we become? I want now to map the lineage of that mannish lesbian, that bull dyke, that monster/dagger/freak/sporty type. These are not traditional genealogies: not binary, not linear, not a family tree so much as a series of small explosions. Perhaps these moments are what Valerie Traub calls “cycles of salience that is, as forms of intelligibility whose meanings recur, intermittently and with a difference, across time” (Traub 2011, 23). In a reversal of standard family history methodology, we begin at the beginning. Female masculinity is not a nineteenth-century construct: it’s ancient. We now know that the Amazons were not an alien fantasy recorded by Herodotus, but thriving communities across Central Asia in which women and men rode, fought, and died alongside each other – and invented trousers (Mayor 2014). We know of medieval court cases of crossdressers prosecuted for their crimes, women warriors, and women passing as men, in many different places and centuries and cultures. We do not need to apply the label butch to them, to try to make someone into something they are not: we know all about that. We don’t need to classify them as anything other than ancestors, women performing masculinity of their own kind, and experiencing the thrill of transgressing gender expectations. George Sand, in 1831, recorded the sensation of wearing male clothes for the first time: I can’t describe how delighted I was by my boots. […] I flew from one end of Paris to the other. I felt I could have gone round the world. […] Not to

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be noticed as a man, one has first to be used to not being noticed as a woman. I was no longer a woman, nor was I a man. […] I was jostled on the pavements like a thing. (Jack 2001, 169) Sand expresses here the freedom so many women – masculine or not – felt when experiencing the freedoms enabled by crossdressing, and the “delight” of stepping outside of gender categories, through the simple mechanism of changing clothing. On the other hand, Dekker and van der Pol list a range of punishments suffered by early modern European women found to have worn men’s clothes. They might not have been queer, but some were. They may have been consciously passing as men, or mistaken for men, or simply dressed for safety. They might have wished to be seen as male or not. In some jurisdictions, if the woman’s transgressions included “sodomy” as it was then understood (sex with someone of the same gender), the penalty was death. In 1641 a Dutch court ruled that Hendrickje Lamberts, “not only dressed in men’s clothing despite the fact that she is a female person in all parts, but also – and much worse – she had entered into a relationship with [another woman …] against all natural order, as if the one had been a man and the other a woman” (Dekker 1989, 79). Lamberts was sentenced to a whipping and twenty-five years’ exile. But for some women, their position – perhaps the privilege of class or wealth or fame – helped partly insulate them from legal or social restrictions. Two hundred years later (in 1818), English gentlewoman, Anne Lister, recorded in her diary: The s generally remark as I pass along how much I am like a man. […] A little-ish, tipsy-ish-looking young man stopped me. Fancying I was ­going to strike him with my umbrella, he stepped back, saying, “If you do, I’ll drop you.” I quietly walked off, saying “I should like to see you.” ­(Whitbread 2010, 60–62) Now that is swagger. Anne Lister had no trouble signalling her desire to other women, and nor in the seventeenth century did the French swordswoman, crossdresser, and singer Mademoiselle de Maupin. Research for my novel of her life, Goddess (Gardiner 2014) indicated broad public awareness of her many affairs with women, and her predilection for men’s clothes, at the same time as she was a fêted star of the Paris Opéra. In the late nineteenth century, influential sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing tried to define and catalogue queer sexualities, while S­ igmund

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Freud brought his psychoanalytical frameworks to bear on solving the question of why some women exhibited masculine traits, and why some went so far as desiring other women. The homosexual woman, argued Ellis, was a congenital invert, and the “commonest characteristic of the sexually inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity or boyishness” along with “a very pronounced tendency among sexually inverted women to adopt male attire when practicable” (1927, 149). Scholars such as Foucault have suggested that works such as these provided the language for lesbian writers like Radclyffe Hall to voice the love that dare not speak its name (Foucault 1978, 101) and to develop or accept a lesbian identity (Newton 1984). But Martha Vicinus claims that “homosexuals remained largely impervious to the medicalisation of desire,” at least until the 1920s (1998, 165). In fact, the genealogy that I outline in this chapter illustrates clearly that lesbians, including “mannish” women, had much more selfawareness and agency than generally believed, before sexologists discovered and catalogued us. I want to broaden this enquiry by suggesting that the discourse was already present – much of it secret, but some of it in the public domain, if coded: in hundreds of years of celebrated crossdressing heroines and, in the decades before the turn of the century, in the literature and the paintings of Romanticism, such as Gautier’s infamous Mademoiselle de Maupin; in the public acknowledgement of women like the Ladies of Llangollen; in unconventional literary heroines and tomboys; in so-called frontierswomen in colonising cultures and the warriors who resisted them; in universities in a wide range of countries, and visible on the streets of big cities in their top hats and cravats and mannish bearing. Awareness, if not identity, and in some places community, already existed. As I have made clear here, sub-cultures of both working class and upperclass lesbians were visible in cities such as London and Paris, and in cultural representations such as literature and visual arts, well before Ellis published Sexual Inversion in 1897. Butch was and is both secret and signalling itself to others: those in the know, and those outside it. In the late nineteenth century, it was read as a performance of desire, says Vicinus: “An elaborate code of recognition, amidst concealment, existed. By performing – costuming – homosexual desire, it was made visible for those in the know, and then gradually for the general public” (1998, 165). Here also we see the recognition of the role of coded costuming in identity formation – the early awareness of the ways in which gendered clothing can be used to signal desire, unconventionality, individual rebellion and community-creation. And that, surely, is a definition of identity: it allows recognition of others who belong in the same subculture. Without that recognition, identity cannot do the cultural work of resistance.

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Figure 4.4 The Ladies of Llangollen: Sarah Ponsonby (left) and Lady Eleanor Butler. 1828

But those decades, in which the new fields of sexology and psychoanalysis were exploring the development of identities, were crucial in the creation of butch as a modern cultural construct (or constructs), because the fin-de-siècle and the First World War, according to Vicinus, “mark an important shift from conceptualising homosexual practices (mannish women or effeminate men capable of deviant sex acts) to deviant sex roles (a deviant lifestyle characterised by same-sex object choice)” (1998, 163). Clearly the other significant historical influence in those decades was the dramatic escalation of campaigns for women’s suffrage in many countries, and the associated media coverage and propaganda about women in concerted

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acts of rebellion. These campaigns brought women, including lesbians, together politically, even at times across class barriers; they took to the streets to demand – voices raised – rights hitherto denied women and girls. Vicinus notes both positive and negative aspects of this: “mannishness became identified with abnormal political demands” – like the vote – and the campaigns “pushed lesbian sexuality and feminism to the centre of 20th century political discourse” (1998, 164). Opponents of suffrage conflated the unladylike behaviour of women’s campaigners with sexual deviance, because surely no normal woman would march on Parliament House or throw rocks through windows. Radicalism was equated with mannishness, with women being so unreasonable and unfeminine as to wish to exercise similar rights to men. Some suffrage campaigners, such as the composer Ethel Smyth and Mrs Pankhurst’s remarkable “Bodyguard” of ju-jitsu experts, were indeed “mannish” and some were undeniably queer. But suffrage campaigns of the nineteenth century largely drew on essentialist narratives of heterosexual women as peacemakers and homemakers, and the inherently good mothers of the nation. Cartoonists and commentators countered this by drawing parallels between feminism and lesbianism, using hints about sexuality as a slur against activists. This birthed a stereotype of the butch harridan and the trope of the violent masculine lesbian that we see replicated in literature and on screen throughout the twentieth century, for example, in the 1968 cinema version of The Killing of Sister George, or prison-based television series such as Prisoner (1979–1986) and Bad Girls (1999–2006), continuing through to current offerings Orange is the New Black (2013–2019) and the Prisoner remake Wentworth (2013–2020). Arguably, though, those years of suffrage campaigning in many countries also marked a noticeable shift in perceptions from the lesbian as an eccentric or exceptional individual, perhaps participating in secret networks, to women’s acknowledgement of their own identity, and the development of a nascent sense of community. This is evident at the start of the twentieth century and the interwar years that witnessed the flowering of lesbian networks, and particularly of butch cultural representation, consciously creating a public lesbian identity visible in major cities such as Berlin, London, New York, and particularly Paris. Butch/femme couples such as Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas or Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge were visible, acclaimed, and lived extraordinarily well-documented and public lives, while at the same time their privilege allowed them the safety of an exclusive lifestyle of salons, parties and expensive clothes. Natalie Barney, one of the most famous of the 1920s Parisian Sapphists, was one of many who created “a theatrical persona which was not one’s true self but did reveal to select others the true nature of the self” (Vicinus 1998, 168). For Barney, at the centre of a cosmopolitan and wealthy circle,

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including artists Romaine Brooks and Tamara de Lempicka, and writers including Stein and Colette, wearing theatrical clothes was not a performance of one’s sexual identity but a revelation of it. […] Self-conscious lesbians of the turn of the century created a private borderline culture based on the mannish woman, but altered for their own purposes. (Vicinus 1998, 166) Barney spent years rediscovering and celebrating the poems and life of Sappho. She, and the women around her, believed their true nature was lesbian, and saw themselves as embodying modernity in the light of an ancient tradition. They even performed costumed “Sapphic” dances and songs in Barney’s garden – positioning their moment of creativity and community in direct relation to the poet and her circle on Lesbos thousands of years earlier. Their clothes, work, public posture and lifestyles were avowedly and performatively lesbian – and often clearly butch or androgynous – as a means of revealing their true selves, and they recorded that in text and in visual arts. One of Brooks’ most famous portraits of Barney is titled L’Amazone (1920), one of many paintings by artists in these circles envisioning a frank and impeccably tailored butch life. The dramatic costumed personae created by Barney or Brooks were designed to represent a female masculinity that could no longer be hidden, and could be both embodied and presented through artworks, texts and paintings, as well as public personae, as part of a conscious project of identity creation and representation. The reality of butch life was very different for women who did not enjoy the privileged lives or access to historical and literary perspectives on sexuality that were available to Barney and Colette. As Lillian Faderman has pointed out, many lesbians in the early decades of the twentieth century not only shared the “common enemy of homophobia” but also the “burden of conceptualising themselves with little or no history to use as guidelines” (2012, 160). Nevertheless, what Joan Nestle calls “the persistent desire” (1992) manifested in different forms and in different places and times. Women who found each other in 1950s Buffalo, New York, later told Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeleine Davis that they too wanted to announce their sexuality to the public: to appear butch meant that they were “not denying” who they were, and they consciously claimed “the identity of difference” (1993, 169). The concept of “not denying” is at “the core of the resistance of the forties and fifties” (Nestle 1992, 64): a resistance that was widespread, private and public, enormously influential at the time, and on late twentieth-century gay liberation movements. We can never underestimate what an extraordinary moment this was in queer and feminist history.

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This resistance arose in the face of police brutality, rejection by family members and communities, discrimination at work, violence in the streets, and complete lack of legal protection (Atkins 1998). It is this singular moment of courage, often among working women in urban areas, simultaneously in many countries, that remains fixed in the very language of butch identity: the tragedy captured in Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues; and the bravery celebrated by Nestle and others, awarding literary medals of valour to mark wounds received in battle against, rather than in defence of, patriarchal power. These literary honours express a continuing recognition of the courage, alongside that of the more privileged artists and writers of the 1920s and 30s, that is encoded in the butch aesthetic. Here, too, in these diverse lesbian sub-cultures, was evidence of some of the tensions and awakenings at the intersections of sexuality, gender, class and race that are still current today. Audre Lorde writes: We tried to build a community of sorts where we could […] survive within a world we correctly perceived to be hostile to us. Lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempt to communicate with each other; we learned lessons from each other, the values of which were not lessened by what we did not learn. (1982, 179) Lorde writes about the ostracisation she faced from the lesbian community in the 1950s for failing to perform butch/femme identities: “We were both part of the ‘freaky’ bunch of lesbians who weren’t into role-playing, and who the butches and femmes, Black and white, disparaged” (Lorde 1982, 178). But in later decades, the boot was on the other foot (Case 1988). We became noir – the cinema of the outcast. Like Bogart and Bacall, we met in darkness. We have so few stories of our own, we borrowed from cheap novels and the movie matinee. Is this still our materiality, these sharp shoes and ironed shirts? Or is it a historical fiction we tell ourselves about the times we discovered each other and made you look? I came out into 1980s feminism that tried to erase us, to hide us, as if we were the madwomen in the attic. Feminist disapproval, derived, perhaps, from nineteenthcentury suffragist morality, meant butch and femme were political anathema. By the 1990s, androgyny was still all the rage and theorists deconstructed our identities, but we reconstructed ourselves and came back, better dressed than ever and Queer as fuck. All those women, over the centuries. Resisting. On one hand, these are hidden histories – sometimes secret, sometimes suppressed. On the other hand, we were visible to each other, and out in the world. We worked in factories, flew planes,

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fought battles, drove cars, painted pictures, wrote books. In both the world and its cultural representations, perhaps you saw us for the first time – in tweed or overalls or uniform or jeans. And on the page. 4

Literary Lives

Through all of this, there were books, passed from hand to hand, worn but never grubby, treated like the precious artifacts they were, giving hope in darkness. These are the books I read then and read now, and write now for other hands, other eyes, other lives. Literature across languages and across cultural traditions and across forms is full of women characters who made their way in the world dressed in menswear, who grew up behaving and dressing like boys, who were taken for men – the “female husbands” and travesti roles in Roman and medieval epics and Renaissance plays, and later in the Romantic operas – who fought and loved and sometimes suffered or were treated as heroes, which indeed they became. On stage in the eighteenth century, they were often comic figures, workingclass actors playing women dressed as soldiers or Amazons. They were followed by dandified suit-clad vaudeville stars, whose descendants tread the boards today – such as the Takarazuka, Japan’s troupe of crossdressing female entertainers. Shows like Vesta Tilley’s Edwardian act played with this public fascination with female masculinity, but it was always seen as a show where the pretty lady in the suit prances like a boy until the lights go down and she strips off her waistcoat and goes home to her husband and kids. In the nineteenth century, these characters developed into one of the first distinct forms of the New Woman in fiction: the “Female Gentleman” described by Melissa Schaub (2013). They were intelligent, brave, sophisticated, and wellread heroines, who, like Marion Holcombe in The Woman in White, were so often described as having the soul of a man trapped in a woman’s body. Many Female Gentlemen, however, were positioned as asexual, just as many Victorian feminists rejected sexuality as a moral evil, like gambling, a sordid side-­ effect of patriarchy that caused untold hardship for women and children. With the impact of the New Woman and suffrage movements, we took on the scripts from music hall and opera, combining the comic female husbands with heroic “Female Gentlemen” and created the beginnings of an aesthetic we still celebrate. In 1928, the publication – and consequent obscenity trial – of Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness (1968, first published in 1928) was a dramatic turning point in literary representation of queer lives. This infamous, widely banned novel introduced Stephen Gordon, love-child of the Female ­Gentleman

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Figure 4.5 Vesta Tilley (1864–1952), Music hall entertainer National Portrait Gallery, UK

and the sexological category of “invert.” Overtly queer, Stephen struggles with self-loathing, fighting a losing battle against desire for women, and embodying the invert: [Stephen] wrenched off the dress and hurled it from her, longing intensely to rend it, to hurt it, longing to hurt herself in the process, yet all the while filled with that sense of injustice. (Hall 1968, 83) Stephen Gordon’s direct literary descendent is Jess Goldberg in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a realist tragedy about butch life in the 1940s and 50s, where visibility can lead to danger as well as desire:

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Figure 4.6 Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), Novelist. Photo by Howard Coster, 1932

The cop put his hand on his gun butt. Somehow we all knew instinctively that none of the butches should move. I heard Peaches’ voice. “What’s going on out here?” We glanced at each other. “Uh oh,” she said. Theresa’s voice was low like a moan. “Leave her alone.” […] The cop unholstered his gun. “You fucking slut,” he spluttered at Theresa. “You fucking perverts,” he shouted at all of us. (Feinberg 1993, 129–30) In the later decades of the twentieth century, novelists tried to reimagine this heritage, sometimes projecting their own post-Freud, post-feminist understandings of sexual identity into an imagined past. We could read much more cheerful tales about women who led eccentric, perhaps isolated and hidden lives: the protagonists of the influential Patience and Sarah (Miller 1969) for example, lived in the country like Anne Lister or the Ladies of Langollen. The book was based on the life of folk artist Mary Ann Wilson and her companion, Miss Brundage, who lived together on a New England farm in the early nineteenth century: Miss Brundage tilled the fields, while Miss Wilson painted. Naturally. Twenty years after Patience and Sarah, in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green

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Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987), butch Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison do not hide their love from the townsfolk. They are tacitly accepted and supported by those around them, even though the book is set largely in the Depression and well before widespread community tolerance of queer folk. (Of course, there were still many butch monsters, murderers, and molesters of innocent females in literature and on screen.) The Female Gentlemen are still with us, especially in historical and crime fiction, and the butch figure has become a popular trope in fiction, both in overtly queer novels and in mainstream fiction. One classic butch trope that recurs in many literary portrayals of butch characters is the mistaken or misread gender identity. Our first glimpse of ambulance-driver Sid in The Light Years, the first of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet novels, follows a lead-up in which readers are encouraged to assume that this love interest of Rachel Cazalet is male. And then they meet at the train: Then [the train] stopped and the doors flapped open and there were people and then there was Sid walking towards her smiling, wearing her brown tussore suit with the belted jacket, bareheaded, cropped hair and a nut-brown face. “What-ho!” said Sid, and they embraced. (Howard 1991, 149) Sarah Waters’ queer historical novel, The Night Watch, also features a Second World War ambulance driver, Kay: Reggie started to laugh. “My mistake,” he said, nudging Viv. “What do you think of that? It’s not a mister, it’s a miss.” Viv turned to look – and saw Kay, in a jacket and trousers. She was drawing a cigarette from a case and, with a stylish, idle gesture, tapping it lightly against the silver before raising it to her lips. (Waters 2006, 71) The physical description of Doctor MacMillan, in Kerry Greenwood’s 1920s-set Phryne Fisher crime series, is also typical. When we meet her in Murder on the Ballarat Train she is “dressed in a tweed gentleman’s suit with formal white shirt, collar, tie and waistcoat and she had large, capable hands” (Greenwood 2005, 39). These are specific visual signifiers in these literary and cultural portrayals of butch women, used in both derogatory and sympathetic portrayals, and as both a stereotype and a realist representation of a materiality that is lived and even celebrated in queer communities. Butch is, of course, much more than a

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tweed suit and sensible shoes, but the aesthetic that has arisen from the ­cultural legacy I have mapped here is central to identity as experienced and in other people’s perceptions. And in the twenty-first century, it is developing even more fluidity and impact than ever. 5

Refashioning Gender

Butch is a cultural concept like all gender concepts, but with a twist. We made it ourselves. We crowned Paris the queer centre of the world in the twenties: the city of light filled with bright young things and all those wild women painting one another’s portraits. In the thirties we were glam like Marlene and in Berlin everything was delightfully decadent, until anyone decadent or butch was forced to wear dresses or sent to the camps (Schoppmann and Brown 1996). In the fifties, working-class butches worked in factories and at blue-­ collar jobs that didn’t require them to dress like ladies, and met their girlfriends in bars and coffee shops after dark. Now, our experiences are shared and also myriad. Contemporary African American dapper wears the button-down shirts and sleek hair of the Apollo Theatre in its heyday, or hip-hop streetwear. Ivan Coyote in cowboy boots and belt. Young women wear kurta in Sri Lanka (KuruUtumpala 2013, 159). Tomboys sing karaoke in Hong Kong bars (Lai 2007, 167). Identities such as butch, says Butler: […] make us not only question what is real, and what “must” be, but they also show us how the norms that govern contemporary notions of reality can be questioned and how new modes of reality can become instituted […] a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm, and makes us see how realities to which we thought we were confined are not written in stone. (Butler 2004, 29) We are not written in stone. The butch aesthetic is our shared materiality – the materiality of me, of us, of centuries. Of the suit, the jeans, the hair. Of the walk. Of the desire. We get grief for it, of course. Men abuse us, beat us. Rape us to punish us for not being sufficiently feminine.3 Women say, “I’m a feminist but I’m not one of those 3 Amanda Lock Swarr (2012) has documented the use of rape as a “corrective” against butch lesbians in South African townships, precisely because of the threat they appear to pose to masculinity and heteronormativity.

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mannish lesbian types. I’m a feminist and I am critical of anything that apes ­heterosexuality – that is mere role-playing.” Perhaps you’re thinking that as you read this. Are you? Here I map these genealogies and chart our connections, our histories. I trace these moments in the past, these women who live only in the pages of novels or ephemeral films, these warriors and victims in history. This process of cartography places me here, in this lineage spanning thousands of years, alongside a crossdresser whipped in the sixteenth century and a fierce woman in dungarees throwing bricks in the Greenwich Village riots of the 1960s. These genealogies are not random: there are silences in the record and in the writing, but there are clear generations of influence that lead us to now, when butch – always hot – is haute. Haute butch is sharp creases and cufflinks and brogues. There are butch fashion labels and shows, magazines, music videos, beloved television hosts and characters, websites showcasing masculine clothes tailored for the female body. We have created and recreated and will create a new culture of ourselves, against dominant cultures, but reflecting our own pasts, recognising at last our own diversities, and living beyond the elements of self-loathing and secrecy that mark our queer histories. So, now, standing on the shoulders of giants, I can write this way of being human, this way of becoming. When I voice this word – butch – I create and recreate this world, this language, this presence, this genealogy. I wear this gender. When I wear a suit and tie I am different – I move through the world not like a woman in a suit and tie but in the shape of butch. Gender and sexuality, gender and love, past and present: butch has always been about possibility. References Atkins, Dawn. 1998. Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities. New York: Haworth Press. Burchfield, Robert (ed.). 1961. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1988. “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic.” Discourse 11 (1): 55–73. Coyote, Ivan E., and Zena Sharman. 2011. Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Dekker, Rudolf M., and Lotte van de Pol. 1989. The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. London: Macmillan.

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Ellis, Havelock. 1927 (rpt. 2000). Sexual Inversion. 3rd edition. Volume 2: Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. Eves, Alison. 2004. “Queer Theory, Butch/Femme Identities and Lesbian Space.” Sexualities 7 (4): 480–496. Doi: 10.1177/1363460704047064. Faderman, Lillian. 2012. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in ­Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press. Feinberg, Leslie. 1993. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca: Firebrand. Flagg, Fannie. 1987. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Gardiner, Kelly. 2014. Goddess. Sydney: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins. Greenwood, Kerry. 2005. Murder on the Ballarat Train. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1993. “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics.” An International Review of Philosophy 12 (2): 167–179. Doi: 10.1007/BF00821854. Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham (US): Duke University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 1994. “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity.” In The Lesbian Postmodern. Edited by Laura Doan. New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, Radclyffe. 1928 (rpt. 1968). The Well of Loneliness. London: Corgi. Haraway, Donna. 2006. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In The Transgender Studies Reader. Edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 103–118. New York: Taylor & Francis. Original edition, 1985. Hiestand, Katherine R., and Heidi M. Levitt. 2005. “Butch Identity Development: The Formation of an Authentic Gender.” Feminism & Psychology 15 (1): 61–85. Doi: 10.1177/0959353505049709. Howard, Elizabeth Jane. 1991. The Light Years. London: Pan Macmillan. Jack, Belinda. 2001. George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. London: Vintage. Jalas, Kristiina. 2005. “Butch Lesbians and Desire.” Women: A Cultural Review 16 (1): 52–72. Doi: 10.1080/09574040500045839. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeleine D. Davis. 1992. “‘They was No-One to Mess with’: The Construction of the Butch Role in the Lesbian Community of the 1940s and 1950s.” In The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Edited by Joan Nestle, 62–79. Boston: Alyson Publications. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeleine D. Davis. 1993. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. London: Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis. Kuru-Utumpala, Jayanthi. 2013. “Butching it up: An Analysis of Same-Sex Female Masculinity in Sri Lanka.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 15 (2): 153–165. Doi: 10.1080/13691058.2013 .807520.

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Lai, Franco. 2007. “Lesbian Masculinities: Identity and Body Construction among Tomboys in Hong Kong.” In Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia. Edited by Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya, 159–179. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorde, Audre. 1982. Zami, A New Spelling of my Name. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Lorde, Audre. 2012. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Ten Speed. Mayor, Adrienne. 2014. The Amazons. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Miller, Isabel. 1969. Patience and Sarah. New York: Fawcett Crest. Nestle, Joan (ed.). 1992. The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Boston: Alyson. Newton, Esther. 1984. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” Signs 9 (4): 557–575. Queen, Carol. 1994. “Why I Love Butch Women.” In Dagger: On Butch Women. Edited by Roxxie, Lily Burana and Linnea A. Due. Berkeley: Cleis Press. Rubin, Gayle. 2011. Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Schaub, Melissa. 2013. Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction: The Female Gentleman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schoppmann, Claudia. 1996. Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich. Translated by Allison Brown. New York: Columbia University Press. Sinnott, Megan. 2007. “Gender Subjectivity: Dees and Toms in Thailand.” In Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia. Edited by Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya, 119–138. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stephens, Elizabeth. 2014. “Feminism and New Materialism: The Matter of Fluidity.” Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies 9: 186–202. Swarr, Amanda Lock. 2012. “Paradoxes of Butchness: Lesbian Masculinities and Sexual Violence in Contemporary South Africa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 37 (4): 961–988. Traub, Valerie. 2011. “The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography.” In The Lesbian Premodern. Edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt, 21–34. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. Vicinus, Martha. 1998. “Fin-de-Siècle Theatrics: Male Impersonation and Lesbian Desire.” In Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930. Edited by Billie Melman, 163–192. Florence, UK: Routledge. Waters, Sarah. 2006. The Night Watch. London: Virago. Whitbread, Helena (ed.) 2010. The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. 2nd edition. London: Virago. Wittig, Monique. 1975. The Lesbian Body. Translated by David Le Vay. London: Peter Owen.

Chapter 5

Materiality and Agential Women in Animal Bridegroom Fairy Tales from Europe and Bengal Amrita Chakraborty Abstract This chapter evaluates constructionist and new materialist approaches to gender and love by studying the animal bridegroom subtype of fairy tales as it appears in Western and in Indian (Bengali) collections. Existing research have paid attention to the function of fairy tales in constructing cultural representations of gender and love, thereby shaping psychosocial views. The effects of male and female bodies in the narratives and the extent to which materiality moulds a subject’s experience of the social have mostly been ignored. The aim therefore is to nuance the entanglement of gender and love by including reflections on the function of materiality in these stories.

Keywords fairy tales – animal bridegroom – agency – gender – love – materialism – body – “The beauty and the Beast” – rupkatha – Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar

1 Introduction This chapter contributes to the evaluation of constructionist and new materialist approaches to gender and love by conducting a comparative analysis of the animal bridegroom subtype of fairy tales as it appears in Western fairy tales and in Indian, more specifically Bengali, folktale collections. The animal bridegroom stories discussed here are taken from the Western literary fairy tale tradition, including writers like the sixteenth-century Italian authors, Basille and Straparola, seventeenth-century French writers like Madame Beaumont and the Grimm Brothers of eighteenth-century Germany. The Indian version of the animal bridegroom fairy tale studied here was originally part of an oral storytelling tradition, carried forward mostly by women in Bengal. This tale was ­collected at the end of the nineteenth century by a Bengali collector,

© Amrita Chakraborty, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_007

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­ akshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar. A close comparison of the two stories, takD ing into consideration the more active role played by women in preserving the Indian version, throws up interesting contrasts in the discursive organisation of the texts, in the role of the women characters, and in the materiality of the discursive practices embedded in the stories. Existing research on the Western versions, in the early feminist work of critics like Lieberman, Dworkin, and Rowe; and the works of contemporary critics, such as Jack Zipes and Donald Haase, have paid attention to the function of fairy tales in constructing (for example) cultural representations of gender and love. They have, however, mostly ignored the effects of male and female bodies in the narratives. On the other hand, research on the Indian story has mostly been restricted to structuralist readings of the tales and to historical studies of the importance of the fairy tale collections in nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist politics. I do not want to dismiss constructionist insights on Western fairy tales, and while I discuss certain constructionist approaches to the study of the Bengali story, the chapter’s main objective is to illustrate the insights gained by including reflections on the function of materiality in these fairy tales. Accordingly, the chapter opens by introducing the theory behind existing constructionist readings of the animal bridegroom subtype in a Western context and then deduces methodological consequences for analysing similar constructions of gender and love in the Bengali versions. It then proceeds to a brief introduction of new materialist theories and their methodological implications for literary analysis. The Western and the Bengali fairy tales are briefly introduced prior to the comparative analysis of the animal bridegroom fairy tales, where I shall explore constructionist and new materialist insights into gender and love in Western and Bengali contexts. This study is important for understanding the functioning of gender relations within societies as fairytales are derived from real socio-historical contexts, and also, in turn, influence and shape the practice of gender within societies by providing models of gender roles and gendered behaviour in the context of love. The focal point of the analysis will be the moment of physical encounter between the male animal and his bride. This analysis leads me to conclude that the effects of the physical encounter overturn the ideological thrust of the narratives. I will use two concepts proposed by new materialist feminists: Elizabeth Grosz’s idea of “freedom to” (Grosz 2010) that allows for a much more empowering and materially-grounded understanding of female agency; and Karen Barad’s notion of an “agential realist ontology” (Barad 2013) that critiques social constructionist understandings of culture by theorising a mutual

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dynamic of intra-activity between discursive practices and materiality, thus showing how matter (both human and otherwise) plays an active role in its own historicity. By including the effects of materiality, the analysis can with greater nuance capture the interaction of gender and love and examine how actively desiring and acting female bodies contribute to shaping their own subjectivities. This counters existing research that has focussed on the representation of the bodies of the female characters as passive and subservient to dominant patriarchal social organisation; and, at the level of the narrative, shows how the patriarchal authorial narration is not seamless and that there are moments when subversive voices emerge. 2

Constructionist Approaches to Animal Bridegroom Fairy Tales

Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have, as contributors to and representatives of the constructionist paradigm, argued that literature is an important discourse and consequently contributes to the construction of the subject within society. Dieter Freundlieb, in his essay “Foucault and the Study of Literature,” notes that Foucault initially regarded literature as a “counter-discourse,” associated with the experience of madness, and as an “other” that was necessarily opposed to all-encompassing reason. But later, starting with The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault began regarding literature as one among many discourses and, like other discourses, governed by a set of rules. In his genealogical phase (the decade of the 1970s) Foucault turned to the question of such discursive formations “as embodiments of ubiquitous power relations concerned with the production and formation of subjects” (Freundlieb 1995, 305). In an interview with Roger Pol Droit on 20 June 1975 on the nature of literature, Foucault states: “No one has ever really analysed how, out of the mass of things said, out of the totality of actual discourse, a number of these discourses (literary discourse, philosophical discourse) are given a particular sacralisation and function” (1995, 4). Foucault then rues that the “political implications [of literature] was [sic] absent from this exaltation” but it was imperative to recognise that culture continued to “force all its children, as they move towards culture, to pass through a whole ideology, an ideology of literature” (Foucault 1995, 6). Judith Butler builds on Foucaultian beliefs that there is no prediscursive reality and that the exercise of power is not purely negative, in that power does not repress, but rather has a positive function and itself produces the subject it seeks to govern. She proposes a performative theory of the construction of gender identity and, by extension, subject formation. She writes:

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That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of the subject. (Butler 1990, 173) Thus in the constructionist paradigm, the body, as an integral part of the subject, participates in the subjecthood that comes into being through the interplay of various social discourses; and literature counts among those social discourses. Jack Zipes, American folklorist and expert on literary fairy tales, is clearly inspired by constructionism when he asserts, with regard to the Western literary fairy tale, that the fairy tale’s function is to carry forward what he calls the civilising process in European societies. This civilising process shapes representations of love (among other things) in fairy tales in the interest of patriarchal class and religious structures. In his book, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, he states that: […] it was considered most important to advance the cause of civilité with explicit and implicit rules of pedagogization so that the manners and mores of the young would reflect the power, prestige, and hierarchy of the ruling classes. Thus it became vital to bring about socialization through fairy tales and the internalization of specific values and notions of gender. (Zipes 2006, 9) Here Zipes draws attention to the fact that the literary fairy tale, as authored by educated writers, had contributed to the construction and perpetuation of conventional gender discourses within the social groups that the texts circulated in. He explores this point further: […] almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folktale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values, and manners so that children and adults would become civilized according to the social code of that time. (Zipes 2006, 10) Similarly inspired by constructionist theory, feminists have pointed out how the Western literary fairy tale has conditioned cultural notions of love,

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­ articularly romantic love culminating in marriage. Fairy tale renderings of p love have constructed how men and women act in love. These renderings have enabled a naturalisation of heteronormative ideas on prescribed behaviour for their respective genders and valorised marriage as the most consequential achievement for women. Donald Haase traces these feminist readings of fairy tales in his essay, “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Critical Survey and Bibliography” (2000), where he notes the association of fairy tales with “female acculturation,”1 as noted by Marcia R. Lieberman in the early days of feminist criticism of fairy tales. Haase writes: […] there was and still is widespread agreement with Lieberman’s argument that fairy tales “have been made the repositories of the dreams, hopes, and fantasies of generations of girls” and that “millions of women must surely have formed their psycho-sexual self-concepts, and their ideas of what they could or could not accomplish, what sort of behaviour would be rewarded, and of the nature of reward itself, in part from their favourite fairy tales.” (2000, 17) Haase discusses Lieberman’s views and those of other feminist scholars who followed her, in order to draw attention to the trail of feminist scholarship that acknowledged the power of fairy tales as modern-day myths to influence women’s behaviour. He quotes from others, such as Andrea Dworkin, who, in Woman Hating (1974), […] echoed Lieberman’s thesis by asserting that fairy tales shape our cultural values and understanding of gender roles by invariably depicting women as wicked, beautiful, and passive, while portraying men, in absolute contrast, as good, active, and heroic. (Haase 2000, 17) In a similar vein, in 1979, Karen E. Rowe asserted the significance of these stories in forming women’s attitudes towards self, men, marriage and society. Later feminist scholarship emphasised the socio-cultural specificities of the classic fairy tales, with critics like Madonna Kolbenschlag calling them “parables of feminine socialization” (1979, 3–4) and Colette Dowling suggesting that they mirror social attitudes (1982, 14). In such constructionist readings, fairy tale discourse acts much like language in general, in that it is “produced by a particular set of social relations” and constructs certain social attitudes. Constructionism argues that “such language is never neutral or ideologically 1 Haase is referring to Lieberman 1972.

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i­ nnocent but designed to convey particular kinds of knowledge to achieve certain effects, usually of power and domination” (Webster 1996, 66). With the same emphasis on the socio-cultural specificity of the classic ­Western fairy tales, Jack Zipes writes of the animal bridegroom tales, where a human female is coerced into sexual submission to the desire of the male animal: If we examine this [animal bridegroom] fairy tale in its historical context, then it becomes evident why it fits sociologically and psychologically into the civilizing process. First, younger women of bourgeois and aristocratic circles were constantly being forced into marriages of convenience with elderly men, who were not always physically appealing or likeable. Second, women had become equated with potential witchlike figures by the end of the seventeenth century, so control of their alleged sexual powers of seduction was linked by church and state to control of diabolical forces. (Zipes 2006, 50) Animal bridegroom tales have also been read as narratives that explore the psychological process of sexual maturation, most notably articulating female fear of sexuality and male fear of inadequacy (e.g. Magnanini 2008, 93–98). In each of these readings, the focus is on the narrative sanctioning of men in privileged positions, with consequences for shaping and influencing the praxis of love and marriage. Attention to materiality, however, is reduced to an analytical focus on the regulation and control of the female body. The fairy tale writer’s narrative is also implicated in this exercise of power. Scholars such as Haase and Zipes also link this exercise of power to questions of fairy tale canon formation, especially its bias towards male writers; and to institutional control over the genre, particularly by the church. The canonical Western fairy tale author’s own patriarchal biases, class concerns such as notions of civility and the proper sphere of matrimony, religious inclinations and morality have all been read as informing and influencing various retellings of fairy tales and thus also regulating the practice of love as represented in them. Much important information can be extracted from animal bridegroom tales by means of constructionist approaches. These readings fruitfully analyse the social pressures acting on the female subjects within the stories and also account for the discursive organisation of the literary texts, including their overarching demand for female submission. However, these approaches also overwhelmingly assume women as passive subjects, targets and bearers of patriarchal myths, and do not adequately recognise their agency. A ­constructionist

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focus in literary criticism, by assuming that discourse holds ubiquitous power over subject formation, denies the possibility for independent and spontaneous action. Ruth B. Bottigheimer forms an exception to this critical trend when she reads some of these classic fairy stories as “rise tales” (Bottigheimer 2009, 20–21), where a subject from the merchant classes makes his/her way up the social ladder by dint of their own wit and fortune (a reading that gives a certain degree of agency to the subject). Her approach, much like constructionist readings, does not at all take into account the articulation of the materiality of the subject’s experience within the romantic/sexual relationship. At the same time, constructionist readings also fail to consider the more dynamic and fluid manner in which gender often acts in the praxis of love, as I hope to show in my analysis. 3

New Materialist Approaches to Animal Bridegroom Tales

One of the important themes in animal bridegroom fairy tales is the sexual male body as experienced by the female. While the discursive organisation of the texts demands that the human bride submit to the animal, the text also registers her revulsion to his unattractive body. This revulsion also shapes the woman’s response to the romantic relationship within the stories. While reading the stories, attention must be paid to the material body, because the narratives document the visceral response that is evoked in the human bride at the prospect of a coerced physical intimacy with a man. The demanding/violent man is represented as a filthy pig, a frog or an ugly beast because the male body appears as bestial to the woman. The texts here register women’s subjective experience and make use of the fantastical in order to represent it as the conventions of the genre allow for such representations. New materialist understandings of how subjectivities emerge “hazardously and ambiguously within a multitude of (both) organic and social processes” (Coole and Frost 2010, 9) have not yet been applied to the study of animal bridegroom fairy tales, despite the obvious relevance of such an approach. Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism moves away from a primarily representational understanding of things towards a performative approach. Barad’s version of performativity differs from Butler’s, however, in that the material is taken into consideration and this emphasis is very helpful in understanding gender and the practice of love in these stories. A belief in the representation of the world as a product of social processes is inherent within cultural constructionism. But by shifting focus from linguistic representation to discursive practices, Barad suggests that:

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[…] the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming. The primary ontological units are not things but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfiguring / entanglements / relationalities/(re) articulations. And the primary semantic units are not “words” but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfiguring of the world. (2003, 818) By shifting focus from approaching fairy tale discourse as language, and looking at the material-discursive practices embedded in the stories, one can reach a more nuanced understanding of the play of gender within the practice of love in relation to the fairy tale and by extension social processes. The relationship between the powerful man-animal and the human woman is not simply fixed as a unidirectional power relation between an active aggressor and a passive receptor, but is subject to constant ongoing renegotiation and reconfiguration, depending on the relations by which they emerge. By applying new materialist insights to animal bridegroom fairy tales, it is apparent that a crucial moment that reconfigures the relationship between the human bride and the animal bridegroom, is the moment of sexual encounter between the man-animal and the woman, and the woman’s very visceral response to it. This moment shows that “even when the focus is restricted to the materiality of ‘human’ bodies—there are ‘natural,’ not merely ‘social,’ forces that matter” (Barad 2003, 810). It is through these reconfigurings within material-discursive forces, through “intra-actions,” that the woman’s agency emerges. This idea of agency should be visualised as the capacity for individual action, and this can be linked to Elizabeth Grosz’s theorisation of “freedom to” as the exploration of what the female or feminist subject “is capable of making and doing.” To understand agency and autonomy, Grosz argues: […] instead of linking the question of freedom to the concept of emancipation or to some understanding of liberation from, or removal of, an oppressive or unfair form of constraint or limitation, as is most common in feminist and other anti-oppressive struggles and discourses, I develop a concept of life, bare life, where freedom is conceived not only or primarily as the elimination of constraint or coercion but more positively as the condition of, or capacity for, action in life. (2010, 140). Such an idea of freedom does not assume a passive subject (a simple receptor of the pressures and forces acting upon her), but recognises the subject’s autonomy and agentive capacity, even as social constraints and pressures act

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upon her. This idea sheds light on the study of the classical fairy tale, set in a time and place when the more conventional understanding of freedom as freedom from all forms of constraints and gender discrimination cannot apply. The female subject in these tales, despite not having attained what we would see as crucial rights and privileges, still has the “ability to act and in acting to make [herself] even as [she] is made by external forces” (Grosz 2010, 142). I will show this by focusing on the material aspects in my analysis of the animal bridegroom stories. The privileging of language, discourse and culture within a constructionist paradigm would suggest that the body as matter is the inert recipient of these forms of power that inscribe themselves on bodies, shape bodies and even produce them. But matter is not inert. There are a host of material-discursive forces (natural, biological and, physical, for example) that are important in the entangled process of materialisation. The fact that matter participates in its materialisation must be taken into consideration while accounting for “human forms of agency” and understanding “productive practices” (Barad 2003, 810). Grosz, too, stresses the importance of “exploring the subject’s freedom through its immersion in materiality” (Grosz 2010, 141). Barad, moreover, importantly asserts that discursive practices are material in nature just as the material is discursive: Discursive practices are not speech acts, linguistic representations, or even linguistic performances, bearing some unspecified relationship to material practices [rather] discursive practices are specific material reconfiguring of the world [and] they are ongoing agential intra-actions of the world through which local determinacy is enacted. (2003, 821) Hence, significantly, by pointing out that discourse is not language and stressing the dynamism of discursive practices, Barad opens up the possibility of dynamism of power relations and explains that these can also be locally determined through agential intra-actions. It follows that power relations can be reconfigured and are not therefore fixed. It is helpful, therefore, to look at the material dimensions of regulatory practices like marriage. Coole and Frost point out that marriage is reconceptualised in new materialist thinking as “visceralsocio-economic” and not just socio-economic in its ontology (Coole and Frost 2010, 16). While the institution aims at ensuring legal inheritance of property and the continuity of the patriarchal social order, it also involves the material interaction of two bodies. Methodologically, I shall draw some consequences from the theoretical insights highlighted by the new materialists. Both Grosz’s and Barad’s materialist approaches, when used to study animal ­bridegroom

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fairy tales, can lead to a more nuanced understanding of the way gender roles are visualised in the stories. By focusing on the material dimensions of discursive practices embedded in the stories, I will open up possibilities for feminist critique of fairy tales that will reveal possibilities for female and feminist subjecthood, female agency and autonomy, despite the patriarchal discursive organisation of the texts; and will show how materiality is portrayed as an active force that intra-acts with the set of social relations reflected in the story. 4

Analysis of Western Animal Bridegroom Fairy Tales

The animal bridegroom group of fairy stories is a subtype of fairy tales that feature a male animal and his romantic relationship/marriage with a female human. Animal bride stories are not discussed here, although there are examples in Asian and Russian folktales, because this type of fairy tale has mostly died out in the West.2 Some of the most well-known examples of animal bridegroom tales from the classical canon are King Pig, The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast. In the literary versions of the story recorded between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, demands were placed on a woman to submit to the desire of a man and obey the commands of her father to marry the animal. In Straparola’s King Porco, three daughters of an impoverished widow are serially forced to marry the filthy Pig King because of his royal command and the Pig King then demands their sexual submission. In the Grimm Brothers’ version of an animal bridegroom tale, The Frog Prince, the princess’s father demands that she keep her promise and orders her to take the frog to her bed. Similarly, in a French version of The Beauty and the Beast by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, the merchant asks his daughter to go and live imprisoned in a castle with the Beast. Within a constructionist understanding, the romantic relationships described within the stories, (that is, the marriages between the animal bridegrooms and the human brides), be they arranged marriages of convenience or coerced sexual arrangements with a powerful male, all “plug” the woman into a socio/political/economic structure that exerts power over her in both a direct and covert manner. The animal bridegroom in both King Porco and the Beauty and the Beast stories are powerful men who are placed socially and financially in a position that is superior to that of the human bride, while, in the Frog Prince, the animal bridegroom finds another powerful male figure, the King (the princess’s father), to support his cause. Not only are these men in 2 For more, see Tatar (2017).

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positions of patriarchal authority capable of enforcing domination on their brides, but there are also other social forces acting on the women, such as the desirable financial and social status to be gained from a marital/sexual union with the animals. These forces act together to demand the woman’s submission to the romantic/sexual relationship. However, material and visceral forces also come into play in this encounter. Consequently, the woman’s submission is resisted by and deferred by the natural bodily forces working from within. Since lived experience is always necessarily embodied, social forces are counteracted by the woman’s own internal bodily impulses. The animal bridegroom tales show how the desirability of the marriage in the social world, because of status and wealth, crumbles upon the prospect of the sexual encounter. On one hand, the male physical frame (the filthy/ugly body) is unable to contain the burden of the bridegroom’s social significance. And so, in the anthropocentric universe of the stories, the non-human body is regarded as sub-human and is in a jarring disjuncture with the family name, social status and class identity that otherwise belongs to an aristocrat and extends to his spouse upon marriage. On the other hand, the bestial appearance of the male body to the woman protagonist is also because of the coerced nature of the sexual encounter itself. This tension is registered in the tale and this also leads to resistance on the part of the bride, despite the discursive thrust of the narrative demanding her submission. The stories register for a moment the material body’s own capacity and potency to shape the subjectivity of the woman in opposition to socio-cultural forces. Her resistance to the physical aspect of the relationship and her revulsion to the male body shows “the active, self-transformative practical aspects of corporeality as it participates in relationships of power” (Coole and Frost 2010, 19). This resistance is seen in the elder daughters of the impoverished widow in King Porco, who successively become the Pig King’s two wives. They cannot bear the thought of spending a night with him and plot to kill their filthy husband. The apparent submission of the third daughter, who becomes the third wife of the Pig King, to his caresses, comes after she has already seen the consequences of her sisters’ resistance and is a step she takes deliberately to make the best of her circumstances. Similarly, the princess in the Frog Prince is unable to follow her father’s command and throws the frog against the wall when she finds him in her bed. Belle in The Beauty and the Beast lives in the castle as a reluctant prisoner and defers her submission to the Beast’s romantic advances until the end of the story. As these fairy tales indicate, human brides cannot ignore their own bodily revulsion to sexual male animal bodies. They either revolt or come to a slow acceptance of his physical frame. Both of these can be defined as positive actions that show the bride’s agentive capacity and thus

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demonstrate her freedom to chart her own course within her circumstances. Such actions ultimately bring about transformation: in this case, they transform the animal bridegroom through the magical transmogrification of the animal body. The importance of materiality in understanding subjectivity emerges as the external forces acting on the female subject are countered by internal material forces. In the face of patriarchal domination in the context of romantic relationships and demands for submission, the stories show the woman protagonists demonstrating their capacity for positive action and acting as agents to secure their well-being and ultimately transforming the male authority figures. The impulse for such action comes from within the female character and the actions are performed even as she is bound by power structures that impose limitations on her. Using Karen Barad’s agential realist elaboration that tells us how relata emerge within relations as the result of specific intra-actions, one can propose that there is no ontologically distinct position of “victim” and “aggressor” that remains rigidly true over a period of time or the course of a story. Rather, different positions emerge through specific intra-actions within the romantic relationships of the stories. In the animal bridegroom fairy tales, the moment of the woman’s physical revulsion to the man-animal is a moment where she ceases to be the object for male consumption/ownership. She vacates the position of “victim” by resisting the submission of her body, despite the voice of the father ordering her to submit, and then she actively chooses a course of action that suits her best. She thus realizes her capacity for action (her agential potential) through a “dynamic process of intra-activity” (Barad 2003, 817). The stories thus demonstrate the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agential positions, instead of simply positioning women as victims, and, in the process, show the complexity of the workings of power within gender equations in the praxis of love. 5

Analysis of Bengali Animal Bridegroom Fairy Tales

When one looks at versions of the animal bridegroom story collected from oral storytelling traditions outside the West, the agency of the female characters seems enhanced. From a comparative perspective, the effects of materiality also seem more dominant. To illustrate these differences, I shall now turn to the Bengali fairy tales, collected in India during the colonial period in one of the landmark texts of the era. The collection, titled Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandmother’s Bag), was written by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar and published in 1907. The volume’s aim was to preserve Bengal’s own indigenous storytelling

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traditions in the face of the threat of cultural extinction due to hegemonic English fairy tale texts. The cultural domination of English texts was the direct result of the spread of English education in India by the end of the nineteenth century. Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, like some other Indian collectors of folk and fairy stories before him, was also inspired by the work of the Brothers Grimm and went around the villages of Mymensingha (a region in present day Bangladesh) in the last decades of the nineteenth century collecting folk and fairy tales. He was also the first Indian collector to use a phonograph. Mitra Majumdar belonged to the class of Indian intelligentsia who were educated under the British colonial education system and were popularly referred to as the bhadrolok, the Bengali equivalent of the English gentlemen. Thakurmar Jhuli was published in the years immediately following the first partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy of India; it was linked to the Swadeshi Movement that was a reaction to the partition and its attempt at a Bengali cultural revival. The Bengali fairy tale, known as rupkatha, was an ancient Indian oral tradition that had been transmitted over the centuries and had amalgamated and preserved a vast range of cultural influences. The bhadrolok classes, partly under the influence of this growing political movement, read essentialist ideas into the indigenous Bengali traditions and also into Bengali women, the supposed bearers of those traditions due to their roles in oral storytelling practices.3 The bhadrolok classes were not without patriarchal biases of their own.4 Thus it is important to remember that Mitra Majumdar’s animal bridegroom tale is presented to us mediated through the eyes of a patriarchal narrator, and that the discursive organisation of the text attempts to push the princess into adopting a more submissive and subordinate role by the end of the story. Nevertheless, the female protagonist remains central to the story of “Kalabati Rajkanya.” It is for this reason that Jack Zipes assumed that Western versions would be younger versions of orally transmitted animal bridegroom stories featuring a “female initiator of human action and 3 The Indian intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century accepted the Victorian divide between the home and the world. In, Indian society though, the home was also associated with tradition and by extension with women: this was the realm that had to be kept uncontaminated by foreign influence. The world was the outer realm of men where daily negotiation with colonial powers had to take place. Rabindranath Tagore, the first Indian recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as other intellectuals of the time, closely associated women and indigenous tradition with oral storytelling. 4 The nationalist need to keep the home uncontaminated resulted in a section of the conservative intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century fiercely resisting efforts on part of the British colonial administration to pass social legislation that would have reformed women’s position, and justifying indigenous practices that were harmful to women, such as child marriage.

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­integration” (Zipes 2006, 49). Although “Kalabati Rajkanya” is well known, it has mostly been subjected to structuralist analysis5 and referred to in the context of Swadeshi politics. By contrast, I will undertake a preliminary constructionist reading and then focus on the material aspects of the story. The story of Princess Kalabati begins with a hermit presenting a magic herb as a gift to the seven queens of a childless king. The herb has the ability to enable them to bear children. However, the five elder queens forget to share the herb with the two younger queens, who are then forced to scrape off what little is left of the herb from the grinding slab. Subsequently the two younger queens give birth to an owl and a monkey, instead of human children, and are cast out from the palace by the king. Their children’s physical deviation from the human form is sufficient to cause the ousting of the two princes and their mothers. At the centre of the story is the Princess Kalabati, a foreign princess who suddenly appears in a magnificent sailing boat and begins a chain of events that ultimately lead to the restoring of the rights of the younger queens and the transformation of their sons. All seven sons of the king (the five human and the two animal sons) set out to win her hand in marriage and it is only the monkey, Buddhu, who is able to reach her and complete all the tasks that she has in store. Upon successful completion of the tasks, the princess, although a little shocked by her suitor’s appearance, keeps her word and marries him. From here, the fortunes of the monkey prince begin to change as he is taken under her tutelage. In the Bengali story, the central moment of the encounter between the human bride and the animal bridegroom is a moment of recognition and acceptance of the physical body. Unlike the Western version of the story, the woman is initially in a position of power. She can reject the animal bridegroom; but she chooses to establish a romantic alliance with him. She chooses him, exercising her own agentive capacities; and, in a complete reversal of the Western fairy tale, it is she who, by accepting the deviant-bodied prince, extends to him the wealth and status that comes with being her husband. Following this, she saves him repeatedly as the five human brothers plot to kill the monkey (despite his clearly generous nature and willingness to help his brothers in their time of need). However, she is not exempt from the patriarchal power structures that impose restrictions on women: her choice of a romantic partner is not respected in the King’s court and she is pressured to choose a husband from among the five human princes. Upon refusing, she is imprisoned; but she uses her wit to buy time and await her husband’s return before exposing all to the king. Seen in the context of 5 For more, see Gopal Rakhal Danda Shamash: Uponibeshbad o Bangla Shishushahitya (Bandopadhyay 1991).

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South Asian cultures, the story is framed by the politics of the andar mahal. The andar mahal or inner house was a space exclusively occupied by women and was forbidden to men who were not family members. The space of the andar mahal was often marked by intense competition for influence over men and through them, control over the resources and the power they held. This was especially true of the power relations between women in polygynous family structures. Bengali fairy tales often document a vast range of ingenious methods employed by women to get the better of their competitors, who were usually their co-wives. Matter and the processes of material life also contribute to the play of power in “Kalabati Rajkanya.” The physical shape of the princes becomes the ground for their disqualification from their legitimate royal status and helps their stepmothers expel their mothers (the two younger queens) from the royal household. As in the Western versions of the tale, as I argued above, the physical frame of the princes is unable to contain the burden of the symbolic significance of their social title, causing a disjunction between the stature of the body politic and the material body. However, the focus in “Kalabati Rajkanya” is on the princess. She is the main protagonist and the story is named after her and not after the animal bridegroom, as is the case in the Western versions. The word Kalabati means one who is cultivated (the word kala is used for both fine arts and for skills). The romantic acceptance of the animal bridegroom by a cultivated woman paves the way for his physical transformation and ensures the restoration of his and his owl brother’s political rights and the rights of their queen-mothers. In her ability to use her intelligence and find her way out of the problem, Kalabati exercises agency and demonstrates her capacity for action and her freedom to act even within the limitations imposed upon her. At one point in the story the Princess claims that earlier she belonged to her father, and in the future she will belong to her husband: but for the moment (in the timeframe of the story) “I am mine,” “ami amar,” she says. It is significant that Mitra Majumdar included this while writing down the story. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal, the right of a woman to legal personhood was contested. Kalabati’s proclamation is not merely a linguistic act reclaiming her personhood, but also a discursive act with material repercussions in that, by speaking these words, she is simultaneously reserving her body for consensual activity. I refer here to Barad’s iteration that “discursive practices are often confused with linguistic expression, and meaning is often thought to be a property of words,” but it is not; and in her materialist understanding, she states “meaning is not ideational but rather specific material (re) configurings of the world” (Barad 2003, 818–819). Kalabati’s claiming of ­personhood is actually a refusal to submit to enforced compulsions. She

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retains her agentive capacities even while imprisoned and, after the truth has been revealed and the five elder princes and their queen-mothers punished, Kalabati performs the final action that paves the way for the transformation of the animal princes into human forms. She burns the hide the princes apparently cast away each night. Hence, in the course of the story the princess does not occupy any single position in relation to the animal bridegroom. There is no single ontological position of woman as “victim” that holds true throughout the tale. As she performs various actions, she intra-acts and her ontological position within her relation with the animal bridegroom constantly changes. An “open sense of futurity” is “inherent in the nature of intra-activity” and so “agency is not foreclosed” (Barad 2003, 826). Kalabati occupies and vacates different positions as rescuer, survivor and victim throughout the tale. By the end of the story she has been reduced to a silent spouse in the household of the ruling male elite. This is borne out by the fact that Mitra Majumdar made illustrations himself to accompany the original text of 1907. In the final picture, Majumdar portrayed the king on his throne flanked by the now-transformed monkey and owl princes. The royal umbrella that is symbolic of the king’s royal status is extended to include them. However, Princess Kalabati, the central protagonist, is absent from the frame. Once she has brought about the transformation of the king’s sons, she is excluded from the trio of the male ruling elite.6 She now uses the formal pronoun for her husband: “uni,” instead of the personal “o.” This practice was common until the early twentieth century in Bengal and enforces the unequal power relations between husbands and wives.7 As discussed above, Princess Kalabati starts in a position of power and is directly responsible for the final salvation of the animal bridegroom. Since this story stems from the oral rupkatha tradition and because this tradition was primarily carried on by women, the existence of stories like this supports Jack Zipes’ thesis that oral stories about the animal bridegroom stem from 6 In the absence of the original notebooks and phonograph records that Mitra Majumdar used while collecting the stories, it is impossible to determine the extent of his interventions in the oral stories that he collected. However, the sketches he included in the text offer definite clues to his point of view and can be read as the author’s own pictorial comments on the story. 7 Uni is a gender-neutral formal pronoun denoting respect, reserved for strangers, superiors and the elderly, while o denotes familiarity but is also used for juniors. Its usage very often exposes a status quo where a person in a lower position (according to class, age, status or designation) will refer to his/her superior as uni; however, in return, the superior will refer to him or her as o. Uni was used for (usually) much older husbands, who were necessarily in a position of privilege in respect to their wives in the nineteenth century. The husband on the other hand rarely referred to his wife as uni, using the personal pronoun o for her.

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­ atriarchal societies. He refers to the work of Heide Göttner-Abendroth, who m says that animal bridegroom stories were actually about a cultivated female taking in a man “who in her eyes is still in the state akin to that of a roaming animal” (Zipes 2006, 43). Instead of the male animal being in a position of power and demanding female obedience, it is a case where “the male has not yet reached the cultural level of the human (= woman). It is up to the woman to bring him ‘salvation’ by making human clothes for him and accepting him into her house as a domesticated inhabitant” (Zipes 2006, 49). The discursive organisation of the texts changed in the hands of the writers of the literary fairy tale, according to Zipes. Abendroth’s ideas are rooted within an anthropocentric view, where “animal” means “sub-human.” Oral traditions are marked by their fluidity, changing shape and form as they pass from one teller to another and often draw from literary traditions while influencing literary production in turn. Hence oral stories adapt to their changing contexts and undergo a constant process of erosion and addition. We can conclude with certainty that, when compared with the Western literary fairy tales of Straparola, the Brothers Grimm and Beaumont on human-animal marriages, the Bengali folktale is more centrally focussed on the human bride rather than the animal bridegroom.8 I have demonstrated in this chapter that not only the social, but also the material aspects are relevant when studying animal bridegroom fairy tales. The material, and the materiality of the subject’s context, mould her experience of the social. Matter plays an active and even an agential role in the stories. Since the animal-bridegroom stories metaphorically talk about heterosexual relations as they existed within cultures, the stories can also be used to explore the role materiality plays within social relations. In the face of the command of the father or the demand of the powerful male for female submission, the possibility for female agency is not foreclosed. In the relation between the man-animal and the woman, these characters intra-act, and through the dynamic nature of those intra-actions, there is a constant re-configuration and renegotiation of the relation between the two actors. Both the man and the woman are actors in this relation: it is not true that one (the man) is the active 8 Bengali culture is focused on strong female characters, as reflected in both the central importance of mother- goddesses, as well as the importance of mothers in the family (although this status is reserved for mothers of sons who are the heirs to the family name (Bagchi 1993)). The most important deities in the eastern Indian region are those belonging to the Shakta tradition of Hinduism, where the female form is worshipped as the highest form of truth or Brahma. The focus on the trio of Lakshmi, Saraswati and Parvati, representing wealth, knowledge and power, mark the most important religious festivities. Bengali patriarchy to this day remains much more covert than the more brash hypermasculine culture of Northern India with its religious cults worshipping Ram and Hanuman.

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enforcer and the other (the woman) is the passive receptor. This leaves open possibilities for female agency within the material-discursive scheme of fairy tales and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the role of women within cultures. References Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 802–829. Bandopadhyay, Shibaji. 1991. Gopal Rakhal Danda Shamash: Uponibeshbad o Bangla Shishushahitya. Kolkata: Papyrus. Bottigheimer, Ruth. B. 2009. Fairy Tales A New History. Albany: State University of New York Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Butler Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cavallaro, Dani. 2001. Critical and Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–46. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Dowling, Colette. 1982. The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. New York: Pocket Books. Frost, Samantha. 2011. “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology.” In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge. Edited by Heidi. E Grasswick, 69–83. New York: Springer. doi 10.1007/978-1-4020-6835-5_4. Foucault, Michel. 1995. “The Functions of Literature.” Translated by Alan Sheridan. In Genealogy and Literature. Edited by Lee Quinby, 3–9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freundlieb, Dieter. 1995. “Foucault and the Study of Literature.” Poetics Today 16 (2): 301–344. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2010. “Feminism, Materialism and Freedom.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 139–157. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Haase, Donald (ed.). 2004. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

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Haase, Donald. 2000. “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Critical Survey and Bibliography.” Marvels & Tales 14 (1): 15–63. Kolbenschlag, Madonna. 1979. Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models. New York: Bantam Books. Lieberman, Marcia. 1972. “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale.” College English 34 (3): 83–95. Magnanini, Suzanne. 2008. Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Majumdar, Dakshinaranjan. 1907. Thakurmar Jhuli. Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh Publishers. Sarkar, Tanika. 2001. Hindu Wife Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Sen, Dinesh Chandra. 1920. The Folk Literature of Bengal. Kolkata: Aparna Book Distributors. Tagore, Abanindranath. 1943. Banglar Brata. Kolkata: Bishwabharati. Maria Tatar (ed.). 2017, Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales about Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World. London: Penguin. Webster, Roger. 1996. Studying Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Zipes, Jack (ed.). 2001. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. New York: Norton. Zipes, Jack. 2006. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Taylor and Francis. Zipes, Jack. 2006. Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 6

Becoming-Woman in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve Wernmei Yong Ade Abstract This chapter engages Angela Carter with new feminist thought, paying close attention to her creation of nomadic subjectivities in The Passion of New Eve. Carter’s novel explores the possibilities offered by “becoming-minority/ nomad/ molecular/ bodieswithout-organs/ woman” (Braidotti 2001, 192) revealed in love. Going beyond questions of desire and pleasure in her examination of love, Carter suggests that equitable love is possible only when gender is imagined differently. This must involve a radical rethinking of the subject, and subjectivity, from one that is unitary and fully known, to one that is never fully known, existing always as potential, and revealed only in relation to others, but also as a relation to others.

Keywords Angela Carter – nomadic subjectivity – radical feminism – The Passion of New Eve – becoming – gender

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I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. (Judith Butler 2006, 46)

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© Wernmei Yong Ade, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_008

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1 Introduction When asked in an interview if she “ever felt inclined to put fiction to the service of an idea of feminism,” British author Angela Carter, best-known for her retelling of classical fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, answered unequivocally: No. I write about the conditions of my life, as everyone does. You write from your own history. Being female or black means that once you ­become conscious, your position – however many there are of you – isn’t a standard one: you have to bear that in mind when you are writing, you have to keep on defining the ground on which you’re standing, because you are in fact setting yourself up in opposition to generality. (Haffenden 1985, 93) Carter passed away seven years later in 1992 from lung cancer, but her response to Haffenden’s question is an indication of her continued relevance to feminist literary studies today, particularly in thinking about what “woman” might become and what she might do, rather than the mere consideration of who or what she is. Even though Carter insisted that she had no intention of “writing illustrative textbooks of late feminist theory to be used in institutions of education,” and that “the thought that I am taught in universities makes me miserable” (cited in Gordon 2017, 130), she would probably have enjoyed, and even agreed to participate in, the kinds of creative and imaginative directions and figurations that feminist theory is taking today. It is creativity used as critique, and as Rosi Braidotti, whose work on nomadism and becoming-woman is germane to examining this particular vein in Carter’s feminism, states: “the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transformations, rather than Being in the classical mode” (2011, 11); the point is, what women can do (2012, 33). In this, Carter’s speculative fiction appears to have anticipated Braidotti’s “agenda for the new millennium” (2002, 2) by at least twenty years. Indeed, Carter’s understanding of the subject as non-unitary, multi-layered and complex, which entails constant positioning and re-positioning, resonates with the cartographic approach to subjectivity advocated by Braidotti, as one that embodies and engenders mobility, flow and all kinds of transformations, basically “a process of becoming nomad” (2011, 5). Braidotti’s focus on processes (becoming) rather than concepts (Being) certainly recalls Carter’s insistence on having to “keep on defining the ground on which you’re standing” because positions are never fixed, being constitutive only of one’s relationship with the centre. We might in fact supplement Carter’s “position” with Braidotti’s “location,” as “an embedded and embodied memory: it is a set of countermemories, which are ­activated

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by the resisting thinker against the grain of the dominant representations of subjectivity” (Braidotti 2006, 29). Carter was precisely such a resisting thinker, and one might locate her in what one critic has described as a “contrapuntal relationship” with mainstream feminism, “never simply representing any one position and never quite in step with anyone” (Easton 2000, 3). This chapter is an attempt to engage Carter with new feminist thought, paying close attention to her creation of nomadic subjectivities in The Passion of New Eve (1982). Carter’s novel is more than an imaginative appropriation of Simone de Beauvoir’s adage that one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one; it is a foray into the possibilities and potentials offered by “becoming-­ minority/ nomad/ molecular/ bodies-without-organs/ woman” (Braidotti 2001, 192), revealed in the loving relations taken up by her characters. Carter was certainly no stranger to nomadism. She had won the Somerset Maugham award for her third novel Several Perceptions in 1969, which offered a cash prize of £500. She used the prize to fund a journey that would mark the beginning of a process of personal transformation for her. She told the Guardian in 1972: “My marriage was on the point of foundering and I think Somerset Maugham would have derived a certain pleasure from financing my running away from home, particularly since I ran away to Tokyo and Bangkok” (cited in Gamble 2006, 105). These were formative years, which her friend and biographer Lorna Sage referred to as a rite of passage. It was ostensibly an experience of ­becoming-other for Carter: […] my female consciousness was being forged out of the contradictions of my experience as a traveller, as, indeed, some other aspects of my political consciousness were being forged. (It was a painful and enlightening experience to be regarded as a coloured person, for example; to be defined as a Caucasian first before I was defined as a woman, and learning the hard way that most people on this planet are not Caucasian and have no reason to either love or respect Caucasians.) (1997a, 39) Her otherness was never more pronounced than in the love affair – “my first Real Affair” (Carter cited in Gordon 2017, 452) – she had with a Japanese man, Sozo Araki: I had never been so absolutely mysteriously other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator. (1974, 7) As a white woman, she was “an instrument which played upon an alien scale” (1974, 7). Noting that women poets tended to “write of Love as the source of

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[their] suffering, and to view that victimization by Love as an almost inevitable fate” (Rich 1979, 36), the poet and essayist Adrienne Rich had urged women to take up the role of the lover, conventionally reserved for the male subject, rather than remaining cast in the mould of the beloved, the object of another’s desire. This would be a crucial first step towards reclaiming women’s status as subjects. For the woman, taking up the active subject position of lover is, ­however, not a simple matter of unproblematically adopting the role of the masculine other: it involves taking up the ambiguous position of a self as subject, in addition to a self as having, historically, been the object of another’s desire. This tension appears to have characterised Carter’s loving relations, who felt at once “a reasonable man” (1997a, 38) and “a female impersonator” (2001, 7). We ought to ask if it was only as an “other” that Carter knew how to be loved; whether she constructed herself as such, so that despite, and perhaps because, of how unconventional a woman she was by Japanese standards – “a female impersonator” and “Glumdalclitch” – she needed, through her own alien eyes, to see herself in the conventionally feminine role of being the object of another’s desire. This tension between two contradictory positions at the heart of the female subject in love also recalls Donna Haraway’s definition of irony: “irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true” (2016, 5). While not all of Carter’s female characters resemble Haraway’s cyborg, the same irony and tension that dominates Haraway’s cyborg imagery forms the basis of many of Carter’s female lovers, most notably in her cross-species human-animal creations in The Bloody Chamber, but also in characters like the winged woman, Fevvers, in Nights at the Circus; Albertina, the shape-shifting daughter of the Doctor in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and of course New Eve, whose androgynous subjectivity exceeds what terms like male and female, or masculine and feminine, can encompass. The exile and alienation Carter experienced, as Braidotti describes in her theoretical explorations of nomadic subjectivities, was thus not one of “a disembedded marginalized exile, but rather that of an active nomadism” (2011, 55). Instead of being positioned as other, Carter located herself as such, against the grain. This is best seen in the way she tended to fictionalise her own life, turning herself into the object of her life stories, and, as previously suggested, the object in her own love stories. As Gamble notes, “she deliberately plays with the notion of the autobiographical writing self” (2006, 8). For instance, in “Flesh and the Mirror,” a semi-autobiographical short story, the female lover describes herself as “pulling the strings of my own puppet” and shifts from referring to herself in the first to the third person, that is, from speaking subject to object: “On the night I came back to it, however hard I looked for the one I

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loved, she could not find him anywhere and the city delivered her into the hands of a perfect stranger who fell into step beside her and asked why she was crying” (2001, 63). The moment of shifting from first to third person can be understood as a moment of creating “countermemories” of the self, which need not necessarily have any bearing or resemblance of truth to Carter’s life, and marks a turn from being to becoming-other. Wandering through the city, Carter’s experience mirrors Eve’s wanderings in The Passion of New Eve, when the latter first encounters her new female body through her still-masculine consciousness. The fictionalisation of one’s life in the mode of autobiographical writing in fact becomes a central formal strategy for the three novels that deal most comprehensively with subjectivity: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann, The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus. They all take the form of memoir, in addition to appropriating the picaresque. It is clear that for Carter, writing and story-telling become the primary modes of practising nomadic subjectivity. Italian philosopher and feminist thinker, Adriana Cavarero, underscores the importance of writing and story-telling in the creation of subjectivity, not in that story-telling creates the subject, or that the subject is located in the act of story-telling. For her, the subject is always the creation of an other, who encounters not a subject, but its story: At once exposable and narratable, the existent always constitutes herself in relation to an other. With all the inimitable wisdom of a familiar feeling [sapore], she knows that she is an unrepeatable uniqueness, but does not know who she is, or who is exposed. (2002, 40) In other words, there is no subject prior to the telling, and certainly no unitary, singular subject or who to which the narrative refers. There is only the story the subject tells; hence Cavarero’s preference for the term “existent” rather than subject. In fact, the unity of any tale told only exposes a desire for the unity of the self in the form of a story and its design. Cavarero uses Karen Blixen’s imagery of a man who wanders around in the dark, only to find, the next morning, that he has traced the image of a stork, to describe this process: “The stork is only seen at the end, when whoever has drawn it with his life – or when other spectators, looking from above – see the prints left on the ground” (2000, 1). Cavarero’s theory of subjectivity, as being mapped in a way that can only be known by an other after its trajectory is complete, chimes with Braidotti’s conceptualisation of nomadic subjects as figurations of what bodies can do, as well as the latter’s understanding of subjectivity as “a process ontology of autopoesis or self-styling” (2012, 31). Carter’s self-styling as nomad also extended to

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her status in the literary world: “I had become the literary equivalent of a displaced person. I kept applying for my naturalisation papers in genre” (1997, 35). As Sally Keenan notes, Carter’s writing often presented “a heretical disagreement with certain aspects of feminist thinking current in the 1970s” (cited in Gamble 2001, 114), which alienated her from her feminist contemporaries. Like Virginia Woolf, who had expressed that it was sometimes better to be locked out than to be locked in (1993, 63), Carter relished her location as an outsider, because it granted her aesthetic licence to question the centre and its tools, including its attitude towards love. An overview of Carter’s oeuvre strongly suggests that she was interested in the ethical implications of nomadism, and saw love as the “Two Scene” in which this might be explored. The “Two Scene” is Alain Badiou’s phrase for love being “a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two” (2012, 29), and thus introduces the ethical dimension of the loving relation. Ann Ferguson and Anna Jónasdóttir note that early feminist engagements with love are characterised by a tendency to vilify love as “a discursive device for seducing women or other others into one or another form of subordination,” and consequently to reject heterosexual romantic love between couples as “problematic because embedded with patriarchal ideology” (2014, 2–3). In 1969, Ti-Grace Atkinson, one of the informal leaders and founders of The Feminists, also known as A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles, had proclaimed that “the phenomenon of love is the psychological pivot in the persecution of women,” and “the woman’s pitiful deluded attempt to attain the human” (1974, 43–44). Atkinson had argued then that a woman can unite with a man only if she accepts her position as an object, specifically his object, and a woman can only love a man as a woman, as far as woman is defined by man, in patriarchal terms, as inessential and subordinate. Atkinson thus concluded that “[t]here’s no such thing as a ‘loving’ way out of the feminist dilemma: that it is as a woman that women are oppressed, and that in order to be free she must shed what keeps her secure” (1974, 45). The problem with love, as identified by Atkinson, is that a woman cannot love as a subject. Feminists then seemed left with two options: to reject love, or radically to rethink subjectivity in love – for both men and women – in order to circumvent the possessive impulse that has historically informed heterosexual love relations. Setting herself apart from the views of radical feminists like Atkinson, Carter’s critical position towards love can thus be said to be aligned more with Stevi Jackson’s position that “consider[s] how we can maintain a critical feminist perspective on heterosexual love while not denying that love remains meaningful for, and highly valued by, many women” (2014, 34). Throughout what can be considered one of feminism’s most tumultuous

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­ eriods, Carter maintained love’s centrality to her life and work, even though it p “very often, and quite usually, leads to tears before bedtime” (Carter cited in Katsavos 1994, 17). Embedded in almost every one of Carter’s fictional texts is a love story. Whether as one of the many strands embedded in the text, or the main ­narrative, the love story often serves as what Jennie Wang describes as “a counter rhetoric of cultural criticism” (1997, xvi). For Carter, love is not experienced only as a personal phenomenon, but has ethical and political consequences as well. We see this most explicitly in The Sadeian Woman (1979), at text that has generally been read and analysed for what it says about the cultural commodification of women. It has never been read as a text on love, though its closing lines, indeed its closing chapter, stresses the continued relevance of love for female emancipation: “In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awaken the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women” (The Sadeian Woman, 150). The Sadeian libertine fears love because it would mean being robbed of the one thing that would make him master: his sovereign right over the subjectivity of the other. As noted by Georges Bataille, “they are to be victims, not partners. De Sade makes his heroes uniquely self-centred; the partners are denied any rights at all: this is the key to his system” (1986, 167). The postscript to The Sadeian Woman is an excerpt from Emma Goldman’s The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation: “The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved” (cited in Carter 1979, 151). This again confirms that, rather than reject heterosexual love, what Carter felt feminism needed was a new way of imagining loving relations. Aidan Day’s reading of The Sadeian Woman acknowledges this ethical focus, when he says that Carter “wants a model for the relationship between people that is based on the principle of reciprocity rather than of self-definition by exclusion” (1998, 101). Day concludes his analysis by noting that while Carter has, throughout her book, utilised “a discourse that leans on philosophical language, Carter ends her work by defining her model of reciprocity and mutuality using the more emotive term ‘love’ […] the reciprocity of thought and feeling properly implied by the word love” (1998, 102). Day’s analysis comes closest to recognising that in love, Carter saw the possibilities of an alternative to the solipsism that characterises Sadeian subjectivity. In referring to love as simply an “emotive” term, concerned only with “thought” and “feeling,” Day’s analysis does not give full range to what love can unveil. In this chapter, I wish to take love beyond the emotive, to suggest that Carter’s works are meditations on the ethical and political possibilities of love. The Passion of New Eve is a satirical

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view of the antagonistic relationship between opposing sexes, and demonstrates the limitations of simple role reversal, where the same opposing terms continue to be locked into a hierarchical relationship. In such a scenario, the subject is a result of self-naming by exclusion, and that which it excludes is its negative other. The Passion of New Eve insists upon a redefinition of the ­subject, so that the subject is constituted in its relation with an other that is exterior to it, rather than its exclusion of the other. This redefinition is made possible only through a loving relation that recognises one’s ethical responsibility to the other. Set against the violence of civil unrest and revolutionary upheaval in America of the late 1960s, The Passion of New Eve is a critique of certain strains of the radical feminist movement, which (at that time) had achieved little beyond simple role reversal. Carter explains that the novel was inspired by a trip across America she had taken on the Greyhound Bus: “It was the height of the Vietnam war. With violent public demos and piles of garbage in New York streets. If you remember, it was the year of gay riots in Greenwich Village, when they even chucked rocks; so my scenario of uprisings isn’t all that far-fetched” (cited in Gamble 2006, 152). There was also the establishment of radical feminist groups like the National Organisation for Women (now). 1967 saw the publication of the Society for Cutting Up Men (scum) Manifesto, written by Valerie Solanas, a feminist cult figure with a history of violence, propelled to fame for attempting to murder Andy Warhol in 1968. The novel satirises the likes of scum, evident in its portrayal of gun-toting, testicle-grabbing, foul-mouthed militant feminists, as well as the hyper-ritualised – bordering on the ridiculous – near-mythological women’s-only community of Beulah, whose high priestess Mother, glorying in titles like “Great Parricide” and “Grand Emasculator,” is a grotesque parody of the many-breasted Goddess Cybele. Even Mother’s selfconstruction as the mythical Goddess is steeped in violence, for each of her breasts is a contribution from the women who serve her. These parodic representations of female violence culminate in the ultimate feminist revenge fantasy on the novel’s main protagonist Evelyn, a serial abuser of women. He is forced to endure public humiliation by rape, castration, and the coup de grace: his transformation into a woman, the New Eve. Mother’s grand plan is to impregnate New Eve with sperm harnessed from Evelyn, so that New Eve may populate the world all by herself. There will be no male involvement in the construction of this new world. Monique Wittig’s wry comment about matriarchies holds true in this instance: “it is only the sex of the oppressor that changes” (1993, 104). What Carter believed to be at the root of feminism’s failure is made explicit in this dystopian tale, and best expressed by Deleuze as “the slavish subordination of action to some high ideal” (cited in Colebrook and

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­Buchanan 2000, 1). Drawing on Deleuze, Claire Colebrook cautions against taking the female subject – an idea or ideal of the female subject, what Wittig terms “the myth of woman” (1993, 104) – as the foundation for political action, for the women’s movement would then cease to be a movement. Colebrook explains: “It would have taken one of its effects – the female subject – and allowed that effect to function as a cause, a ground or a moral law” (2000, 1). If, as Braidotti intuits, subjects are constitutive of their locations, and if locations are an effect of resistance, then there cannot be a female subject prior to acts of resistance. There can only be an idea of the female (to be championed), or the female object (to be defended), but never a female subject. Mother’s revolution fails because she has made herself into a “high ideal,” even if this ideal subverts cultural norms of femininity. Mother has merely supplanted one myth with another one. Nothing radical has happened here. Significantly, the chapters on Mother are immediately followed by the chapters on Zero, the impotent sadistic patriarch, to demonstrate precisely that it is only the sex of the oppressor that has changed. Like Mother, the first thing Zero does is to rape Eve, and the second thing he does is to make her his eighth wife, whom he hopes to impregnate, as Mother also hoped to do, once his virility is restored. Zero keeps his wives as slaves, who serve him unquestioningly, despite his constant abuse. They refer to him as “Master,”; they cook and clean for him, his pigs and his dog; they do his every bidding, and in return he “services” them by turns each night. It is their belief that his sex has life-giving powers, and they willingly subject themselves to his abuse for this belief. Zero is thus able to sustain belief in his mastery in spite being impotent: “But his myth depended on their conviction; a god-head, however shabby, needs believers to maintain his credibility. Their obedience maintained him” (1982, 99). His women live up to the archetypal female psychosexual role of masochism, whose dependence on a master is the only thing that guarantees his rule. Mother, “the hand-carved figurehead of her own, self-constructed theology […] the great black, self-anointed, self-appointed prophetess, the self-created god-head that had assumed the flesh of its own prophecy” (1982, 58) and Zero both live solipsistic, narcissistic existences; their mastery is sustained only by slaves who are willing to subject themselves. Mother and Zero appear at first glance to be marginal, mutant others, but not in a way that challenges the power of the majority. By comparison, Lucie Armitt regards New Eve’s androgyny as rendering him/her exemplary of Haraway’s cyborg, able to turn on its own creator because it bears no essential loyalty to its master. S/he is “a typical manifestation of the postmodern subject and his/ her problematic position regarding the socalled ‘natural’ world” (Armitt 1996, 194). Armitt wonders, however, to what

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extent Carter felt that “existence as cyborg is genuinely liberatory” (1996, 194). More recently, Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira draws on Braidotti’s mixing of the notion “organs without bodies,” as coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Donna Haraway’s cyborg figuration to bear on Evelyn’s sex change (1998, 292). Like Armitt, Ferreira finally concludes that “Eve is clearly a cyborg, a ­technological triumph, a fusion of parts and wholes, with potentialities to become an example for a future assemblage of gender roles” (1998, 296, emphasis added). While both Armitt and Ferreira provide compelling arguments for viewing New Eve as a cyborg figure, a creature not of nature, but of a “technological womb,” neither goes far enough in teasing out what this cyborg can do. We know what s/he is – a cyborg, a mutant, a nomad – and we know she is thus empowered (in the sense of power as potentia). What we need is to consider what she can do. And this, I think, is what Carter speculates about. The nomadism constitutive of New Eve’s subjectivity is embodied in the experience of “becoming-woman,” both empirically and ethically. Evelyn is physically transformed into a woman, but her ethical transformation only begins when she encounters an exteriority, and not merely an other within herself, even if this other within is a male consciousness. Braidotti emphasises that “woman” in Deleuze’s concept of becoming-woman “does not refer to empirical females but, rather, to topological positions” (2011, 393). This distinction is crucial, for if “woman” here referred merely to empirical females, all we would have is role reversal, much like Mother has in mind when she castrates Evelyn. Evelyn’s transformation from man to woman rests on the presumption that what makes a woman is the absence of manhood. Understood as shifts in topological positioning (including linguistically, for instance from the first to the third person), becoming-woman begins to approach the ethical. Braidotti further explains that “becoming-minority/ nomad/ molecular/ bodies-withoutorgans/ woman is posited as the general figuration for the kind of subjectivity Deleuze advocates” (2001, 192), a form of becoming-other. Braidotti’s use of the “/” is significant; the danger lies in reading the adjacent terms as interchangeable, when they in fact move, rhizomatically, along a metonymic chain. Each may be a substitute (by association) for another term, but the value of each is not reducible to the other. To treat the terms as merely substitutive would be to reduce them to states, or “Being in the classical mode” (Braidotti 2001, 11). If anything, moving along the metonymic chain of minority/ nomad/ molecular/ bodies-without-organs/ woman, the nomad experiences becoming-other without fully severing relations with its point of departure. As Braidotti remarks, “the space of becoming is therefore a space of affinity and symbiosis between adjacent particles. […] The space of becoming is one of dynamic marginality” (2001, 192).

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Another significant distinction is Braidotti’s use of “figuration” rather than “figure” to refer to the nomad. A figure is a state, or “Being in the classical mode”; a figure stands in for something and has a substitutive value. As figure, Eve the cyborg can only serve as an example for, as Ferreira suggests above. A figuration, on the other hand, “is a living map, a transformative account of the self; it’s no metaphor” (Braidotti 2011, 10), where a metaphor is a figure – and indeed in the sense of being an instance of figurative language – that substitutes for literal expression. As figuration rather than figure, it is along a metonymical chain of becoming-minority/ nomad/ molecular/ bodies-withoutorgans/ woman that Evelyn is moved and transformed from man (singular and unitary) to becoming-woman (multi-layered, complex creature of flow). This idea of moving, not between spaces or categories, but within all spaces and categories (Braidotti 2011, 7) is central to the transformation Evelyn undergoes. We risk falling back into immanence, into states of Being, if we simply imagine Eve as a figure, rather than figuration. In fact, it is as a figure (of femaleness) that she first encounters herself: But when I looked into the mirror, I saw Eve; I did not see myself. I saw a young woman who, though she was I, I could in no way acknowledge as myself, for this one was only a lyrical abstraction of femininity to me, a tinted arrangement of curved lines. I touched the breasts and the mound that were not mine; I saw white hands in the mirror move, it was as though the white gloves I had put on to conduct the unfamiliar orchestra of myself. […] They had turned me into the Playboy centerfold. I as the object of all the unfocused desires that had ever existed in my own head. I had become my own masturbatory fantasy. And – how can I put it – the cock in my head, still twitched at the sight of myself. […] naked and a stranger to myself. (1982, 74–75) Here, New Eve’s “becoming-woman,” traverses the line that separates “her own fleshly” experiences and “his mental ones” (1982, 77–78). New Eve undergoes a course of gender reprogramming, including being forced to watch films starring Tristessa, who performed “every kitsch excess of the mode of femininity” (1982, 71). It is ironic that the woman who at one time was perfect only because she had reflected his desires should now be the model of perfect femininity to which s/he should aspire. Even more ironic is the fact that Tristessa is in fact a man in drag, whose femaleness is embodied only in a performance of femininity. Eve’s experience of becoming-woman, here, still lacks the exteriority that properly constitutes becoming-other. Evelyn’s sex change, while physically more radical, is not very different from Tristessa’s mere transvestism. With his

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“cock stuck in his asshole so that he himself formed the uroborus, the perfect circle, the vicious circle, the dead end” (1982, 173), and with Eve now become Evelyn’s own masturbatory fantasy, both characters remain hermetically sealed, and merely reproduce “the others of the Same” (Braidotti 2011, 6). Despite the complete sex change from male to female, there is in fact no radical change here, and the failure of Mother’s revolution is also apparent in her failure to impregnate Eve. Mother had planned to impregnate Eve with Evelyn’s sperm, harnessed when Mother raped Evelyn prior to his surgery, so that Eve, “first of all beings in the world” and “entirely self-sufficient” (1982, 77) might populate a new world on her own. Eve escapes before Mother can impregnate her. If Mother had been successful in impregnating Eve with Evelyn’s sperm, the child would have been a reproduction of the same solipsistic and narcissistic hermetic existence. Nothing would have changed. As Carter would have it, Mother fails. At the end of the novel, Lilith only hints at the possibility, albeit with some prophetic certainty, that Eve is pregnant, a result of her sexual union with Tristessa. In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Bruhm and Hurley note that “the child exists as a site of almost limitless potential (its future not yet written and therefore unblemished)” (2004, xiii). Bruhm and Hurley additionally note that “[c]aught between these two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, the child becomes the bearer of heteronormativity, appearing to render ideology invisible by cloaking it in simple stories, euphemisms, and platitudes” (2004, xviii). In other words, the child also functions as a figure for cultural and ideological reproduction. Eve’s as-yet-unborn child not only symbolises this potential, but, because the narrative does not confirm its existence, this is potential that remains as potential, not yet born. This is important. If, as Armitt suggests, Carter indeed questioned the liberatory potential of Eve the cyborg, then I suggest that this liberatory potential lies instead in the as-yet-unborn child, whose conception flies in the face of reproductive logic. Eve’s child, if it did exist, would certainly not be the bearer of heteronormativity, and would harbour within it the potential to be completely other. When Eve and Tristessa make love in the desert, they do not do so as heteronormative sexed subjects, but as multi-sexed subjectivities, and multi-sexed bodies. There is nothing recognisably heteronormative about their union. As Lilith notes: “‘Your baby will have two fathers and two mothers’” (1982, 187). Before Zero destroys Tristessa’s glasshouse, he forces Eve and Tristessa into a mock marriage union: So he made us man and wife, although it was a double wedding – both were the bride, both were the groom in this ceremony. […] You and I, who inhabited false shapes, who appeared to one another doubly masked, like

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an ultimate mystification, were unknown even to ourselves. (1982, 135–136). Eve, once male, transformed now into a female, while retaining the consciousness of a man, is asked to dress up as a man once more; Tristessa, now exposed to be male, is asked once more to play the feminine role of the bride. Eve and Tristessa, as multi-sexed subjectivities, experience what Braidotti calls “de-familiarisation”: De-familiarisation is a sobering process by which the knowing subject evolves from the normative vision of the self he or she had become accustomed to. The frame of reference becomes the open-ended, interrelational, multi-sexed, and trans-species flows of becoming by interaction with multiple others. A subject thus constituted explodes the boundaries of humanism at skin level. (2012, 35) While both are restored to the “normative vision of the self he or she had become accustomed to,” it is to a self that is already exposed to an other, already strange and alien to themselves. There is no nostalgic return to a former self here, for both of them have undergone the “dissolution of all sexed identities based on the gendered opposition” (Braidotti 2011, 393–394). Not-man, notwoman, becoming-woman/ other/ minority/ nomad, their sexual encounter is the starting point of their ethical connection with each other. Carter scholars have, in the last few years, responded ambivalently to the “Butlerfication” of The Passion of New Eve. Joanne Trevenna argues that, while this “Butlerfication” facilitated a “‘recovery’ of Carter’s work since the novelist’s death in 1992” and “thereby reinforced her status as a major feminist literary icon” (2002, 267–268), Carter’s work presents a model of gender acquisition that is more aligned to earlier feminist formulations. Trevenna singles out the self-conscious theatricality in Carter’s presentation of gender acquisition: “Carter, unlike Butler, stresses that the acquisition and performance of gender identity is overt and self-conscious” (2002, 269). As suggested at the start of this chapter, this theatricality also serves her parody. There is, however, another aspect of Butler’s work that has received little attention in this context, namely her later work on vulnerability in relation to gender. In Precarious Life, Butler suggests that being a gendered or sexed being already means being exposed to another: “As a mode of relation, neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another. […] [W]e are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well” (2006, 24). Butler does not understand

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g­ ender and sexuality as properties, possessions or identities one can be said to have or not have. To consider them as mere properties is to obscure the social conditions of their formation. What this means too is that there is no gendered subject prior to its relation with another. This is what Butler means by being dispossessed: my gender is never quite mine, because, as part of social ­conditioning, it is revealed to me only in relation to an other. Reading The Passion of New Eve with this aspect of Butler’s work in mind, we begin to see that Eve comes to know himself or herself as a gendered being only through his/her relations with others, precisely only in being dispossessed, that is, “becomingother.” As mentioned above, Eve is forced to undergo gender reprogramming after he is transformed into a female. Eve is however the “clumsiest of pupils,” and remarks: “it takes more than identifying with Raphael’s Madonna to make a real woman!” (1982, 80) The chapter following her escape begins thus: I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman’s shape. Not a woman, no; both more and less a real woman. (1982, 83) Following this, she is captured by Zero and brought back to his harem, where she is sexually assaulted, forced into a polygynous marriage, exploited for her manual labour, and abused on a regular basis. Her experience with Zero is “as savage an apprenticeship in womanhood as could have been devised for me […] I had almost become the thing I was” (1982, 107). The church of Zero is a microcosm of the world, where woman is the second sex, a slave to man. His other wives live in bad faith, willingly subjecting themselves to his mastery in the false belief that his sex has life-giving powers. They epitomise the women Atkinson argues are pitiful and deluded: objects in a love relation who can unite with men as long as they remain his slaves. Eve is, through her relationship with a man, socially conditioned into becoming a woman. The chapter following Zero’s harem introduces another aspect of womanhood: love and sexual pleasure. As already mentioned, radical feminists like Atkinson and Wittig reject heterosexual love on the basis that it is as “woman” that women are oppressed. As Atkinson explicitly states, men define what “woman” is: that is, woman as an identity is bound to her relationship with man. Wittig likewise argues that what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, and so to reject the identity of “woman” is therefore to reject the heterosexual relation. She concludes that “a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society” (1993, 105). The lesbian is not an identity as far as identity is understood as something one might be said to have. The lesbian, in

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­ ittig’s formulation, is the refusal of identity. Braidotti thus includes Wittig’s W lesbian as counting towards figurations of nomadic subjectivity (2011, 11). The lesbian, as a figuration of alternative feminist subjectivity, is, however, not without its problems. Biddy Martin notes that lesbianism became “feminism’s magical sign of liberation” (1988, 86), an observation that reminds us again of the risk that nomadism constantly runs, namely the risk of falling back into segmentation. For this reason, I think Carter goes further than Wittig in the figuration of an alternative feminist subjectivity. When Eve and Tristessa make love, they do so as multi-sexed beings, and there is no single term in the language of sexuality to name their relation. Here are some possibilities of the locations Eve and Tristessa might take in relation to each other, but also in relation to dominant ways of positioning sexed and gendered beings in relation to each other: sexed female and male, they are heterosexual; sexed female and gendered woman, they are lesbian; gendered man and sexed male, they are gay; sexed male and gendered woman, they are bisexual; gendered woman and sexed male, they are bisexual. Carter makes it impossible to name, by exclusion, what they are or how to name their sexual relation. I see their lovemaking as the climax of the novel, an event that creates “an alternative space of becoming that would fall not between the mobile/immobile, the resident/ the foreigner distinction, but within all these categories” (Braidotti 2011, 7; original emphasis). What we have here, revealed in the loving relation, is becomingminority/ nomad/ molecular/ bodies-without-organs/ woman. Atkinson’s derision of love, and her insistence that “there’s no such thing as a ‘loving’ way out of the feminist dilemma,” is grounded in an ideology of the subject that does not encompass the possibility of change, as if, to cite Carter in another context, “we were the slaves of history and not its makers” (The Sadian Woman, 3). It is based on the insistence that women are subjects – fully formed, fully known, fully knowable – to be lifted out of, and defended against, love. Carter’s novel demonstrates that there is a loving way out of the feminist dilemma, that perhaps it is the only way. This, however, must involve a radical re-thinking of the subject, and subjectivity, from one that is fixed, unitary and fully known, to one that is never fully known, even to itself, existing always as potential, always becoming, revealed only in relation to others, but also as a relation to others. References Armitt, Lucie. 1996. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Edward Arnold. Atkinson, Ti-Grace. 1974. Amazon Odyssey. New York: Links Books.

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Badiou, Alain. 2012. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush. New York: The New Press. Bataille, Georges. 1986. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Braidotti, Rosi. 2001. “Becoming-Woman: Rethinking the Positivity of Difference.” In Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century. Edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka, 381–413. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. London: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. London: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2012. “Interview with Rosi Braidotti.” In New Materialisms: Interviews & Cartographies. Edited by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, 19–37. n.p.: Open Humanities Press. Bruhm, Steven and Natasha Hurley (eds). 2004. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso. Carter, Angela. 2001. Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. London: Quartet Books. Carter, Angela. 1982. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago. Carter, Angela. 1979. The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago. Carter, Angela. 1997. “Fools are my Theme.” In Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. Edited by Angela Carter, 31–35. London: Chatto and Windus. Carter, Angela. 1997a. “Notes from the Front Line.” In Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. Edited by Angela Carter, 36–42. London: Chatto and Windus. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge. Colebrook, Claire and Ian Buchanan (eds). 2000. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Day, Aidan. 1998. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Easton, Alison. 2000. Angela Carter: Contemporary Critical Essays. UK: Macmillan Education. Ferguson, Ann, and Anna G. Jónasdóttir (eds). 2014. Love: A Question for Feminism in the 21st Century. New York and London: Routledge. Ferreira, Maria Aline Seabra. 1998. “Myth and Anti-Myth in Angela Carter’s ‘The Passion of New Eve.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Special Issue: On Psi Powers 9 (4/36): 284–302.

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Gamble, Sarah (ed.). 2001. The Fiction of Angela Carter: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gamble, Sarah. 2006. Angela Carter: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, Edmund. 2017. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haffenden, John (ed.) Novelists in Interview. Methuen. London. 1985. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Haraway. Edited by Donna J. Haraway, 5–90. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Jackson, Stevi. 2014. “Love, Social Change, and Everyday Heterosexuality.” In Love: A Question for Feminism in the 21st Century. Edited by Ann Ferguson and Anna G. Jónasdóttir, 33–47. New York and London: Routledge. Katsavos, Anna. 1994. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 14 (3): 11–17. Martin, Biddy. 1993. “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s].” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 274–293. London and New York: Routledge. Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On Lies, Secrets and Silence. London: W.W. Norton & Company. Trevenna, Joanne. 2002. “Gender as Performance: Questioning the ‘Butlerification’ of Angela Carter’s Fiction.” Journal of Gender Studies 11 (3): 267–276. Wang, Jennie. 1997. Novelistic Love in the Platonic Tradition. Lanham, ML: Rowman & Littlefield. Wittig, Monique. 1993. “One is not Born a Woman.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 103–109. New York and London: Routledge. Woolf, Virginia. 1993. “A Room of One’s Own.” In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Edited by Virginia Woolf, 3–114. London: Penguin Books.

Part 3 Fluid Identities in Heterotopic Spaces

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Chapter 7

Ferzan Özpetek’s Cinema: A Post-constructionist Approach to Gender and Love Dikmen Yakalı-Çamoğlu Abstract Through a thematic/visual analysis of Ferzan Özpetek’s films Hamam (1997), Harem Suare (1999) and Cahil Periler (Ignorant Fairies, 2001), this chapter focuses on how gender and love mutually construct each other in Özpetek’s cinema and argues that he takes a post-constructionist stance as he shows us that love is a material-discursive experience built around stories which intra-act with bodies. Through Özpetek’s films, I argue that as gender and love mutually construct each other in and through heterotopias, simultaneously on discursive and material levels, gender becomes a fluid narrative identity, which has to be re-narrated in each love relationship/affair/story.

Keywords Ferzan Özpetek – gender – love – narrative identity – heterotopia – postconstructionism – Hamam – Harem Suare – Cahil Periler – Ignorant Fairies

1 Introduction Turkish-Italian film director Ferzan Özpetek devotes most of the diegetic space in his movies to issues concerning gender and love. Through a thematic/visual analysis of his films Hamam,1 Harem Suare and Cahil Periler (Ignorant Fairies), this chapter argues that gender and love mutually construct each other in Ferzan Özpetek’s cinema and that he takes a post-constructionist stance as he shows us that love is a material-discursive experience built around stories that intra-act with bodies. The chapter also focuses on how Özpetek treats love as a

1 Hamam in Turkish means ‘steam bath’ or ‘Turkish bath,’ and the film in its different English versions is subtitled as one of these. In this chapter, I shall refer to the film as ‘Hamam.’

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gender bender and creator of fluid gender identities; it also explores how, and in what ways, gender identity can only be temporarily fixed through a narrative of love. I suggest, then, that love is a story mainly about bodies and neither love nor bodies exist “out there” in any stable way, detached from discursive and material practices. Through Özpetek’s films, I argue that as gender and love mutually construct each other in and through heterotopias, simultaneously on discursive and material levels, gender becomes a fluid narrative identity that has to be re-narrated in each love relationship/affair/story. Ferzan Özpetek was born in Istanbul in 1959. He moved to Italy in 1976 to study Film History at a University in Rome and subsequently qualified as a film director at Accademia D’arte Drammatica “Silvio D’amico.” He began his career as an assistant director in 1982 and worked for fifteen years with many important Italian directors. He débuted as a director in 1996 with Hamam that was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and became an international success. In 1999, he co-authored and directed Harem Suare. In 2001, he co-authored and directed Ignorant Fairies or His Secret Life that competed at the Berlin Film Festival, was a box office hit in Italy, and won four silver ribbons and three Golden Globe awards as well as the Best Film Award at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Since then he has made nine other films, a documentary, published two books, directed operas in Italy and won many more awards. He was one of the few Italian directors who had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Özpetek 2017). 2

Theoretical Framework

This study utilises three different theoretical tools to make sense of Özpetek’s films and address how gender and love mutually construct each other across changing webs of phenomena. Firstly, I argue that the director takes a postconstructionist position by suggesting that there is and has to be a ballast between the discourses and corporeality that make up gender and love; and that he sees these two concepts as an interplay of the material and the discursive, the natural and the cultural. Secondly, as he points to the materiality of gender and love, and when he focuses on space, he emphasises that gender and love exist and construct each other through entanglements and weavings in different kinds of third spaces within the existing order of things that I shall analyse through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (Foucault 1986). Thirdly, I make use of the theory of narrative identity to discuss the way Özpetek’s characters re-narrate their own stories and identities as they enter these new spaces and as they develop and transform within the heterotopias. In each film,

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Özpetek shows how discourses and social narratives are entangled and interwoven with materiality. As his characters try to survive unhappily within a materiality that has been imposed and depicted by social standards that seem to be ubiquitous, they have to narrate stories of disintegration or avulsion in order to develop and create new selves. As Nina Lykke puts it, post-constructionism has been suggested as an umbrella term for converging trends in feminist theory, such as “‘[f]eminist materialism,’ […] ‘corporeal feminism,’ […] ‘material feminisms,’ […] ‘transcorporeal feminism,’ […] ‘post-human’ feminism” (2010, 131). Post-constructionism concerns “recogniz[ing] both continuities and discontinuities in relation to feminist de/constructionism” (Lykke 2010, 132). Post-constructionism is not what comes after constructionism; it should be understood as both “transgressing” and “including” what was already there (Lykke, 2010, 133). Materialist feminism is concerned to find a ballast between two positions. The discourse-reality dichotomy has to be overcome in order to arrive at a more holistic understanding of phenomena, science and society. Postconstructionism has been exploring the ontology of things, reality and society, trying to find a ballast between the modernist understanding of reality and post-modernist understanding of discourse as constitutive of reality (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 5). Post-constructionism is willing to deconstruct the discourse-reality dichotomy through various theoretical positions and trying to make “matter” matter again. In this understanding, language structures how we come to know about the ontological, but does not constitute it (Hekman 2008, 98). However, when discourses change, material reality is also altered. Discourse does not constitute the ontology of bodies: however, as they go through a set of discursive practices, the material reality of bodies is transformed (Hekman 2008). Discourses and how they craft bodies have real material consequences in practice. Therefore, bodies are material and discursive at the same time; and it is this interconnection that post-constructionism and materialist feminism seek to explore (Grosz 2017). As Karen Barad puts it, there is “a strong commitment to accounting for the material nature of practices and how they come to matter” (Barad 2003, 45). This is the very point through which I argue that Özpetek adopts a postconstructionist approach as he explores the discursive and material aspects of gender and love in his films. From a poststructuralist point of view, both gender and love may be considered as ontological illusions that come into being only within discourse. In parallel with this conceptualisation, Özpetek seems to be interested in the stories and meanings that appear to be the immaterial or incorporeal conditions that persist in relation to and within the materiality of gender and love. Through an analysis of Özpetek’s cinema, I argue that,

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a­ lthough gender and love are entangled with stories and discourses that embed morality, they intra-act with bodies. The material practices of gender and love are imposed, represented, judged and criticised through stories within discourses; however, in the end there are consequences enacted materially on bodies. Moreover, from the perspective of materialist feminism, bodies are not considered as passive entities that can be inscribed by culture. On the contrary, bodies intra-act with discourses, creating material-discursive forms of agency (Barad 2003). This also applies to Özpetek’s uses of materiality as “space” in his visual narratives. Özpetek emphasises that his characters (in particular) and the audience (in general) also need to find a ballast between discourse, reality and corporeality. He utilises a “space,” a setting, for the diegesis: this is a material aspect to be personified; a space where we acknowledge the entanglement of materiality and meaning; a cosmos where intricacies of gender and love are experienced by the characters and explored and addressed by the director. In line with Barad’s posthumanist formulation, this “space” takes up the position of a nonhuman agent; intra-acts with the characters and creates a turn, a future that is radically open (Barad 2003). Theoretically I make sense of this “space” through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Foucault discusses this concept in detail in a lecture from 1967 entitled “Of Other Spaces” that was published shortly before Foucault’s death in 1984, and translated into English in 1986. Here, he states that he is particularly interested in the types of sites that are in relation with other spaces “in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault 1986, 24). Heterotopias are “other” places that are simultaneously mythic and real (Foucault 2003, 4). Foucault identifies various principles of heterotopias. As connected to our discussion here, they may be “heterotopias of crises or deviation [where] individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed” (2003, 5). Moreover, heterotopias are often linked to “slices of time” or “heterochronies.” Foucault asserts that heterotopia is most functional when “men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (2003, 6). Although Foucault names the bathhouse a heterotopia, consecrated to the activities of purification, and Özpetek also utilises it for this purpose in his films, the hammam can be treated as a heterotopia that encompasses many of the principles that Foucault points out (cf. Germen 2015). In fact, Özpetek seems to create several heterotopias in each of his films; as spaces inhabited by and intra-acting with his characters, utilised in their development, and as visual stories that become heterotopias for the viewers.

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In this chapter I will focus on the sixth principle of heterotopias. Foucault suggests that “they have a function in relation to all the space that remains” (Foucault 1986, 27). They either […] create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory […]. Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. (Foucault 1986, 27) He calls this latter type a “heterotopia […] of compensation” (1986, 27). I suggest that films in general and Özpetek’s cinema in particular create heterotopias of illusion and compensation at the same time. I will discuss this further as I analyse the films. The last theoretical tool that I utilise is the theory of narrative identity. In line with the post-structural convention, here narratives are considered as a way of mediating the construction of meaning (Fivush and Merrill 2014). In today’s postmodern society where coherence and constancy have lost their previous implications, it is through narrative identities, through thinking of ourselves autobiographically and by way of telling our life stories to others, that we can “integrate the past, present and future and thereby constitute stable, coherent identities on both a personal and communal level” (Hinchman 2001, 2). The theory of narrative identity assumes that the self is narratively constructed and communicated (Gergen 2003). Narratives provide life with a feeling of order, and events have no meaning in themselves unless we confer it on them with our stories (Ricoeur 1991). Narrative identity, then, is “coherent but fluid and changeable, historically grounded but ‘fictively’ reinterpreted, constructed by an individual but constructed in interaction and dialogue with other people” (Ezzy 1998). Thus, narrative identity is always in process and unfinished (McAdams and McLean 2013). From the perspective of new materialism, on the other hand, narrative identity may be thought of as a process of reconstruction through weavings and entanglements of material-discursive forms; according to the presence of other agencies and through intra-action with them; and it undeniably influences our future actions. It is a cognitive and emotional self-understanding that produces reality. It is always embodied, situated and embedded in a setting. Through a material-discursive understanding, I consider narrative identity as four dimensional, which means that it is not only about our chronological, abstract self-narrations but includes all senses of our corporeality – visual,

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a­ uditory, sensual as well as affective. We may argue that narrative identity is not only discursive but it is a certain kind of knowing self within an entanglement of materiality. It is knowing our subjectivity or becoming a subject within a visual and sensual narrative, in a certain material surrounding where we feel like ourselves. It is only after we leave the familiar setting with all its materiality – the images, the scenery, the smells, the sounds, the pace of living, all the objects that we daily touch – we come to realize that we only feel like ourselves in a certain setting ― in a certain place of knowing self. Thus, the material reality of a character, the setting, where the subject is produced, is one of the main parts of narrative identity. Moreover, narrative identity is entangled with a certain structure of feeling (Williams 2001, 66). Our stories of self, how we know and convey ourselves in a particular setting, is always entangled with how we feel. Özpetek plays with this structure of feeling in his heterotopias. He takes his characters out of their familiar settings, their comfort zones, places them into an unknown and makes sure that their narrative identities are disrupted within a totally new material world and structure of feeling. Their sense of self and subjectivity is so displaced that they cannot survive unless they develop a whole new narrative of self ― another narrative identity. As his characters construct new narratives, Özpetek shows us how fragile gender identity is. I suggest that as Özpetek places his characters into heterotopias in order to develop and transform, they realise that they need to have their stories adapted as well. Their reality, corporeality and identity are transformed as the characters enter and (sometimes) remain in the heterotopias. Only through narrative identity can they have a meaningful story of resilience. Through these theoretical positionings, I argue that as gender and love mutually condition each other on discursive and material levels within heterotopias, gender comes to be seen as a fluid narrative identity that has to be re-narrated in each love story. 3 Method This chapter explores three of Özpetek’s films through a thematic/visual analysis: − Hamam, 1997, written by Ferzan Özpetek, Stefano Tummolini and Aldo Sambrell; − Harem Suare, 1999, written by Ferzan Özpetek and Gianni Romoli; − Cahil Periler (Ignorant Fairies), 2001, written by Gianni Romoli and Ferzan Özpetek.

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Firstly, I shall draw on narrative analysis with a focus on the main themes of each text. Thematic analysis (also called ideological analysis) is a methodological tool to address the hidden politics of every film/text and it examines how, by identifying the main themes of the text, we can focus on its ideological backdrop, as well as its agenda. I presume that representations are not transparent communicators of reality, but reconfigurations of the world in its becoming, and that they intra-act with all the other material-discursive aspects of life within a particular culture. Doing a thematic/visual film analysis involves teasing out the concepts, images, theoretical positions, myths and discourses that make up a film. Through this analysis some main themes come to the fore, such as “love,” “gender” and “fluidity of gender identity.” Narrative analysis explores the discursive aspects of stories, characters and setting. However, I am also particularly interested in teasing out the material aspects of the stories in order to find out how the material worlds of the films intra-act with the characters and how they open up a space for new materialdiscursive forms of agency. Thus, for the visual analysis, I focus on the material aspects of the visual tools utilised in each scene to see if, and how, Özpetek formulates nonhuman forms and how he constructs them as agents within his own material-discursive cinematic world. From this perspective, his use and conceptualisation of space is of particular interest to me, since it reflects how he utilises materiality as a nonhuman agent and how he shows it intraacting with all other forms of agency to make his point about gender and love in general. To sum up, in the analysis, I identify a limited number of themes that tease out the intra-actions of matter and discourse in Özpetek’s cinematic world. Since matter is taken as an active participant in the world’s becoming, here, I am particularly concerned with the ways in which Özpetek represents the entanglements and weavings of gender and love so that gender comes into being. It must be noted that the director’s and/or the scriptwriter’s ideological or theoretical intentions may seem to be overestimated in textual analysis; however, the texts are open for scrutiny in myriad ways with the assumption that ideologies permeate into them in several forms and, most often, unintentionally. From a material realist point of view, it may be argued that a director/ writer is an agent who is ontologically inseparable from his creation since he is also entangled in intra-action within the same world (Barad 2007, 84–94; see also “Introduction” in this book). Methodologically, then, we cannot talk of a real reflection of the world: the process is better described as diffraction, where both Özpetek and I (as the analyser) have a relation of “exteriority within” with the film and the world he represents. With this approach, I can address certain

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ways of seeing, representing and conceptualising the materiality and the mutual conditioning of gender and love. 3.1 Hamam In Hamam, the protagonist, Francesco, an Italian, heterosexual, “unhappily” married, successful businessman comes to Istanbul in order to sell a Turkish Bath that he has inherited from his late aunt. There, he stays with the created family of his aunt in her house, annexed to the hammam. Francesco falls in love with the son of the family, Mehmet, and although he comes to Istanbul for a few days, he decides to restore the hammam and stay there for good. Later, Marta, his wife, who has been in an adulterous relationship with his business partner, comes to Istanbul to see Francesco and make him sign the divorce papers. Marta discovers her husband’s homosexual indulgence with Mehmet. When Francesco is killed by the Mafia, Marta stays in Istanbul and this time she enters the world of the hammam, only to find out that she, too, has another sexual identity. In each film, Özpetek shows us an entangled web of discourses, narratives and materialities. Francesco tries to survive unhappily in a patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist society. First, he narrates a story of disintegration in order to develop and create a new self. Mehmet and Francesco’s homosexual and homosocial indulgence cannot be easily explained as “finding his real self in a new place.” For Özpetek self has no real side to it. Nor can the space he creates be equated to the closet, where the characters are hiding from the rest of the world and enacting their real selves. He creates a third space, where bodies become free, only to find out that the outside was actually the entrapment, a big closet where everybody is hiding from another version of themselves. Once they have faced the alternate versions of themselves, they need to find a way to make peace with their old selves; they need to invent a story and re-narrate their own identity in order to go on. Inside the closet is the film’s diegetic space as the material aspect of Özpetek’s cinema. The hammam appears to be this third space: a heterotopia where identities are re-negotiated (Stolt 2010). At first, it appears to be the closet. The hammam is a place where one must be naked. The material aspects of the discourses we live by are taken off before entry. Everyone leaves their clothes ― all the social and cultural symbols that they wear, at the door. As the narrator tells us, “the steam of the hammam does not only mollify the flesh, it also softens the assertions and traditions of the patriarchal society.” Özpetek imagines the hammam as a queer space, a time out of time where corporeality takes over. In line with a Foucaultian analysis, it becomes a heterotopia and a heterochrony. From the eyes of a stranger, Francesco, the hammam is a mythic place, an illusory space.

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However, he soon finds out that it is also a real, a perfect place where he suddenly realises that the rest of the world is an illusion, a carceral society where everybody is trapped. It is a heterotopia of illusion and compensation at the same time. In a central scene of Hamam, Mehmet tells Francesco about Turkish-bath philosophy. At the same time, the camera shows us the high ceilings of the hammam that is filled with steam as men play with warm water, all relaxed; all “mollified by the steam.” Mehmet tells Francesco that bathing in a hammam helps one to “relieve the flesh so that one can get to relieve the spirit.” What is suggested here is to be relieved from the assertions of the heteronormative, patriarchal society and find out in what ways we would indulge our bodies if they were not trapped in the discourse that enables heteropatriarchy. Here, Özpetek points out his stance on the dichotomy and underlines that although our bodies are the slaves of discourses, they are still out there, in flesh: they feel, they need, they have pleasures and pain; in short, he points out the materiality and corporeality of our identities. Özpetek shows us the scene where Francesco and Mehmet French kiss in the hammam through the eyes of Francesco’s wife Marta. This perspective identifies with the eyes of the audience who consider themselves as heterosexual. However, when Marta starts questioning her own sexual identity in the end and takes on the queer space that formerly belonged to Francesco’s aunt, a so-called fag hag, the audience has to question their own sexual identity, too (Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004, 170). Thus, Özpetek does not suggest that there is only one true identity to our bodies that awaits discovery in a heterotopia; he suggests that the only way to change the discourse that entraps our bodies is to give them a space, to open them to love and to corporeal pleasures. Thus, the hammam appears to be the heterotopia, a third space where existing identities are negotiated and subverted and Francesco thinks that he finds out the real in this seemingly illusory space, so that the rest of the world is exposed as an entrapment that has always been illusory. Özpetek displaces Francesco from his setting ― every material aspect of this character is changed in Istanbul. The hammam as a heterotopia is the most important non-human agent in the becoming of the film’s world. Its intra-activity with the characters opens up a space where we can see gender as a form of becoming as well. Francesco falls in love with Mehmet and the fact that he falls in love with a man makes him question his entire identity. He realises that there is no gender identity before loving somebody. Gender is presented as a material-discursive phenomenon, the reality of which is a dynamic process of intra-activity. In the world’s becoming, gender comes to matter only when there are determinate causal structures with “determinate boundaries,

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properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies” (Barad 2007, 140). Within Özpetek’s cinematic world, it is the weaving and entanglement of love with the body—their intra-activity—that creates the reality of one’s gender identity. By underscoring this, Özpetek places the ontology of gender under scrutiny in his films. 3.2 Harem Suare Harem Suare, the second film I analyse, takes us to the last decade of the Ottoman Empire, to the times of Sultan Abdulhamid, and the story starts and ends in 1908 when the harem was dissolved and its inhabitants were dispersed. The film tells us about the love affair of Safiye, a beautiful Western white concubine, with the black eunuch, Nadir, who is one of the harem attendants. Nadir and Safiye become allies in order to make Safiye the Sultan’s favourite, which is the only path one can take in order for her to gain power in the Harem. Nadir makes sure that Safiye has her share of nights with the Sultan and she succeeds to become his favourite long enough to get pregnant with a son. However, in the meantime, Safiye and Nadir fall in love with each other, engage in a sexual relationship, and almost become a family within the harem. Later on, when the harem is dispersed by the Young Turks, they stay together; however, they cannot last for long. Nadir leaves Safiye and she becomes a singer in one of the Harem Suares in Europe that were musical belly-dance shows about harem life. In Harem Suare, once again, the hammam is in the centre of the harem, where concubines and favourites discover corporeal pleasures of all sorts, and once again it appears as a heterotopic space where all the rules the inhabitants live by seem to be mollified. In a famous scene, Safiye engages in erotic play and gives a massage to a black concubine in the hammam, knowing that Nadir is watching her. The camera focuses on the white hands of Safiye on the black skin of the concubine in erotic play. East meets West; the colour of the skin does not matter any longer. It changes from something forbidden or disidentifiable into a corporeal-material agent that evokes desire as the individuals intra-act in a play of corporeal pleasure. The strict rules of the harem are mollified and once again the hammam appears as the place where individuals can play with identities, undermine and subvert them. Safiye intends to show Nadir the endless possibilities of love and pleasure. Nadir gets the message and they meet in their own secret room. Their secret room in the attic is actually a storage room, full of valuable furniture, household goods and ornaments that belonged to Esma Sultan, the sister of Sultan Mahmud ii. She was one of the most powerful women at the time. There is also a magnificent regal caique (a rowing boat) that was used by Esma

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Sultan at the Bosphorus. Nadir tells the story of Esma Sultan and says that most of this furniture was dumped in the attic because Esma Sultan did not like Eastern styles of décor and preferred Western furniture. While arranging her Palace accordingly, she also ordered that all the Eastern-style items should be cast aside here. Then, he shares another story: Esma Sultan used to go on tours on her caique on the Bosphorus and look out for young, handsome men. When she fancied one, she took him to her Palace, spent a night of love with him and had him killed the next day so that nobody would hear about her affairs. Özpetek creates this attic as a heterotopia, with all the objects filling it, surrounded by stories, to represent the entanglement of materiality, meaning and human beings as agents to make sense of it all. By putting all the components into the space, Özpetek reminds us that there is a material and embodied reality to the world that outlives human beings. Esma Sultan, despite all her power, is long dead. Özpetek also suggests that Esma Sultan was a pitiable soul who was trapped in and by gender discourses. Although she was very powerful, she could not live a free life; she was not allowed to have a love affair out of wedlock. As she could not change the discursive practices that denied her many of her bodily rights, she used her power to create provisional heterotopias where the influence of social discourse is suspended. Many of her young lovers were killed as a result of the prescriptions of discourse, ideology and the code. Discourse becomes extremely material when one ends up in a coffin. The same entanglement is like a shadow hanging in the room as it becomes Safiye and Nadir’s closet and heterotopia. Esma Sultan’s (material) memory reminds them that incorporeal pleasures may kill people and that what is “natural” in this space is completely “unnatural” outside. This brings us once again to Barad’s idea that the material-discursive nature of constraints, conditions, and practices are conjoined (Barad 2003, 823). When Safiye and Nadir meet in this secret room, just before they kiss, Safiye asks him: “Do you have anything to tell me?” Nadir replies: “What I want to tell you is in a language that I do not know, and it has no dictionary.” Love seems to be always mediated because it is bound to be interactive; it has to be conveyed. Lovers need to tell about it either in words or in body language. However, both of these languages are learnt within a culture. Thus, the question arises: Can we have a materiality of love and of making love that is completely detached from the discourses of love, gender and sexuality that we find within our cultures? Nadir, as a castrated male, as a person who was denied his sexual rights in a modern perspective, an outsider, was not taught the language of love.2 2 For more information on Ottoman black eunuchs, see, Junne 2016.

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However, Özpetek suggests that there is a materiality to love that a person can discover through their body. They kiss and then they make love. Although Nadir’s castrated body prevents him from performing penetration, he still can give and receive pleasure, thus he can speak the body language of love. Their secret room, their own closet, is the place where their bodies become free, opening up a space for them where they can forget about all other identifications and narrate a story of their own in the shadow of all kinds of punishments that will be enacted on their bodies if they are caught. Both in the hammam and in their secret room, Özpetek creates a heterotopia for Safiye and Nadir. The film is a good example of how a director may create temporality and spaces that serve as an “allegory of queerness” (Malagreca 2007, 222). These spaces are illusory: however, they also expose every real space as more illusory and, at the same time they create a space that is “other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged” as the rest of the world “is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault 1986, 27). What they find in the heterotopia is not their real self or real identity; what they find is another version of themselves based on love and corporeality. Once again, this appears as Foucault’s heterotopia of compensation, as I defined this earlier with reference to the sixth principle of heterotopias. 3.3 Cahil Periler (Ignorant Fairies) Harem Suare, with its focus on both materiality and narrativity, connects Özpetek to his third film, Cahil Periler. In the beginning of Harem Suare, Özpetek puts forward the significance of stories in our lives through the words of one of the narrators of the film: […] don’t you ever forget this: it is of no importance how you live your life. What is important is how you recount it to yourself and especially to others. It is this way you give meaning to your faults, pain and death. These words foreshadow what is to come in Özpetek’s career. Obviously, he is speaking within the conventions of post-structuralism as he suggests that there is no meaning outside of stories: in other words, outside language. Individuals seem to have agency; they choose their own meanings and emplotment, and tell their stories in particular ways; however, these meanings are always drawn from the repertoire that exists within their culture and society. Here, like many post-structuralists, he does not say that there is no reality out there; he tells us that one cannot give meaning to events without stories. The stories generally point to other stories, and this recursivity, in the end, creates the ontological problem of reality that I have been trying to deconstruct.

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In Cahil Periler, Antonia, a doctor in Rome, discovers that her husband, Massimo, had a secret love and life just after his sudden death in a car accident. Her whole world that is highly heteronormative, turns even further upside-down when she discovers that this secret lover is a man named Michele, a market worker. Özpetek creates two different material worlds or spaces through which the late husband, Massimo, moved. With his wife, Antonia, he lived an uppermiddle class life in a suburb, full of particular values. This is a quiet, neatly organised life. The world he shared with his male lover, on the other hand, seems to be crowded with an elective family of queers. It seems warm, noisy, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. As in the other films, all the characters in this elective family seem to narrate a story of disintegration or avulsion, and then narrate another one to create new selves and a new family. These characters include a male-to-female transperson from Southern Italy, a gay man sick with aids, an  older woman from Turkey who has been through prison and torture, a younger woman from Naples who may be described as “an ethical” slut (Anderlini-D’Onofrio 2004, 163), and a number of other members who are all non-normative. Here “love” seems to be the main theme along with “acceptance.” In one of the key scenes of the film, the transperson says: “you need to lie to your loved ones,” referring to his family in Southern Italy. These characters seem to have two stories; the one they tell to their loved ones in order not to be judged and punished in a patriarchal, heteronormative society; and another one to share with their created families where they seem to be with their other selves. Thus, created families act as heterotopias because, in order to survive and lead a mentally healthy life in such a society, a person needs to find redemptive meanings in suffering and adversity and needs to rewrite their own story, centred on the themes of personal agency and exploration (McAdams, 2013). Only then does it become a story of resilience and one can focus on “positive adaptation in the face of adversity” (Bunting 2016). Through positive relationships and secure attachments with their elective family, and through narrating stories of resilience and love, these people hang on to each other and seem to stay psychologically healthy. Even if they use the words “lies” and “reality,” both seem to be narratives with realities and lies integrated into each other. So, the question stands: is the secret life of the characters the reality? According to Anderlini-D’Onofrio, “The content of the closet becomes the film’s diegetic space, the situatedness in which the story unfolds” (2004, 166). The female protagonist, Antonia, enters this world out of superficial curiosity, looking for a female lover and cannot even recognize that the man she is talking to is the lover she is looking for.

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­ ntonia and Michele start their relationship with animosity. However, Antonia A cannot keep away from this world as she tries to understand how and why her husband loved Michele and this family so much, especially when she learns that this love affair went on for seven years and Massimo remained faithful to Michele throughout. In the course of the film, she becomes a member of the family. Once again, Özpetek takes his character out of her comfort zone and opens up a whole new world in which she re-narrates herself. Antonia and Michele become spiritually and intellectually attracted to each other in the scene where Michele finds out that the reason he was drawn to Massimo in the first place was actually because of Antonia. Michele tells Antonia how they met. Michele and Massimo were both looking for the same book of Nazım Hikmet’s poetry in a bookstore. After searching for it for a long time, both Michele and Massimo reached for the last copy. Obviously, Michele felt a spiritual connection to Massimo as he believed that they both admired the same poet. The high point of the scene is the moment when Antonia recites a poem by Nazım and Michele suddenly realizes that Massimo bought the book for his wife, Antonia. Michele thus realizes that some of the aspects of Massimo’s character that he loved dearly were actually Antonia’s. Through the same poetry, Michele now feels connected to Antonia. In an interview, Özpetek says I don’t see any difference between a straight story and a gay story. I’m talking about the human condition. You never know whom you will fall in love with. And this is not about sexuality; it is far above sexuality. While growing up we are conditioned; they format our mind and emotions in certain ways […]. I don’t like the words ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ at all because they’re labels. (Özpetek in Dorsay 2009; my translation) Gender identity is not stable enough to be described or labelled. Human beings are much more complicated than the labels that are affixed to people based on sexual or gender identities. For Özpetek, there are individual stories to tell, but no labels. Stories and narratives give the director the flexibility he needs to delineate the complexities of each individual, their love stories and their gender identities. Although connected as friends and intellectuals, Michele and Antonia’s relationship is a complicated one. Their erotic journey starts when they visit a gay club with the whole created family. The diegetic space is filled with images of desire as Michele joins other men in an erotic dance, knowing that Antonia is watching him. Michele seems to test his and her gender identities to see how fixed they are and how much space they have for each other. A handsome

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­ eterosexual young man, Emir, seems to be interested in Antonia and they h have a chat over a drink. Michele seems to be a little disturbed as Antonia leaves the bar with him, but actually, she rejects him. Later that night, Michele returns home to have group sex with the males at the bar. He is even further disturbed to find the Nazım Hikmet book in a gift-wrap at home. All these intricate feelings turn into a big fight when Antonia and Michele meet again. They insult and hurt each other with the verbal tools provided by a heteronormative, patriarchal society. However, as Antonia and Michele accept the fact that they are attracted to each other, their sense of self is transformed. The ongoing narrative that each has been telling themselves about their gender identity has a rupture now and they do not know how to name it, how to change it, or what to do with it. The coherence of their narrative identities is at stake and this affects the foundations of their very beings. Later, Antonia invites Michele to her villa. This time, Özpetek displaces him and the camera shows the surroundings from his perspective. The audience feels the sadness and the disillusionment he experiences as he observes the two lounge chairs facing to the lake and the armchairs in the drawing room half-turned to face each other. All the material aspects of the setting imply a happy, harmonious couple. For the first time Michele feels himself as the intruder in this love triangle rather than as the real, secret lover of Massimo. He suddenly realises that this world is as real as his own world he shared with Massimo. Then he cries; Antonia cuddles him affectionately and eventually the cuddle evolves into kissing. In this incident, Özpetek suggests that two people may fall in love against a backdrop of grief and adversity, and that love is above desire. Here friendship, spiritual and intellectual connection brings about love; desire comes afterwards and challenges their (gender) identities. Although Massimo is referred to as “gay” and has sex with other men in the film, he falls in love with a woman, Antonia. Thus, it is implied that gender is fluid and it is not necessarily identified by the gender of the desired one. It seems that gender is only temporarily fixed within a love story, making gender and love mutually constructive. Moreover, Özpetek suggests that this fluidity makes it futile to label a gender identity at all. The movie ends ambiguously. Antonia finds out that she is pregnant with Massimo’s baby. She decides to go on a trip alone, maybe to “find” herself. This means that she needs to have space to re-narrate and re-organise her narrative identity before she finally commits to Michele. At home Michele, not knowing that Antonia is expecting, drops a glass, to see if it is going to break. Superstition implies that she will be back as the glass does not break. Although ­Özpetek leaves the story there, the audience may presume that they are going to raise the child together within their created family.

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Narratives, narrativity and narrative identity are at the centre of Özpetek’s cinema. His cinema implies that gender identities are temporarily fixed, not only by desire, but through love. To love somebody is to create a new story; becoming the protagonists of a new shared narrative; changing one’s narrative to encompass another person’s. The sex of the object of affection is not the main element in the creation of one’s gender identity. What is important is how each individual story unfolds and how it can fix the gender identity of the protagonist, albeit only for the duration of the story. Michele needs to constitute a new heterosexual subjectivity, while Antonia needs to transgress her cultural identity in order to love: they both need to become two selves in love without any labels. Throughout his films, time and time again, Özpetek shows us that gender identity is not a feature of personhood that can be described or labelled; the very attempt to do this is a social construct. In his visual narratives, gender identity is treated as a narrative identity only temporarily fixed by love. 4 Conclusion Özpetek creates heterotopias for his characters where we can witness the materiality and the corporeality of gender and love. He is operating with an ontology where human bodies and discourses intersect and intra-act, which affects how gendered bodies are experienced. Love is portrayed as material-discursive and this produces counterdiscourses that transgress and bend normative gender. For Özpetek, gender and love seem to be in a causal intra-activity and they are treated as discursive practices that are “boundary-making practices that have no finality in the ongoing dynamics of intra-activity” (Barad 2007, 821). Gender identity does not pre-exist love; in other words, there is no pre-existing gender identity that determines who one will love. Love and gender are both intra-active becomings. When we explore gender within post-structuralist paradigms, we are talking about “an identity reunderstood as fluid rather than fixed, as constructed and performed rather than inherent and ascribed” (Nowlan 2010, 5). This is what Özpetek also suggests in his cinema. He places an individually told love story as the main element in the construction of gender identity. However, he also shows us that both gender and love are about bodies, the naked corporeality of bodies when they are totally open, vulnerable and unguarded. He asserts that the stories and discursive practices of our society make up our social reality, identify and label us, judge us and thus construct a carceral society where we have to find closets, spaces, time out of time – lived heterotopias – to set our

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bodies free. He suggests that when we are free in our corporeality, even if we need to create or find heterotopias for this, then maybe we can free our minds and realise how we suffer because of the discourses of embodiment that we have constructed. Özpetek’s approach to narrating gender identities, the way he problematises them and constructs them as not easily recognisable within the existing repertoire of sexual identities, links us to the next section of this book where we explore the surprising persistence of gender norms in marginal sexual fields in more detail. References Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman (eds). 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anderlini-d’Onofrio, Serena. 2004. “Bisexual Games and Emotional Sustainability in Ferzan Özpetek’s Queer Films.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2 (3): 163–174. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward and Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bunting, Lisa and Anne Lazenbatt. 2016. “Changing the Narrative: Life Span Perspectives on Multiple Adversity.” Qualitative Social Work 15 (4): 484–500. Dorsay, Atilla. 2009. “Ferzan Özpetek: ‘Italya’da bir Türk, Türkiye’de İtalyanım.’” Boğaziçi University Mithat Alam Center Interview. https://docplayer.biz.tr/7457346-Ferzanozpetek-italya-da-turk-turkiye-de-italyanim.html (Accessed 8 June 2020). Ezzy, Douglas. 1998. “Theorizing Narrative Identity: Symbolic Interactionism and Hermeneutics.” Sociological Quarterly 39 (2): 247–253. Fivush, Robyn and Natalie Merrill. 2014. “The Personal Past as Historically, Culturally and Socially Constructed.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 28 (3): 301–303. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16(1): 22–27. Foucault, Michel. 2003. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Gergen, Mary. 2003. “Life Stories: Pieces of a Dream.” In Social Construction: A Reader. Edited by Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary Gergen, 65–77. London: Sage. Germen, Baran. 2015. “Of Parks and Hamams: Queer Heterotopias in the Age of Neoliberal Modernity and the Gay Citizen.” Assuming Gender 5 (1): 111–137.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. 2017. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hekman, Susan. 2008. “Constructing the Ballast.” In Material Feminisms. Edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 85–103. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hinchman, Lewis P. and Sandra Hinchman (eds). 2001. Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. New York: State University of New York Press. Junne, George. 2016. The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire: Networks of Power in the Court of the Sultan. London: Tauris. Lykke, Nina. 2010. “The Timeliness of Post-Constructionism.” NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18 (2): 131–136. doi: 10.1080/08038741003757760. Malagreca, Miguel Andrés. 2007. Queer Italy: Contexts, Antecedents, and Representation. New York: Peter Lang. McAdams, Dan P. and Kate C. McLean. 2013. “Narrative Identity.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22 (3): 223–238. Nowlan, Bob. 2010. “Queer Theory, Queer Cinema.” In Coming out to the Mainstream: New Queer Cinema in the 21st Century. Edited by JoAnne C. Juett and David Myles Jones, 2–19. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Özpetek, Ferzan. 2017. Ferzan Özpetek Official Web Site. http://www.ferzanozpetek.com (Accessed 8 June 2020). Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. “Life in Quest of Narrative.” In On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Edited by David Wood, 20–33. New York: Routledge. Stolt, Robert. 2010. Homi Bhabha’s Third Space in Özpetek’s Cinema. Munich: Grin. Williams, Raymond. 1961 (rpt. 2001). The Long Revolution. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.

Chapter 8

Love and Monsters: Gender, Autonomy and Desire in Modern Golem Literature Alana M. Vincent Abstract This chapter traces the development of the figure of the golem from its early appearance in Jewish text to its presentation in modern literature, as a test case for the boundaries between human and non-human. Unlike the rabbinic literature in which the golem first appears and attracts questions of legal ramifications, modern literature investigates questions of emotion and eros. In the literary treatments reviewed, the golem is narratively acknowledged as an autonomous being when it exhibits the capacity for emotional attachment and agency.

Keywords golem – Michel Foucault – heterotopia – Rabbinic – Judaism – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – Frankenstein – monster

1 Introduction In our consideration of the entangled relationship between gender and love, some consideration should also be given to questions of autonomy: the ability of a subject to navigate gendered and emotional scripts, to employ both gender and emotion in the construction of a self, and to express selfhood through the performance of emotion and of gender. This construction of a self is complicated from the perspective of new materialist theory, in which “the difference between humans and animals, or even between sentient and nonsentient matter, is a question of degree more than of kind” (Coole and Frost 2010, 21). However, there has always been some interjacency between the human and the nonhuman, as attested to by the long history of the figure of the monster. In a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in the academic year 1974–75, Michel Foucault traced the figure of the monster in modern politics,

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with a focus on the moral and political monster, a creature that does not so much break the social contract as exist outside it, untouchable by the rule of law (Foucault 2003, 56). In this way, Foucault argued, the monstrous actually functions to protect and uphold the established “normal” order, by clearly containing whatever may threaten it. The monster thus functions in a fashion similar to the concept of heterotopia, which Foucault had developed over a decade previously, where threats to the normal order are contained within their own separate but still accessible spatial regimes that “are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites” (Foucault 1986, 24). By situating his inquiry in modernity, focusing initially on the monster as a moral concept and working his way backwards from that domain and into the legal and medical, he avoided engagement with the premodern history of the term and its range of enfleshed connotations. The medieval monster was a hybrid, such as a centaur or a griffin: a creature composed of parts from various species. Later on, the term took on a medical connotation, referring to a malformed or incomplete creature (for example, displaying significant congenital abnormalities): akin, though not identical, to the golem with which this chapter is concerned. From there, monstrosity developed into the moral, political, and psychological discourse of abnormality that concerned Foucault.1 But the material roots of the concept of monstrosity reveal it as a discourse of gender as well as of legal power, and in so doing reveal the link, elided in Foucault’s lectures on this topic (though not in his work as a whole), between gender and social control. Monstrosity, as a medical condition, was initially ascribed to a defect in the maternal imagination that imprinted upon the developing foetus: a theory that cast a literary shadow long after it was abandoned in medicine (Huet 1993, 5–9). In this chapter, I will focus particularly on the development of the golem, a monster from Jewish mythology, created by human agency and subject to human will. How does the way the golem is imagined, as a boundary figure between the human and the nonhuman, change over time? What role do gender and love ― particularly eros, which Hannah Arendt defined as a desire for what one lacks (1971, 178)—play in the development of the golem from an extension of its creators’ agency into an autonomous subject in its own right? In pursuing these questions, I will engage with both the religious and the literary history of the golem, tracing its development from ancient esoteric texts to contemporary novels. In so doing, I will provide a perspective on the way ­constructions of gender, emotion, and autonomy have (and have not) changed over time. 1 See Williams 1999; Park & Daston 1982; Huet 1993.

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The Mystical Golem

Jewish mysticism is unusual among mystical traditions in its relationship with texts. Sefer Yetzirah, normally dated between the second and the sixth century ce, is essentially a mathematical-linguistic treatise on the premise that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the basic building blocks of all creation. To simplify the system greatly, different combinations of letters serve as recipes for mastering different forms of matter, both inanimate and animate; the ability to create various things is the mark of spiritual mastery, understanding the mechanisms of creation well enough to duplicate it oneself ― as the sage, Rava, says in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 65b: “If the righteous desired it, they could create a world.” This statement occurs immediately prior to several lines describe Rava’s own creation of a golem and are crucial to the history of the golem mythos. The Sefer Yetzirah’s focus on letters as the building blocks of creation, and the ecstatic Kabbalistic tradition of reciting various letter-combinations that grew from Sefer Yetzirah, are also the source of the tradition – popular among modern novels that feature the golem mythos – that a golem is animated by words either carved into its flesh or written on a scroll placed in its mouth. These popular renditions are, needless to say, vast simplifications of earlier mystical descriptions of golem creation. The idea of the golem did not gain much traction outside esoteric circles until the Renaissance, when Jews, engaged in religious polemic with their Christian neighbours, cited the legendary ability of Jewish sages to create and animate beings as a sign of Judaism’s ability to provide a model of how the universe is put together, far surpassing the Christians’ dominant paradigm of scientific understanding (Idel 1990, 216). Judging by the interest Renaissance Christian alchemists seem to have taken in such esoteric Jewish texts, some aspects of this argument were effective: the legend of the golem succeeded, in at least a limited way, in securing wider respect for Jewish esoteric knowledge. And, having proven to be a useful tool in disputes outside esoteric Jewish circles, the golem gradually became a useful tool within the Jewish community. 3

The Halakhic Golem

The first recorded discussion of a golem in the texts of Jewish legal thought, known as halakah, is a responsum paper authored in the late 17th century by R.  Zevi Hirsch ben Ya’aqov Ashkenazi (ha-Hakham Zevi), whose ­great-grandfather Elijah Ba’al Shem of Chelm was reputed to have created and

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then destroyed a golem. In the interest of absolving his ancestor of the charge of murder, ha-Hakham Zevi took up the question of precisely what sort of creature a golem is. For Zevi, the deciding question regarding the value of a golem’s life was: could it be counted as part of a minyan, a prayer quorum of ten legally responsible adult Jewish men? The responsum makes reference to the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 65b, citing as precedent the golem created by Rava, who sent the creature to his fellow sage Zeira, who commanded the creature to “Return to your dust,” thus destroying it. Zevi argues that “if you consider that there was a benefit to count it [in a minyan], R. Zeira would not have cast him from the world […] were it of any benefit, R. Zeira would have been prohibited to cast it from the world” (quoted in Idel 1990, 217). This argument is, in part, an appeal to authority: if it were wrong to destroy a golem, Zeira would not have done so, and since Zeira did so it cannot have been wrong. But the underlying logic of Zevi’s responsum is an equation between value and utility: the potential for a golem to be protected against destruction – to be considered sufficiently human that Zeira would have committed a crime in casting it from the world – rests on its religious “benefit,” its ability to perform (and to enable a community to perform) ritual actions. Following this underlying logic, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the halakhic golem came to serve as a test case for the boundaries of the human, compared with other “incomplete” or “deficient” forms of being (“the minor, the stupid, and the deaf” (Idel 1990, 218)), whose destruction is forbidden in order to articulate more precisely the key point of distinction between them. In addition to introducing the golem into the realm of halakah, ha-Hakham Zevi’s other notable contribution to golem lore was to introduce the idea of the golem as not only a liminal creature, having the appearance of life without being properly alive, but also an inherently dangerous creature. His responsum suggests that Zeira not only had the right to return Rava’s golem to dust, because it could serve no useful purpose (such as counting as part of a minyan), but also the obligation to do so, because everyone knows (even though there is no previous textual evidence of the belief) that otherwise the golem is “prone to destroy the world” (Idel 1990, 218). By the middle of the eighteenth century, then, the characteristics of the golem as we know it today were more or less fixed in religious texts, and ripe for elaboration by nineteenth-century German writers, including Jakob Grimm.2 The golem was a creature made of clay and animated by words either inscribed

2 Cited in Scholem (1965, 159). Other scholars have also attested to the existence of Grimm’s golem tale.

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or inserted into its head that does its master’s bidding until it inevitably runs mad and must be destroyed. This is the general outline of the story of the Golem of Prague as recorded by Chaim Bloch in 1919, and translated into English by Harry Schneiderman in 1925. This was the first appearance of the creature in English literature, just slightly over a century after the 1818 publication of the work that would have the greatest influence on the creature’s portrayal and reception in twentieth century literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 3.1 Frankenstein The resemblance between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein and the myths of the golem is strong enough for Frankenstein frequently to appear in surveys of the golem in art and literature. However, in spite of claims such as Jane P. Davidson’s that “The connections between Shelley’s golem created of human cadavers […] and golem stories discussed in Jewish legends have been thoroughly studied” (Davidson 1995, 228), the actual connection between the two stories is rather difficult to pin down. It is true that Jakob Grimm published his version of the golem story in Zeitung für Einsiedler in 1808, and that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preface to Frankenstein noted that Mary Shelley was inspired by “some German stories of ghosts” which she read in 1816 (Bertman 2015, 47). It is true that both Shelleys had at least some ability to read German, and that Mary Shelley’s relations were eventually involved in the publication of an English translation of Grimm’s fairy tales that did not include the golem tale, in 1823 (Bertman 2015, 48). From these facts, it is reasonable to suppose that Mary Shelley would have been in an excellent position to be aware of the golem legend. But the potential for awareness is not the same thing as awareness itself, and Shelley’s own record of the writing of the novel specifies its inspiration as a French translation of a German original, and even details the particular tales that struck her as memorable; there is no hint of a golem among them (Shelley 1974, 224). Stephen Bertman (2015), who has produced the most extensive scholarship to date on the relationship between the golem and Frankenstein, can offer only a series of suggestions about figures close to Shelley who were in a position to have heard of the Grimm publication (with no evidence that they ever actually did) and might have recited it in Shelley’s hearing. There is, in short, no clear connection between the two tales, no “smoking gun” (Bertman 2015, 47) – or, at least, no clear connection between the early golem mythos and the writing of Frankenstein. The connection exists instead in a sort of literary hindsight, as later writers have incorporated the themes of Frankenstein and the concerns of its critics into their own golem stories. The monster in Frankenstein may not be a golem, but a good number of golems are the literary children of Frankenstein, and so some attention to the way that gender and

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love operate in interpretations of Shelley’s story is necessary to understanding the way the figure of the golem has developed. Particularly prominent in the history of the reception of Frankenstein is Margaret Atwood’s poetic re-visioning of the story. Atwood’s reading of the text is revealed both in her poetic response (1966) and her 2011 volume of essays In Other Worlds: sf and the Human Imagination. Her views more closely resemble criticism that was contemporary with the novel’s original publication, which was heavily concerned with the author’s use of “natural” and “supernatural” elements together in the same narrative,3 than the explicitly gendered readings that have become prominent since the late 1970s, which cast the text as as a gothic “horror story of maternity” (Moers 1974, 7). These approaches tend to see Shelley’s own sublimated “anxieties about femaleness” (Gilbert 1978, 49) expressed in the form of Victor Frankenstein, who flees from and is ultimately destroyed by his unnatural progeny. For Atwood, it is the act of creation that is key to the story, but not a maternal birthing; rather, Frankenstein “plays God—creating new beings—and the results are monstrous” (Atwood 2011, 207); Frankenstein creates, but cannot control. Atwood’s poem maintains the prominence given to a male narrative voice; even the dramatic final lines of the poem mirror the closing lines of the book. And, yet, something important has happened in the journey from novel to poem, a subtle but vital shift in the cultural imaginary that underpins each work. In Shelley’s original, the creature’s pathos rests in its creator’s repulsion. It is Frankenstein, not the creature, who is the first to flee, and the creature’s subsequent journey – narrated at length by the creature himself in a framestory placed in the middle of the novel – is a reaction to this initial rejection. In Atwood, the creature does not speak until the very end, and then it is to declare its autonomy from its creator: “I will not come when you call” (1976, 69). In its final declaration, the creature makes a claim to its own space, which it carves out by receding and prowling. These motions locate the monster apart from its creator, in command of a Foucaultian heterotopia, in which its monstrous deviance is given free reign but, simultaneously, contained at a distance from its creator, whose continued ability to inhabit a space of non-monstrosity is enabled by this containment. Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich were roughly contemporaries, and Atwood’s 1973 review of Rich’s seventh volume of poetry, Diving into the Wreck, reveals a deep familiarity and sympathy with Rich’s previous work; it is entirely reasonable to read them as fellow-travellers, in conversation with each other, 3 See the selection of reviews archived at http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Reviews/reviews. html (Accessed 8 June 2020).

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engaged in parallel projects of cultural reconstruction. Indeed, the similarities between “Speeches for Dr Frankenstein” and “Planetarium” (1968), the last of the four poems Rich appended to her influential essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” for its 1972 publication in College English, are striking: Rich’s “Woman in the shape of a monster/a monster in the shape of a woman […] a woman ‘in the snow’” stands beside Atwood’s “creature, his arctic hackles/bristling […] his paws on the horizon, rolling the world like a snowball.” Rich’s woman is “an instrument in the shape of a woman” who is “bombarded yet I stand/I have been standing all my life”; Atwood’s creature articulates its rejection of the instruments that created it: “I recede. I prowl. / I will not come when you call.” Even taken out of context, these lines are powerful statements of resistance; contextualised, their resistance is clearly part of the différance feminist project, focused on the reclamation of women’s voices, autonomy and creative potential. Rich’s poem, and the essay it accompanies, are explicit about their investment in this project of reclamation, and this is why I am introducing them here as intertexts for Atwood’s slightly trickier poem. Unlike Rich’s “Planetarium” that attempts to restore to prominence the imagined voice of the astronomer Caroline Herschel, a real historical figure whose scientific contribution was largely ignored or attributed to her brother William, “Speeches for Dr Frankenstein” is a re-visioning of Mary Shelley’s novel. To take the prevalence of the male narrative voice and Atwood’s fidelity to a reading of the novel that predates feminist criticism of it as indications that this poem is not an example of literary feminism is, therefore, to ignore the context in which “Speeches for Dr Frankenstein” was written at the very breaking point of second-wave feminism as a distinct literary movement, at approximately the same time as Atwood was also engaged in composing what she describes as a “proto-feminist” novel, The Edible Woman. This was the first work of a nearly two-decade long series of prose outputs that focus on women’s struggles—often very small, quotidian struggles—to reclaim their subjectivity and creative agency from not only the larger commercial and patriarchal structures that surround them, but also from very specific, individual men. Atwood’s men are seldom villains; with very few exceptions, they do not abuse, threaten, or neglect. Instead, they provide, protect and nurture. They love—in their own way. They do not, however, leave much space for the object of their care to establish her own selfhood, and this is the source of the conflict that drives the plots of Atwood’s novels prior to the 1985 publication of The Handmaid’s Tale. Read against the background of her prose outputs, then, the focus on male creative mastery in “Speeches for Dr Frankenstein” can hardly be taken as distinct from and unrelated to the later feminist readings of Shelley.

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Rather, I argue, Atwood’s poem foregrounds the struggle for creative autonomy, highlighting the monstrosity of one human being’s attempt to cast themselves as creator and master of another’s subjectivity. The heritage of feminist criticism and re-visioning of Frankenstein has cast a long shadow, informing the construction and treatment of the monstrous in English literature well beyond works that can be read as straightforward derivatives of Shelley’s novel. The ways in which gender and love are entangled and co-implicated in the construction of human selfhood is a theme that does not appear only in feminist literature, or indeed science fiction. In fact, the influence of this body of criticism has been so profound that it has destabilised and re-shaped the presentation of the story that is so often presumed to have been its origin. Twentieth-century authors writing golem stories have infused them with some of the pathos associated with Frankenstein, and especially with Atwood’s re-vision of the Creature who fights its way free from a possessive love. The modern golem signifies a quest for liberation and personal fulfilment, in sharp contrast to its origin in classical Hebrew text. 4

The Literary Golem

In contrast to the halakhic golem, which was a useful test case for exploring the limitations of legal responsibility, the golem in English literature has functioned primarily as a vehicle for exploring issues of autonomy and control, and through these explorations, it has also become entangled with representations of gender and love. In the modern golem novel, the golem either signifies or else directly undertakes the quest for voice and personal autonomy, signified primarily through its expression of affection and desire. Between 1991 and 2013, six novelistic treatments of the golem legend were published: three by men and three by women. Two of the novels included in this study—both, notably, by male authors—keep the golem more or less constrained to this purpose, and follow the classic literature in focusing on the effects that the ill-considered extension of agency has upon the lives of its creators. In Daniel Handler’s novel, Watch Your Mouth (2000), Mimi Glass, a beleaguered Jewish mother who works part-time as the props mistress for the Pittsburgh Opera, is charged with creating an authentic golem for the company’s production of The Golem as part of its summer season of ironically presented anti-Semitic operas.4 In an attempt to find escape from the strain of an 4 There are actually five operas with nearly identical titles, in both German and English, that débuted prior to the publication of the novel (Golem by Nicolae Bretan; Der Golem by Eugen

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operatically convoluted family situation, Mimi recites the alphabetical formula she has learned from working on the production—“Ah, By Clay Destroy Evil Forces, Golem, Help Israel: Justice!” (Handler 2000, 16)5—and animates a creature that goes on stubbornly to obey her command to destroy everyone who has ever harmed her: her daughter, her son, her husband and finally herself. In Handler, as in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), the golem is, ultimately, a symbol of the oppressed and voiceless struggling for control of their own lives, and in both novels the golem is more or less based on (or, in the case of Chabon, a direct reference to) the Golem of Prague. This is not to say that the golem narratives in these novels are straightforward retellings of the golem narratives recorded in halakhic literature, however. Even in these relatively traditional golem narratives there is an entanglement between the emotional and the material that is absent from the older cases. The golem in these novels appears primarily in response to a very specifically erotic oppression: Mimi Glass feels trapped in a parody of a happy family, while her husband and son are both engaged in incestuous relationships with her daughter, and the unsubtly named Sam Clay (yes, Clay) is a closeted homosexual trying to survive the McCarthy era. The other four of these recent novels place their focus primarily on the golem’s quest for autonomy, and here again emotion—and particularly eros— is the primary signifier of the golem’s undertaking. In three of these, the direct conflict between the will of the golem and its creator form a significant part of the plot; two of these novels, Cynthia Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers (1997) and Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), are the only ones in the sample that feature female golems. Ozick’s golem, who insists on the name Xanthippe, begins as a projection of her utterly unsympathetic heroine Puttermesser’s unarticulated, inarticulable desires, and her development of her own subjectivity is portrayed as a conflict between Puttermesser’s desires and her own. On the surface, Puttermesser desires justice and the power to see justice done. Xanthippe, however, soon takes on the character of a succubus, wreaking havoc on the mayoral administration to which she has both helped and forced Puttermesser to ascend. Xanthippe claims: “[I] want a life of my own. My blood is hot” (Ozick 1997, 105), and d’Albert; The Golem by Abraham Ellstein; The Golem by Larry Sitsky and Golem by John Casken); the plot described by Handler, in which “a good Christian woman […] marries a Jew in an act of self-hatred, changing everything about herself, changing her name to suit him, while meanwhile he is secretly building a horrible monster” (Handler 2000, 90) resembles none of them. 5 The acrostic is so contrived that it seems devised to be funny.

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­ roceeds to work her way through the long list of every man Puttermesser has p considered herself wronged by, leaving them all victims of sexual exhaustion. The novel leaves open the question of whether Xanthippe is acting out Puttermesser’s subconscious desires or expressing her own—or even deliberately tormenting her creator. Eventually, horrified (whether by Xanthippe’s actions or her own complicity in them) Puttermesser traps and destroys Xanthippe, bringing that particular chapter in her life to a close. This particular destruction adds another layer to the suggestion in the halakhic literature that everyone knows that a golem is prone to destroy the world: if, instead of an amoral creature whose pursuit of her own desires is made dangerous through her ­increasing autonomy from the moral restraint of her creator, Xanthippe is instead a materialisation of Puttermesser’s deeply-held desires, then it is not the golem itself that is dangerous, but the extension of human agency—the unfettered desire—that it represents. In the halakhic literature, where the golem is a test-case for the boundaries of the human, there is never any serious suggestion that it might become ­human; the most a golem in that body of literature ever manages is to look human enough to fool an observer. In modern literature, the golem’s internal state is interrogated to determine and challenge the human/non-human boundary. Golems move towards humanity first when they demonstrate desire, and while that desire is often erotic it is not always erotic. In the 1996 novel Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett depicts a golem rebellion, in which a group of golems each grinds up a bit of the clay that forms them in order to produce an Über-Golem. The Über-Golem’s physical matter contains elements of all of the golems; it has been animated not by the “holy words” that, in Pratchett’s account, priests use to make other golems, but by the hopes and dreams that each of them scribbles down and stuffs into its head: “CREATE PEACE AND JUSTICE FOR ALL… RULE US WISELY… TEACH US FREEDOM… LEAD US TO…” (Pratchett 1996, 320). Ultimately the cacophony of competing, unattainable dreams, rather than its innate golem-ness, renders the creature dangerous and necessitates its destruction. But it is the capacity for independent desire demonstrated by the rebellion that convinces the city authorities to acknowledge the potentially equal being of the golemim.6 While Ozick and Pratchett each portray the effects of golems developing emotional autonomy, acting on desire contrary to the will of their masters, Wecker explores the character of the golem from the inside, probing the 6 I say “potential” because unfree golems remain property, and the golems themselves express a preference to be freed through purchase, rather than legal writ, so golem emancipation in Ankh-Morpork remains a work in progress.

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d­ ilemmas of a self whose will is always contingent upon the desires of another. Wecker’s golem, like Ozick’s (and Marge Piercy’s), passes outwardly as human. In this regard she is not without precedent in the Jewish textual tradition, as both of the seventeenth-century female golems Idel describes are also mistaken for human by observers.7 Like Xanthippe, she is both highly articulate and able to reason, as demonstrated in multiple debates between her and the other titular character, the Djinni. These allow the titular Golem, Chava, passionately to advocate for the validity and even desirability of her particular way of experiencing the world, limited by and filtered through the needs and desires of her master. A female golem, by virtue of her femaleness, throws open questions of agency that male golems do not force us to confront quite so sharply; women’s agency has, historically, been compromised by many forces and these compromises have been the subject of feminist analysis since 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women. But Wecker pushes the issue even further, beyond what would otherwise be comfortable and well-worn critical territory, and into the still quite fraught debates of constructionist feminist philosophy; she speaks directly to the tension uncovered in, for example, Saba Mahmood’s work (2011) on Egyptian Muslim women who exercise their agency precisely by rejecting “Western” feminist liberation. A female golem, by virtue of her golem-ness, deepens the reader’s imaginative engagement with such questions of agency: what happens when the final result of political liberation is a personal choice to return to or replicate circumstances that others have experienced as oppressive and sought to escape? Can a deliberate rejection of autonomy be understood, even accepted, as a valid stance towards the world, or does that very rejection strip Chava of her claim to be a thinking subject whose desires must weigh equally with the Djinni’s? By placing these questions at the forefront of the discussions between the titular Golem and Djinni, Wecker challenges her readers—Anglophones who might therefore be assumed to take for granted the heritage of liberationist feminist discourse—to imagine themselves in the position of someone whose currents of desire run contrary to what they have learned to consider natural, and thereby to confront the inconsistencies in their own tradition. Piercy also anticipates these questions of autonomy, without pushing the answers to the same extreme as Wecker. Body of Glass is the most radical revisioning of the golem included in the study; it is also the earliest. It is a science fiction novel in which the “golem” is actually a cyborg named Yod, created by a 7 Wecker is aware of one of these; see http://www.helenewecker.com/meet-the-golem-thejinni (Accessed 8 June 2020).

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scientist named Avram to defend the city of Tikva. Yod’s story is interwoven with a retelling of the classic legend of the Golem of Prague, which had been popularised by Chaim Bloch. Yod’s name is the tenth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, indicating that he is the tenth cyborg Avram has attempted to create. But a small vowel shift, indistinguishable in Hebrew text, transforms Yod into Yad, or “hand,” which is also the word used to signify the pointing device used for Torah reading to ensure that the parchment is not damaged by the imprecise touch of a human finger. Yod/Yad is, in other words, intended as a mechanical extension of human agency, designed to perform tasks that his creator cannot. Yod’s development as an autonomous emotional being is shown largely through his relationship with Shira, a scientist Avram recruits to help Yod learn how to pass as human. As in all of the literature that portrays the golem as challenging the human/non-human boundary, the narrative focuses closely on Yod’s emotional development—but also, uniquely among this sample of literature, on Shira’s conflicted feelings towards him, as she ponders the ethics of their sexual relationship and whether Yod’s programming leaves him sufficiently capable of consent. Like Chava, Yod is articulate about his own desires and limitations, although, unlike Chava, he is aware of his programming as programming, as something that may be altered rather than something intrinsic to his nature. This is clear in his final message to Shira, following his self-destruction: I have died and taken with me Avram, my creator, and his lab, all the records of his experiment. I want there to be no more weapons like me. A weapon should not be conscious. A weapon should not have the capacity to suffer for what it does, to regret, to feel guilt. A weapon should not form strong attachments. I die knowing I destroy the capacity to replicate me. I don’t understand why anyone would want to be a soldier, a weapon, but at least people sometimes have a choice to obey or refuse. I had none. (Piercy 1991, 563) In the end, it is not Yod’s emotional or moral development, but rather Shira’s, that brings a resolution to the novel. Upon realizing that she has just enough record of Avram’s work to re-create Yod as a companion, a lover, stripped of the weapons programming that caused him such anguish, she recalls his final message, considers his wishes and destroys the remaining traces of Avram’s project. While literary golems are vehicles for exploring questions of autonomy, they rarely actually achieve autonomy under their own power: it must be

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granted by outside forces. Emotion is important in golem narratives not so much because it makes a golem more human, more worthy of recognition as an autonomous being, but because demonstrating a capacity for emotion, attachment and desire sparks recognition by others. The golem thus remains a tool, a test-case, not for its humanity but for our own, that is defined through its entanglement with the monstrous. 5 Conclusion In its earliest incarnations in religious texts, the golem signified advanced mastery over the raw materials of creation. This mythical mastery was always sharply limited by the concrete constraints imposed on the political power of the Jewish sages, who represented a small and frequently persecuted religious minority. In this context, the creature came to function as a point of comparison for imagining the boundaries between human and non-human; it permitted those with relatively little power nonetheless to articulate the extent of their autonomy by identifying the creature’s lack. The golem that thus developed as a religious and legal fiction eventually morphed in to the monster of legend, ripe for literary exploration. In this guise, the golem acquired gender, and in so doing became a site of complex entanglements and weavings: between creature and creator, autonomy and subjectivity, text and reader, emotion and agency. When the golem passes from the realm of religion to the realm of literature, it enters into a heterotopia, but not the geographic, contradictory and liberating space theorised by Foucault. Literature itself both functions as a heterotopia, a space set apart but nonetheless both accessible from and necessary to the functioning of the everyday world, and also containing within itself further heterotopias, literary spaces themselves set apart from (but whose mere possibility is nevertheless foundational to the existence of) literature itself. Before Foucault (1986) coined the term “heterotopia” as a conceptual mirror-twin for utopia, it was a medical term for tissue that is growing outside its proper physiological location. Matter out of place. The spaces of heterotopia and of the monstrous are thus imaginatively coequal, insofar as the monster also signals a form of life outside the boundaries of, and therefore threatening to, the regular order. In the same way, in Foucaultian heterotopias, the dead in the cemeteries threaten the regular order of the living, and the players on the stage threaten the regular order of the real. The spaces of imagination, no matter how fantastic, cannot escape their origin in and entanglement with the

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­imaginer’s8 experience of the material. The figure of the monster thus haunts the edges of our collective lore, marking out the divide between the quotidian and the heterotopic imaginaries. The introduction of the monstrous signals the shift from realism to the fantastic, from a space that we might well mistake for the one we inhabit already to one through which we move with increasing degrees of detachment and dis-ease, conscious (and comforted) at every turn that the world we encounter is not our own. Literary heterotopias, and the monsters that mark their borders, function to police the boundaries of the real through their apparent challenges to the very existence of such boundaries. If it is the appearance of the monster that signals a departure from quotidian space, then what does the monster signal when it appears in a space that we had previously accepted as reflective of our everyday experience? The monster does not merely mark otherness: it others, and in so doing it opens up a space in which otherness may make a demand on the sympathy of a reader who may not have allowed for monstrosity. Thus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presents a challenge to the masculine technological/scientific domination of nature, which derives its power precisely from the ease with which readers initially accept Dr Victor Frankenstein’s world as a mirror of their own. His understanding of his place in that world represents their understanding of their place in theirs and his ambitions and motivations are comprehensible within their own worldviews. This initial familiarity gives Frankenstein’s descent into monstrousness its power to shock and its potential to re-orientate the reader’s relationship to their own everyday world. The golem novels that followed Frankenstein play, in part, upon a presumption of their readers’ familiarity with that novel and its critical heritage, a predisposition to imagine that the creator of the monster must have some characteristics of the monstrous. That predisposition permits more recent authors to shift the focus of their exploration from the questions of mastery that dominated early esoteric literature on the golem to the much more complex, entangled, evershifting territories of gender and love, shifting the narrative focus from the 8 I use this word deliberately to encompass both the author and the reader, bearing in mind the insight of reader-response criticism, which is particularly relevant to the line of argument I am pursuing here, that the meaning of a work of literature (or, indeed, the image-space invoked by a work of literature) is a co-production between the author and the reader, as described by Rosenblatt (1938 and 1978; see also Fish 1971). In the scheme that I am presupposing here, the work of imagination that comprises the act of reading is begun in the mind of the author, who commits to the page an assortment of images which are taken up and brought to completion – albeit not necessarily the completion envisioned by the author – in the mind of the reader. The material experience of both author and reader thus lays a claim to the imagined space.

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c­ reator to the creature, while retaining and complicating the concerns about autonomy and desire that have characterised the myth of the golem from its beginnings. References Arendt, Hannah. 1971. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt. Atwood, Margaret. 1986. Selected Poems 1965–1975. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Atwood, Margaret. 1979. The Edible Woman. London: Virago. Atwood, Margaret. 2011. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. London: Virago. Bertman, Stephen. 2015. “The Role of the Golem in the Making of Frankenstein.” The Keats-Shelley Review 29 (1): 42–50. Bloch, Chaim. 1925. The Golem: Legends of the Ghetto of Prague. Translated by Harry Schneiderman. Vienna: John N Vernay. https://sites.google.com/site/golemproject (Accessed 8 June 2020). Chabon, Michael. 2000. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davidson, Jane P. 1995. “Golem—Frankenstein—Golem of Your Own.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7 (2/3): 228–243. Fish, Stanley. 1971. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16(1): 22–27. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Verso. Gilbert, Sandra M. 1978. “Horror’s Twin: Merry Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” Feminist Stu­ dies 4 (2): 48–73. Handler, Daniel. 2000. Watch Your Mouth. New York: MacMillan. Huet, Marie Hélène. 1993. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Idel, Moshe. 1990. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. Albany: SUNY Press. Leavis, F.R. 1975. The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought. London: Chatto & Windus. Mahmood, Saba. 2011. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Moers, Ellen. 1974. “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.” The New York Review of Books March 21. https://janeaustensummer.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/moers-female-gothic-the-monster_s-mother.pdf (Accessed 8 June 2020). Ozick, Cynthia. 1997. The Puttermesser Papers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Park, Katharine and Lorraine J. Daston 1981. “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England.” Past & Present 92: 20–54. Piercy, Marge. 1991. Body of Glass. London: Penguin. Originally published as He, She and It, New York: Random House. Pratchett, Terry. 1996. Feet of Clay. London: Victor Gollancz. Rich, Adrienne. 1972. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English 34 (1): 18–30. Rosenblatt, Louise. 1938. Literature as Exploration. New York: Progressive Education Association. Rosenblatt, Louise. 1978. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Scholem, Gershom. 1965. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Schocken Books. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 1974. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Edited by James Reiger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wecker, Helene. 2013. The Golem and the Djinni. London: HarperCollins. Williams, David A. 1999. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Chapter 9

Drinking, Dancing and Hooking Up: Young Adults in Sexual Pursuit in the Mainstream Nightlife in Denmark Mie Birk Jensen Abstract This chapter explores young people’s experiences with sexual pursuits in the mainstream nightlife in Denmark based on data from a large-scale qualitative study on gender, youth, and intoxication among young adults. Focusing on three specific materialdiscursive entanglements, namely the dance floor, bodily signs and the exchange of drinks, and drawing on social constructionist insights, Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia,” affect theory and new materialism, Jensen approaches these young adults’ narrated experiences with sexual pursuit as reflecting complex intra-actions between the socio-material context and the affective atmosphere of the nightlife. These intra-­ actions produce real effects that spill over into young adults’ experiences with sex and further intimate and romantic contact outside the nightlife.

Keywords gender – sex – alcohol – nightlife – hook up – young adults – heterotopia – affect – new materialism – affect

1 Introduction In this chapter, I explore the mutual conditionings of gender and love through a focus on sexual pursuit. My focus on sexual pursuit provides insights into how sexual and romantic relations among young adults emerge in the mainstream nightlife, as young adults actively seek out certain venues in order to meet potential romantic and sexual partners. I demonstrate how young adults ascribe meaning to sexual pursuits through their understandings and beliefs  about gender and sexuality, not simply as categories of ­identity, but as

© Mie Birk Jensen, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_011

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­ henomena that are felt, embodied and embedded in a ­socio-material context. p This focus contributes to our understanding of how gender and desire are mutually constitutive, and emerge in relation to specific cultural and material settings and gendered beliefs. The nightlife constitutes an important arena for young adults’ sexual and romantic explorations, but it is also an arena that is simultaneously saturated with gendered expectations (Jensen, Herold, Frank and Hunt, 2018). It thus makes a particularly fruitful context for the study of young adults’ experiences with sexual pursuit. In this chapter, I make use of data from 140 qualitative interviews with young adults between 18–25 years old, to analyse young adults’ narratives of sexual pursuit, and how such pursuit is ascribed meaning in different ways, as they navigate in and through the gendered expectations in the nightlife. The interview data stems from a large research project on intoxication, gender and youth, conducted at the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University. The project is founded on an interest in the relations between intoxication, young adults and gender, and this vast amount of data allows me to zoom in on narratives on sexual pursuit that made up a significant part of the participants’ stories of what goes on in the nightlife. In this chapter, I focus on how these young adults narrate their personal experiences with sexual pursuit, and how these emerge in the nexus between their beliefs and embodied experiences of gender, as well as the nightlife. As I will go on to argue, the nightlife is central to their pursuits, because it constitutes a hybrid space in which gender is ordered around an idealisation of heterosexual desire through various human and non-human components. Young adults’ sexual practices when accompanied by alcohol use have been investigated through a focus on “hook-ups,” “casual sex” “one-night stands” and “flirting” (Pedersen, Tutenges and Sandberg 2017; Jensen, Herold, Frank and Hunt 2018). These sexual practices may refer to multiple types of encounters that may be fleeting and ambiguous in meaning, ranging from body language and kissing to sexual intercourse (Currier 2013; Lewis, Atkins, Blayney, Dent and Kaysen 2013; Jensen, Herold, Frank and Hunt 2018; Pedersen, Tutenges and Sandberg 2017). While such practices are often linked to alcohol use for Danish young adults, and defined by the fact that they require little long-term commitment between consenting partners, I argue that even such playful encounters can be integral to young people’s early experiences with forming sexual and romantic relations; both as embodied experiences of desire that may come to shape their future relations, but also insofar as even playful forms of sexual encounter may evolve into more committed connections when young people leave the nightlife. In other words, sexual pursuit, even when taking place in

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the nightlife while under the influence of alcohol, is not limited to the nightlife itself; it may spill over into their everyday lives as it affects their understandings of how sex, romance and love are intertwined with gendered expectations. Pursuing sexual encounters is thus a complicated practice, and understanding it was further complicated by the translation of interviews from Danish to English. In the data, the Danish term “score” was most commonly used. Contrary to terms such as “hook-up” or “one-night stand,” “score” may refer to the process of trying to flirt or hook up, but as will become clear, it does not necessarily indicate a pre-defined end-goal. In a Danish context, “score” thus refers to different forms of sexual pursuit, that is, processes by which young adults seek out sexual, romantic and/or flirtatious encounters, and I have chosen not to translate it in quotes where the meaning would otherwise become obscured. With this focus, I add to existing research by analysing how young adults ascribe meaning to their experiences with sexual pursuit, not simply as an effect of a pre-existing sexual or gendered identity, nor as an effect of the setting. Rather, sexual pursuit emerges in different ways in the complex intra-actions between the socio-material context and the affective atmosphere of the nightlife, as well as young adults’ experiences with gendered expectations and embodied desire. To explore young adults’ narratives of sexual pursuit in relation to their beliefs and embodied experiences of gender in relation to the nightlife, I draw on social constructionist insights, as well as affect theory and new materialism. I draw on Judith Butler’s (1990, 2004) theoretical contributions to constructionism to approach gender as a socially constructed phenomenon embedded in a specific historical and cultural context. I augment these insights with affect theory to explore how gender is not only performed through sexual pursuit, but also embodied in an affective atmosphere sensed in a specific setting (here, the nightlife). Inspired by the new materialist turn and Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) framework of agential realism, I further explore how young people’s experiences are affected by specific material arrangements within the nightlife, in which agency accrues, not only to themselves, but also to material things. This enables me to approach these young adults’ narratives of sexual pursuit in relation to three specific material-discursive entanglements, namely the dance floor, bodily signs and the exchange of drinks. All of these played a significant part in these young adults’ narratives of sexual pursuit. Combining these theoretical insights, I have been able to ask: how do these young adults, in their narratives of sexual pursuit, enact (shifting) boundaries between themselves and their surroundings? How are their embodied experiences of sexual pursuit entangled with other social and material agents?

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The methodological consequence of my employment of these theoretical perspectives is a reading of their narratives that excludes the possibility of a final truth about gender or sexual pursuit. Rather I argue that, with this theoretical framework, we may approach sexual pursuits as complex phenomena that are not only enacted by young adults themselves, but also affected by their situated experiences in specific spatiotemporal contexts. I take heterosexual pursuit as my starting point because the vast majority of the narrations of sexual pursuits, particularly in the mainstream nightlife, were about heterosexual desire, although their experiences were not uniform.1 Furthermore, this focus allowed me to refuse to take heterosexuality for granted as a norm; like other sexualities, it is practised and produced in different ways, and this focus allows for an exploration of the complexities of how heterosexuality emerges as an embodied and affective experience when young adults pursue one another. 2

Existing Research on Alcohol and Sexual Pursuit

Drinking to intoxication has become a common, and even expected, rite of passage into adulthood for young people in Nordic countries, and it continues to play a central part in Danes’ lives throughout young adulthood (Demant and Østergaard 2007). Drinking alcohol is an integral part of young people’s lives, because it plays an important part in developing and maintaining social bonds with peers, and in the formation and exploration of gendered, sexual and romantic identities in Nordic, British, and American contexts (cf. Abrahamson, 2003, 2004; Demant and Østergaard 2007; Leigh and Aramburo 1996; Maclean 2016; Peralta 2008; Room 1996). While young people do make use of alcohol to play and experiment with gendered and sexual identities, drinking also often takes place in settings that encourage heteronormative relations between men and women (Jensen, Herold, Frank and Hunt 2018; Jensen and Hunt 2019). Whether it be pre-parties, house parties, or the mainstream nightlife, young people are encouraged to drink and behave in accordance with masculine and feminine ideals of behaviour, depending on their assigned gender (e.g. Griffin, Szmigin, Bengry-Howell, Hackley and Mistral 2013; Herold and Hunt 2019; Hutton, Wright and Saunders 2013; Jensen 2019; Nicholls 2017; Tan 2013; Østergaard 2007). The mainstream nightlife came into being as part of the development of a “nighttime economy,” a term that was first introduced by urban geographers in 1 Approximately 14% of the sample identify as non-heterosexual (7 identify as homosexual, 9 as bisexual and 4 as pansexual).

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the early 1990s in the UK to examine possibilities for urban renewal of British towns and city centres through nighttime entertainment (Hobbs, Winlow, Hadfield and Lister 2005; Shaw 2010). These entertainment offers developed in the vein of an increased focus on the opportunities for economic growth through investments in leisure and tourism, and through this, there was a rapid increase in the venues that offered alcohol as a ‘core commodity’ because it attracted people into the city at night (Hobbs, Winlow, Hadfield and Lister 2005, 163). The nighttime economy now consists primarily of venues marked by heavy alcohol consumption, made possible by liberal alcohol policies, as well as both governmental and private corporate interests in the development of urban entertainment offers (e.g. Chatterton and Hollands 2002; Hayward and Hobbs 2007; Hollands and Chatterton 2003; Hunt and Frank 2016; Roberts 2015). The nighttime economy has since commodified both leisure and pleasure, and the mainstream nightlife is now primarily targeted at young people, who seek the pleasures and thrills of drinking heavily and letting loose outside the constraints in their everyday lives (Measham and Brain 2005; Hutton, Wright and Saunders 2013). With an increasing pressure on young adults during the day to be rational, effective and perform educationally and professionally, the nightlife promises freedom, emotional stimulation and hedonism. However, much research indicates that there are indeed plenty of constraints in the nightlife because it does not cater for all people equally; instead, it targets specific groups of young people based on taste, fashion and style. This produces divisions amongst young people, excluding those who cannot live up to the demands of the mainstream nightlife in terms of style, dress or wealth (Chatterton and Hollands 2002; Roberts 2015). Furthermore, the mainstream nightlife (that is, venues that do not cater to specific audiences, such as subcultural drug users, or lgbtq+ youth) promotes certain forms of gendered and sexual interactions (Boyd 2010; Hutton 2016; Roberts 2015). For example, in her study on mainstream nightclubs in Singapore, Tan (2013) writes: Built into this notion of clubs as places of sociability is the production of Ladies’ Night, when “appropriate-looking girls” gain complimentary entry because they are perceived as already paying with their presence. It is thus evident that club admission policies are not gender neutral, and that they blatantly capitalize on the lure of (hetero) sexualized feminine bodies. (2013, 718) Tan makes it apparent how specific gendered and sexualised promotions within the nightlife capitalise on how the consumption of alcohol is

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i­ntertwined with gender and sexuality, as many young adults seek out venues to engage in intoxicated sexual experiences that are encouraged and shaped through the specific (gendered) offers of the nighttime economy. Drinking alcohol in the mainstream nightlife is interwoven with (hetero)sexual encounters, because it constitutes an affectively charged space that facilitates certain sexual desires and sexual encounters. In addition, a sensuous atmosphere is created through alcohol, lighting, music and the presence of multiple bodies in close proximity (Duff 2008; Pedersen, Tutenges and Sandberg 2017; Tan 2013). Researchers have pointed to how alcohol consumption is often dominated by a heterosexual logic that dictates that men are expected always to be interested in sex and thus initiate it, whereas women are expected to limit it (BrownBowers, Gurevich, Vasilovsky, Cosma and Matti 2015; Leigh and Aramburo 1996; Young, McCabe and Boyd 2007). Research also shows that women who drink are read as more sexually available and risk being held more accountable than men are when drinking alcohol, especially when it comes to sexual behaviour (Horvath and Brown 2007; Nicholls 2017; Pedersen, Tutenges and Sandberg 2017). Grazian (2007) has argued that young men make use of clubs to perform sexual aggression towards women to gain status among their peers. Others have criticised such research for limiting their analytical focus through a hegemonic view of gender that obscures the complexities of its modulation within the nightlife, as men may form bonds of solidarity with women, and women may also enjoy the sexual atmosphere of the nightlife (Anderson 2009; Harder and Demant 2015; Harder and Ravn 2014). The young adults in this study therefore narrate sexual pursuit in a context that is marked not only by heavy alcohol use, but also by gendered and sexual norms, where men and women are expected to perform certain roles, and to express and direct their desire in certain ways. At the same time, it would be counter-­productive to see their experiences as a uniform expression of gender norms; rather, this analysis aims to augment our understanding of how sexual pursuits emerge as gendered in different and complex ways, not solely as an effect of a pre-existing space or identity. With this in mind, I argue that the nightlife offers more than one way to perform gender: similarly, it does not simply offer a “time out” from other spaces, with their restrictions and demands, or a space for the hedonistic pleasures that stand in opposition to everyday life. This is because the nightlife is part of a nighttime economy that also constrains sexual pleasures within an economic framework in which gendered and (hetero-)sexual norms are reproduced and intertwined with the gendered and sexual expectations that have come to mark young adults’ alcohol use.

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Theoretical Views of Sexual Pursuit

As a gender scholar with a background in cultural studies, my approach to how young adults articulate sexual pursuits in the context of going out to clubs is micro-sociological. Because existing research still needs to address the complexities of how young adults navigate the nightlife as a gendered and sexualised nightscape, I explore how young adults narrate their experiences of sexual pursuit in mainstream clubs. I combine various theoretical approaches to grasp the i­ ntra-actions between the spaces in which sexual pursuit takes place, and the restrictions and possibilities they experience in such spaces when in sexual pursuit. Through this, I examine how young adults narrate sexual pursuit in relation to their beliefs and embodied experiences of gender, as well as in relation to the nightlife, and specific discursive-material arrangements within it (i.e. the dance floor, bodily signs, and alcohol). In recent decades, constructionism has offered insights into the instability of gender and sexuality and how these phenomena have changed in meaning throughout history and across cultures. Judith Butler presented her theory of performativity in 1990 when she argued that people contribute to the construction of their gender and sexuality by adopting and performing situated cultural signs and behaviours that enable them to be recognised as individuals with certain gendered or sexual identities (Butler 1990). Butler argues that: […] acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence of identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. (1990, 185) Because these signs and behaviours are imitated and repeated over time, they may appear inevitable and even natural (Gurevich, Vasilovsky, Brown-Bowers and Cosma 2015). In this way, Butler conceptualises gender as “a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed” in the eyes of others; whether real or imaginary, gender thus constitutes “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (2004, 1). As I explore young adults’ narratives of sexual pursuits in the Danish nightlife, I pay attention to how certain signs and behaviours are narrated as saturated with gendered and sexual meanings, and how acts, gestures and desires are narrated as central to sexual pursuits insofar as they are ascribed gendered and sexual meanings.

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It was an obvious consequence of constructionist insights and of the postcolonial critique of Western gender studies that cultures should be seen as constructing gender and sexuality in a way that reflects its unique traits. In her development of the politics of location, post-colonial gender scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1986) argues that location matters, because otherwise, an analysis of gender holds an implicit claim to a universal and crosscultural representation that neglects the different material and historical contexts that people face. Such an analysis would “rob them of their political and historical agency” (1986, 79), because women, or other gendered groups, cannot be conceptualised as singular in terms of interests or challenges (1986). Mohanty writes: The relationship between Woman – a cultural and ideological composite Other constructed through diverse representational discourse (scientific, literary, juridical, linguistic, cinematic, etc.) – and women –– real, material subjects of their collective histories – is one of the central questions the practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address. This connection between women as historical subjects and the re-presentation of Woman produced by hegemonic discourses is not a relation of direct identity, or a relation of correspondence or simple implication. It is an arbitrary relation set up in particular cultural and historical contexts. (1986, 62) With this in mind, I argue that it is important to take the politics of location seriously, because otherwise one runs the risk of generalising; in the eagerness to represent a unified group, one would not take the plurality of experience seriously, and thus would not be able to address the way inequalities are locally produced in historical and material contexts. Based on this theoretical stance on location, I pay special attention to the importance of locality when I analyse the gendered meanings associated with young adults’ experiences with sexual pursuits in the nightlife. I read their experiences as locally situated, but I do not take their narratives as final ­representations of what young women and men may experience in general, or in this context. Rather, through a micro-sociological analysis, I point to how their narratives of sexual pursuit emerge in the intra-action between the nightlife, their own embodied embeddedness within it, and the cultural field of possibilities and constraints upon which they draw. Locality, however, is not to be understood as agential due only to cultural inscriptions on its surface. Locality is a material phenomenon that exerts an effect on other phenomena. The distinction between nature and culture as a binary has enabled scholarship on the social and cultural aspects of gender,

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but has limited our focus on how gender intra-acts with materiality, and how we not only produce, but also reproduce and consume our environment (Christensen and Hauge 2012). Scholars, such as physicist and gender scholar Karen Barad, have argued that studies on gender have been too exclusively focused on performativity, linguistics, and cultural discourse, whilst neglecting how the material may also exert agency (Christensen and Hauge 2012). This critique has inspired a material turn ― new materialism ― and in this chapter, I draw on Barad’s (2003, 2007) theoretical framework of “agential realism” that encourages a new thinking of discourse and matter, drawing on insights from natural science and gender studies combined. Barad argues that discourse cannot be separated from matter, because the distinction between the two implies that humans are separate from the material world. Barad argues that what we know does not represent or stand outside of what is; rather, we come to know what we know about the world, because we are of the world (2003). Thus, Barad dismantles the representationalism embedded in early gender scholarship, but she also goes beyond Butler’s theory of performativity, in which discourse may shape our physical realities (2003). Barad argues that we are not simply located in the world, we are part of it: as humans, we do not simply observe and react to our environment, because humans are not the only ones to enact agency; we are part of an on-going intraactivity in which discourse and matter are mutually constitutive (2003). In fact, the boundaries between human and non-human are performative, because “discursive practices are not human-based activities but rather specific material (re)configurations of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted” (Barad 2003, 828). Seen within the framework of agential realism, the material environment of the nightlife, and alcohol itself, are not simply physical entities that these young adults represent in their narratives: the physical world can enact agency and influence the way we understand the boundaries between ourselves and the world. Barad writes: Material conditions matter, not because they “support” particular discourses that are the actual generative factors in the formation of bodies but rather because matter comes to matter through the iterative intraactivity of the world in its becoming. The point is not merely that there are important material factors in addition to discursive ones; rather, the issue is the conjoined material-discursive nature of constraints, conditions and practices. The fact that material and discursive constraints and exclusions are intertwined points to the limited validity of analyses that attempt to determine individual effects of material or discursive factors. (Barad 2003, 823).

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Drawing on agential realism, I understand the narratives that form the subject of my analysis not simply as reflective of young adults’ experiences of the nightlife and alcohol; they give insight into their experiences with being acted upon by these material agents. My use of agential realism thus challenges the assumption that their narratives are simply a socially shaped, discursive construction reflecting the environment and the physical and cultural properties of alcohol. Making use of Barad’s framework, I conceptualise phenomena as entangled; it does not make sense to make clear distinctions between different components of a phenomenon as individual beings or things, and neither can qualities be ascribed to them that pre-exist intra-action (Barad 2007). In this way, the material and the discursive are already entangled; they are mutually constitutive. The narratives of young adults’ experiences of sexual pursuit are verbal renditions of experiences that are already material-discursive: through their narratives they enact shifting boundaries between themselves and others, as well as material conditions (such as the dance floor, alcohol, their bodily capabilities, etc.). They are drawing on a field of possibilities that concerns discursive and material arrangements simultaneously. Making use of agential realism, I add to the existing research on gender and alcohol through an exploration of how the material is not solely narrated as a tool or a way to “do gender” (e.g. Measham 2002). Rather, the material properties of alcohol and the nightlife can be agential, as young adults narrate cause and effect in their sexual pursuits. This enables me to ask how these young adults, in their narratives, enact (shifting) boundaries between themselves and their surroundings, including other social and material agents. In my attempt to combine constructionist and new materialist approaches to the role of locality in my empirical material, I have turned to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to conceptualise the mainstream Danish nightlife. While I am aware of Foucault’s constructionist leanings, I do not think his model of the ordering of gender and sexuality precludes an awareness of the effects of materiality. In “Of Other Spaces” (1986), Foucault defines heterotopia as a place in which a fragment of the social world is ordered in an alternate way, marking it as different, or Other, in relation to its environment. Heterotopia lies between a non-place (utopia) and the everyday social world we live in; heterotopic spaces exist between them as “all other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986, 24). A heterotopic space makes visible the norms that surround it by mirroring them, either by making a place where deviance is placed and mirrors the norms in society around it (such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals); or as an ordering of normative ideals that are otherwise in chaos and undergoing change in the surrounding social world (Foucault 1986). A heterotopic space can thus be a place of compensation, insofar as it is a real space that creates an

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order that is “as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled” (Foucault 1986). Inspired by Foucault, I conceptualise the mainstream nightlife in Denmark as a heterotopic space, because it is structured around an ordering of gender and sexuality that is not like that of everyday life, but nor is it a utopia. The mainstream nightlife mirrors the surrounding society, in which gender and sexuality are subject to change, offering a clear ordering of gender as what men and women are supposed to do in relation to an idealisation of heterosexual desire through socio-material arrangements. As a heterotopia, the nightlife mirrors the norms and rhythms of what surrounds it, by making leisure the purpose and norm for gendered and sexual rituals and gestures; and through the consumption of alcohol and the exchange of certain signs and behaviours, one can gain entry (Foucault 1986, 25–26). In order to analyse narratives of sexual pursuit within a heterotopic space, I further employ insights from affect theory. Drawing on Gurevich et al. (2015), I conceptualise affect as a state of being that cannot be seen as the property of the individual: rather, it emerges in a circuitry of feelings and responses among people and objects (Gurevich, Vasilovsky, Brown-Bowers and Cosma 2015). Affect is not free flowing, as bodies, objects and emotions are entangled: through social interactions, people exchange affect, in which they draw not only on their own embodied and affective experience, but also on the cultural field of possibilities and restrictions for behaviour. Affect thus emerges in the intraactions between people and objects in proximity, such as in the nightlife. This is because different spaces offer certain forms of culturally shared meanings, rules and symbols (Ahmed 2006; Gurevich, Vasilovsky, Brown-Bowers and Cosma 2015). When the young adults in my study narrate their sexual pursuits, they rely on being able to sense expectations and boundaries within a specific space. These boundaries are also embodied and negotiated in relation to the ­particular setting in which certain places and symbols, such as the dance floor, bodily signals and alcohol are infused with meaning that is both sexually charged and gendered; together, these phenomena enact agency. As a methodological consequence of affect theory, I shall consider sexual pursuit an affective practice, because sexual pursuits do not emerge solely from an individual nor from an atmosphere; affect is not restricted either to our inner lives or to an exterior presence: it is created in the interaction of both, and may move us and move through us. With this in mind, I pay attention to how young adults sense and negotiate boundaries and to whether embeddedness in a specific context (the nightlife), and its entanglement with specific discursive-material components, such as the dance floor or drinks, is central to their narratives. I will look for both cultural and material agents intra-acting and at play in this nightlife.

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4 Methodology The data used in this study is part of a large-scale research project carried out at the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research at Aarhus University. I worked on the project as a Ph.D. student together with a team of skilled researchers, including pi Dr Geoffrey Hunt, Dr Vibeke Asmussen Frank and Dr Maria Dich Herold. The project consists of 140 qualitative interviews with young adults between 18–25 years old (average age: 21.2), as it is at this age alcohol use and drinking to intoxication is at its highest (Dawson et al., 2004). I personally conducted in total 38 out of the 140 interviews, but familiarised myself with the full dataset. As a team, we recruited a diverse group of young adults, including working and unemployed young adults, as well as full-time and part-time students (attending vocational school, universities, etc.) with a multi-tiered recruitment strategy, making use of online platforms, street level recruitment and chain referrals. The interviews were conducted between April 2015 and June 2016 at different locations, such as the university, in the participants’ homes and in libraries. The interviews were semi-structured and focused on the young adults’ experiences of intoxication and gender. It included a questionnaire on their personal background, as well as questions about their general alcohol consumption (frequency, quantity etc.), as well as open-ended questions about their personal experiences. Open-ended questions were used to gain access to information on a variety of different experiences with alcohol in relation to cultural, embodied, affective and material aspects. Thus, we formulated open-ended questions that would allow the respondents to focus on drinking practices and settings, bodily experiences with feelings of intoxication, as well as attitudes towards different drinking styles, and the consequences thereof. We also included photo elicitation, asking them to reflect on selected pictures of different drinking situations in order to gain insight into various types of information that could not otherwise be easily described (Johnson and Weller 2002; Russell 1994). This photo elicitation facilitated many of the narratives on embodied and affective aspects of the young adults’ sexual pursuits: for example, as they described their embodied experiences with dancing in relation to pictures of people on a dance floor. In appreciation, the respondents received a gift card to the movie theatre. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, and coded with the data-analysis software Nvivo 11. The research team organised the data into overall themes, such as “health,” “gender” and “sexuality/desire.” The sexuality/ desire code constitutes the basis for this analysis, and I subcoded this into relevant themes, including experiences with sexual pursuit (in Danish: ­

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“­scorepraksisser”). The sample used in this chapter consists of data from the interviews that included personal experiences with sexual pursuit when drinking including narratives on how to succeed. Their reflections on their personal experiences varied, but tended to highlight the cultural, social and material aspects of a night out, in which alcohol, venues and their own presence were given meaning in relation to gendered and sexual norms. Out of the 140 interviews, 138 respondents talked about sexuality and desire during the interview, out of which 77 included narratives on sexual pursuits (“scorepraksisser”). Out of these respondents, 45 identified as men, 30 as women, and 2 as genderqueer and agender, respectively. 4.1 Analysis of Sexual Pursuit In the interviews with young adults, speaking about sexual pursuit in the nightlife, they often emphasised that such experiences involved heavy drinking. Feeling drunk was narrated as central to sexual pursuit because it enabled young people to approach strangers and feel more open and confident. Within alcohol studies on youth and intoxication, this is common knowledge (e.g. Abrahamson 2003, 2004; Demant and Østergaard 2007; Jensen 2019). Their narratives, however, implied new insights in that they also included reflections on appropriate actions in this context for young women and men respectively, often in relation to specific practices within the nightlife, such as buying and receiving drinks, dancing, talking and how to dress. To understand how these young adults ascribe meaning to sexuality and gender in the mainstream nightlife, I shall examine their narrated experiences and divide the analysis into sections based on three socio-material entanglements: the dance floor, bodily signs and drinks. 5

Sexual Pursuit and the Dance Floor

When narrating experiences with sexual pursuit in the nightlife, these young adults referred to how certain places enabled them to act on their sexual interests in ways that were not accessible in other spaces. This was due to how sexual pursuits are not only accepted, but also expected in the nightlife. Talking about her experiences with going out to a club rented by friends, Klara says: There was a good atmosphere. […] It was like there just had to be “scored” that night, well that’s what the guys thought, and the girls really thought so too. It was about finding your target and then I got my drink in the bar and stood there for just 30 seconds, when a guy comes to me and asks me

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if I want to dance. Then the night has started! […] Everybody wanted it to be a good night. Klara’s description is not solely of her own sexual pursuit: she senses a collective affective atmosphere of (hetero)sexual pursuit (“that’s what the guys thought”; “the girls really thought so too”). She confirms this as she receives an invitation to dance, which serves as an indication of sexual pursuit in this setting. Similarly, other young adults described how they could sense interest, not only from invitations to dance, but also from ways of dancing. For example, Nicolas says, “If she wants you, she will dance more like up against you. That is the way you can tell.” Many respondents described how they made use of the dance floor as a location for sexual pursuit, because they could benefit from others being in proximity, and because they could capitalise on the positive effects of alcohol to negotiate the boundaries between themselves and others. Mogens says: It is about taking it slow to begin with and then go! It came quite natural to me to take it to the next level, when I was drunk and on the dance floor. Go one step further, one step further, one step further. Just nice and easy. Not too pushy, but also so she can see that you did it on purpose. […] Then you go to talk, and then out dancing again. As you get more drunk, there is more intensity about it, you can end up groping each other on the dance floor, if you are drunk enough. Mogens narrates how he pursues by actively showing interest (“so she can see you did it on purpose”), but simultaneously balances his desire with what is appropriate for the context (“not too pushy”). Mogens is able to negotiate the boundaries between himself and the woman he is in pursuit of through an ­affective practice in which feeling, sensing and alternating between pushing and holding back are central in order to not transgress social norms of behaviour in this space. Feeling drunk and being on the dance floor enables him to be in sexual pursuit, but he also articulates how this behaviour becomes natural to him under these circumstances, as alcohol also acts (“if you are drunk enough”). Many young adults referred to some form of “nature” during the interviews, for example, as they described dancing as a “mating ritual” or “primal.” Hildur exemplified this in her descriptions of her sexual pursuits on the dance floor: I have never tried to pick someone up that I did not know, when going out. It is always people that you know in advance, who seem extra

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attractive. […] It is a bit like tribal dancing. It is more like the primitive human, mating dance. I imagine a peacock, spreading its feathers, showing what you’ve got, when you dance and act like that, it is a way of showing who you are, how you are in that space. […] If you have a connection there, I think you feel like then you will have a connection in other places too. It is transferable in some way. It is a primitive instinct, you are in contact with yourself, it is more primal in some way, showing off, and communicating with your body. Hildur describes dancing as a way to communicate physically with others to test out sexual compatibility. Dancing is a way of showing off and experiencing who she is in “that space.” On the dance floor, Hildur ascribes a certain naturalness to sexual pursuit that enables her to be “primal” and rely on “instincts,” as long as it is with someone she knows in advance. From a constructionist perspective, Hildur’s narrative of her sexual pursuits is performative, as, through dancing, she is adopting certain cultural acts, gestures and desires, which she goes on to describe as a “mating dance.” Through this, she narrates sexual pursuit as an effect of a pre-existing identity and an inevitable development, insofar as it is ascribed meaning as part of an unfolding human history: she enacts “the primitive human,” naturalising her own sexual pursuit as if an inherent and transhistorical heterosexuality is invoked; as if it naturally unfolds through her. Even though this performance is constrained to this setting and her desire is to dance with people she already knows, she narrates her sexual pursuit as a desire that transgresses her own behaviour and its embeddedness in a particular space and time. With new materialist insights, we can augment this analysis and argue that Hildur’s narrative is not solely a matter of how she constructs this form of sexual pursuit as natural; it constitutes a discursive-material intra-action, because she is not the only agential being in her narration. Her ­statement “how you are in that space” points to sexual pursuit as an entanglement between herself and the dance floor, not as separate entities, but as mutually constitutive. Her narrative implies that being in sexual pursuit is not simply a reaction to an environment that enables her to pursue others, because the boundaries between herself, the dance floor, the physicality of her body and desire are shifting. At the same time, these shifting boundaries produce real effects, because they are “transferable” and determine whether she chooses to have sex with someone when she leaves the dance floor. For these young adults, sexual pursuits also emerge as an effect of the collective atmosphere, and their ability to navigate within it through sensing and feeling. The nightlife supplies them with a specific setting—the dance floor—in

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which sexual pursuits can emerge “naturally”: they rely on fantasies about gender and human (hetero)sexuality to enact sexual pursuit as an inevitable occurrence that exceeds their own pursuits. Their enactment of these fantasies enables them to have sex when leaving the club, but they also indicate that they rely on the context to decide whether it is appropriate or not. Researchers argue that, while the nightlife may encourage drunken and transgressive pleasures, the relation between women and alcohol, in particular, is complex. Women are expected to balance contradicting expectations of femininity, in which they are at once expected to be liberated and let loose, whilst also living up to ideals of restraint and respectability when they go out (Hutton, Wright and Saunders 2013; Griffin et al. 2013). Thus, sexual pursuit may be experienced as natural and enjoyable, but it also demands that women balance contradictory expectations based on their gender. Unlike Hildur, Nicolas and Mogens, other young adults in the study did not find the club’s dance floor to be a suitable space for sexual pursuit, as they struggled with navigating what was appropriate behaviour for them in this space, particularly in relation to reading and expressing bodily signs. 6

Sexual Pursuit and Bodily Signs

I have argued that dancing constitutes an affective practice, and that sensing and feeling are important for sexual success. In this section of the analysis, I explore in-depth how bodily signs are entangled with sexual pursuit on the dance floor, and how the importance of bodily signs may provide young adults with challenges as they try to navigate their own desires, as well as others’ desires (or lack thereof). Many young adults expressed how they struggled with how to read and interpret bodily signs when in sexual pursuit, and some decided deliberately to avoid trying to sense these boundaries. Per explains: Usually, when you go out, the key is just to be more aggressive. Go to the girls and be a bit more aggressive than how most guys would act. You may grab the girl and take her, sort of lift her up. Then it is 50/50. Either you get slapped or you succeed. It has been a while since I have done it, and I might not really have had the confidence to take the next step that comes after this. Per describes how he tries to be more aggressive than other guys on the dance floor. Contrary to Mogens, he does not sense boundaries: he finds them by

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d­ eliberately crossing them, resulting in potentially violent rejection. He describes this as “the key” to sexual pursuit, but indicates that it may not actually lead to sex, because he does not have the confidence to go any further, and he goes on to explain that he feels there is “pressure” on men to perform when in pursuit. Interestingly, many women seemed to reflect precisely on how to avoid or deal with men who were engaged in similar forms of sexual pursuits, employing multiple strategies for avoiding such aggressive pursuit. For example, Karoline says: Sometimes it is so uncomfortable to make eye contact with a guy, because then some of them will come dancing towards you. So, it is very much about staring down on the floor when dancing, or to keep eye contact with friends, who you know are not out to get with you sexually or anything. Karoline articulates how she feels it is necessary to take certain preventive measures, such as avoiding eye contact, to fend off any potentially aggressive suitors. Karoline makes use of the dance floor when she goes out, and although she is often in pursuit, she does not utilise the dance floor for this. Like other young women in the study, Karoline described the dance floor as a problematic place, because it makes women susceptible to sexually aggressive behaviour, but she also goes on to suggest that it is simply not an appropriate place for sexual pursuits. We didn’t kiss on the dance floor, we kissed outside. […] There is a difference, but more like a difference in how other people think of me. […] I think, on the dance floor, I become very judgmental, it is like “oh, she is so cheap, and oh he is nasty.” But then again, when you yourself are in that situation, then I know that I do not think that I am cheap, and I do not think that he is nasty. In Karoline’s narrative, she must navigate between her own desires and the risk of being judged by others when in sexual pursuit. Like many others in this study, she employs the concept of the “cheap girl” to police her own sexual pursuit to avoid the risk of breaking with cultural norms of appropriate sexual and gendered behaviour. She ascribes these norms to others, as is evident when she tries to imagine what others think of her. This constitutes an affective practice in that she tries to sense what appropriate behaviour is for her on the dance floor. She tries to predict what gendered and sexual meanings her

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bodily movements may hold to others, but it is a guessing-game, as she relies on reading bodily signals within a cultural landscape. Thus, where Klara describes how she senses a collective affective atmosphere satiated with sexual interest in which these boundaries are to be crossed on a night out, Karoline senses an atmosphere loaded with risks of being labelled a “cheap” girl. For some of the young men, the dance floor could also be too sexual. Lars described how he could easily dance, if it was just dancing when going out to clubs. However, when dancing became a form of sexual pursuit, he found it problematic, because even when drunk, something tells him he “should get to know her” instead of hooking up with a stranger. Because of this, he tries to use the dance floor to help his friends in their sexual pursuits: I made a deal with him that when I got up to go dancing with her, then he should also get up and then we could trade places. It was a sneaky move, so we switched places and then I sat down again, and he stood there and had a cosy time with her. […] She was attractive and very nice, but if she is willing to do something with him without knowing him, then I am not interested, not in any way. Lars is prepared to dance with women when he is out for the night, but he does not engage in sexual pursuit on the dance floor on his own behalf. Instead, he utilises the dance floor to help his friend with his sexual pursuit through his ability to read and give off bodily signs and through “sneaky” movements. In his experience, sexual pursuit is expected when going out, but he problematises how this is done with strangers. He distances himself from many other young men insofar as he finds sexual pursuit to be undesirable in club spaces, but at the same time, he emphasises how girls who were in sexual pursuit were undesirable to him. This was a tendency among the young women and men, who spoke more often about their perceptions of appropriate behaviour for women than for men. Signalling sexual interest on the dance floor could limit women’s status in the eyes of some men and women. This analysis suggests that sexual pursuits require that young adults successfully navigate gendered expectations that differ for young women and men in the nightlife, and specifically on the dance floor. This navigation was an affective practice in which they sensed the boundaries between themselves and others, but also tried to map out what was expected of them in a specific situation as they tried to act on their sexual interest. In this process, these young adults seemed to balance their behaviour through reading bodily signs in ­combination with the gendered norms embedded in the material surroundings, and their narratives thus present sexual pursuits as discursive-material

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entanglements. This was not only the case on the dance floor, but also in relation to “the drink.” 7

Sexual Pursuit and Drinks

Multiple young adults in the study spoke at length about how different types of alcohol were connected to different moods and places and how different drinks gave off different signals. Choosing a drink was not simply a matter of what one felt like drinking, but also how one wanted to be perceived by others in a certain context, for example to appear wealthy, feminine, or “one of the boys”. Buying and receiving drinks was also often described as means to express sexual interest and pursue others. There was a widespread consensus that drinks were mainly offered by men to women, and only men in the study described how they bought drinks and reserved a table to attract women and impress other men. It could, however, be difficult to sense when it was appropriate for a woman to accept a drink, as explained by young women and men alike. Andrea explains: From my perspective, I don’t think it is just to pick someone up that you offer a drink. But I don’t think all guys feel like that. […] I usually start out by trying to read that person, what is his actual purpose? Have I sent some signals that could seem wrong? Andrea articulates how the offer of a drink can be infused with sexual intentions, and she finds it necessary to try to “read” if this is the case. She tries to control the “signals” she sends, in order not to breach the norms of appropriate behaviour for her, as a woman accepting a drink may be a risky practice. In her narrative, this practice is material-discursive, insofar as she reads the cultural connotations of the drink, but these are entangled with the materiality of the drink, the setting and the shifting boundaries between herself and her surroundings. The riskiness of this practice may lie in how the drink constitutes an extension of her bodily signals that can work to challenge and/or dissolve boundaries between her own body and others. Similarly, Freja explains: If the guy starts out saying: “I will give you a drink,” then okay, fine, but then you get the drink, and then you are also sort of required to stand and talk to him. It is different if you stand there talking, and then he offers a drink. Then maybe the conversation is just going really well, and if you hit it off, it is like “cool” he offers me a drink.

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Freja indicates that the drink is infused with sexual intentions and accepting it can determine what appropriate behaviour is for her: it can offer possibilities for a sexual pursuit, but it may also make her feel obligated to show interest. Freja describes how “a drink” should be offered and accepted only after one feels a connection is established in order for her to avoid being caught in an unwanted situation, because of how the drink may lead to expectations of her behaviour. The young men in the study differed in their opinion on how they felt women should behave when offered a drink. Some narrated how drinks would, and should, lead to sex, but others felt that they did not have to lead anywhere. For example, Imad says: A lot of girls they fall for – or not fall for it, but I think it is their way of being, they can go out and drink for free. But then they end up in our beds afterwards, but I think they know that, right. Imad positions himself as an active pursuer, as he tries to get girls to “fall for it,” yet at the same time, he acknowledges that they may be aware of how they will end up going home with a man who buys them drinks. The drink is central to his pursuit, yet at the same time, he seems to indicate that these women may be in pursuit themselves, regardless of his intentions. This contrasted with other young men, who would offer drinks without expecting anything, or simply abstained from offering drinks for various reasons (for example, because it was too “expensive,” too “macho,” etc.). Alf says: Girls; it is just a trap when you go out. They just want drinks, they want your money and then they leave. It is a trap. If I could do that, then I would. It is not worse than that. The guys are kind of drunk, and they think: “oh, I can pick her up, she just needs a drink,” but no you can’t, not at all. In contrast to other young men who felt that the drink ensured success in sexual pursuit, Alf describes the drink as “a trap”: intoxicated men spend money without being any closer to persuading a woman to have sex with them, because when drunk they feel that they could; the influence of alcohol is central. The drink seems to involve a transaction, not only of the drink itself, but also of bodily signs and desires that are intra-acting with the physical presence of the drink. The drink thus becomes infused with gendered and sexual intentions, suggesting a transactional logic to sexual pursuits. Alf ascribes this behaviour solely to girls in the nightlife, but he does not mind it too much, as he says that he would do the same if he could.

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Many young women and men felt more strongly about women who were only interested in free drinks, and described them as “gold diggers,” “users” or “cheap girls” if they decided to have sex with the man who bought the drink. This was regardless of whether these young women decided to have sex with the man who bought them a drink or not. Ask says: Those are bottle-whores. Some of them, you can easily take home with you, others, they are just like, they get a few drinks and then they are gone again. Ask uses a derogatory term (“bottle-whores”) to describe women who seek out free drinks when going out. These girls are described as equally problematic, regardless of whether it is possible to take them home or not. It seems that in his experience, women who are actively seeking out drinks are considered, by default, problematic because they do not live up to the sexual connotations of the drink, nor of the gendered order in the nightlife. However, some of the young women n ­ avigated this paradox by rejecting conventional understandings of sexual pursuit. Michelle: There are also times, when you think “fuck you” and it is quite funny sometimes, because how many can you actually “score” in one night? We have made that bet, because when you are a girl you frequently get a drink offered. So sometimes we make a bet on who gets the most drinks. I: To get a drink offered, is that to “score”? M: Yes. It is when you get a drink offered, or the like. We agree on it from home and see who “scores” the most. Unlike many others, Michelle does not always try to live up to gendered norms of appropriate behaviour in relation to drinks, and she reworks the meaning of how gender and drinks intra-act in the nightlife. In certain situations, she decides to reject expectations by making the drink the object of her pursuit. She is actively engaged in a sexual pursuit, but the desired object is not men: it is their offer of a drink, and this is seemingly possible precisely because it is entangled with sexual intentions and the ordering of gender. 8 Findings In this chapter, I have analysed young adults’ narratives about sexual pursuit in the nightlife in relation to specific entanglements, namely the dance floor,

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bodily signs and drinks. I have argued that the dance floor provides a place within the nightlife where young adults express sexual interests more overtly, in ways that can be felt as natural, but at the same time, this holds gendered implications as heterosexual desires are enacted as naturally unfolding through certain intra-actions between bodies, the dance floor and the nightlife. However, what some young adults narrate as “natural” relies heavily on their ability to sense, and make sense of, an atmosphere and bodily signs, and this does not appear to be equally accessible to all young adults, nor in all situations. Thus, many struggle with how to negotiate the boundaries between themselves and others in sexual pursuit, because they narrate their attempts to read and give off bodily signs and desires as troublesome. The negotiation of boundaries is narrated as entangled with gendered norms, and sexual pursuit may constitute a risky practice insofar as the inability to control bodily signs may enable young adults to enact their desires in ways that violate the boundaries of others. This is seen in Per’s aggressive form of masculine behaviour that seems to be mirrored in Karoline’s narrative of how her sexual pursuit becomes constrained on the dance floor because of this type of behaviour. In extending this analysis, I argue that alcohol constitutes a material enactment of sexual pursuit that intra-acts with the ordering of gender in the nightlife through how drinks affect bodily signs. Accepting or offering a drink is not solely about being in pursuit of others sexually, but about the ability to navigate how the drink may intra-act with gendered norms and expectations. This was particularly directed at young women’s behaviour, as young women’s mere presence in proximity to a drink can be experienced as problematic, regardless of the outcome of the encounter. Within a social constructionist framework, it is interesting that these young adults not only narrate their attempts to enact gendered norms successfully in the nightlife, but also contest these through their accounts of how they might behave contrary to what they sense is expected of them. Butler argues that people may desire certain sexual encounters precisely because they are forbidden. This is a paradox, in which norms may play a significant role in the doing of sexuality: but we cannot always predict or foresee their role, and they may work to undo or reproduce these very norms (Butler 2004). This is important to this study, because the majority of young adults who were interviewed referred to the norms and expectations embedded in the nightlife when in sexual pursuit. Paradoxically, these norms not only constrain their sexual desires, but may enable them to act in certain ways in their sexual pursuits that stand in opposition to the intended effect of the social regulation, for example, when “the drink” becomes the object of pursuit, or when dancing is used to help others in their sexual pursuit. At the same time as they may work on and against

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gendered norms in sexual pursuit, it seems that the field of possibilities for action and for making meaning of their experiences is entangled with the materiality of the nightlife. New materialism offers us an understanding of how the material and the discursive can be combined: it enables us to grasp the complexities of how bodily signs may be negotiated, not only by young adults themselves. Their narratives therefore offer insights into how the boundaries between themselves and others are negotiated as the material enacts agency upon them and their embodied presence in the nightlife. The nightlife is described by the participants as a space in which sensing is central, since the ordering of gender is important to pursue others sexually, or to refuse such pursuit. With Foucault, I argue that sensing is bound up in the nightlife as a heterotopic space, because sexual pursuit is described whilst referring to a clear ordering of gender, and specific practices, such as dancing and offering or receiving a drink, are infused with sexual intentions that are read according to gendered norms. These young adults may narrate their enactment of sexual pursuit in different ways depending on the situation, but when in the nightlife, these enactments are made possible and restricted by the setting that constitutes a heterotopic space in which sexual pursuit is ordered meticulously around gender through specific entanglements, in this case alcohol and the dance floor. The nightlife may then constitute a heterotopic space because of its ordering of gender: but it is transmitted and negotiated through embodied experiences with materiality and gender. It is now relevant to ask what my analysis implies about gender and love. It is my aim to contribute to an understanding of how sexual pursuits emerge among young adults in relation to gendered norms that are enacted in and by specific material arrangements within the mainstream nightlife. This analysis contributes by highlighting how material-discursive entanglements are vital to our understanding of how desire is enacted in complex ways. It is important not simply because it tells us something about the nightlife as a separate heterotopic space, but because it produces real effects that spill over into young adults’ experiences with sex and further intimate and romantic contact outside the nightlife. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the participants for taking the time to share their perspectives and personal experiences with my colleagues and me. I also wish to thank the entire research team that contributed to the project, especially Sidsel Schrøder, Lea Trier Krøll, Dennis Spang Vestergaard, and Maria Dich Herold

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who played a major role in recruiting and in-depth interviewing a total of 140 young alcohol users. I also want to thank my supervisor at the time, Vibeke Asmussen Frank, for her feedback and insights. The research project ran from 2015–2018 and was funded by Research Fund Denmark: Social Sciences. id number: DFF-4003–00035. References Abrahamson, Maria. 2003. “Alcohol och mötet mellan unga kvinnor och män.” Nordisk Alkohol- & Narkotikatidsskrift 20 (4): 227–239. Abrahamson, Maria. 2004. “Alcohol in Courtship Contexts: Focus-group Interviews with Young Swedish Women and Men.” Contemporary Drug Problems 31 (1): 3–29. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Anderson, Tammy L. 2009. “Better to Complicate, Rather than Homogenize, Urban Nightlife: A Response to Grazian.” Sociological Forum 24 (4): 918–925. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–831. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Boyd, Jade. 2010. “Producing Vancouver’s (Hetero)Normative Nightscape.” Gender, Place & Culture 17 (2): 169–189. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. Brown-Bowers, Amy; Maria Gurevich; Alexander T. Vasilovsky; Stephanie Cosma and Sarde Mattie. 2015. “Managed Not Missing: Young Women’s Discourses of Sexual Desire Within a Postfeminist Heterosexual Marketplace.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 39 (3): 320–336. Chatterton, Paul and Robert Hollands. 2002. “Theorising Urban Playscapes: Producing, Regulating and Consuming Youthful Nightlife City Spaces.” Urban Studies 39 (1): 95–116. Christensen, Hilda R. and Bettina Hauge. 2012. “Feminist Materialisms.” Kvinder, Køn og Forskning 1 (2): 3–8. Currier, Danielle M. 2013. “Strategic Ambiguity: Protecting Emphasized Femininity and Hegemonic Masculinity in the Hookup Culture.” Gender and Society 27 (5): 704–727. Dawson, Deborah A.; Bridget F. Grant; Frederik S. Stinson, and Patricia S. Chou, 2004. “Another look at heavy episodic drinking and alcohol use disorders among college and noncollege youth.” Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 65 (4): 477–488.

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Demant, Jakob and Jeanette Østergaard. 2007. “Partying as Everyday Life: Investigations of Teenagers’ Leisure Life.” Journal of Youth Studies 10 (5): 517–537. Duff, Cameron. 2008. “The Pleasure in Context.” International Journal of Drug Policy 19: 384–392. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Grazian, David. 2007. “The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activity.” Symbolic Interaction 30 (2): 221–243. Griffin, Christine; Isabelle Szmigin; Andrews Bengry-Howell; Chris Hackley, and Willm Mistral. 2013. “Inhabiting the Contradictions: Hypersexual Femininity and the Culture of Intoxication among Young Women in the UK.” Feminism and Psychology 23 (2): 184–206. Gurevich, Maria; Alexander T. Vasilovsky; Amy Brown-Bowers, and Stephanie Cosma. 2015. “Affective Conjunctions: Social Norms, Semiotic Circuits, and Fantasy.” Theory & Psychology 25 (4): 513–540. Harder, Sidsel K. and Jakob Demant. 2015. “Failing Masculinity at the Club: A Poststructural Alternative to Intoxication Feminism.” Substance Use and Misuse 50 (6): 759–767. Harder, Sidsel K. and Signe Ravn. 2014. “Along the lines of boys and girls: Masculinity at play in young women’s drug use.” In Masculinities in the Criminological Field: Control, Vulnerability and Risk-taking. Edited by Ingrid Lander, Signe Ravn and Nina Jon (2nd edition), 213–222. New York: Ashgate Publishing. Hayward, Keith, and Dick Hobbs. 2007. “Beyond the Binge in Booze Britain: Market-led Liminalization and the Spectacle of Binge Drinking.” The British Journal of Sociology 58 (3): 437–456. Herold, Maria Dich and Geoffrey Hunt. 2019. “Drinking Comfortably? Gender and Affect among Danish Pre-partiers.” International Journal of Drug Policy. https://doi .org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.07.017. Hobbs, Dick; Simon Winlow; Phillip Hadfield, and Stuart Lister. 2005. “Violent hypocrisy: Governance and the Night-time Economy.” European Journal of Criminology 2 (2): 161–183. Hollands, Robert and Paul Chatterton. 2003. “Producing Nightlife in the New Urban Entertainments Economy: Corporatization, Branding and Market Segmentation.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 (2): 361–385. Horvath, Miranda and Jennifer Brown. 2007. “Alcohol as Drug of Choice; Is Drug-assisted Rape a Misnomer?” Psychology, Crime & Law 13 (5): 417–429. Hunt, Geoffrey and Vibeke A. Frank. 2016. “Reflecting on Intoxication.” In The SAGE Handbook of Drug and Alcohol Studies: Social Science Approaches. Edited by Torsten Kolind, Betsy Thom and Geoffrey Hunt, 322–336. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Hutton, Fiona. 2016. Risky Pleasures? Club Cultures and Feminine Identities. New Zealand: Ashgate.

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Hutton, Fiona; Sarah Wright, and Emma Saunders. 2013. “Cultures of Intoxication: Young Women, Alcohol, and Harm Reduction.” Contemporary Drug Problems 40 (4): 451–480. Jensen, Mie B. 2019. Gender, Alcohol Intoxication and Young Adults: Young Danes’ Narratives on Flirting, Sexual Pursuit and Sex in the Context of Heavy Alcohol Use. (PhD thesis). Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University. Jensen, Mie B.; Maria D. Herold; Vibeke A. Frank, and Geoffrey Hunt. 2018. “Playing with Gender Borders: Flirting and Alcohol Consumption among Young Adults in Denmark.” Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. https://doi.org/10.1177/1455072518807794. Jensen, Mie B. and Geoffrey Hunt. 2019. “Young Women’s Narratives on Sex in the Context of Heavy Alcohol Use: Friendships, Gender Norms and the Sociality of Consent.” International Journal of Drug Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.07.021. Johnson, Jeffrey C. and Susan C. Weller. 2002. “Elicitation techniques for interviewing.” In Handbook of Interview Research: Context & Method. Edited by Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, 491–514. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Leigh, Barbara C. and Beatriz Aramburo. 1996. “The role of alcohol and gender in choices and judgments about hypothetical sexual encounters.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26 (1): 20–30. Lewis, Melissa A.; David C. Atkins, Jessica A. Blayney, David V. Dent and Debra L. Kaysen. 2013. “What is Hooking up? Examining Definitions of Hooking up in Relation to Behavior and Normative Perceptions.” Journal of Sex Research 50 (8): 757–766. Maclean, Sarah. 2016. “Alcohol and the Constitution of Friendship for Young Adults.” Sociology 50 (1): 93–108. Measham, Fiona and Kevin Brain. 2005. “‘Binge’ drinking, British Alcohol Policy and the New Culture of Intoxication.” Crime, Media, Culture 1 (3): 262–283. Measham, Fiona. 2002. “‘Doing Gender’ – ‘Doing Drugs’: Conceptualizing the Gendering of Drug Cultures.” Contemporary Drug Problems 29 (2): 335–373. Mohanty, Chandra T. 1986 . “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (Autumn): 61–88. Nicholls, Emily. 2017. “‘Dulling it Down a Bit’: Managing Visibility, Sexualities and Risk in the Night Time Economy in Newcastle, UK.” Gender, Place & Culture 24 (2): 260–273. Østergaard, Jeanette. 2007. “Mind the gender gap.” Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 24 (2): 127–148. Pedersen, Willy, Sébastien Tutenges, and Sveinung Sandberg. 2017. “The Pleasures of Drunken One-night Stands: Assemblage Theory and Narrative Environments.” International Journal of Drug Policy 49: 160–167. Peralta, Robert L. 2008. “Alcohol Allows You To Not Be Yourself. Toward a Structured Understanding of Alcohol Use and Gender Difference among Gay, Lesbian, and Heterosexual Youth.” Journal of Drug Issues 38 (2): 373–399.

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Roberts, Marion. 2015. “‘A Big Night Out’: Young People’s Drinking, Social Practice and Spatial Experience in the ‘Liminoid’ Zones of English Night-time Cities.” Urban Studies 52 (3): 571–588. Russell, Bernard. 1994. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Room, Robin. 1996. “Gender Roles and Interactions in Drinking and Drug Use.” Journal of Substance Abuse 8 (2): 227–239. Shaw, Robert. 2010. “Neoliberal Subjectivities and the Development of the Night-Time Economy in British Cities.” Geography Compass 4 (7): 893–903. Tan, Qian H. 2013. “Flirtatious geographies: Clubs as spaces for the performance of affective heterosexualities.” Gender, Place & Culture 20 (6): 718–736. Young, Amy M., Sean E. McCabe, and Carol J. Boyd. 2007. “Adolescents’ Sexual Inferences about Girls who Consume Alcohol.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 31: 229–240.

Part 4 Social Relata

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Chapter 10

Love in Different Climates: Love Care and Practices of Intimacy among Women in Hong Kong and Britain Stevi Jackson and Petula Sik Ying Ho Abstract This chapter draws on a comparative study of young adult women and their mothers in Hong Kong and Britain to explore meanings and practices of love in differing sociocultural contexts. It addresses both love in romantic/sexual or marital relationships and love between mothers and daughters, showing how the divergent life trajectories of Hong Kong and British mothers affected their relationships with and expectations of their daughters. The concept of “practices of intimacy” (Jamieson 2011) is employed to illuminate the variety of forms that expressions of attachment, care and affection can take, bounded by gendered, generational and wider socio-cultural expectations.

Keywords practices of intimacy – mother-daughter relationships – love – reflexivity – sexuality

1 Introduction “Love” is not monolithic; it is everywhere gendered, but not always in the same way. It is also common to distinguish a variety of forms of love: for example, romantic or passionate love is thought of as differing from love in long-term relationships, while love between parents and children is seen as distinct from that between sexual/romantic partners. In this chapter we focus on love and intimacy between mothers and their young adult daughters in two societies— Hong Kong and Britain—and also how mothers’ experiences of (heterosexual) love relationships influence the way they view, and seek to monitor, their daughters’ sexual/romantic lives. In discussing these issues we raise questions of agency under different forms of social constraint, taking account of the

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­ aterial conditions of life in our two societies1 and the local cultural specificim ties that shape the meaning and practice of love. The approach we adopt here draws on sociological constructionism, where agency, deriving from the human capacity for reflexivity, is understood as foundational to the very possibility of sociality. At the core of this broadly symbolic interactionist view of the social is a conceptualisation of the self as social, originating from the work of the pragmatist philosopher, George Herbert Mead (Mead 1934; Jackson 2010). This self comes into being, develops and is modified through interactions with others, by way of which we come to be and are able to view ourselves, reflexively, as both subject and object, through a dialogic interplay between self and other, self as “I” and self as “me” (see Crossley 2001; Jackson 2010). This reflexive capacity enables us to locate ourselves and act in relation to others. It is thus both socially (interactionally) created and the basis of sociality, which we understand as the social interaction and cooperation that makes social life possible. Because it is reflexive, selfhood involves active meaning-making, a self that is capable of independent reflection and action, and hence agency and resistance. This meaning-making does not occur in a social vacuum but is intersubjective and context-specific. Taking our cue from Gagnon and Simon (Gagnon 2002; Gagnon and Simon 2004; Simon 1996), meaning-making can be seen as occurring at multiple levels of the social, each interacting with the others. At the macro level are the cultural scenarios (or discourses) available in any given social context, for example in media, scientific representations or everyday common-sense understandings. In interaction with others such meanings can be reinforced, modified or challenged and new meanings can emerge. Finally, through the internal dialogue with the self each of us processes and makes sense of meanings deriving from the wider culture and our interpersonal relationships, which then feed back into interpersonal interaction. Love is generally experienced as a deeply personal, embodied and often intense emotion, but it is nonetheless socially shaped and mediated. As the anthropologist Michele Rosaldo argues: “Feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood” but are “structured by our forms of understanding” (1984, 143). These forms of understanding derive from the cultural scenarios (or discourses) available to us, but they are mediated and modified through everyday interactions with others and through the individual reflexive process of sensemaking. Love may be individually felt, but it is, above all else, a relational feeling directed towards a loved other or others. Love is also “done” as well as felt, from the outward expression of feeling to the acts of care we perform for those 1 Sik Ying is Hong Kong Chinese and Stevi is white British. We are of the same generation as the mothers in our sample.

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we love; it is thus performed and displayed to loved others, social audiences and researchers. The “doing” of love can be usefully thought of as “practices of intimacy”; “practices which cumulatively and in combination enable, create and sustain a sense of a close and special quality of a relationship between people” (Jamieson 2011, 1). This conceptualisation does not privilege any particular form of intimate or love relationship and therefore can encompass relations between lovers, friends and family members. It recognises, too, that intimacy can be sustained in hierarchical as well as egalitarian relationships and can be expressed in a variety of ways. Finally, because it can take account of such variability, it avoids ethnocentric assumptions about the characteristics of love and intimacy and can usefully be applied in crosscultural, comparative research such as the work we discuss in this chapter. 2

Methodological Complexities

Our data derive from an exploratory comparative study of the lives and relationships of two generations of women. We conducted life history interviews with young adult women and their mothers in Hong Kong and Britain (­England and Wales) and focus groups with young women.2 We interviewed 13 young women and 12 of their mothers in Britain and 14 young women and 12 of their mothers in Hong Kong. The focus groups, one in each location, comprised some of the young women from the interview sample and some recruited separately. Since we were aiming to compare two culturally and geographically distinct locations, we sought to match the samples as closely as possible. Making both crossgenerational and crossnational comparisons is a complex process and we therefore chose to keep both samples culturally homogenous, recruiting only from the dominant ethnic group in each location: white British and Cantonese-speaking Chinese respectively. The daughters in our samples were aged 20–26 and university-educated. By chance rather than deliberate selection, all the mothers were heterosexual, as were most of the daughters; there was one lesbian in the Hong Kong sample and one bisexual in the British sample (see Jackson, Ho and Na 2013; 2017). The data we have does not, of course, give us direct access to women’s love experiences, but only to the way they talk about those experiences in a research setting. Nonetheless, such talk does reveal something of how these women make sense of love and intimacy and can sometimes reveal an active 2 For a variety of reasons, it was not feasible to conduct focus groups with the mothers.

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process of sense-making through self-reflection. We have treated the mothers’ and daughters’ accounts as both “topic” and “resource” (Plummer 2001). As a resource they provide information about individuals’ lives, albeit limited by what they chose to tell us. Treating participants’ accounts as topic means considering how they talk about the issues at hand, listening for (and reading transcripts for) instances of reflexivity and sense-making as well as, more generally, how they construct their narratives of self and other. The capacity to tell such stories is itself evidence of past and present reflexive processing of life events, framed by the cultural resources narrators have to hand for interpreting their own and others’ experiences. Such stories, while necessarily reconstructions of the past from the standpoint of the present, are nonetheless about “real” events, rooted in the actuality of individual lives and the material circumstances that have shaped them (see Jackson 2010). In what follows, we begin from the ways in which women talked to us about love and sex, drawing attention to both material and cultural factors that help account for the differences we found between Hong Kong and the UK. We then discuss the mothers’ generation’s experiences of love and heterosexual relationships and how these experiences, along with the current circumstances of their lives, have affected their relationships with their daughters and the ways in which they have sought to influence daughters’ sexual and romantic conduct. Finally, drawing from more recent research, we consider how collective political resistance can affect practices of intimacy in private family life. 3

Talking about Love and Sex

In the course of talking to us about feelings and practices of intimacy, women did not always, indeed not often, talk explicitly about love. We would argue, however, that it is possible to feel and practise love (or what we might call love) without necessarily using the word. In crosscultural research involving different languages, even words that are directly translatable from one language to the other may have different resonances. This is certainly the case with the word “love.” In Chinese languages “love” (ai in Putonghua/Mandarin, oi in Cantonese) is a weighty word, used far more sparingly than in English. These linguistic issues, combined with cultural specificities in the meanings and understandings of love (see, for example, Pan 2016), may help explain why the word “love” was used much more freely by the British women, whether in relation to familial or sexual/romantic relationships. Not all the British women, however, used the word “love” in relation to either families or partners. As in other research on personal life, there was often “a curious absence of love” (Carter 2013), even when women were telling us

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about valued, close and meaningful relationships. It was sometimes cited in an impersonal sense, as in two young British women who distanced themselves from conventional views of couple relationships: “sex […] is just fun […]. I don’t think you need to have this massive hang-up about having to be in love with someone” (Lucy); “even if you love someone it doesn’t mean you’re going to stay together” (Rachel). In personal terms, love was explicitly mentioned more often in relation to love within families than in talking about current romantic/sexual attachments. It was, however, referenced in order to make a past unsatisfactory or destructive relationship intelligible. Here, in the case of three of the British mothers and two of the daughters, “being in love” provided a narrative device to explain the relationship. More unusually, one of the mothers, Barbara, gave a lengthy account of how love in her long-term relationship had changed over time, from being “thrilling” when she was young to the ease of being with “someone I’ve shared my life with.” These relationship stories shared a high level of self-reflexivity, especially concerning the women’s understanding of the self in relation to love. We received no such introspective accounts of love from Hong Kong women. It is not that family and relationships do not matter to them: the strength of family bonds in Chinese societies is well-documented and there is evidence of these bonds becoming more affectionate in recent years (Liu 2017; Zheng and Ho 2017). When Hong Kong women talked about how they valued family relationships, this was more in terms of practices than feeling. They spoke of what they did and would do for each other and the support they received from each other; feelings were expressed through acts of care or referenced in terms of avoiding hurt. Accounts of relationships with partners did sometimes include feelings, if not love, but were more often recounted in factual terms, as what had happened. While lacking the introspective self-reflection that was common among the British women, Hong Kong women displayed reflexivity primarily through the orientation of self to others. One of the ways in which we sought to prompt talk about attitudes to love and sex was through the use of vignettes: fictional scenarios featuring a problem or dilemma facing an imaginary protagonist. One of our vignettes ran as follows: Claire is a 22-year-old lesbian who has never come out to her mother. She decides the time is right to do so because she has fallen in love and wants to introduce her girlfriend to her mother. How do you think her mother would feel? We expected Hong Kong and British women to express different attitudes to the scenarios we presented, but there was also a marked divergence in their

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mode of response. When vignettes are, as in this case, framed open-endedly, the expectation is that they will prompt extended discussion of the scenario, but this did not happen with the Hong Kong mothers. Most of them expressed negative views, such as “I would want her to have a normal married life rather than an abnormal relationship” (Elsie), and did so in such a way that it foreclosed further discussion. The only exception was Ms Wong, whose daughter is a lesbian and who had thus faced the situation depicted in the vignette. Most made it clear that they did not want to consider the issue further. British mothers were more liberal. Susan, for example, said that a mother “should just be pleased that they’ve found a loving relationship.” They also offered much longer and considered responses, often referring to lesbian or gay friends and relatives and highlighting changes in attitudes to lgbtq+ people over their lifetime. Even Patricia, the only British mother who expressed very negative attitudes to lesbian sexuality, engaged in a lengthy deliberation of the issues, including her struggles with her faith: “If it was me and I’ve only got one child I would be utterly devastated um, but I would never abandon her because she’s my child, but I would far rather that it wasn’t the case. I know somebody who had two children, a boy and a girl […] it turned out that the daughter was a lesbian and of course she was devastated but it was her child you know and she still loved her […] . If you love somebody and you’re that way inclined it must be really awful if you’ve got people telling you what you’re doing is wrong and yet you see the church’s teaching that I’ve been brought up with says it is wrong, but I feel very puzzled about this one, because I think well you know, if God is all loving and understanding I’m only a human being, I can understand how they must feel and want to be with someone so why doesn’t God understand it?” While Patricia’s views were atypical among the British women, her way of talking about personal matters was very typical in its reflexive sense-making, the interplay between self and others and her weighing up the issues as she saw them. Moreover, like other British women, she could refer to knowledge of her own social circle (her friend’s daughter and a gay male cousin) in making sense of the vignette. Most of the Hong Kong mothers had no such knowledge or experience. The lives of lesbians in Hong Kong remain largely hidden from the majority of the population and few Hong Kong citizens claim to know any ­l gbtq+ people (Tang 2013; Suen 2017). Thus, not only would Hong Kong women, particularly the mothers, see departure from the heterosexual norm as extremely difficult to deal with and threatening to the material well-being of

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families, but they had little experience of known lgbtq+ people to draw on in responding to the scenario with which they were presented. The responses of the women we interviewed reflect their experience and the wider social and cultural conditions that shape their perspectives on sexual life, including what we have elsewhere identified as the pragmatism of Hong Kong women (Jackson, Ho and Na 2013). The contrast between the British women’s extensive discussions of lesbian relationships and the brief and opinionated responses of the Hong Kong mothers also reveal a greater openness about sexual issues among the British women. More than this, the way the older generation of Hong Kong women shut down further discussion, thus distancing themselves from something that could disrupt normative family life, may reflect the concern about “face” (mianzi) and family reputation, which are still of paramount importance in Hong Kong. 4

Love and Intimacy: The Mothers’ Life Trajectories

The life experiences that produced these contrasting views and impacted on the mothers’ relationships with the daughters, were shaped by the differing contexts in which they had grown up and entered into adult relationships. Given the colonial context of Hong Kong mothers’ upbringing and entry into adulthood, the poverty and harsh conditions of life in Hong Kong from the 1950s to the early 1970s, it is not surprising that they had strikingly different early sexual experiences from the British mothers. The latter benefitted from the welfare state and expanding educational and career opportunities, as well as exposure to feminism and changes in sexual mores. The two groups of women thus had very different life trajectories in terms of sexual/romantic relationships, affecting attitudes to their daughters’ love relationships. The Hong Kong mothers all married in their twenties. There was a strong expectation of marriage that would free their parents of responsibility for them. Often women of that generation in Hong Kong were not allowed to have boyfriends or indeed much freedom to do anything outside the family home; the older generation would be involved in matchmaking. Elsie, for example, told us: “When I was [my daughter’s] age my parents would not allow me to see guys.” Most of the Hong Kong women, however, did have relationships with their husbands well before marriage, often involving lengthy courtship, and met them through their daily lives in their communities, at work or through school or college. Marriage could, however, be a practical matter. For example, Ellen told us that her mother asked her to marry in order to be put on the waiting list for public housing. For some, the choice of husband seemed i­ nstrumental

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rather than romantic. Both Ms Au and Felicity were attracted to their future husbands because of the men’s ambition and the associated promise of future material success. While this motivation indicates a degree of pragmatism, it was tempered by more affective concerns, including a desire for companionship with a compatible partner. Felicity, for example, described her relationship with her husband in the early years of marriage as very close. Chastity prior to marriage was an accepted norm for this generation, but this did not mean that no pre-marital sex occurred. One of our focus group participants (Susie) told us that her mother had confessed to having had sex with her father prior to their marriage. The Hong Kong mothers themselves did not divulge any information about pre-marital sexual activity. The British mothers, however, were far more forthcoming about their pre-marital sexual activity, which was becoming fairly common by the late 1960s, though cohabitation was not widely accepted and single mothers were still stigmatised, especially if they were young and poor (Phoenix 1991). Two of the British mothers, Barbara and Janet, had never married. Barbara wanted love and a “permanent relationship” but “marriage didn’t come into it, it just seemed irrelevant somehow,” while Janet “couldn’t see the point of it.” Janet had cohabited briefly with her daughter’s father, but the relationship ended when her daughter was a small child. Barbara’s relationship with her partner of over 30 years began when she was pregnant by another man. Her partner took parental responsibility for that child as well as his own daughter, Laura, born a few years later. While the other ten British women had at some point been married, only two, Patricia and Michelle, had never had a sexual relationship with anyone other than their husband. Both had strong religious convictions and reported having been brought up by very strict parents. The other British women all had pre-marital (hetero)sexual experience, often with a series of partners, starting in their mid to late teens or early twenties, and had at some time cohabited with a partner. Karen gave birth to her daughter two years before marrying. She was happy cohabiting and had not wanted to marry, but did so in order to try to save the relationship, which lasted only another two years. For some, marriage was undertaken to please others: in Karen’s case, her partner; in Diane’s, her mother; and in Cherry’s, her father. The overall pattern of these British women’s early adult relationships, then, contrasts sharply with that of their Hong Kong contemporaries. When it comes to the quality of long-term relationships, however, there is less of a contrast. Instead we have a picture of varied relationships, some happier or more lasting than others, depending more on individual circumstances. The majority of formal marriages had remained intact. Eight of the Hong Kong women were married to their original husbands; two were divorced (one

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twice) and two were widowed. Four of the ten British marriages had ended in divorce. Relationships after marriage differed in the two locations. Three of the four Hong Kong women who were divorced or widowed (Mimi, Felicity and Ms Cheung) had boyfriends at the time of the interview, though none cohabited with her boyfriend. Whereas Hong Kong women’s later relationships took the form of dating or visiting arrangements, British women cohabited or remarried. All the UK women who had experienced divorce and separation had subsequent relationships. Frances and Cherry had each had two relationships since divorce, and Cherry’s second relationship resulted in marriage. Judith had remarried and Karen was cohabiting with a long-term partner. Thus, as with their entry into relationships, the British women’s sexual and romantic trajectories were more varied than those of the Hong Kong women. It was not only the differing experiences of relationships that shaped this generation of women’s attitudes and their relationships with their daughters, but also current economic and social circumstances. Hong Kong is now a rich society, but it is characterised by a huge gulf between rich and poor and minimal social welfare (see Goodstadt 2013). The welfare state in the UK may be under severe strain, but it still provides a more effective safety net than is available in Hong Kong’s naked capitalism. People in Hong Kong have had to be self-reliant, relying primarily on their families for support. Housing is a particular problem and most Hong Kong inhabitants live in tiny apartments. Both because of the lack of affordable alternatives and cultural expectations, the young Hong Kong women all still lived with their parents. British parents expect their children to leave home on attaining adulthood, even if some boomeranged back because of housing costs or for other reasons; only three British daughters lived with their mothers. This situation, as might be expected, had consequences for their relationships. 5

Practices of Intimacy between Mothers and Daughters

Most of the women, both British and Hong Kong, described their relationships with their mothers or daughters as “close,” but what “closeness” meant and how it was practised differed between the two locations, particularly in terms of disclosing and confiding on the one hand, and practical and companionate intimacy on the other. Disclosing and confiding were central to accounts of mother-daughter relationships among the British women, taken as signifying a “good,” “close” relationship. Rachel expressed a common view when she said: “we talk about like, literally like everything, there’s like nothing I wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing up with my mum.” “Everything” includes open ­discussion

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of sex and relationships. Samantha, having recounted how she told her mother about losing her virginity, goes on to say: “my mum was always really open […] my mum’s very, very good about that sort of stuff.” Among the British women, a lack of disclosure was taken as indicative of a problem in the relationship. For example, Zoe described a rather difficult relationship with her mother, in whom she often had not been able to confide. In discussing the lesbian vignette, the relatively late age of coming out was often interpreted in terms of the quality of the mother-daughter relationship: “If I was her mother, I’d be really upset that my daughter hadn’t felt she could come to me with something that affects her life so much” (Lucy). Such openness was simply not expected in Hong Kong. Despite the strength of family bonds in Hong Kong, personal relationships outside the family are rarely discussed within the home. In perhaps a rather extreme case, Ms Au said she did not want to know about her two daughters’ sexual or romantic relationships. More generally in Hong Kong families, the expression of strong feelings or controversial opinions is discouraged. The aim is to maintain harmony within families that remain hierarchical in terms of both gender and generation (see Ho, Jackson and Kong 2018). There was not a total absence of talk about sex and sexuality but, where it was mentioned, it was likely to be in the form of warnings and injunctions, particularly against daughters losing their virginity before marriage. When Hong Kong daughters gave us accounts of their mothers’ concerns about their virginity during our focus group discussion they demonstrated a degree of reflexivity. In particular, they mentioned caring for their mothers’ feelings and avoiding hurting them. They also, however, told their stories with humour, enabling them to distance themselves from their mothers’ obsession with virginity and express a degree of resistance, even when they were ultimately compliant. This is exemplified in Donna’s contribution: […] my mum […] keeps checking and she scares me, like erm, she does still say it’s very important to be a virgin until you get married and she says, oh you still look young because you’re still a virgin […] and you know before the hpv protection injection, our doctor says it’s better to get the injection when you’re still a virgin because it works better and my mum says, “oh do you want to do that?” “No,” because I don’t like injections, I don’t want like pain and she says “woow, why don’t you want the injection? Is it because you’re not a virgin anymore?” “Okay I’ll do it.” “Don’t waste money if you’re not a virgin anymore, don’t do it.” I say, “I’ll take the injection.”

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While there are obvious contrasts between the sexual liberalism of British mothers and the Hong Kong mothers’ assiduous policing of their daughters’ virginity, there are also common concerns. In both cases mothers can be seen as engaging in practices of care and protection towards daughters. Hong Kong mothers sought to protect daughters against events, such as unplanned pregnancy, that might jeopardise their daughters’ future prospects. British mothers commonly practised protection through enabling their daughters to engage in early teenage sexual experiences in the safety of their bedrooms and through ensuring they had access to contraception. Moreover, British mothers’ practices, and encouraging daughters to confide in them, can be seen as constituting benign surveillance (see Jackson and Ho, 2014). Given that disclosing and confiding were not central to mother-daughter relationships in Hong Kong, these women adopted other practices of intimacy. Companionship was one of the most important means by which closeness between Hong Kong mothers and daughters was expressed. Since they lived together, they routinely spent time in each other’s company, but it is time set aside for mothers that counts: “she [my mother] relies on me and so we just hang together and watch movies […] at home and then have pizza” (Susie). Shopping together is common as a sign of closeness. Mimi and Ellen seek advice from their daughters in order to look stylish and modern; Mimi and her daughters also go to Karaoke together. A daughter who takes her mother out to lunch, or ― even better ― on trips abroad, is particularly admired. Such activities constitute public displays of filial propriety (xiao) and closeness. By displaying xiao, daughters also give mianzi (face) to their mothers (see Zhang 2016). Companionship was expected to continue after daughters marry; it is a common expectation in Hong Kong to spend time with parents and especially in-laws at weekends, as well as during major festivals (Koo and Wong 2009). As Jamieson (2011) has observed, practical support is crucial to the maintenance of familial and other intimate relationships and is, of course, a central part of parental responsibility. Mothers in both locations supported their daughters through education and worried about their futures in these uncertain times, but not in the same way. Hong Kong mothers had pushed their daughters to succeed throughout their childhoods and invested heavily their education and extra-curricular activities, hoping they could gain high-paying, high-status careers. British mothers were less concerned about daughters’ material success; “so long as she’s happy” was a frequently uttered phrase. The Hong Kong mothers’ concern with economic security is understandable given social conditions in Hong Kong, but they also wanted their daughters to have

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opportunities they themselves had lacked. As Maria said, “It was fulfilling enough just to see my children getting what I couldn’t have.” Among Chinese families, as Elizabeth Croll (2006) notes, parents spend resources on their children, not just “as a sign of devotion, but also as the strategic nurturing of long-term gratitude and indebtedness to parents” (2006, 479). This indebtedness is repaid in Hong Kong through the “monthly contribution,” the regular financial payment that adult children are expected, and expect, to make to their parents’ household, whether or not they live with them and as soon as they are able (Koo and Wong 2009). Almost all the young Hong Kong women we talked to were making substantial monthly contributions. This may be seen as repaying parents’ investment in them, but it also has a symbolic meaning as a declaration of care and a demonstration of the strength of family bonds. Hong Kong daughters were also planning for their parents’ old age—a necessity given the lack of welfare and economic uncertainty—and often expressed concern for their parents’ futures. The British daughters, on the other hand, did not expect to help their parents out financially. They had given little thought to parents’ old age beyond “finding them the best possible care home” (Bryony) and certainly did not expect to provide care themselves. British daughters talked more about emotional closeness to their mothers, but were far less concerned about their mothers’ futures and offered little practical care or support. While Hong Kong families may be hierarchical and avoid disclosure of anything that might upset the imposed harmony, mothers and daughters demonstrate love and care through alternative practices of intimacy. 6 Postscript: Politics and Intimacy Our mother-daughter interviews pre-dated the Umbrella Movement, and would doubtless have produced different Hong Kong stories had they been conducted afterwards. This movement, part of the wider campaign for democracy in Hong Kong, involved a 79-day mass occupation of three central areas of the city in the autumn of 2014. It not only disrupted daily life in Hong Kong but also made evident deep political rifts in Hong Kong society, and, importantly, within families. Our more recent research with both men and women from different backgrounds and of differing political opinions revealed how the struggle for democracy and against the authoritarian state broke open the silences within families that maintained “hierarchical harmony,” but also led to new ways of demonstrating love and care despite political disagreements (see Ho, Jackson & Kong 2018).

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While there were instances of political solidarity within families, most activists were at odds with their families. For example, Gin encountered her policeman brother across the barricades in the early days of the occupation. Caught between her political convictions and her emotional ties to her brother, she displayed a delicate relational reflexivity in standing up for her opinions while showing her care for her brother, his wife and the baby they were expecting. I told him he did not need to be afraid. His sister is not doing bad things; she is just fighting for things for you and your children […] . I asked him to believe in Hong Kong people. Hong Kong people fight for their next generation including his children […] . Peggy’s husband disagreed with her and disapproved of her participation in the occupation: “I nearly wanted to initiate a divorce. I told my husband: ‘I would never have married you if I’d known your political stance.’ I was actually very emotional.” Yet she later said: “I thanked him for taking care of the family. I always had sick leave and did not go to work [during the occupation]. We have a mortgage and he took care of all the financial burden so that I could be free to go [to the occupation] anytime.” Like Peggy and Gin, most of our activist participants sought to restore familial harmony while challenging the hierarchy and silences that had previously sustained it. The consequences of the Umbrella Movement and its associated struggles are still unfolding. In August 2017, sixteen young activists were given prison sentences for anti-government protests, including Willis Ho, jailed for 13 months for her leading role in opposing a land development scheme in the North-East New territories (see Ho 2017).3 In response to this sentence, Willis Ho’s mother posted a tribute to her daughter on Facebook, including the following: “I can only send my support in silence. When you see the sun rise, the sun set and the stars at night, I am with you, thinking about you and giving you strength. When you are back, you will be stronger with a lot more experience. I want you to know that I am so proud of you and you have done nothing wrong.”

3 Hong Kong has since witnessed more mass protests, violent confrontations between demonstrators and the police, and the introduction of the National Security Law. Many activists now face long prison sentences.

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While she refers to her “dearest daughter,” nowhere in this post does she use the word “love.” Yet it is a powerful and moving expression of maternal love. In thinking about love and care across cultures, we need to be alert to cultural and linguistic differences and how (what we might call) love, care, and affection can be reflexively understood, practised, expressed and displayed in varied ways. References Carter, Julia. 2013. “The Curious Absence of Love Stories in Women’s Talk.” The Sociological Review 61 (4): 728–744. Croll, Elizabeth. 2006. “The Intergenerational Contract in the Changing Asian Family.” Oxford Development Studies 34 (4): 473–491. Crossley, Nick. 2001. The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire. London: SAGE. Gagnon, John. 2004. An Interpretation of Desire. University of Chicago Press. Gagnon, John and William Simon. 2001. Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality, 2nd edition. Chicago: Aldine. Goodstadt, Leo F. 2013. Poverty in the Midst of Affluence: How Hong Kong Mismanaged Its Prosperity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Ho, Petula Sik Ying. 2017. “On the Frontline: Three years after the Umbrella Movement.” Discover Society 49. https://discoversociety.org/2017/10/04/on-the-frontline-threeyears-after-the-umbrella-movement (Accessed 8 June 2020). Ho, Petula Sik Ying, Stevi Jackson and Sui-Ting Kong. 2018. “Speaking against Silence: Finding a Voice in Hong Kong Chinese Families through the Umbrella Movement.” Sociology 52 (5): 966–982, doi: 10.1177/0038038517726644. Jackson, Stevi. 2010. “Self, Time and Narrative: Re-thinking the Contribution of G.H. Mead.” Life Writing 7 (2): 123–136. Jackson, Stevi, Petula Sik Ying Ho and Jin Nye Na. 2013. “Reshaping Tradition? Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Tradition and Modernity in Hong Kong and British families.” The Sociological Review 61 (4): 667–688. Jackson, Stevi and Petula Sik Ying Ho. 2014. “Mothers, Daughters and Sex: The Negotiation of Young Women’s Sexuality in Hong Kong and Britain.” Families, Relationships and Societies 3 (3): 387–405. Jackson, Stevi, Petula Sik Ying Ho, and Jin Nye Na. 2017. “A Tale of Two Societies: The Doing of Qualitative Comparative Research in Hong Kong and Britain.” Methodological Innovations 10 (2): 1–20. doi: 10.1177/2059799117703117. Jamieson, Lynn. 2011. “Intimacy as a Concept: Explaining Social Change in the Context of Globalisation or Another Form of Ethnocentrism?” Sociological Research Online 16 (4): http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/15.html (Accessed 8 June 2020).

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Koo, Anita C. and Thomas W.P. Wong. 2009. “Family in Flux: Benchmarking Family Changes in Hong Kong Society.” Social Transformations in Chinese Society 4: 17–56. Liu, Jieyu. 2017. “Intimacy and Intergenerational Relations in Rural China.” Sociology 51 (5): 1034–1049. Mead, George Herbert. 1924. Mind Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pan, Lynn. 2016. When True Love Came to China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Plummer, Ken. 2001. Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to Critical Humanism. London: SAGE. Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1984. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion, edited by Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine, 137–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, William. 1996. Postmodern Sexualities. New York: Routledge. Suen Yiu Tung. 2017. “Challenging the ‘Majority Support’ Argument on Not Introducing Anti-Discrimination Legislation on the Ground of Sexual Orientation in Hong Kong.” Hong Kong Law Journal 47 (2): 1–24. Tang, Denise Tse-Shang. 2013. Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Zhang, Yi. 2016. “Practising and Displaying Xiao: Young Mothers’ Negotiations of Obligations to Elders.” The Journal of Chinese Sociology 3; 27. doi 10.1186/s40711-016-0047-9. Zheng, Jing and Petula Sik Ying Ho. 2017. “Contextualising Transformed Intergenerational Relationships in China: Using Adult Daughters’ Mate Selection as an Example.” Families, Relationships and Societies 6 (3): 447–62.

Chapter 11

New Arrangements of Embodiment, Materiality, Love and Gender in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party Mustafa K. Topal Abstract This chapter explores how gender and love are constituted in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (pkk) and the extent to which the effect of material agency can be identified in relation to the constitution of gender and love. It analyses data, based on my observation of and interviews with pkk members and the party’s written material. Drawing on theoretical insights and concepts from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Karen Barad, the chapter argues that constructionist insights advance understandings of how the pkk’s discourse on gender and love is naturalised through an all-encompassing disciplining of bodies in iterative acts. However, these insights need supplement from new materialism and its encouragement to explore the effects of non-human agents.

Keywords pkk – Abdullah Öcalan – women warriors – Kurds – militant movement – guerrilla war – Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Karen Barad – new materialism

1 Introduction This chapter analyses how gender and love are constituted1 in the Kurdish militant movement pkk (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan), also known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. I will do this by presenting a discussion of constructionist and new materialist theories, arguing that both approaches offer analytical insights into subject formation processes. An exclusive reliance on either 1 The word constitute is used here instead of construct in order to emphasise the materiality of causation. The concept of construction has its origins in the notion that everyday experiences acquire meaning in discourse. However, my data is not only discursive or textual, and I want to give weight to my own observations of the effects of materiality.

© Mustafa K. Topal, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004441460_013

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a­ pproach could not achieve the same results and would lead to a simplification of complex data. Gender and love are two phenomena that affect identity in a prominent way, as constructionism, especially through discourse and power analysis, has pointed out. New materialism, however, insists that the material can affect the constitution of gender and love as well, and should be taken seriously in any research on these phenomena. Bearing in mind the relative values of these two approaches, I will ask how gender and love are constituted in the pkk, and to what extent the effect of material agency in relation to the constitution of gender and love can be identified? Answers to these questions will follow from a set of empirical data collected during my interviews with fully-fledged members of the pkk (known as cadres), the movement’s written material and my own observations and field research conducted in the mountainous terrain where the pkk’s camps are located. Reflection on these issues affords a broader and more in-depth understanding of the capacity to act in militant and national conflicts as it affects the phenomena of gender and love. In exploring the constructionist approach, I draw on the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to identify how gender and love are constituted ­socio-culturally in the pkk. However, I will also highlight the limitations of their single-minded focus on discourse. Therefore, I contend that their approach can fruitfully be augmented with Karen Barad’s new materialist view of material agency. Accordingly, my approach in this chapter will be, first, to give an introduction to relevant concepts and terms from Foucault, Butler and Barad. This will be followed by a short introduction to the pkk and the movement’s socialisation practices for new members. This will set a framework for my analysis of the movement’s view of gender and love, where I will answer my own questions regarding the constitution of new concepts of gender and love, as well as the effect of material agency in this regard. 2

Combining Constructionism and New Materialism

Foucault made crucial contributions to research in the fields of gender and sexuality with his book The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1978). In this work, he identifies the correlation between power, knowledge, sexuality and identity. He documents how the discursive regulation of “normal” and “deviant” sexuality happens due to the efforts of the regime in power to control life processes and demographics. Gender, in Foucault’s view, is constructed by discourse and institutionalised by regimes in power, depending on the socio-historical context the subject finds itself in. Foucault goes on to argue

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that we have submitted to a modern gender regime. This regime rules by, for example, gathering knowledge about its citizens’ sexuality and identity; through educational measures, medical practices and family structures, which it controls. These measures secure the regulation of reproduction and, ultimately, the survival of the culture in question (1978, 104–105). Cultural discourses position the subject according to an overarching organised law, thus bestowing on the subject its identity, including gender (1978, 155). This makes sexuality a factor of much less biological importance than hitherto assumed. Foucault also argues that there is no innate essence or free will regarding gender and sexuality within the subject. The subject is a product of the social structure they live in and a historical construct of their era. We cannot become subjects “around” or “before” discourse (1978, 155). Foucault’s concept of discourse covers not only linguistic phenomena, but also norms of power and culture. Foucault’s concept of power is crucial to his work. He works with the form of power that lies in social structures and norms. He believes that power does not exist as absolute power, but only as exercised power. For him, power is an omnipresent phenomenon and is not, in its visible form, something that individuals can fully possess or be fully aware of. One of the most important forms of power described by Foucault, and one that is useful for this chapter, is “disciplinary power” (1978, 149). This form of power, among other things, influences the way individuality is created through culture and conformity in society; it draws the guidelines for the “normal” and the “abnormal” in relation to, for example, the formation of gender and love (1979, 83). Like Foucault, the American philosopher Judith Butler focuses on the creation of the subject through discursive practices. Butler’s relevance for my purposes lies in her use of the term “subversion,” referring to upheaval in culture and the ability to create, among other things, a breaking of norms (1990, 31–32). Her theory of performativity explains, using the terms “agency” and “subversion,” how changes in identity are possible. According to Butler, performativity is a quoted and repeated constitutive practice, not an isolated course of action. Performativity will always be a repetition of a norm or a set of norms, and it is through this repetition that performativity has its effect. Performativity defines the process by which gender is formed as emerging through discourse (1993, 12). This means the repetitive actions of speaking and interpellation constitute gender, even though the individual may believe that it is based on a substantial quality such as their inner nature (1990, 25). Gender, in other words, is viewed by Butler as something one does, not as something one is. She therefore claims that there is no such thing as congenital femininity or masculinity (1990, 33). Furthermore, Butler claims, drawing inspiration from Foucault, that

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both socio-cultural gender and biological sex are produced through discourse and constituted through performativity. In extension of this, Butler declares herself in agreement with Foucault that there is no such thing as prediscursive gender (1990, 25). A point common to Foucault and Butler is that one effect of culture’s repetitive actions is that procedurally constructed gender presents itself as essential and given. Foucault (1981, 69) speaks of naturalisation, but Butler phrases it as follows: Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. (1990, 33) Butler does not explain whence the incentive to subversion emerges or how materiality affects the formation of gender and love, but she does offer a shift from the cultural norm that controls the body’s materialisation to a procedural interaction between discourse and bodily materiality in the production of gender and gender differences. Finally, Butler argues that materiality must be understood procedurally (1993, 8–9), while noting the simultaneity and correlation between materiality and discourse. This formulation of materiality and its correlation with discourse is considered problematic by the American physicist Karen Barad. Barad’s new materialist objection is that the formulation rests on an analytical prioritisation of the discursive, in such a way that the agency of materiality is not recognised (2003, 821–23). New materialists, including Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Vicky Kirby, share constructionism’s critique of biologically deterministic views of gender. Yet, they insist on the prediscursive facticity of the body and of materiality, and argue that the material must be analysed as a constitutive force on an equal footing with the discursive. In this respect, they also critique constructionism and its way of considering language as crucial to our constructions of reality, to the point that the body and other material agencies become invisible (Barad 2003, 811). Barad’s theory of “agential realism” guides my analysis to include thoughts on the effects of materiality. Barad’s perspective on gender is based on her synthesis of Niels Bohr’s quantum physics, Foucault’s ideas about discourse and Butler’s theory of performativity (2007, 63). Barad’s agential realism breaches the binary oppositions between discourse/matter, mind/body, organism/technology, human/non-human and so on in order to understand what knowledge is and how the world materialises based on knowledge. Barad also states that she does not focus on the relationship between biological sex and ­socio-cultural

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gender. She also refuses to work with the dualism between epistemology and ontology, deriving from Descartes’ separation of soul and body. Instead, she argues that there is a need to reconceptualise, not only humans, but also animals, materials, nature, technology and so forth, since complex issues cannot be answered solely by approaches that put the human at the centre of analysis (1996, 75). The solution, according to Barad, is an interdisciplinary approach that makes space for the diversity of agency to be explored analytically without privileging human intentionality (1998, 112). Barad accepts Butler’s analysis of the way discourse is materialised through performativity, but she is not impressed by Butler’s reduction of materiality to discourse (1998, 91). Her critique of Butler and Foucault focuses not only on their failure to include materiality in their research, but also on their way of understanding material agency and its ability to create change, including normative changes in society (2003, 811). From this baseline, she asks the famous and interesting question of “how matter comes to matter,” creating, in agential realism, the opportunity for the human and social sciences to take account of materiality without abandoning the human subject (1998, 90). For Barad, it is important to create the conceptual opportunity to explore the effects that discourse and materiality have on each other in combination, not separate from one another. In explaining agential realism, Barad argues that “intra-action” takes place between human and non-human agents. Everything does something; everything has agency; everything is performative and has real effects. Barad does not deny Butler’s theories and consequently she argues that discourse’s performativity forms the bodily-material, while there is a simultaneous process whereby the bodily-material resists and acts in itself. Barad suggests an extension of Butler’s concept of performativity that includes an understanding of material agency as performative (1998, 106). Furthermore, Barad defines performativity using Niels Bohr’s concept of “phenomena.” Phenomena are here understood as both constituted and objectively existing in reality. They are constituted, since it is impossible to create an objective realisation without using discourses and scientific devices; at the same time, phenomena are also objectively existing realities, related to matter and subjectivity, so they can be replicated by other observers using a similar scientific approach (1996, 170– 171). The process between already fused and hybrid phenomena, where new phenomena are constituted, happens through what Barad calls “intra-­action” (1998, 106). While “interaction” requires active relationships between multiple entities or phenomena and already have established elements and each have their own built-in limits, “intra-action,” by contrast, characterises the mutual constitution of entangled agents where fused and hybrid p ­ henomena together

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constitute new phenomena (2007, 33). Intra-­action is thus action from within and concerns phenomena mutually causing change in one another. By insisting on intra-action, Barad makes the phenomenon a result of a local and situated agential cut, where the researcher/observer establishes a cut and limits a subject position over the object one wishes to analyse. Phenomena, in other words, can be observed in the present, and are both material and discursive. Phenomena are momentary and can be temporarily delimited from each other, but otherwise have an active and mutually transformative effect on each another (2007, 148). Another term Barad uses, which is relevant to my argument in this chapter, is “diffraction” (2007, 94). The term is taken from physics and describes how waves bend, spread and materialise in different forms, especially when passed through a small opening or over an edge. By using the term in gender research, Barad wishes, like Haraway (1997, 268), to achieve better analyses as an alternative to using the methodology of critical reflection to analyse change and dynamics. In this connection, Barad argues that science and research should be focused on transformative processes, where differentiation emerges from within. From this starting point, she proposes a multi-layered diffractive approach, arguing that a diffractive practice and diffractive readings will create better, more responsible, more ethically justifiable scientific production than traditional reflection on practices (2003, 803). Barad argues that the concept of diffraction opens the way to revitalise analytical perspectives and create alternative understandings. These are different from the traditional process of reflection, which implies separation between subject and object, and where the ­subject is placed centre stage as the one who acts (2007, 71). With the concept of diffraction as a dynamic tool, it is possible to create theories on the effects of materiality instead of focusing solely on bodily materialisation as an effect of discursive performativity (2007, 84–94). 3

Methodological Considerations

Like Foucault and Butler, I understand gender as a social category that is constituted through discourse and shaped in socio-cultural structures. I will therefore rely on Butler’s theory of performativity and its argument that repeated actions make change possible in gender identity. I take the view that young people’s resistance and their striving for freedom in and through the pkk can be viewed as a form of subversion involving cultural upheaval, and thereby also new ways of viewing, acting, thinking and feeling gender and love. I follow Barad in her idea that phenomena such as gender and love can be

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­ nderstood, not solely as culturally constituted, but also as an effect of physiu cal actors. On this basis, I will examine the interaction between cultural and material factors behind the gender identity of pkk members and their understanding of love. This chapter relies on empirical data that I collected for my PhD thesis, entitled Female Soldiers in the Kurdish National Movement pkk: A Gender-­ Reflective Perspective (submitted in April 2020 in Danish). The crucial part of the data consists of 10 days’ field studies conducted in Iraq in the company of cadres who are members of the pkk and qualitative interviews with members of the pkk. The 22 interviews were carried out in Europe and Iraq between September 2017 and April 2018. A secondary source of empirical data includes written works and periodicals published by the pkk. 4

Background to the pkk

In this section I will briefly introduce the pkk, the central elements in its recruitment practices and the creation of the party’s “new human.” This background information, including aspects of life in the training camps, assists in determining how physical experiences and material effects are involved in the establishment of gender and love among the movement’s members. The pkk was founded on 27 November 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan. Today, the party fights for recognition and improvement of Kurdish people’s rights in the region extending across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. In 1984, with most of Kurdistan being under Turkish supremacy, the pkk initiated a guerrilla war against the Turkish government. The first pkk manifesto aimed to create an independent Kurdish state as a solution to the violence and oppression that the Kurdish people had experienced through time. Since its inception, however, the pkk has moderated its ideology and has begun to be critical of the aim of founding a nation state. In the late 1990s, the pkk began to develop an alternative to the nation state and state socialism. The alternative system, developed (primarily) by Öcalan after he was imprisoned in Turkey (1999), is called Democratic Confederacy. The inspiration for Democratic Confederacy is drawn from the American theorist and anarchist, Murray Bookchin (1982), and his theories of social ecology and communalism. Central to recruitment in the pkk are the movement’s training camps. These are typically found on the higher ground of the Kurdish mountains, isolated from civil society and difficult for the Turkish military to locate. Life in these mountain territories may be understood, following Barad, as a web of relata including many inseparably interwoven human and non-human elements.

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In Kurdish society, the act whereby young people choose to abandon their existing way of life and leave home to go to the “free territory” is described as a “break.” The break here means moving to a higher level. This refers to the “holy” Kurdish mountains on higher ground where the young people have chosen to go in order to become guerrillas and participate in guerrilla warfare against the Turkish military. According to many cadres, it is a huge step for a young person to leave civil society and adjust to life in the free territory, especially as regards “integrating” oneself with the mountains and nature. Integration means becoming part of nature and being embraced by nature so that it can take care of you and protect you in a process that also demands that the cadres show respect for nature. The interviewees describe how they experience being drawn to and connected to the mountains in connection with their decision to join the struggle. This intra-action between human and non-human actors has an effect on the cadres’ survival instinct and their wish to discover themselves in the mountains. Life in the mountains and the processes they experience in their own bodies through cold, starvation, sorrow, strength and other experiences, together with a distance from civilisation and technological development, allow them to experience themselves as connected to nature and the animals. Intra-action with the unique Kurdish biosphere changes, reconstitutes and materialises itself through performative practices in which the cadres come to experience nature as part of themselves, not only as a context, but also as an agent and as living creatures with whom they have mutual relationships, including compromise, and who have an effect on them. In the training camps, participants are cut off from all contact with the outside world. An ordinary day in the free territory begins for all involved at 5:00 and ends at 20:00 hours, with breaks for eating and relaxation. Women and men eat in the same place, although often in gender-separated groups. Six to eight men or women sit in a circle on the ground and eat together communally, from the same large plate, with their hands, using flatbread as spoons. Eating with their hands is not because of limited resources, according to my designated male companion, Zagros, but because the cadres are always on foot, and it is impractical to carry too many things including tableware. Physically, they usually place themselves under a tree or at the foot of a cliff to avoid being seen from planes and drones. They sit close together, shoulder to shoulder. Most of the time they move together and there is a lot of physical touching. The fact that everything happens collectively, such as meals where they eat together and drink from the same teacup, is highlighted by Mordem, a male teacher who was also one of the party’s first cadres, as a practice that strengthens solidarity.

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Training in the pkk aims to create a “new human” and teach them to submit to the party’s norms. It usually takes place in a large cave in a cliff or underground. Conditions are basic: there are no facilities such as chairs and tables; the cadres simply sit on the ground. Where there are taller trees for cover, training takes place outside in the open air. Mordem says that the cadres prefer open-air-training because they appreciate natural teaching where they can feel the wind, smell the flowers and hear the sounds of animals. Mordem also emphasises that new participants must learn the importance of being a part of nature. New members need to know that training in the pkk is not about hiding behind high-walled institutions such as universities where knowledge is created, so they claim, in artificial laboratories and offices are cut off from the real world. In the mountains, the cadres feel the material effects of nature, and they have to learn to live with it in order to survive in the struggle, which, in the long term, makes possible a realisation of the ideals of the pkk. This intra-action between the cadres and nature, where physical experiences and material effects become noticeable, puts in place a special framework for the constitution of gender and love among the members. From the viewpoint of the pkk, the whole process is designed to maintain the “break” and train recruits for subversion. The aim is to create the party’s “new human” to replace the existing identity that cadres have from civil society (Öcalan 1983). In order to achieve this, party members are asked to choose a codename. These codenames must symbolise each individual’s new identity, and often refer to a Kurdish geographical feature such as a high mountain or a large river. The training process creates, to use Foucault’s terminology, a form of disciplinary power, created by the participants in the pkk through party ideology and culture. The aim of the training and the performative actions it includes is to bring bodily and other material practices into harmony with a new discourse, thereby also cleansing language, identity and gender of capitalist ideological connotations. 5

Separate Genders

New members of the pkk are separated into men and women as far as possible. Divided into the two normative genders, they live in separate camps and sleep separately, though most daily activities are conducted together. The distance between the men’s and women’s training camps is only a couple of hundred metres. According to pkk cadres, the purpose of separating men and women was to strengthen the women and make them completely free of male

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d­ ominance, even from their male comrades, so that women could find their own strength. The male teacher, Mordem, told me that separation was introduced in the wake of the Serhildans, an Intifada-like uprising in the 1990s, when a large number of people, often with traditional conceptions of gender, joined the organisation. My interviews revealed that even today cadres come with different conceptions of gender and therefore react differently to the physical separation of men and women. For example, the female cadre Zeri describes her first encounter with the camp and her surprise at the separation: The new participants’ camps were very different. We were on our way down [for her first meeting with the guerrillas in the mountains]. The camp was next to the water. Comrades were eating. Women were eating together, while men were eating together. I was surprised and asked about the separation. “Why are you separated?” It didn’t make sense. They said: “This is our culture.” I was at the university before […] It was different compared to where I came from. Here Zeri points out that the physical separation did not make sense to her, because she came from a university in a large city, where people are used to gender roles that are not patriarchal. However Mordem’s interpretation indicates that the separation is also put in place to guard against confrontations between the pkk’s ideology and the traditions and basic understandings the participants bring with them from civil society, in order to ensure the women’s chances of survival in the mountains, protect them from male lust and dominance and make them feel safe, so that they remain part of the struggle. The female cadres downplay these possibilities, however, and choose to define the separation by their own theory, called “separation theory.” This refers to women’s separation from men in thought and idea. The woman must return to her natural origins before she can become a free human. The female cadre Delal, whom I interviewed in Europe, states: Coming up to the mountains to live means breaking with society. In the mountains, one must break with men to become organised. Therefore, it is a double separation. To become free, this is a necessity. Your first war is with yourself. This is the war of return: a return to your origins. This is a long and endless struggle. Because it demands a mental revolution. Although all female cadres maintain that the mechanism is in place to secure liberation, it is evident that it also serves the purpose of preventing romantic relationships between cadres and protecting women from situations that

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could damage the party’s reputation among Kurds, thereby preventing women from enrolling in the party should they hear of any abuse or pregnancy. For this reason, participants are trained to act in specific ways according to their gender. Two female cadres, Zeri and Zin, describe this as follows: When we arrived, we were told about what we could and could not do, the morality and culture of the party. The party’s organisation. […] For example, a woman is not allowed to wander alone in the mountains. In life and in the party, these are precautions to make you careful. You are a woman. Therefore, you have to be careful about your behaviour, your attitude. You must not be misunderstood! […] These rules are perceived as irritating to begin with. […] Then you think: “Do they not trust me?” But everything makes sense in time. (Zeri) Especially in the youth section, you could see that the leadership were attentive towards women, and often intervened to protect them against men’s masculinity. (Zin) Even though the pkk aims to subvert patriarchal society, it paradoxically creates and strengthens the separation of women from men. Women are assigned to a certain position through disciplinary techniques, promoting party discourse (Foucault 1979), making them responsible for not conveying anything to the wider Kurdish society that could be misunderstood or could not be defended. However, this is also a mechanism based on mistrust, since Öcalan argues that women and men in Kurdish society have very little knowledge of each other, and hence lack the confidence to create a friendship without expecting a love relationship (Öcalan 1998, 233). A woman is assigned a huge responsibility, while a man is merely expected to “kill his masculinity,” meaning that he should stop being masculine and dominant. The interesting thing is, however, that both men and women feel that gender categorisation through separation strengthens both men and women. 6

Bodily Differences

From their many years of war experience, the first female cadres to join the pkk say that physical and mental separation from their male comrades has been necessary to help them find the right way to fight. The first women in combat tried to be as masculine as men. They tried to prove that they too were physically strong, so that many of them were incurred, for example, back inju-

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ries. A female leader called Dersim, one of the party’s first female members, confirms this, citing her own injured back in an interview with me. In time, she and many other cadres realised that men and women are different and that the difference in body structures can have a direct effect on their ability to perform physical tasks. It can also have an indirect effect, because the materiality of the body forced the pkk and the women themselves to think about their role in the movement in new ways. This new line of thought required women to have separate training camps in the mountains, isolated from civil society, giving them a place where they could see themselves reflected in their gender-­specific morphology, and actively choose relations with human and non-human agents in intra-action with the movement’s discursive view of women. The meaning of the separate training camps can therefore be explained through Butler’s work, where a new understanding of the body is generated through participating in new sets of iterative acts, but also based on Barad’s focus on the interaction and intra-action between discourse and materiality. As I have shown, the interviewees’ critical view of the dualism between man and nature articulates a desire in the pkk to abolish the divide between culture and nature and remove humanity from centre stage. Abolishing divisions also applies to the divide between femininity and masculinity. At the same time, though, the pkk cultivates a relatively heteronormative body difference in a form presented as gender nature. It is difficult to understand what is meant by “gender nature,” but the term contains at least two paradoxes. First, there is a wish to overhaul received and popular views of gender, but this overhaul rests on a confirmation of a gender binary that has long been debated in gender theory. Second, there is an attempt to erase, as far as its appearance and gender identity are concerned, the body that makes women into something special. Erasing specifically female bodily characteristics is done through desexualising the characteristics traditionally thought of as awakening lust in men. This can typically be seen in the female cadres’ clothes. In the mountains, both female and male guerrillas wear the same military clothing, modelled on traditional Kurdish male clothing (called gabardine). It is shapeless, very loose, and has the purpose of desexualising bodies, since this clothing allows male and female bodies to be presented without sexually connoted features. On the one hand, this desexualisation can be interpreted as the military clothing contributing to the cadres’ feeling of being deprived of their bodies as an identifiable focus point in their interactions with each other. This also affects the different ­appearances in musculature and strength, since the clothes, for example, prevent men from showing off their big strong muscles. On the other hand, it seems that the women are happy with their new clothes, since it gives them more opportunity to move as they please. For example, Cane, a female cadre, explains to

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me that the party is first and foremost a military enterprise that necessitates their wearing practical clothes both in the mountains and in the towns. Cadres wear their clothing all the time and only have one set of clothing. They sleep in their clothing so as to be prepared for possible attacks, since these can come at any time. None of the women wears makeup, including both the guerrilla women and those who serve in the cities. Dresses and skirts are not worn except on national holidays. On the whole, they try in their behaviour, both speech and movement, to avoid signalling anything feminine that could be misunderstood as sexual behaviour. Female cadres aim to be well-groomed without being vain. Women’s hair can be tied up in a way that may be associated with traditional femininity and serves as the only bodily marker of sexual difference. Cane, who serves in the civilian arena, says that she does not wear a dress or skirt and misses it: We are a people in pain. There is always oppression. Under these circumstances, you feel that you don’t want to do anything [in the form of makeup] individually. This in time becomes a culture [not being concerned with your appearance]. It is not because the leadership forbids it. When our lives are so politically important, I cannot waste two hours every day in front of the mirror with my hair. It becomes redundant. It is not only something we do in the mountains, our people do it too, it is cultural. There are mothers who always wear dark clothes. Cane explains that there is a lot of sorrow in their everyday life, with comrades falling in battle. The absence of people who were connected to oneself affects one’s incentive to spend time on bodily appearance, which could be viewed as self-centred and disrespectful. The female cadres explain that the lack of investment in their appearance does not affect their own sense of womanhood. It does not seem to be bound to the clothes they wear. They postulate that womanhood does not lie in the body’s look, clothing or behaviour, but in emotions and the natural being of the body. They feel that guerrilla clothing, together with the lack of traditional clothes and makeup, contribute to their new identities becoming visible to themselves. Butler’s concept of performativity helps us to deduce that the practice of clothing has the potential to change female cadres’ gender identification (Butler 1990, 134–141). 7

Natural and Binary Gender

In the pkk, women and men are viewed as belonging to different natural genders and gender is thought of as a binary system. Cadres claim that nature’s

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flora and fauna show the same gender binaries that are central to reproduction. They do not dismiss the existence of other forms of gender and sexuality, but these are viewed as deviant rather than natural. The pkk believes that gender is a social construct, but they also believe that women and men have their own “naturality.” The interviewees want to avoid calling this biological (so as not to be viewed as positivists): this, they say, lies within women’s and men’s character. Character here means “natural attributes” that define womanhood and manhood. It is hard to understand where gender’s naturality and natural attributes come from if they do not lie in biology, but, as far as a woman’s naturality is concerned, she is described as a creature identified with nature. This is clearly a patriarchal re-visioning of women, who are celebrated as having been first to till the soil, tame the wild animals and try to create a balance between humanity and nature, including the animals. Women are seen as part of the earth. This refers both to the fertile soil and to the land of the home country, where a nation is to be built. A symbolic similarity is drawn between the earth of the mother country and the female body. As part of the earth and part of nature, the woman becomes a symbol of peace and order, since female nature is not thought to include the yearning for dominance or ownership that is found in men. According to a female cadre, Gulesor, who also researches women’s history, women’s nature consists of five elements: The nature of a woman has five basic characteristics […]. One of them is energy. The energy of woman is very fluid. Another is emotional intelligence and conduct of life. Emotional intelligence is a result of her contact with nature. The other is the sixth sense that is strong in woman. And the other one is delivery, namely the capacity of childbearing. Productivity. We are not only evaluating the production as biological. At the same time, we think that it has a sociological dimension. The last one is menstruation that is the kindest connection of woman with nature. It is connected with periods. That makes the connection of woman with nature and life stronger. Even though the pkk claims not to be biologically deterministic, it argues that biological sex implies a certain socio-cultural gender identity. The intention seems to be that, by separating biological sex from socio-cultural gender, it is possible to find traits among women where they are stronger than men, and to develop these so that they can be on an equal footing with men in the struggle. Women are described as being nature’s energy, making women emotionally stronger than men. This is presented as a compensation for women’s lesser physical strength that women have experienced during their struggles in the mountains. Gender subversion therefore resides in constituting a new gender

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identity, where an attempt is made to create an equal balance between men’s and women’s strengths through naturalisation of different discursively assigned characteristics. This naturalisation requires firm discipline, ideological education and a progressive introduction to the movement’s mode of being. Here, Foucault points to the importance of applying a perspective to the centre of power, examining the power-holder’s intentions and studying the power in process, where it works and creates its effects (Foucault 1993, 336). In the same way, Butler’s theory of performativity can explain the effects of the genderseparated camps and the concomitant repetitive actions that are required from all cadres on their sense of identity. This helps us to understand how the pkk enables a new gender identity among women in the party: this appears to all cadres as substantial, stable and natural. New materialism, on the other hand, can explain how the physical surroundings of these practices has an effect on the way women’s gender, in particular, is constituted. Barad’s theory of agential realism also insists that everything present comes to be, and can be recognised, precisely through the relations that the present is part of: relations to other humans, to discourses, to non-human, organic and non-organic phenomena. In Barad’s perspective, one cannot ignore how the biological body, the animal and plant life in the mountains and the cadres’ specific material living conditions come into play and affect gender. For example, the female cadre Berivan says that before joining the pkk, in her old home, she always experienced pain before menstruation. This accorded with Kurdish views of menstruation as an illness and to be spoken of negatively. To her surprise, she learned that, in the mountains, in spite of or perhaps because of the more physically demanding living conditions, she no longer has pain during menstruation. On the contrary, she now feels glad when she is about to menstruate, since it reminds her of being a woman. With Barad’s theory in mind, it makes sense to view gender-assigned pain as intra-actionally constituted. Pain is both culturally and materially conditioned, and culture – traditional Kurdish culture as well as the pkk’s (micro)culture – as well as the material surroundings and the cadres’ activities all have an effect. From the cadres’ perspective, the effects of intra-action with human and non-human elements are not necessarily visible. They are stabilised and naturalised through repeated actions, and cadres do not convey any constructionist scepticism when they claim that women’s and men’s gender natures must not be ignored. They hold that it should, instead, be cultivated in a new way. Even though the pkk aims to redefine womanhood and manhood, the motivation to do this not from, for example, Beauvoir’s famous sentence, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (2010, 330). Instead, they seem to believe that

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“One is born woman, but one also becomes woman.” This is also evident in statements by the female cadres Zin and Berivan, among others: Either I am ashamed to be a woman, or I show it off. It is not to be a better gender, but it is better to be a woman than a man [Laughs]. At least we are emotionally stronger. (Zin) I now have three identities: I am young, I am a woman, I am a Kurd. But first and foremost I am a woman. My womanhood is more important than my youth and Kurdish background […]. Being a woman means being able to create life […]. For example, there is something called menstruation for women. The female inner world is different. Even spring affects women differently. Our feelings are different […] Women and men are born biologically different. This also affects their mentality. (Berivan) Zin’s and Berivan’s statements show how they draw on discourse of their own becoming as a personal experience that takes place within and on their own bodies and leads them to be women and be proud of it. Most women cadres say that they have first been able to feel that they are women in the mountains. The pkk’s emphasis on female liberation, together with the bodily experiences of female cadres, has made it possible for them to discover that they have a gender nature. Before this, they did not know what their bodies could and could not do. 8

Desexualised and Non-romantic Love

Cadres in the pkk may not marry for the rest of their lives, be anyone’s boyfriend or girlfriend, or declare romantic feelings towards each other. They are also to abstain from sex, even though the party metaphorically describes its cadres as “humans of infatuation” or “creators of love” (Öcalan 1992, 282). This unwritten rule is not evident anywhere in official party documents, but it is a culture that all cadres are familiar with and practise, according to Mordem, mentioned above. Öcalan does not want cadres in the party to view each other as sexual objects, where their bodies, sexuality and instincts are central elements. Based on what is called “free love,” cadres’ relationship to one another must not be sexual or physical. They must view each other first as desexualised and complete humans who are part of the free society they wish to build

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(­Öcalan 2012, 277). Their relationships must not signify romantic expectation of one another. Instead, relationships must be comradely (Öcalan 2012, 161). These can be practised inside the party environment, referred to by Öcalan as the “Party-school” (1992, 85–98). Love in modern society is viewed, according to Mordem and other cadres, as detached from moral norms and reduced to erotic love, where the capitalist lifestyle permeates men’s love life. This ideology explains why no love stories like Romeo and Juliet are produced in our time. Until 1980–81, there was no conscious prohibition on pkk cadres forming relationships. Some of the party’s first cadres got engaged after the founding of the party and were allowed to continue in their existing relationships. In time, however, it came to be seen as difficult for them to be revolutionaries at the same time as being in relationships and having to live up to the party’s expectations. Over time, says Mordem, it became obvious to party members that they had to create the social and geographical conditions for free companionship before pursuing romantic relationships. The central purpose of a cadre’s life is to contribute to the revolution and to liberate the territory they know as Kurdistan. At the same time, one can work at creating a free society. The male cadre Bozo describes this as follows: Love cannot only be lived through feelings. You must create the right circumstances. For us, there is no “after the revolution.” We have dedicated our lives to the revolution. If the revolution in Kurdistan ends, we will join a new revolution in another country. We have dedicated our lives to our belief. For us, there is no such thing as a worldly life with children and family. We have no after, but we have a continuation. Bozo believes that no free societies or free countries exist where women and men can live together without having ownership over each other, where they are liberated from social powers, and where they have a balanced relationship with nature. Therefore, it is not enough to put feelings and attraction into the centre stage and believe that these are enough to make one happy. Other cadres mention the challenges of having a family and children in the mountains while there is a war going on. This makes it difficult for the family to be together and for the parents to protect the children. Bozo and the female cadre Zelal explain: Right now, because there is no free society where we can live a free life, it is not possible for us [between men and women] to have a sexual and emotional relationship. Also, we are at war. How can we make room for family and children? We have a hard life with fights on many fronts. (Bozo)

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My two sisters got married. I do not understand how they could get married. Because we are faced with a reality of society that is shattered. Not just in a geographic sense, but also in a cultural and linguistic sense. How can we give birth to others without giving birth to ourselves? We cannot liberate anyone without self-emancipation. (Zelal) These statements support the argument that the chapter has presented thus far, namely that, by creating desexualisation through clothing, looks, behaviour and sexuality, the pkk’s policy is strongly regulating and aims to strengthen the party’s power base. All the interviewees believe, like Öcalan, that being in love is self-created and not necessarily linked to instinct or gender (Öcalan 1992, 198). With the thorough training programmes and strict ­self-development, where the focus is on disciplining body, mind and instinct as well as permanent abstinence from different forms of sensual gratification, alcohol and drugs, the pkk wants cadres to become perfect and complete humans. This is what one might call, with Sloterdijk, a form of secular asceticism (Sloterdijk 2013, 32–39) or, with Foucault, pastoral power (Foucault 1982, 783–784) implemented through discourse with an effect on gender and love. Both the concepts of asceticism and pastoral power can, despite their traditional ­association with religion, be used to describe the pkk’s surveillance and self-surveillance with regard to gender and love. Paradoxically, in this way the pkk reinforces gender; like the différance feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, people are returning to an emphasis on the meaning of bodily gender differences, even though the body is simultaneously being desexualised. Bozo explains: It is not just about sexual instincts and how to control them. It is about taking control of your own body and being able to define your own body’s needs. We should not just say the body needs sex, food and sleep. Who defines what and how much we need? Sleep, for example! One can live with four hours of sleep or have 20 hours of sleep a day. Therefore, it is about making a choice and then adjusting your mind and body to it. It is about compiling all our energies and using them for a determined life, where the need and necessity for something everyday-like becomes smaller. That is what we do as cadres. […] We are trying to create a balance between body, instinct, need and pleasure. According to Bozo and the other interviewees, sexuality is not a pleasure activity. Sexuality is something that is given to humans and animals so that they can reproduce. Sexual energy is nevertheless seen as the greatest natural energy in humans, one that cannot be repressed, but that must be tamed and ­transformed

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into consciousness and a form of ideological energy to strengthen the will for battle. Cadres are trained to lower their personal, sensuous, and bodily needs and to avoid articulating gendered feelings for each other, which would otherwise contribute to creating chaos. If they form relationships, Zagros believes, they cannot avoid experiencing failure, break-ups, disappointment and jealousy, and that these can affect their combat skills. Nevertheless, it is not forbidden to show love and caring towards each other as long as it is not romantic or sexual, but helps to strengthen the will. Comradely love should give rise to the cadres’ creative potential in the form of strengthening themselves in combat and sacrificing themselves for comrades. In comradely love, there is therefore no room for irrational feelings or urges. There is no felt need to form a sexual identity. Here, it is important to mention Foucault’s underlining of the emergence of the normative as regards limitations related to the articulation of sexuality (Foucault 1978, 112–120). The pkk, with its control of life processes and relations, defines the setting for the cultural norms and gender regime that cadres must submit to. The pkk thus creates a counterdiscourse regarding sex, shuts itself off and exercises the power of definition in the same way as the main discourse. The same also applies to love, where cadres call the love they have for each other pure love, as opposed to what is called “eros-love,” where physical bodily attraction between couples is present. The importance of gender and sexualisation to romantic life is edited out. At the same time, love and sexuality are also separated: Sexuality is not something that is given to us for pleasure’s sake. […] Pleasure is there to motivate humans and animals to cultivate it, so life can go on […]. It is like taste in food. Without taste, humans maybe couldn’t eat, and life would end […]. Sexuality and love are two different phenomena. But they are often treated and mixed together. Much too intricate. It has unfortunately ended with sexuality often being put in front of love. (Mordem) When love is not gender-romantic, it can also occur between human and ­nature, and animals, according to the male cadre Mordem. There is a striving for wholeness. Love is presented as an emotion, a force of attraction to a union and completeness, but not detached from socio-politics, social conditions and geographical circumstances. Before one can form a relationship, one has to learn to be oneself, find one’s own naturality and feel love towards nature. The process of becoming a revolutionary concerns crossing the limits of ­individuality, and the search for realising oneself through the other, the love of your life. Love becomes a question of being connected to other humans, nature and the ideological collective. It is a form of loving one’s neighbour in an

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a­ scetic way that does not need be shown or spoken of. The female cadre Zeri and the male cadre Mordem put it like this: I fulfil my need for love with my comrades. [...] There is no need to say a lot: a look, a smile, doing something together. It’s nice to feel that you are together in sorrow, in joy. [...] Believe me, it is higher than a mother’s or a father’s love. We become soul-twins. We become a whole. It affects me a lot. You become complete. It does not own you. It is salways with you. (Zeri) In this world, under these circumstances, we do not have the opportunity to experience true love. But that does not mean that we cannot fall for something beautiful, a tree or a geographical place. Or we can have feelings for the opposite sex. Love is actually so much more than something that develops towards the opposite sex. (Mordem) For cadres, love is not understood mainly as romantic or erotic, but about developing a common horizon of understanding. An ideal picture is painted of love as a transcendent force in the one who loves and is loved. Love thereby becomes not only an individual feeling, but a special sense-making feeling that joins humans, nature, animals, ideology etc. together. As is typical in Kurdish society, there is a great deal of physical contact between cadres, in which they practise physical care for each other. I have found that they always shake hands when they meet or part from each other. Women always give each other hugs and kisses. I have also known women and men who hug each other, but I have realised that this is current only among those who have a long and close friendship with each other. Although they distance themselves from sexual behaviour and try to avoid signalling anything romantic, they are not reluctant to put a hand on one another’s leg while sitting together. They often sleep on the ground in their clothes, without any form of mattress or sleeping bag. Therefore, cadres of the same gender can sometimes sleep together under a blanket to keep warm, or if there is a blanket missing. It is noteworthy that touching someone of one’s own gender is never seen as problematic, viewed as stimulation or a sign of homosexuality. Several cadres say that they themselves can feel if the intention is more than comradely when they are touched by another cadre. In these instances, or if a cadre declares their emotions for another person, the person is asked to pull him-/herself together and sent to rehabilitation for “weak personalities.” But it is hard to ­define what this touching signifies and how it is separated from sexual ­intentions when it cannot be put into words but is experienced with emotions, such as comfort and discomfort. Butler believes that touching, like gender, is procedurally constituted, but it is experienced by the subject as essential and

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given. However, the cadres have an understanding that the body has an agency and so can itself tell whether the touch should be perceived as care or as something erotic. Barad also maintains that cultural effects of bodies, bodily behaviour, physical surroundings and biologically based sensory reactions interact, and that the intra-action of these effects can explain the cadres’ experience of comfort or discomfort when a touch happens. 9 Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to put forward an understanding of how gender and love are established in the pkk. In doing this, I have used constructionist and new materialist theories to show how they can contribute to an understanding of the empirical data. I have shown that there are advantages to both approaches, so that it makes better sense to use them in a complementary way to achieve new analytical understandings. The constructionist approach, represented in this case by Foucault and Butler, is productive when it comes to explaining how culture and identity depend on repeated actions and genesis in language. With the constructionist approach, it has been possible to show how the pkk as a political power and social movement, based on a certain agenda, internalises and institutionalises gender to create a new human. This happens, inter alia, through a certain discourse of discipline that regulates the cadres’ identities, bodies, sexuality etc. In this way, members’ life processes can be controlled and the implementation of a new culture secured. Butler’s theory helped me to show how subversion through performative actions is established in the pkk, and how changing identity is possible. In the pkk, as in many communities, culturally installed repeated actions, both linguistic and bodily, create gender and variations of love. Furthermore, neither Foucault nor Butler actively specifies where the incentive to subversion arises from or what meaning the material has for the creation of identity concepts such as gender in the pkk. That is why I have chosen to invoke Barad’s new materialist perspective in my work. Using Barad’s agential realism, where there is intra-action between human and non-human agents, it has been possible to analyse how materiality has an effect and is a cause in creating concrete and normative changes in the culture. My aim has been to expand my understanding of discursive performativity and include the effect of materiality in the fusion where gender is established in the pkk. Here, I have chosen effects and dependencies from life in the mountains, cadres’ ­eating and sleeping habits, their clothing and biological bodily processes exemplified by women’s menstruation, and shown how all these material effects intra-act with discursive views of gender and love.

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As mentioned above, my analyses are based on some preliminary results of my PhD project. A substantial number of Kurdish youth are joining the pkk, with a resolve to gain increased scope for representation and options. With its bases and training camps in the mountains, the pkk creates space for subversion that includes radical change in culture and new ways of looking at gender and love. In the pkk, there is a focus on both biological sex and socio-cultural gender, where the creation of the body, sexuality and love challenges and redefines the relationship between culture and nature. This calls for a diffractive formation of theories and their intersectional methodological consequences, with the aim of reaching a complex understanding of gender and love in a Kurdish militant context. References Barad, Karen. 1996. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction.” In Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science. Edited by Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, 161–194. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Barad, Karen. 1998. “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10 (2): 87–128. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2010. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Random House. Bookchin, Murray. 1982. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Palo Alto: Cheshire Books. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Mark Sheridan Smith. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1981. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Edited by Robert Young, 48–78. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777–795. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge. Öcalan, Abdullah. 1983. Kürdistan’da Kişilik Sorunu [The question of personality in Kurdistan]. n.p. Öcalan, Abdullah. 1992. Kadin ve Aile Sorunu [The issue of women and family]. Istanbul: Melsa Yayinlari. Öcalan, Abdullah. 1998. Aşkin Kanunlari, Savaş kanunlarindan Daha Zordur [The rules of love, are more difficult than the rules of war]. Ocak: Çözümlemeleri, Parti Merkez Okulu Yayinlari. n.p. Öcalan, Abdullah. 2012. Özgürlük Tezleri-I [Freedom Theses-I]. Jineloji Akedemik Yayinlari, Forlaget Azadi. n.p. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. You Must Change Your Life. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Malden: Polity Press.

Chapter 12

Bound and Entangled: Masculinities, Embodiment and the Materialisation of Gender in the Sexual Field of the bdsm Club Serena Petrella Abstract This chapter contributes to studies of gender, intimacy and love, by testing the “strong” New Materialist proposition that bodies and matter matter, are agentic, intra-act and influence social and cultural processes. By drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory, and the “discreet” new materialism of sociologists Pam Alldred and Nick Fox, the chapter positions itself against this proposition by taking a more nuanced approach, proposing instead that non-human agents, and most importantly, fields, are entities that can have material effects. This proposition rests on an analysis of gender management and the influence of space in the bdsm club based on a cluster of ethnographic studies that have approached bdsm practice as a form of erotic collective life, and studied communities that come together in specialised public spaces.

1 Introduction This chapter contributes to studies of gender, intimacy and love, by testing the proposition that bodies and matter matter, are agentic, intra-act and influence social and cultural processes. This position that I consider to represent a “strong” new materialism, would consider the materiality of space seriously: it would assume that the physical location of a place and the morphology of that space have agentic properties. This theoretical approach would also assume that the physicality of bodies is animated by something “other-than-cultural,” is agentic in and of itself, and can “talk back” (Alaimo and Heckman 2008, 7). My analysis positions itself against this “strong” version of new materialism. I take up a more nuanced approach that proposes that non-human agents, and most importantly, fields, are entities that can have material effects. Fields are made up of physical, social and cultural components that can affect space and bodies. As assemblages, they intra-act with their constituent components and with one another. These entanglements can be understood as systems of

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r­ elations, framed in physical space, and materialised upon bodies; they influence the manner in which sexualities are articulated, bodies are assembled and gender is performed. The bdsm club, then, should be approached as a “sexual field” (Green 2014a, 25). The questions that have guided this research project were the following: can a place, such as a bdsm club, affect the ways in which people engage with one another, and have consequences for the manner in which bodies can come together in intimate exchange? Do the bodies of the practitioners of bdsm indeed “talk back” to mainstream understandings of sexuality in ways that impact on gender? Can bdsm practice do away with “everyday” hegemonic and normative gender? Can gender be materialised in new and novel ways due to these agentic influences? To answer these questions, I have been inspired by two theoretical approaches: Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory, and the new materialism of sociologists Pam Alldred and Nick Fox. In this chapter, I bring together fruitful new materialist insights and apply them to sexual field theory. The methodological consequences of these two theoretical perspectives lead me to conclude that, in the context of bdsm exchange, the materiality of space can have discreet agentic properties, if we think of space and bodies as “caught up” in networks, or “assemblages” of animate and inanimate relations (Fox and Alldred 2017, 5). My “discreet” version of new materialism will also lead me to the realisation that the materiality of the body in the bdsm club, for the most part, remains entangled in hegemonic versions of gender, and very seldom is able to “break free” and reconstitute itself along new lines of flight. The empirical data that I investigate to reach these conclusions is made up of a cluster of ethnographies (Holt 2011, 2016; Martin 2011; Newmar 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2011; Turley 2011; Weiss 2011), carried out over the last decade, approaching bdsm practice as a form of erotic collective life, and studied communities that come together in specialised public spaces.1 I will show that a “strong” new materialist approach that assumes that spaces and bodies have intrinsic agency, is not supported in the ethnographic studies I investigated: in bdsm, bodies do not “talk back,” falling short of formulating new ways of “doing” gender and intimacy in bdsm exchange. In similar terms, the materiality of the space of the club, the fronts adopted, and the apparatuses used are not particularly transformative and rarely facilitate a ­recasting of gender in novel ways. Even though the bdsm club is supposed to 1 I selected these specific works because they studied public bdsm practices and collective erotic exchange. Ethnography as a research methodology gives voice to the practitioners themselves, allowing them to make sense of their own experiences. Newmar concisely sums up the power of ethnographical narratives in these terms: it is an account of “the way it is” by the people “who engage in it” (2008, 626).

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be a place where “everything goes” in terms of gender possibilities, in practice masculinity continues to be primarily performed in hegemonic ways, falling well short of possible de-territorialising potentials. A hegemonic logic of practice continues to organise exchange, and the ways in which gender is performed “out there” in the “real world” penetrates and impacts on the queer spaces of the bdsm club in a manner that gives higher status to hegemonic forms of masculinity and relegates others to the bottom rung of the status hierarchy. Such occurrences can be understood as the “aggregated effects” of sexuality-assemblages that “re-territorialise” masculinities in conventional, heteronormative and hegemonic gender schemas. 2

Relational Materiality in the Sexual Field of bdsm Practice: Perspectives from Field Theory and New Materialism

Before I embark on an analysis of gender management and the influence of space in the bdsm club, I provide an overview of Field Theory and sociologist Adam I. Green’s elaborations of this theory as he applies it to sexual fields. I will then move on to discuss sociologists Pam Alldred and Nick Fox’s new materialist conceptualisation of sexuality-assemblage. Bourdieu’s Field Theory can be considered one of the most influential contributions in social theory to make sense of the relationship between the individual and the social order, and is specifically directed at overcoming persistent dichotomous fossilisations in social theory concerning the issues of action, agency and subjectivity/objectivity (Green 2008b, 609). new materialism is similarly interested in undoing such theoretical divisions. Heavily indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s “monist” philosophy (1988, 253–4), new materialism refuses to fall back into older theoretical dichotomies, such as mind/ body (Braidotti 2011, 311), objectivity/subjectivity, and, by implication, reality/ social construction (Alldred and Fox 2017, 2). In this way it does away with perniciously resistant dualisms in the social sciences, such as nature/culture, mind/matter, and human/non-human (Barad 1997, 181; Braidotti 2013, 2, Coole and Frost 2010, 26). New materialist ontologies are plural, open, complex and contingent, approaching materiality in relational and emergent senses (Alldred and Fox 2007, 1; Coole and Frost 2010, 29). Materiality emerges relationally in flows among a myriad of interconnected parts, institutionalised social structures, actors and systems of ideas, but also non-human agents (Alldred and Fox 2017, 2).2 2 For instance, Barad has explored non-human forms of agency in her analysis of 3D ultrasonography; illustrating how technologies can have affective properties (1998, 114).

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Bourdieu’s Field Theory is also concerned with relational materiality, and provides important theoretical tools to illuminate how social relations are written into bodies and influence the materialisation of gender and desire. Here it is necessary to provide a brief overview of the Bourdieusian theoretical tool-set, and provide definitions for the concepts of field and habitus. The concept of field entails a system of arbitrary relations that emerge out of the struggles for economic, cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1990, 67), and is constituted by the interplay of relations of force that define and direct such struggles over capital (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 99). The field is patterned and operates in predictable ways, according to specific “rules” of engagement. But these rules are not “fixed”; rather, they manifest themselves in regularities (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 99). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is particularly helpful in making sense of the manner in which individuals engage with one another in a specific field.3 The habitus is defined as an informal shared knowledge that gives individuals a “feel” for the rules of the field and social interaction. It involves a “practical sense”—an embodied, involuntary understanding—of how things “work.” Bourdieu defines habitus as “a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and, in particular, a predisposition, a tendency, propensity or inclination” (emphasis in original, 1977, 214). In a congruent line of argumentation, sociologists Pam Alldred and Nick Fox propose the concept of sexuality-assemblage to make sense of erotic engagement (2013; 2015; 2017). This diffuse approach to sexuality permits us to think beyond the border of the body and devote attention to a range of physical, biological, social and cultural, political or abstract forces with which bodies interact. Two important insights emerge. First, the “fundamental relationality” of all matter is foregrounded because bodies, things and other social formations, Alldred and Fox argue, obtain their “is-ness” only in relation to other entities; all aspects of the relational chain deserve analytical attention (2017, 5). Secondly, it is advantageous to shift the focus of analysis towards the manner in which assembled components are able to affect or be affected by one another (Alldred and Fox 2017, 5). Fields, conceived here as both spatial loci and symbolic spaces, can be understood, following Alldred and Fox’s f­ ormulation, 3 According to Green, Bourdieu believed that human beings are constitutionally docile, symbolically absorptive, and prime for cultural construction, especially in early life. Yet humans are not aware of the manner in which they are “seeped into” their symbolic environments: they do not perceive the socialisation process itself, and end up misrecognising their identities, dispositions, inclinations, tastes, material and cultural orientations, and even bodily structure. The power of symbolic forces lies in the fact that humans misrecognise these processes as straightforward articulations of their “nature” (Green 2008b, 609).

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as able to exert force on matter and affect the manner in which bodies are materialised. This “discreet” approach to materiality would not go as far as arguing that bodies and spaces affect cultural constructions: but fields can. I will elaborate on this in more detail in the following section on space. Let us consider some additional terminology from Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical tool-box, including the concept of sexuality-assemblage, and the related concepts of affect, territorialisation and aggregation. A sexuality-­ assemblage is moved by “complex, multi-layered force that produces encounters, resonances and relations of all sorts” (Braidotti 2011, 148). Territorialisation can be thought of as an “ecological” specification. It describes the affects in assemblages that specify the capacities of a body or a relation. Arousal, attraction, preferences and conduct can all be understood as territorialisations that emerge from the affects and desires of a sexuality-assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 88–89). Aggregation happens when forces enact a clustering effect on groups of bodies, producing conventional and pervasive relations (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 294). For instance, aggregations re-produce larger pre-existing social structures such as patriarchy, heteronormativity, and “hegemonic masculinity” (Alldred and Fox 2017, 6). We should not be surprised, then, that even in the sexual field of the bdsm club, gender can be materialised in conventional ways (Alldred and Fox 2017, 7; Beckman 2011, 9). Similar to Bourdieu’s field theory approach, the discreet new materialism of Alldred and Fox argues that the manner in which sexuality manifests has to do with how bodies, things, ideas and social institutions assemble. The usefulness of this approach to sexuality is that it allows one to think about the borders of the material body as a result of physical, biological, social and cultural, political or abstract forces with which bodies interact and intra-act: In this view it is not an individual body but the sexuality-assemblage that is productive of all phenomena associated with the physical and social manifestations of sex and sexuality, and establishes the capacities of individual bodies to do, feel and desire. (Alldred and Fox 2017, 5) Through this lens, we can think of desire as an effect, not an essential quality of a body: it becomes part of what Clough has termed the assemblage’s “affect economy,” forces able to shift bodies and other relations towards or against one another, in terms of “attention, arousal, receptivity or reaction and inaction” (2004, 15). I will now discuss the potentially agentic properties of spaces, and see in what way they are related to the concept of sexuality-assemblage. I will also explore the concepts of field and of habitus, in order to investigate how bodies

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in specific sexual fields are materialised. I wish to explore how in some cases, bodies end up being “re-territorialised” in conventional and “aggregated” ways. In other instances, bodies, through emergent forms of relational sociality (I will discuss the case of Pup Play), can be articulated in new ways, “de-­ territorialising” hegemonic heteronormative gender forms.4 3

The Agentic Effects of Space in the Sexual Field of the bdsm Club

Can a place, such as the bdsm club, affect the ways in which people engage with one another, and have consequences, first for the manner in which bodies assemble and come together in intimate exchanges, and second, for the materialisation of masculinity? The materiality of a space may have agentic effects, but it is important to consider the fact that such a space may have been already “colonised” by a socio-cultural apparatus, extrinsic to it, since the sexual field is not hermetic to hegemonic influences. I contend that it is possible to approach the analysis of bdsm practice as framed by the specific social spaces in which it takes place, and consider the sexual field of bdsm, in its own right, as a special locus, with its internal logic and structures: “a particular kind of social organization” (Green 2008a, 26, original emphasis). Green argues that: “Collective sexual life is often anchored in physical and virtual nodes, or sites […] to the extent that sites are inhabited by actors who come to the field with overlapping sensibilities and tastes – that is, overlapping erotic habitus” (Green 2014b, 27).5 A bdsm club may be understood as a space where people with a particular inclination towards non-­ normative eroticism congregate. I found significant convergence on this point across all ethnographies: all the practitioners expressed feelings of disenfranchisement with “vanilla” eros (Newmar, 2011, 65; Weiss, 2011, 11; Martin, 2011, 84); 4 Field Theory has recently been fruitfully applied to the analysis of erotic collective life. These studies have generated important insights into the manner in which the advent of modernity and the dismantling of some normative controls on sexuality have made possible the rise of heterogeneous specialised sexual subcultures, “specialized erotic worlds, designed for sexual partnership and sexual sociality” (Green 2008a, 25). See Green (2008a, 2008b, 2014) Martin and George (2006); Hennen (2014); Farrer and Dale (2014) for more. 5 Green defines erotic habitus as “a socially constituted complex of dispositions, appreciations, and inclinations arising from objective historical conditions that mediate the formation and selection of sexual scripts. The concept rests on the principle that sexual desire is oriented to the social world through historically specific erotic habitus that differentially invest particular objects with erotic meaning, while rendering other objects neuter” (2008b, 626).

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and still, for the great majority of practitioners, the actual practices of bdsm were learned in the clubs: participants underwent a veritable socialisation process, during which they learned to become “players,” and were exposed to a logic of practice that pre-existed their entrance into the spaces (Turley, 2011, 111–12; Newmar 2010b, 319–320, 321–22; Weiss, 2011, 186; Martin, 2011, 158). The overlapping of dispositions and “congregations” of tastes eventually become so patterned that they take on socialising and structuring effects. Green makes this point, by arguing that “the erotic worlds in which we find sex and partnership establish the conditions of possibility for intimate life but also socialize the very things we want and come to desire” (Green 2014a, 25). I wish to illustrate this point by making reference to the foundational organisational dichotomy in bdsm that frames the desires, the ontological possibilities and the practices of players: D/s. D/s can be generally understood as “D for Dominance” and “s for submission,” and is also encapsulated in the moniker “S/M” (Sadism and Masochism; Newmar, 2010b, 317) that entails power exchange between a dominant and a submissive player. D/s is the master frame of reference for all bdsm exchange in the sexual field, and effectively organises desires according to the S/M dichotomy, but also cultivates a hegemonic mode of appreciation, and a related “way of doing things”: as participants take up their position in the orders of the bdsm club, their desirous dispositions aggregate into “erotic habitus,” crystallising into systems of valuation and judgement and constituting a “structure of desire” that “all actors are obliged to consider should they wish to play the game” (Green 2014b, 27–28). The organisational dichotomy of D/s has literally colonised the clubs, and shapes the morphology of the spaces where bdsm exchanges take place. Each space is devoted to the unfolding of a specific scene: the dungeon, for instance, is furnished with crosses, whipping posts, and suspension apparatus; the Doctor’s office generally presents an examination table, with stirrups and specialised tools; the electrical room, dedicated to electric torture, is likely to contain a pineal chair or table (a structure where a body can be strapped down and restrained); the classroom holds a teacher’s desk and student desks, a chalkboard and a raised platform where corporeal punishment can be prominently displayed (Martin 2011, 132; Weiss, 2011, 122). The props that players bring to the scene, or are made available to them in the spaces, are also imbued with strategic symbolism (the rope of the rope master; the cat of nine tails of the Leatherman; the latex mask on the face of the Slave; the speculum inserted into the Patient; the cane raised against the Naughty Pupil), as each prop “calls into being” a specific kind of bdsm persona. In this way, each persona is ­invested with a set of expectations for “proper” practice and particular

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t­echnological expertise so that the apparatus can be wielded appropriately and the scene unfold authentically. These detailed descriptions make it evident that, insofar as players can come together, be “framed” and constituted by the D/s dichotomy, they are thus “ordered”: bodies are already called into being through specific sets of relations, and players inevitably are required to undertake and enact such organising schemas, as they engage in play. It is important then to recognise that these spaces can indeed have discreet influence on the ontological constructions of practitioners, and shape their practices: they are able to tangentially materialise relations on bodies. But the schemas provided are not necessarily emergent: they have penetrated the bdsm club, the sexual field, and are older socio-cultural organisations, crystallised into the culture and social practices of bdsm. My analysis of the ethnographic material finds a strong convergence here: across bdsm clubs in the UK, Germany, and the US, the spaces of bdsm club present a demarcated order of things, of D/s desires; the possibilities of coming together in bdsm in generally predictable ways. Weiss reflects on the manner in which “real world” social structures have aggregating effects on the bdsm sexual field: The positionalities of these practitioners were, I realized, linked in complex ways to the social and historical formations, of race and gender, but also, in a more obscure way, to the subject positions produced within late capitalism. I began to understand sm performance as material. Rather than existing in a bracketed space of play, sm performances are deeply tied to capitalist cultural formations; rather than allowing for a kind of freedom from racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies, such spectacular performances work within the social norms that compel subjectivity, community and political imagination. (Weiss 2011, 6) This line of argument is important: it points to the hegemonic penetrations of the socio-cultural order into the sexual field, illustrating that the queer space of the bdsm club is generally not immune to those organising principles that Deleuze and Guattari would term “re-territorialisations” of “aggregated effects” of everyday life (1983, 294). 4

Erotic Habitus and Structuration

I will now examine the concept of erotic habitus in more detail, and apply it to bdsm exchange, considering the example of two men engaging with each

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o­ ther in a club, who take up the oppositional erotically charged personas of “bad ass top” and “indispensable service bottom.”6 The sexual field has predisposed the relations of engagement to which these participants have been acculturated. As they engage in play, they acquire erotic habitus, aligning with orders of desire that are intrinsic to that field, and make intelligible their complementary personas. In terms of erotic attraction, the top will be animated by the wish to dominate, and the bottom by the yearning to be subjugated. How is the materialisation of gender managed on their bodies, and through their practices? The top will consolidate gender in conventional, “aggregated,” hypermasculine ways; the bottom will not, “territorialising” masculinity in novel ways. How successfully they “pull off” the scene will depend on how well they control the “techne”7 of each position, which in turn affects their positionality in the status structure. If their gendered and embodied personas align with the institutionalised norms of the sexual field, they will accrue significant erotic capital and high status. If they have not “mastered the game,” their erotic capital will be diminished. Each encounter is “incipient,” always presenting the potentiality of unfolding in unexpected ways. Participants are bestowed a certain amount of erotic capital that can be conceived as the quality and quantity of their attributes that elicit an erotic response in other players. These are specific field effects that shape the manner in which engagement unfolds, or what Alldred and Fox would term “territorialising affects.” Hennen, in his analysis of the gay leatherman sexual field, explains that “under certain conditions, fields clearly constitute desire as well, while fostering the development of new pleasures and new forms of sexual capital” (2014, 77, original emphasis). These insights provide support for what I term a “discreet” new materialism that allows for the agentic effects of fields on embodiment and gender formations. What kind of ontological blueprints are made available to practitioners as they enter the bdsm sexual field? Practices are constitutive of ontologies (Weiss 2011, 186; Newmar 2010b, 319–20; Martin 2011, 158), and this is how the men in the ethnographies examined chose to name themselves: as perverts, 6 Newmar defines bad ass tops as high status, sadistic and emotionally distant dominants, that have a reputation of eliciting terror in their submissives (Author??? 2011, 110); indispensable service bottoms “perform powerlessness but not necessarily victimization” and, placing the pleasure of their tops above their own, are committed to fulfilling their desires, effacing their own (2011, 112–14). 7 In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault defines techne as the work “one performs on oneself in order to bring one’s conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transforms oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behaviour” ([1984] 1990, 27). These “techniques of the self,” Weiss argues, are practical, and “should be thought as a set of skills and a craft that must be learned and mastered” (2011, 11).

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voyeurs, masochists, bottoms, indispensable service bottoms, bottom martyrs, bad ass bottoms, pain sluts, switches, doms, slaves, submissives, babies, ponies, pups or puppies, poly perverts, pain fetishists, leathermen, daddies, bad ass tops, dominant tops, plain tops, benevolent dictators, service tops, butches, switches with top leanings, crossdressers and gimps. Each strategic ontology includes a technique for practice to be mastered and perfected. Interestingly, bdsm sexual fields do not necessarily share hierarchies: for instance, in some communities bottoms are ranked low in terms of erotic capital, while in others they enjoy significant status. bdsm practitioners occupy social space in the bdsm club via stratified positions that articulate what Green terms “tiers of desirability” (Green 2008a, 33). If, on one hand, each sexual field has a continuous variation in erotic capital, always incipient and fluid, collectivity of action tends to pattern such exchanges, categorising and hierarchising sexual agents according to their accumulation of erotic capital. In turn, actors begin to pattern their stylistic choices and their erotic habitus in accordance to erotic value in that specific bdsm community, in order to accrue more status: they “are likely to adapt their appearance, behaviour and demeanor over time in order to associate themselves via a particular class of actors, thereby elevating their status within the field’s tiers of desirability” (Green 2008a, 33). Significantly, across the ethnographies analysed, tiers of desirability vary: capital can take a variety of forms, including physical traits and effective presentations, but could also be acquired through mastery of technique. I also found that, across all ethnographies, prestige was directly correlated to the level of mastery of a specific practice: becoming an “expert” bdsm practitioner was usually tied to an increase in status (Weiss 2011, 11; Newmar 2010b, 319– 322). For instance, in the bdsm sexual field, players learn to take on pre-­ configured personas convincingly, by mastering specific practices, thus becoming “experts,” and this can improve their social standing. All these aspects of capital can, to a certain extent, be manipulated and enhanced, as “actors recognize the body, affect and personal style as a resource that stratifies players in a variety of fields, affording differential degrees of power and significance” (Green 2008a, 29). One should not assume that the hierarchy of status in one club can be lifted and applied seamlessly in another space. Specific community norms give differential status to roles and practices: a bottom in a gay leather bear enclave may be highly appreciated and revered (Newmar 2011, 117), while a bottom in the San Francisco pansexual scene may enjoy significantly less status (Weiss 2011, 177). The precise logic of status, then, is not stable, but contested and fluid, and constantly re-configured by the exchanges that take place within the sexual field.

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Once established, structures of desires may take on a life of their own, and exist to a certain extent independently of individual players and their personal desires, “as actors conform to and are re-socialised to the sexual field […] sexual actors may learn to like an erotic world as they develop its habitus through a process of deliberate inculcation”: Indeed, the more specialized a given erotic world becomes, the more standardized its erotic prize, the more predictably ordered the relational patterns, and the more institutionalized the currency of a given form of erotic capital. (Green 2008a, 29) 5

Materialising Gender in the bdsm Club

How is masculinity managed in bdsm exchange? How is gender problematised in bdsm practice? Can bdsm function as a gender utopia, where “everything goes”? Many testimonials across all ethnographies examined bdsm’s attempt to “do away” with gender. Any person participating in the bdsm sexual field, regardless of their gender, is “free” to take up any role, be it top or bottom, and not necessarily be “wed” to it. At least at the level of discourse, members of the community are strongly committed to this approach where “everything goes”: bdsm is often about polarized roles: top/bottom, dominant/submissive, Master/slave. These roles are not fixed to a genital-sex-gender matrix; the practitioners I spoke to were adamant that there is no essential, generalizable, or immutable correspondence between one’s body or genitalia, one’s gender presentation, and one’s bdsm practice. (Weiss 2011, 17–18; see also 160) As Foucault once optimistically opined, gender in bdsm fields is decentered in favour of a new logic of practice, domination and submission: The S/M game is very interesting because it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid. Of course, there are roles, but everyone knows very well that those roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end, the slave has become the master. (Foucault [1983] 1996, 387–99) The ethnographic accounts I analysed show that practitioners have great investment in the belief that gender dynamics are suspended and effaced in the

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bdsm sexual field, and substituted by a new ontological organisational dichotomy: “D” for domination and “s” for submission. Naming is important because players ontologically bracket who they are in terms of what they do. The manner in which men “play” in the bdsm club includes gender performances that at times fantastically inflate heteronormative schemas and at times completely subvert them. For instance, some men enact a highly stylised hyper-masculinity. Newmar presents an illuminating example of such artificially stylised hyper-masculinity when describing an exchange between a male top and his submissive partner: “You can take this because you know I want you to feel this, and you want to do it for me” (2010a, 401). Holt describes a vicious, emotionally distant “bad ass top,” who objectifies his partner for his sadistic whims: “Can I know my partner well enough that the slightest move or gesture can send her over the edge? Can I play her like the fine instrument that she is? Can I coax a soft melody from her cries, and have it accompanied by her writhing harmony? When the havoc is over, can I cradle her gently and nurture peace from the chaos? This is my journey.” (2015, 67) The field of the bdsm club allows the opportunity to enact highly problematic, countercultural, and even criminal forms of masculinity, strictly illicit and disavowed in the real world (Newmar 2011, 108), but strongly eroticised in this space. At other times, men are able to enact heroically nostalgic masculinities: an opportunity that would not easily present itself outside the sexual field. A Dungeon Monitor (a person hired by a bdsm club to monitor scenes and ensure the safety of participants), interviewed by Holt, recounted an instance in which he was forced to intervene and stop a scene gone horrifically wrong: a dom had beat his sub into unconsciousness. This individual decided to stalk the predatory dom, follow him to another bdsm club, and enact revenge on behalf of the abused sub: Do you know what happened to that predator? Somebody at a play party walked up behind him with a Louisville slugger8 and whacked him on the side of the head and knocked him down. Who do you think that was? You got it. I made a trip to Rhode Island just to get him. (Holt 2015 , 98; the scene is also described in Holt 2016, 927) 8 A Louisville Slugger is a type of baseball bat, generally made of wood, but can also be made of aluminum.

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Where else would this man have had a chance to engage in such heroic machismo, and play the hero: a rugged John Wayne of the dungeon? These performances performatively reinforce “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1995, 78) and heteronormative gender binaries. It is possible for traditional gender norms to be completely subverted and expunged. Weiss describes a slave auction during which “an Asian American man, young and tiny, cross-dressed in a red velvet dress, Mary Janes, and white lace gloves,” expresses his heart’s desires to have a mistress gender humiliate him, “force him to cross-dress and then insult him for his desires” (2011, 4). Stereotypical gender effacement is articulated through a reversal of power relations, as men, assumed to be powerful and assertive, electively take on roles that symbolically typify powerlessness: they engage in scat play as babies, and wish their mistress would scold them, then wipe them clean, and coddle them (Martin 2011, 199–200); they are devoted slaves, who fastidiously clean their dom’s toilet (Turley 2011, 117); they are rambunctious puppies, who embrace helpless “freedom” at the leash of their masters: “‘There is nothing as wonderful as being a dog, to have no worries, to know that your master will take care of you’” (Martin 2011, 191). Finally, in some cases, men refuse to commit to a specific persona and choose to oscillate fluidly between the two poles of dominance and submission, effortlessly managing hybridity by resisting crystallisation into one specific bdsm identity. A switch, for instance, may equally enjoy domming and subbing, depending on his mood; a service top may reluctantly dominate a bottom at their behest (Martin 2011, 335). But how do these forms of gender territorialisation stack up in terms of erotic capital? Are all gender performances equally valued in the bdsm club? 6

Orders of Desire, Erotic Capital and Gender Territorialisations

My analysis of the ethnographies shows that all bdsm clubs present a large amount of ontological taxonomies that have already undergone pervasive institutionalisation. These are the personas of tops, bottoms and switches; in more rare cases, ontologies are in a process of emergence: for instance, puppies (or pups) are a very new bdsm persona formation (Wingnall and McCormack 2017, 801). I generally found strong heterogeneity in “tiers of desirability” in bdsm sexual fields, with each community outlining its own specific organisational rankings in terms of status, and each kinky persona accruing more or less erotic capital.

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The fact that the majority of men choose to identify as dominant,9 more often as “bad ass tops” or “benevolent dictators,” and less often as “service tops” or “switches,” and seldom as “bottoms” makes the case that, in most bdsm fields examined, the dominant personas accrue the highest erotic capital. This supports the hypothesis that the bdsm club is a sexual field: sexualities, bodies and gender remain entangled with older territorialised versions of gender, and seldom are able to “break free” from older and territorialised hegemonic versions of masculinity. This indicates that gender continues to be performed in hegemonic ways, and proves that older orders of gender “penetrate” the queer space of the bdsm club. This is supported in the findings by Newmar (2011, 109), Weiss (2011, 176), and Holt (2015 , 66). Newmar illustrates this point powerfully: Women in Caeden are more likely to bottom to men than to top them; men clamor access to them, and they are accessed only when they risk being hurt. Men who top can become successful clamorers, gaining access to intimate moments through repeated assurances that they can simultaneously violate women and keep them safe. (Newmar 2011, 182) In a similar vein, Weiss found that, in the San Francisco bdsm scene, submissiveness in men was treated with suspicion and policed strongly by other men. She quotes the testimony of Phil, a submissive: “After I became known as a submissive, a lot of my male friends who were switches or tops didn’t like me now. There’s a lot of prejudice [on the part of] male tops – even gay male tops – against submissiveness […] I lost a lot of apparent respect as soon as they found out I was a male bottom.” (2011, 177–178) This testimonial indicates the cultural resonance of both patriarchy and homophobia. Weiss explains: 9 Newmar’s findings reveal that practices fell into a strongly demarcated gender dichotomy, with more men doing topping, and more likely to top exclusively, and more women doing bottoming, and being more likely to bottom exclusively. The women who exclusively top in the Caeden scene are pro-dommes: they are paid for their services (Newmar 2011, 208). This is strongly reflected in most of the ethnographies analysed, with the exception of the Berlin szene (Martin 2011). According to my total calculations across the ethnographies analysed, men overwhelmingly ontologically bracketed their practices as tops: this was the case for 44 men, with 18 declaring themselves switches, and 8 as bottoms. This distribution reveals much about status hierarchies.

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This masculine anxiety, gay or straight (or otherwise), is formed around the submissive male, showcasing the dense connections between heterosexuality (as ideology) and power […] Submissive men are not celebrated as transgressing gender norms. (2011, 177) It should not be surprising that crossdressers, or “sissy maids” (Weiss 2011, 18), in this particular sexual field, end up relegated to the bottom rung of the “tiers of desirability” (Green 2008a, 33), and find it difficult to accrue erotic capital (Weiss 2011, 4). It is important to unpack the relationship between gender, domination and submission, and the manner in which it is tactically deployed in bdsm sexual fields. In his work on symbolic violence, Bourdieu approaches gender as a symbolic “master status”: If the sexual relation appears as a social relation of domination, this is because it is constructed through the fundamental principle of division between active male and the passive female and because this principle creates, organizes, expresses and directs desire – male desire as the desire of possession, eroticized domination, and female desire as the desire for masculine domination, as eroticised subordination or even, in the limiting case, as the eroticized recognition of domination. (1988, 21) Green elaborates on this point, arguing that it should not be surprising that traditional gender schemas continue to operate as a privileged site for eroticisation in sexual fields, including the bdsm club: “Binary male and female typifications, and the division of labour upon which these typifications rest, establish the substance of erotic desires and practice, including fantasies that revolve around dominance and submission” (Green 2008b, 611). In similar terms, Deleuze and Guattari would define such normative stubbornness in the sexual field as “molar resonance,” an aggregating affect left over from wider cultural heteronormative hegemonies that infiltrate the sexual field of the bdsm club. They argue that territorialising forces in sexualityassemblages regularly “colonise” matter; such forces also impact upon the materialisation of gender on bodies according to pre-existing systems of normalisation: this is why gender, even in the bdsm club, often remains conventional and prescriptive (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 294; Alldred and Fox 2017, 7; Beckman 2011, 9): Thus territorialized, sexuality loses its potential, channelling desire into a relatively narrow range of sexual capacities, specifying its capacities by

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linking it to conventional desires, though still with the possibility of deterritorialization or a line of flight. (Alldred and Fox 2017, 8) Traces of such territorialisations can be found in the testimonials of submissive men, who show ambivalence towards their roles in curious adjustments when they express their desires to be submissives. Such practices can be understood as “gender corrections,” where men minimise the status of their tops, by arguing that the bottom is really the one in charge, who controls the unfolding of the scene, and has stipulated what can and cannot happen (Newmar 2008, 395). They also frame the bdsm exchange in terms of solipsistic and agonistic engagement with pain, centering such an experience as “an end in itself,” “investing” pain with new symbolic charge (Newmar 2010a, 402). Rather than admit they are being subjected, these men describe themselves as the sole agentic presence in the exchange, who victoriously overcome hardship: “Because the thing that I got out of it most was a pure sense of accomplishment and of – a kind of victory really. It felt like I’d just [been in] some incredibly tough battle, you know, and won” (Newmar 2010a, 404). It is also important to consider that a decision on the part of the practitioners to enact conventionally gendered personas, such as a typically hypermasculine master, sadistically cruel, cold and emotionally distant, may be a “strategy of recovery.” Newmar makes the argument that because the Caeden community is populated by people that are “accidentally androgynous” (2011, 29), these hyper-stylised gender performances allow practitioners to embody a “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1995) that is conventionally unavailable to them in everyday life (2011, 29–30).10 Erotic capital may also be accrued by mastering the ability to buttress the “performative efficacy” (Weiss 2011, 22) of tops. Turley provides the powerful testimonial of Joe, a dominant, who poignantly describes, with awe, the ontologically bolstering power of his sub: He was willing and compliant. I remember the session because of his willingness and submissiveness and that just sort of […] made me feel incredibly powerful, incredibly confident, incredibly wanted, incredibly attractive […] all the ego boosting […] you are almost […] worshipped I suppose. (Turley 2011, 195) 10

The women and men in this community are unable to perform gender effectively in conventional ways, “failing” to perform what Connell has defined as “emphasized femininity” and “hegemonic masculinity” in their regular lives outside the bdsm club (Connell 1987, 1995).

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Babies and pups are interesting figures and deserve analytical attention, because they make most powerfully evident the incipient nature of sexuality-­ assemblages and the heterogeneity of territorialisations across bdsm fields. Such personas are qualified by helplessness and a strong desire to be cared for, which calls into question normative masculine agency and competence. Bastian, a puppy in the Berlin szene, explains: There is nothing as wonderful as being a dog, to have no worries, to know that your master will take care of you. […] Other people don’t understand the time commitment involved. You start as a welpe (puppy) and it takes time, just like a real Welpe, with regular training, between six months and two years. And a lot of people aren’t prepared to put that time into it. (Martin 2011, 191–192) An element of humiliation is intrinsic to such roles. But when a person soils himself and demands that his “master” deal with the mess, who is really in charge? This sheds light on the subtle power reversals that are at the heart of such roles and that impact upon the materialisation of gender. In terms of erotic capital, how do such personas rank in the hierarchy of desirability in bdsm sexual fields? In Caeden, babies are considered to be “bossy bottoms” (Newmar 2008, 79), and due to the fact that they “call into question” the authority of their doms, they are ranked low on the hierarchy of desirability of this community. In the Berlin szene people who play as pups and babies are considered to engage in fringe activities, or “edge work.” These practices enjoy special status recognition, imbuing practitioners with the erotic capital of “sexual outlaws”; yet they are also marginalised and remain on the margin because their practices have not been pervasively institutionalised (Martin 2011, 198). 7

Lines of Flight: Pup Culture as an Incipient and Novel Way to Do Gender in the bdsm Sexual Field

It would not be productive to stress the structuring effects of the sexual field disproportionately: there is always incipient generative potential. In some bdsm sexual fields, hegemonic orders have not managed to infiltrate as pervasively, and switches and submissive men are able to accrue significant erotic capital and enjoy high status. For instance, Turley’s work shows that the erotic work of service tops, whose “dominant primary role is to sexually satisfy the submissive partner” (2011, 184), allows them to amass significant status.

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S­ imilarly, Martin argues that in the Berlin szene service tops and the switches enjoy the highest status, precisely because of their versatility and their refusal to perform a fixed identity and role set. In that community ambiguity is highly prized (Martin 2011, 155). Sexuality-assemblages are not stable entities: they are constantly in flux, incipient, constantly “awash with flows of affect that aggregate and dis-aggregate relations” (Alldred and Fox 2017, 7). Therefore, there is always a potential for transformation, a “de-territorialising” effect, what Deleuze and Guattari have termed “lines of flight” (1988, 277). The productive effervescence of lines of flight make evident the incipient plurality of fields: the new path, once forged, reveals the open spaces beyond the limits of what has consolidated in a specific field of practice. It is thus always possible for new identities, attractions and erotic desires to emerge, and these can reinvent the terms of eroticism and organised sociality in ways that go beyond sexual practices, including novel ways of doing gender. Lines of flight occur when centripetal “territorialising” forces that organise a specific field “run amok,” splinter off (shooting off diagonally), and (rhizomatically) “sprout” new forms of intelligibility, desire and materiality. Because sexual fields always carry the seeds of transformation, they have the potential to produce any and all capacities in bodies. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the “nomadic” and “rhizomatic” aspect of sexuality-assemblages that may produce “subversive unforeseeable expressions of sexuality” (Beckman 2011, 11; Alldred and Fox 2017, 7–8). Illustrating this point, Hennen discusses a new way of being gay, the subculture of “bears.” Bears have congregated and formalised into a new gay subculture, a movement that has consolidated into its own sexual field, emerging as an oppositional ontology to the sexual field of gay leathermen. Bears resist leathermen’s highly codified, hypermasculine eroticism that values a narrow masculine presentation (hypermasculine, rugged, and chiseled good looks, clad in leather) and impersonal, emotionally distant and penetration-centered sexual scripts (2014, 79). Another emblematic example of lines of flight is the emergence of another gay subculture, a specialised enclave in the bdsm sexual field: pups and puppies. Wingnall and McCormack speculate that these roles solidified into a field of exchange in the early 2000s (2017, 801). It is interesting to investigate how the pup sexual field territorialises ontological schemas. What logic of practice animates desires and how are the “rules of the game” for engagement organised? This field presents new ontologies for intelligibility that can, at least in some instances, undo the overreaching ordering dichotomy of D/s (dominance and submission) of other bdsm sexual fields. Gender is effaced and ontological

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borders are organised around “doggie performances”: “I’ll walk around and nuzzle up, expect treats, curl up with another pup, give and get strokes, growl when I see somebody I don’t like […] random things that you would see a dog do” (Wingnall and McCormack 2017: 805). If, at times, the D/s ordering structure is maintained, with a dominant master/owner/handler training a submissive “pup,” at other times it is expunged. Some practitioners engage in master-pup sexual play that definitely maintains the D/s dynamic (Wingnall and McCormack 2017, 806), but in other cases, pups congregate and engage in horizontal sexual play, and these are definitely new forms of diffuse eroticism. For some, cuddle puddles are not sexual; rather, they are collective engagements oriented towards forging emotional bonds (Wingnall and McCormack 2017, 808). In these gatherings, pups not only do away with their masters: they also forge new homosocialities that expand sexuality-assemblages, transforming the possibilities for eroticism. For some practitioners, sexual engagement is antithetical to being a pup: “There isn’t anything sexual about sex play, in my opinion. It’s playful […] I mean, puppies are sexual by default.” (Wingnall and McCormack 2017, 807) I believe the pups’ sexual field provides corroboration that sexuality-­ assemblages carry the potential for new incipient forms of eroticised sociality that can “re-territorialise” masculine gender performances. 8 Conclusion This chapter has explored how gender is materialised in heterogeneous ways by men in bdsm sexual fields. I have argued that fields, conceptualised as both spatial loci and symbolic spaces, are able to exert force on matter, and affect the manner in which bodies are materialised. I have shown that principles of structuration vary; practices are institutionalised differently, and gender is materialised in disparate ways, depending on the community. I argue that a “strong” new materialist approach, proposing that space and bodies can be agentic in and of themselves, is not supported in my investigation of gendered embodiment in bdsm practice. My analysis of a number of ethnographies shows that in bdsm bodies do not “talk back.” They do not formulate new ways of “doing” gender and intimacy in bdsm exchange. In similar terms, the materiality of the space of the club, the fronts adopted and the apparatus used are not particularly transformative, and rarely facilitate a recasting of gender in novel ways. Even though the bdsm club is supposed to be a place where “everything goes” in terms of gender possibilities, in practice masculinity continues to be performed in hegemonic ways for the most part. It is

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only rarely that gender is articulated in truly novel ways. The emerging practice of pup play was discussed as an emblematic example of a line of flight. My work shows that a hegemonic logic of practice continues to organise bdsm exchange, and the ways in which gender is organised and performed “out there” in the “real world” penetrates and impacts the queer spaces of the bdsm club in a manner that gives higher status to hegemonic forms of masculinity and relegates others to the bottom rung of the status hierarchy. Such occurrences can be understood as the “aggregated effects” of sexuality-assemblages that “re-territorialise” masculinities in conventional, heteronormative and hegemonic gender schemas. References Alaimo, Staci and Susan Heckman. 2008. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” Material Feminisms. Edited by Staci Alaimo and Susan Heckman, 1–19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alldred, Pam and Nick Fox. 2017. “Materialism and Micropolitics in Sexualities Education Research.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education. Edited by Louisa Allen and Mary Lou Rasmussen, 1–21. New York: Palgrave. Alldred, Pam and Nick Fox. 2015. “The Sexuality-assemblages of Young Men: a New Materialist Analysis.” Sexualities 18(8): 905–920. Alldred, Pam and Nick Fox. 2007. Get Real About Sex. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Barad, Karen. 1998. “Getting Real. Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10(2): 87–128. Barad, Karen. 1997. “Meeting the Universe Half Way: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction.” Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science. Edited by Lynn Nelson and Jack Nelson, 161–194. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Beckman, Frida. 2011. Deleuze and Sex. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Clough, P.T. 2004. “Future Matters: Technoscience, Global Politics, and Cultural Criticism.” Social Text 22 (3): 1–23.

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Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialism.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–45. Durham: Duke University Press. Connell, Robert. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, Robert. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Sydney and Boston: Allen & Unwin. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Athone. Farrer, James, and Sonja Dale. 2014. “Sexless in Shanghai: Gendered Mobility Strategies in a Transnational Sexual Field.” In Sexual Fields. Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life. Edited by Adam Isaiah Green, 143–170. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. [1984] 1990. The History of Sexuality, Vol. ii: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. [1983] 1996. “An Ethics of Pleasure.” I Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961– 84. Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, 371–381. New York: Semiotext(e). Fox, Nick and Pam Alldred. 2013. “The Sexuality-assemblage: Desire, Affect, Anti-humanism.” The Sociological Review 61(4): 769–789. Green, Adam Isaiah. 2014a. “Introduction. Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life.” In Sexual Fields: Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life. Edited by Adam Isaiah Green, 1–23. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, Adam Isaiah. 2014b. “The Sexual Fields Framework.” In Sexual Fields: Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life. Edited by Adam Isaiah Green, 25–56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, Adam Isaiah. 2008a. “The Social Organization of Desire: A Sexual Field Approach.” Sociological Theory 26 (1): 25–50. Green, Adam Isaiah. 2008b. “Erotic Habitus: Towards a Sociology of Desire.” Theory and Society 37(6): 597–626. Hennen, Peter. 2014. “Sexual Field Theory. Some Theoretical Questions and Empirical Complications.” In Sexual Fields. Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life. Edited by Adam Isaiah Green, 1–23. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holt, Karen Marie. 2016. “Blacklisted: Boundaries, Violations, and Retaliatory Behavoiur in the BDSM Community.” Deviant Behavior 37(8): 917–930. Holt, Karen Marie. 2015. Negotiating Limits: Boundary Management in the Bondage/Discipline/Sadomasochism (BDSM) Community. Unpublished PhD thesis, City University of New York, USA. Martin, John Levi and Matt George. 2006. “Theories of Sexual Stratification: Towards an Analytics of the Sexual Field and a Theory of Sexual Capital.” Sociological Theory 24(2): 107–32.

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Martin, Richard Joseph. 2011. Powerful Exchanges: Ritual and Subjectivity in Berlin’s BDSM Scene. Unpublished PhD thesis, Princeton University, USA. Newmar, Staci. 2011. Playing on the Edge. Sadomasochism, Risk, Intimacy. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Newmar, Staci. 2010a. “Power Struggles: Pain and Authenticity in SM Play.” Symbolic Interaction 33(3): 389–411. Newmar, Staci. 2010b. “Rethinking Kink: Sadomasochism as Serious Leisure.” Qualitative Sociology 33: 313–331. Newmar, Staci. 2008. “Becoming a Sadomasochist. Integrating Self and Other in Ethnographic Analysis.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 37(5): 619–643. Turley, Emma Louise. 2011. “It Started When I Barked Once When I Was Licking His Boots!” A Phenomenological Study of the Experience of Bondage, Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism (BDSM). Unpublished PhD ­thesis, University Of Huddersfield, UK. Weiss, Margot. 2011. Techniques of Pleasure. BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Durham: Duke University Press. Wingnall, Liam and Mark McCormack. 2017. “An Exploratory Study of a New Kink Activity: Pup Play.” Archives of Sexual Behaviour 46: 801–811.

Part 5 Afterword

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Chapter 13

Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights Sara Davidmann Abstract Michel Foucault argues that heterotopias are counterhegemonic sites which existing sites in culture are inverted and contested (1986, 24). In this essay, I suggest that the photography studio can be considered as a heterotopic space for lgbtq+ people and provide an outline of my project Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights in support of this. The project portrays some of the many gender and sexual identities being expressed today. Contradicting the idea that the two-sexes/two-genders systems are the only way of being, this work proposes that all human beings are equally natural and that we are all “earthly delights.”

Keywords Michel Foucault – collaborative photography – heterotopia – lgbtq+ – gender – ­sexuality – identity

In his 1986 essay, “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault describes his theory of heterotopias. Foucault argues that heterotopias are “outside of all places.” They are counterhegemonic sites in which “all other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986, 24). Foucault proposes that gardens, boarding schools, rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, cemeteries, brothels and mirrors all constitute heterotopic sites. In this brief essay, I would like to suggest that the photography studio can also be considered as a heterotopic space for lgbtq+ people and I provide an outline of my project Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights in support of this. Photography studios have a history of offering a safe space for lgbtq+ people to express their gender and sexual identities. The studios of Maryam Sahinyan (1911–1996) and Hashem el Madani (1928–2017) are powerful examples of this. Photography studios can be understood as liminal spaces: outside

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e­ veryday life and beyond the pressures of the visual regime of the street or the ­identity space of the home. Within this space, the individual can be whoever they perceive themselves to be. Furthermore, this perception is recorded in a lasting image that can be re-visited at will. In societies that reject lgbtq+ people as equal citizens, and thus enforce a masquerade of heteronormativity, photography studios such as Sahinyan’s and el Madani’s offered important spaces and places of affirmation for people identifying beyond the heteronormative. Supporting this notion of the performative potential of photographs, Les Back argues that portrait photography is not always based on the photographer’s vision: Lenses are not always about the control and fixing of subjects. To see photography merely as a governing technology misses the instability and complexity of the drama that unfolds on either side of the lens […]. It is a mistake, I think, to see the lens as only looking one way. (2004, 136) With my photography I invite people into a conversation, rather than a one-way process. All the people who came to be photographed for the Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights project are people that I knew already. Many are friends, some are from a London queer community that I belonged to at the time, and some are people I had previously photographed for earlier projects. The way I usually work is that participants and I spend hours together, sometimes days, taking photographs and talking. Very rarely have I photographed someone just once. During the time we spend together, a relationship develops between the people I collaborate with and myself that may last for several years. Some participants came to be photographed for the project on their own, while others came with significant others. Frequently, but not always, when people came together, they were lovers in the traditional manner of being physically intimate. Love between participants also took other forms. For example, Francis and Nat are both trans women. Francis, who is older, had taken on the role of being a mentor to Nat, giving her advice and guidance. Sometimes, when people see the photograph of Francis and Nat, they ask if they are mother and daughter. While Francis and Nat are not biologically related, their relationship could be said to be similar to a mother/daughter relationship. Similarly, looking at the photograph of Gerry and Gary one might assume that they are gay lovers. Gerry and Gary are seen to be comfortable with their bodies, and at ease being naked and physical with each other. Although they pose together with their arms around each other, their relationship is one of friendship. As well as being photographed, everyone who took part in the project described their own gender and sexual identities. These were recorded and

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e­ xtracts from these, in the participants’ own words, became the more detailed captions that accompany the photographs. These captions reveal that gender and sexual identities are not always visible or readable, and that boundaries can be fluid and flexible. The title of this photographic project refers to the Creation myth of Adam and Eve, in which the polarities of “female” and “male” are depicted as the natural order for human beings. In contrast, the photographs in Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights portray some of the many different gender and sexual identities that are being expressed today. Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights puts forward that all human beings are equally natural, and that we are all “earthly delights,” contradicting the idea that the system of two sexes and two genders is the only way of being. In line with this, I would argue that the Eve, Adam and the Garden of Earthly Delights photography studio offers a space that represents, contests and inverts the heteronormative premise and constitutes a heterotopic lgbtq+ space. 1

Participants’ Descriptions of Their Gender and Sexual Identities

T, work in progress/genderbender and sex positive Lucille, ladyboi and queer Adrien, female/ex male and glam dyke Nat, open-minded female (assigned male at birth) and heterosexual Francis, pre-op transsexual and the ‘ultimate’ bisexual Jason, man and queer Tracey, woman and queer Kitty, she-male woman and lesbian Tracey, feminine but with moments of androgyny and queer Ali, changes day-to-day with butch days and femme days, and queer Gerry, trans man and bisexual Gary, bio-male and bisexual References Back, L. 2004 . “Listening with our eyes: Portraiture as urban encounter.” In Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the sociological imagination, edited by Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman, 132–146. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27.

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Figure 13.1

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T and Lucille, C-type print 2008

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Figure 13.2

Adrien, C-type print 2008

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Figure 13.3

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Nat and Francis, C-type print 2008

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Figure 13.4

Jason and Tracey, C-type print 2008

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Figure 13.5

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Kitty, C-type print 2008

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Figure 13.6

Tracey and Ali, C-type print 2008

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Figure 13.7

Davidmann

Gerry and Gary, C-type print 2008

Index Adaptation 3, 6, 14, 16, 21–22, 32, 119, 146, 153, 252 Affect (noun) 58–59, 73, 146, 175, 177–178, 180–181, 185–186, 188, 190–192, 199, 201, 212, 218, 245–247, 257 Affect theory 37, 53, 57–58, 63, 68, 175, 177, 185, 247, 251–252, 260, 263 Affection 23, 27–28, 32, 41, 46, 50, 52–53, 59, 155–156, 166, 205, 209, 218 Agency 5, 13, 16, 18, 26, 31, 40, 42–46, 48, 50, 52, 90, 104, 108–112, 114, 117–121, 144–145, 147, 152–153, 159–160, 165–166, 168–171, 173, 177, 182–183, 185, 197, 205–206, 220–224, 240, 244–245, 259, 263 Agent 1, 5, 7, 17, 19, 22, 30, 40, 43–45, 48, 59, 110–111, 113–114, 116, 118–119, 144, 147, 149–151, 177, 183–184, 186, 189, 220, 224, 227, 231, 240, 243–245, 247–248, 251–252, 258, 261 Agential cut 7, 18, 225 Agential realism 5, 40, 44, 46, 50, 104, 109, 114, 177, 184, 223–224, 234, 240 Aggregation 19, 245, 247–251, 257, 260, 262 Aggression 110, 114, 180, 190–191, 196 Alaimo, Stacy 5, 33, 36, 39–40, 42–43, 45–46, 48–49, 51–52, 143, 157–158, 243, 262 Alcohol xi, 176–188, 190, 193–194, 196–201, 237 Alldred, Pam 243–247, 251, 257–258, 260, 262–263 Alternative 6, 15, 20, 22, 31, 128, 136, 199, 213, 216, 225–226 Ambivalence 54–55, 62, 73, 134, 258 Androgyny xi, 25–27, 33, 79, 87, 93–94, 125, 130, 258, 269 Animal 18, 28, 30, 36–37, 40, 46, 104, 108–110, 112–114, 116, 119, 121, 125, 159, 224, 227–228, 233–234, 237–239 Animal bridegroom 103–105, 108–119 Anthropocene 35–37, 41, 45–51, 53 Anthropocentric 18, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 46–50, 113, 119 Apparatus 6–7, 11, 19, 244, 248–250, 261 Art x, 6, 33–35, 37, 39, 41, 50–53, 57–58, 69, 71, 74, 90, 93, 117, 137, 142, 163, 173 Asexual 28, 95

Assemblage 35, 45, 131, 200, 243–248, 257, 259–263 Atwood, Margaret 164–166, 167 Autonomy 45, 110, 112, 159–160, 164–171, 173 Aylonit 25, 27 Barad, Karen 5–6, 11–12, 18–19, 22, 30–32, 34–35, 40, 42–46, 48–51, 104, 109–111, 114, 117–118, 120, 143–144, 147, 150–151, 156–157, 177, 183–184, 198, 220–221, 223–226, 231, 234, 240–241, 245, 262 Barbin, Herculine 2, 8, 15–17, 33 bdsm 243–245, 248–264 bdsm clubs 243–245, 247–250, 252–258, 261–263 Beauvoir, Simone de 12, 55, 124, 234, 241 Becomings ix, 5–6, 19, 21, 33, 37, 40, 44, 46, 49–50, 53, 60, 69, 82, 86, 99–100, 110, 122–124, 126, 131–132, 134–137, 146–147, 149, 156, 183, 235, 238, 252, 264 Bible, Hebrew 11, 22–29, 31–33 Binary 3–4, 25–26, 31, 43, 63, 81–84, 87–88, 182, 223, 231–233, 255, 257 Biology 4–5, 12–14, 17, 19–20, 28, 32, 35, 48, 54–55, 58, 73, 111, 222–223, 233–235, 240–241, 246–247, 268–269 Biopower 14, 30 Bipolar 16, 22 Bisexual 100, 136, 157, 178, 207, 269 Blue Wedding to the Sea 34–35, 46–47, 53 Body xi, 1–3, 5–7, 11–20, 22–27, 29, 31–32, 35, 38, 40–43, 45–49, 51, 66, 79–82, 85–87, 95, 100, 102–106, 108–111, 113–114, 116–117, 120, 122, 124, 126, 131–133, 136, 141–144, 148–152, 156–157, 166, 168–169, 174–187, 189–190, 192–197, 220, 223–225, 227–228, 230–235, 237–238, 240–241, 243–253, 256–257, 260–261, 268 Bohr, Niels 5, 43, 223–224 Borderlinking 57–58, 60, 62, 64, 68–70, 72–74 Boundary 13, 16–19, 22, 28, 43, 47, 82, 110, 134, 149, 156, 159–160, 162, 168, 170–172, 177, 183–185, 188–190, 192–193, 196–197, 218, 263, 269

278 Bourdieu, Pierre 243–247, 257, 262 Braidotti, Rosi 5, 41, 49, 51–52, 122–126, 130–134, 136–137, 223, 245, 247, 262 Britain xi, 102, 115, 123, 178–179, 199–201, 205–216, 218 Butch 6, 79, 81–88, 90–94, 96–102, 252, 269 Butler, Judith 1, 4, 6, 8, 11–13, 15–19, 21–23, 25, 29–32, 58, 74, 87, 99–100, 105–106, 109, 120, 122, 134–135, 137–138, 177, 181, 183, 196, 220–225, 231–232, 234, 239–241 Cahil Periler 141, 146, 152–153 See also Ignorant Fairies Carter, Angela 6, 122–129, 131, 133–134, 136–138 Categorisation 23, 26–27, 36, 50, 82–83, 89, 132, 136, 175, 230, 252 Causality 19, 31, 44, 149, 156 Chabon, Michael 167, 173 Chaos – Chaotic 20–24, 26–28, 31–32, 184, 238, 254 Childbearing 23–25, 116, 233 Children 13–14, 23, 25–26, 28, 39, 54–57, 59–62, 64, 66, 68–71, 73, 79, 86, 95, 105–106, 115–116, 120, 133, 137, 155, 163, 205, 210, 212–213, 215–217, 236 Choice 14–15, 38, 59, 60, 62, 84, 91, 116, 169–170, 200, 211, 237, 252 Cixous, Hélène 4, 12, 55, 73–74 Clothes 79, 82–83, 88–90, 92–93, 100, 119, 148, 231–232, 237, 239–240 Clubs 154, 179–181, 187, 190, 192, 199–201 See also “bdsm clubs” Collaborative photography ix, 267–268 Community ix, 27–28, 34, 38–39, 41–42, 61, 84, 86, 88, 90, 92–94, 98, 100–101, 121, 129, 145, 158, 161–162, 211, 240, 243–244, 250, 252, 253, 255, 258–261, 263, 268 Complexity 1, 4, 7, 14, 20–21, 25, 28, 36, 38, 55–56, 69, 73–74, 83–84, 114, 120, 123, 132, 154, 171–172, 175, 177–178, 180–181, 190, 197–198, 207, 221, 224, 241, 245, 247–248, 250, 268 Conceptualisations 5, 7, 11–14, 21, 25, 30, 39–40, 44–45, 47–48, 83, 91, 99, 111, 126, 143, 147–148, 171, 174, 181–182, 184–185, 200, 206–207, 224, 229, 245, 261 Constructionism xi, 1–6, 11–18, 20–21, 23, 25–26, 30–33, 36, 44, 54, 56, 59–60, 64,

Index 70, 74, 101–109, 111–112, 116, 127, 141–143, 145, 156–160, 165–166, 169, 175, 177, 181–182, 184, 189, 196, 206, 208, 220–221, 223, 234, 240, 245–247, 250 Contestation 3, 7, 16, 62, 83, 85, 117, 185, 197, 252, 267, 269 Countering 6–7, 29, 65, 84, 92, 105, 113–114, 123, 126, 128, 156, 238, 254, 267 Crossdressing 79, 88–89, 90, 95, 100, 252, 255, 257 Cultural representation 90, 92, 95, 103–104, 182 Cyborg 101, 125, 130–133, 138, 169–170 D/s 249–250, 260–261 Dance floor 175, 177, 181, 184–193, 195–197 Darwin, Charles 20–21, 27, 31, 33 Daughter 7, 24, 27, 29, 54, 56–57, 59, 62–64, 66–74, 112–113, 125, 167, 205, 207–219, 268 Deconstruction 3–4, 12, 43, 94, 143, 152 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 19–21, 27, 29, 31–32, 87, 129–131, 137, 245, 247, 250, 257, 260, 262–263 Derrida, Jacques 1, 3–4, 8, 12 Desirability 86, 113, 169, 192, 252, 255, 257, 259 Desire x, 28–29, 35, 37–40, 42, 45, 51, 53, 61–63, 66, 73, 79, 81–82, 86–90, 93, 96, 99, 101–102, 112, 122, 125–126, 132, 150, 154–156, 159–161, 166–171, 173, 176–178, 180–181, 185–191, 192, 195–199, 212, 218–219, 231, 246–251, 253, 255, 257–260, 263 Deviation xi, 11–12, 14–17, 19, 22–27, 30–31, 33, 91–92, 102, 116, 144, 164, 184, 221, 233, 263 Différance feminism 3–4, 12, 55, 69, 73, 165, 237 Difference 3–4, 7–8, 12–14, 18, 20–21, 30, 44, 56, 58, 63, 86–88, 93, 114, 137–138, 154, 159, 200, 208, 218, 223, 230–232, 237, 241, 262 Diffraction 6–7, 11, 18, 20, 22, 29–31, 147, 225, 241 Disability 17, 23–24, 31 Disciplinary Power 222, 228, 230

Index Discipline 14, 30, 220, 234, 237, 240–241, 263–264 Discourse 2–7, 11–13, 15–17, 20, 22, 25–27, 3o–32, 36, 39, 44, 49, 54, 56, 67, 70, 74, 83–84, 90, 92, 104–113, 115, 117, 119–120, 127–128, 141–149, 151, 156–157, 160, 169, 174–175, 177, 181–185, 189, 192–193, 197–198, 201, 206, 220–225, 228, 230–231, 234–235, 237–238, 240–241, 253 Dominance 35, 39, 47, 100, 105, 161, 207, 229–230, 233, 249, 251–253, 255–261, 264 Drinking 155, 175, 177–180, 185–187, 193–197, 198–201, 227 Ecosexuality 6, 34–47, 49–51, 53 Effeminate 25, 91 Empathy 23, 27 Entanglement 1, 3, 5–7, 13, 18–19, 22, 28, 31, 34, 38, 40, 42–51, 55–56, 58, 60, 71, 79, 103, 110–111, 142–148, 150–151, 157, 159, 166–167, 171–172, 175, 177, 184–185, 187, 189–190, 195–198, 224, 241, 243–244, 256 Environment 34–42, 44, 46–51, 183–184, 189, 200, 236, 246 Epistemology 13, 17–19, 34, 36, 39, 120, 224 Eros 40, 159–160, 167, 238, 248 Erotic xi, 38–40, 44, 46, 137, 150, 154, 167–168, 236, 239–240, 243–244, 246, 248–261, 263 Essentialism 1, 4–5, 12, 14, 64, 73, 83–85, 92, 106, 115, 181, 222–223, 239, 247, 253 Ethics x, 37, 39, 46, 48–51, 57, 73, 122, 127–129, 131, 134, 137, 153, 158, 170, 225, 251, 263 Ethnicity 29, 153, 207 Ettinger, Bracha L. 54, 56–63, 65–66, 68–70, 72–74 Eunuch 23–24, 150–151, 158 Evolvings 3, 21, 23, 32, 82, 134, 155, 176 Exclusion 4, 23–25, 27, 44, 81, 118, 128–129, 136, 179, 184 Experiment 19–20, 28–29, 39, 170, 178 Fairy Tale ix, xii, 103–117, 119–121, 123, 163 Family xi, 3, 23, 27–29, 55, 84, 87–88, 94, 113, 117, 119, 134, 148, 150, 153–155, 167, 207–209, 211, 213, 215–219, 222, 236, 242 Fascinance 57, 63

279 Fashion 79, 81–82, 100, 179 Father 22–23, 28–29, 60, 63, 66, 69, 112–114, 117, 119, 133, 161, 212, 239 Female 3, 17, 25–27, 31, 39, 47, 81–82, 85–86, 89, 95, 98, 100–105, 107–112, 114–115, 119–121, 123–126, 128–136, 153, 167, 169, 174, 226, 229–236, 239, 242, 257, 269 Female gentleman 79, 95, 98, 102 Female masculinity 79, 86, 88, 93, 95, 101 Femaleness 132, 164, 169 Feminine 58–59, 63–64, 73, 84, 87, 99, 107, 121, 125, 134, 178–179, 193, 199, 232, 269 Femininity 3, 39, 73, 83, 130, 132, 190, 198, 222, 231–232, 258 Feminism ix–xii, 3–4, 8, 12, 19–20, 32–40, 42–43, 46–53, 55, 69, 73–74, 83, 87, 92–95, 97, 99–102, 104, 106–107, 110, 112, 120–124, 126–129, 134–138, 143–144, 157–158, 165–166, 169, 173, 182, 198–200, 201, 211, 237, 241–242, 262 Femme 83–84, 86–88, 92, 94, 100–102, 269 Field, sexual 157, 243–245, 247–257, 259–261, 263–264 Fluidity ix–x, 7, 33, 79, 83–84, 99, 102, 109, 119, 141–142, 145–147, 155–156, 233, 252–253, 255, 269 Foreign 24, 28, 115–116, 122, 136 Fox, Nick 243–247, 251, 257–258, 260, 262–263 Freedom x, 86, 89, 104, 110–111, 114, 117, 121, 127, 148, 151–152, 157, 164, 166, 168, 179, 211, 217, 222, 225, 227–229, 235–236, 241–242, 244, 250, 253, 255–256 Gender norms xi, 22, 24, 31, 33, 157, 180, 200, 255, 257 Gender Studies ix–x, 12, 15, 17, 20, 138, 182–183 Gender Trouble 4, 8, 16, 32, 120, 198, 241 Genderqueer 11–12, 16, 22–24, 26–27, 31, 82, 187 Genitals 25–26, 90, 160, 222, 253 Governmentality 2, 14, 21, 99, 105, 179, 200, 268 Green, Adam 244–246, 248–249, 252–253, 257, 263 Grosz, Elizabeth 5, 11–12, 19–22, 27, 31, 33, 87, 101, 104, 110–111, 120, 143, 158, 223

280 Guattari, Félix 5, 19–20, 32, 131, 245, 247, 250, 257, 260, 263 Gurevich, Maria 180–181, 185, 198, 199 Habitus 246–253, 263 Hamam 141–142, 146, 148 Hammam 144, 148–150, 152 Handler, Daniel 166–167, 173 Haraway, Donna 5–6, 8, 11–13, 17–19, 22, 30–31, 33, 36, 52, 82, 101, 125, 130–131, 138, 223, 225, 242 Harem Suare 141–142, 146, 150, 152 Hegemonic 1, 7, 15, 84, 115, 180, 182, 198, 244–245, 247–250, 255–259, 261–262 Hermaphrodite 2, 8, 33 Heteronormativity 7, 12, 27, 40, 47, 87, 99, 107, 133, 148–149, 153, 155, 178, 231, 245, 247–248, 254–255, 257, 262, 268–269 See also “Norms” Heterosexuality x, 22, 39, 47, 82, 92, 100, 119, 127–128, 135–136, 138, 148–149, 155–156, 176, 178, 180, 185, 189, 196, 198, 200, 201, 205, 207–208, 210, 257, 269 Heterotopia 2–3, 7, 141–142, 144–146, 148–153, 156–157, 160, 164, 171–172, 175, 184–185, 197, 267, 269 Hierarchy 3, 20, 22, 27, 46, 83, 106, 129, 207, 214, 216–217, 241, 245, 250, 252, 256, 259, 262 History ix, xii, 3, 13, 39, 46, 53, 79, 81, 83–84, 88, 93, 100–101, 120, 123, 129, 136–137, 142, 159–161, 164, 181, 189, 207, 233, 267 History of Sexuality 1–2, 8, 13, 33, 101, 221, 241, 263 Holt, Karen 244, 254, 256, 263 Homosexuality 14, 82, 90–91, 148, 154, 167, 178, 200, 239 Hong Kong x–xi, 7, 99, 102, 205–219 Humanism 13, 17, 49–50, 134, 168, 171, 219 Ignorant Fairies 141–142, 146, 152 See also Cahil Periler Immaterial 13, 15, 19–22, 31, 143 Inclusion 11–12, 15, 22–25, 27, 31, 50, 82, 118, 153 Incorporeal 20, 143, 151, 158 Individuation 56–57, 67, 69, 73 Infertility 23–25, 27

Index Intelligibility 4, 14–16, 19, 22–28, 31, 88, 209, 251, 260 Interaction 1, 18, 40, 43–44, 50, 58, 105, 111, 134, 145, 151, 157, 179, 185–186, 199, 201, 206, 223–224, 226, 231, 240, 246–247, 264 Intersection 1, 12, 40, 85, 94, 156, 241 Intersex 15, 17, 23, 26, 31, 33 Intimacy xi, 35–40, 42, 44, 46–52, 57, 59, 72, 109, 175, 197, 205, 207–208, 211, 213, 215–216, 218–219, 243–244, 248–249, 256, 261, 264, 268 Intra-action xi, 5, 7, 18–20, 22, 27, 37, 42–46, 48–51, 55, 57, 74, 105, 110–112, 114, 118–119, 141, 144–145, 147, 149–150, 156, 175, 177, 181, 185, 189, 194–196, 224–225, 227–228, 231, 234, 240, 243, 247 Irigaray, Luce 4, 8, 12, 46, 52, 55, 69, 73–74 Iterability 1, 4, 16, 19, 29–31, 117, 184, 220, 231 Kristeva, Julia 4, 12, 54–61, 63–66, 68–69, 71, 73–74 Kroeber, Theodora 57, 59, 70 Le Guin, Ursula K. 54–63, 65–75 Lesbian 42, 82, 84, 86–88, 90, 92–94, 99–102, 135–136, 138, 142, 200, 207, 209–211, 214, 219, 269 lgbtq+ 179, 210, 267–269 Liberation 1, 6, 93, 110, 131, 133, 136, 166, 169, 171, 190, 229, 235–237 Lines of flight 20, 244, 259–260 See also “Nomadic lines” Location 123, 127, 130, 136, 171, 182–184, 186, 188, 207, 213, 215, 243 Lorde, Audre 12, 81, 94, 102 Love Studies 4, 34–37, 40–41, 43, 45, 50–53 Loyalty 16, 22, 28, 30, 130 Male 3, 12, 15, 17, 25–26, 31, 39, 47, 81–82, 87–90, 98, 102–104, 108–109, 112–114, 118–119, 125, 129, 131, 133–134, 136, 151, 153, 164–166, 169, 210, 227–231, 236, 238–239, 254, 256–257, 269 Male-to-female 133, 153 Marriage xii, 22–23, 25–27, 29–30, 32, 35, 41–42, 46–49, 59, 62, 70, 107–108, 111–113, 115–116, 119, 124, 133, 135, 148, 167, 210–215, 217, 235, 237

Index Masculinity xi, 3, 25, 39, 62, 79, 81–83, 86–90, 92–93, 95, 99–102, 119, 125–126, 172, 178, 196, 198–199, 222, 230–231, 245, 247–248, 251, 253–263 Masochism 130, 249, 252, 263–264 Materiality xi, 2–3, 5–7, 11–13, 15–22, 25, 30–31, 43–46, 49, 52–53, 79, 82, 94, 98–99, 103–105, 108–112, 114, 119, 142–144, 146–149, 151–152, 156, 175–177, 181–187, 189, 192–193, 196–198 220, 223–225, 231, 240, 243–248, 260–261–262 Maternal 46, 55–63, 66, 68–69, 73, 160, 164, 218 Matrixial 54, 56–57, 60, 62–63, 68–70, 73–74 Matter 5–7, 16, 18–20, 31–32, 40, 42–46, 48–52, 102, 105, 111, 117, 119–220, 143, 147, 157, 159, 161, 168, 171, 183–184, 198, 223–224, 241, 243, 245–247, 257, 261, 263 Measurement 1, 6, 18–19 Melancholia 56, 64–66, 71, 73, 74 Menstruation 26, 233–235, 240 Methodology 3–6, 12–13, 18–21, 30–31, 37, 88, 104, 111, 146–147, 178, 185–186, 200–201, 207, 218, 225, 241, 244, 269 Mishnah 24–26 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 182, 201 Molar 19–22, 27–29, 31–32, 257 Molecular 19–22, 27–28, 31–32, 122, 124, 131–132, 136 Monster 8, 17, 33, 88, 98, 159–160, 163–165, 167, 171–172, 174 Monstrosity 21, 121, 160, 164, 166, 171–173 More-than-human 34–36, 40, 43–45, 49–50 Mother 7, 39–40, 53, 54–74, 79, 92, 116–119, 129–131, 133, 166, 169, 174, 205–219, 232–233, 239, 268 Motherhood 55–56, 58–62, 64, 68, 72–75 Mother-daughter relationships 67–68, 70, 72, 213–216 Narrative xii, 11, 23–24, 28–31, 62, 66, 69, 81, 83–84, 86, 92, 103–105, 108–109, 113, 126, 128, 133, 137, 141–148, 152–159, 164–165, 167, 170–172, 176–178, 181, 187, 190–193, 195–197, 200, 208–209, 218, 244 Nature 2, 4–5, 13–14, 17–21, 30–31, 34, 37–41, 43–47, 49–53, 56, 60, 65, 83–84, 89, 92–93, 107, 110–111, 113, 130–131, 135, 142,

281 164, 169–170, 172, 181–182, 183, 188–190, 196, 220, 222–224, 227–229, 231–239, 241, 245–246, 267, 269 Network 3, 5, 42, 47, 49, 84, 92, 158, 244 New materialism 1–2, 6, 11–13, 16, 18–19, 30–32, 34–35, 37, 40, 43, 45–46, 48–52, 102–104, 109–111, 120–121, 137, 145–147, 159, 173, 175, 177, 183–185, 189, 197, 220–221, 223, 234, 240, 243–245, 247, 251, 261–263 Newmar, Staci 244, 248–249, 251–252, 254, 256, 258–259, 264 Nightlife 7, 175–185, 189–190, 192, 194, 200 Nighttime economy 178–180, 199 Nomadic lines 19–22, 28–32, 122, 124–126, 136–137, 160, 162 Nomadism 122–127, 131–132, 134, 136 Non-anthropocentric 34–35, 37, 40–41, 46, 48–50 Non-human 5, 7, 13, 17–18, 22, 113, 149, 159, 168, 170–171, 176, 183, 220, 223–224, 226–227, 231, 234, 240, 243, 245 Non-organic 5, 13, 17–18, 22, 30, 234 Norms xi, 4, 11, 13–14, 16–17, 20–24, 26–27, 30–31, 33, 35–36, 42, 83, 92, 99, 130, 134, 144, 153, 156–157, 160, 173, 178, 180, 184–185, 187–188, 189, 191–193, 195–200, 210–212, 221–224, 228, 236, 240, 244, 248, 250–252, 255, 257, 259 (See also “Heteronormativity”) Öcalan, Abdullah 226, 228, 230, 235–237, 242 Ontology 5, 13, 19, 22, 31, 37, 43–46, 49, 51–52, 104, 106, 110–111, 114, 118, 120–121, 126, 143, 147, 150, 152, 156, 158, 173, 224, 245, 249–252, 254–256, 258, 260, 263 Özpetek, Ferzan 7, 141–158 Patriarchal 4, 28, 55, 64, 68, 94–95, 105–106, 108, 111–116, 119, 127, 130, 148–149, 153, 155, 165, 229–230, 233, 247, 256 Performativity 2, 4, 6, 15, 18, 25, 31–32, 46, 82–84, 93, 105–106, 109, 120, 157, 181, 183, 189, 198, 222–225, 227–228, 232, 234, 240–241, 255, 258, 268 Perversion 2, 13–15 Phenomena 4–5, 15–19, 30–31, 43–45, 50, 68, 110, 127–128, 142–143, 149, 176–178,

282 Phenomena (cont.) 181–182, 184–185, 186, 198, 221–222, 224–225, 234, 238, 247, 264 Photography ix–x, 7, 43, 267–269 Piercy, Marge 169–170, 174 pkk 7, 220–221, 225–226, 228–238, 240–241 Polygyny 22, 29, 117, 135 Post-constructionism 60, 141–143, 158 Posthumanism 6, 13, 18, 32, 37, 48–49, 51–52, 120, 157, 198, 241, 262–263 Power 1, 3, 6, 11, 13–15, 17, 20, 30, 36–37, 39, 41, 48, 53–55, 59, 61, 70, 94, 105–120, 130–131, 135, 137, 150–151, 158, 160, 165, 167, 170–172, 221–222, 228, 234, 236–238, 240, 242, 246, 249, 251–252, 255, 257–259, 263–264 Pratchett, Terry 168, 174 Precariousness 4, 134, 137 Prediscursive 15, 105, 223 Pregnancy 29, 129–130, 133, 150, 155, 212, 215, 230 Proliferation 16, 21 Property 22, 111, 168 Protection 13, 21, 25–28, 32, 35, 61, 94, 160, 162, 165, 199, 214–215, 227, 229–230, 236 Psychoanalysis 55–56, 61, 69, 74, 87, 90–91 Pursuit, sexual 168, 175–178, 180–182, 184–197, 200 Queer ix–x, 7, 28, 38–40, 42, 52, 79, 82–83, 86–87, 89, 92–96, 98–102, 133, 137, 148–149, 152–153, 157–158, 198, 245, 250, 256, 262, 268–269 Rabbinic xi, 11, 22, 24–26, 31–33, 159 Rape 29–30, 32, 39, 99, 129–130, 133, 199 Reconfiguration 19, 31, 38, 47, 110–111, 147 Reflexivity 84, 205–206, 208–210, 214, 217–218 Relata 5–7, 18, 22, 30–31, 43–44, 74, 114, 226 Representationalism 6, 74, 109, 183 Reproduction 2, 21–23, 25–29, 31, 38, 74, 133, 180, 182–183, 197, 222, 233, 237 Resistance x, 2, 6, 11, 14, 16, 46, 79, 83–84, 88, 90, 93–94, 113–115, 124, 130, 165, 206, 208, 214, 224–225, 245, 255, 260 Rhizomatics 19–20, 32–33, 101, 131, 260

Index Rich, Adrienne 55, 68, 75, 125, 138, 164–165, 174 Ritual 16, 30, 35, 41–42, 46, 129, 162, 185, 189, 264 Rupkatha 115, 118 S/M 249, 253, 263–264 Sadism 128, 130, 136, 249, 251, 254, 258, 264 Same-sex 14, 26, 28, 41–42, 91, 101 Saris 24–25, 27 Segmentarity 19, 22, 27–28, 136 Separation 5, 44, 46, 57, 59–61, 64–66, 69–70, 72–73, 132, 160, 183, 190, 198, 213, 224–225, 227–231, 233–234, 238–239 Shelley, Mary W. 163–166, 169, 172–174 Signification 4, 14–15, 17–18, 20, 22, 24–26, 31, 43, 47, 56, 58, 65–66, 69, 82, 88, 98, 113, 117, 152, 166–167, 170–171, 181, 213, 236, 239, 252 Son 22, 24, 28, 30, 60–61, 63, 116, 118–119, 148, 150, 167 Sprinkle, Annie 34–35, 37–42, 45–51, 53 Status 26, 28, 49, 55, 106, 113, 116–119, 125, 127, 134, 180, 192, 215, 245, 251–252, 255–260, 262 Stephens, Elizabeth 34–35, 37–42, 45–51, 53, 83, 102 Sterile 23–25 Structure 1, 3, 19, 23, 33, 40, 61, 67–68, 83, 106, 112, 114, 116–117, 143, 146, 149, 165, 185–186, 201, 206, 222, 225, 231, 245–251, 253, 261 Submission 108–109, 112–115, 117, 119, 222, 228, 238, 249, 251–261, 264 Subversion 4, 8, 11, 16, 18–19, 21–22, 29–32, 84–85, 105–106, 120–121, 130, 149–150, 198, 222–223, 225, 228, 230, 233, 240–241, 254–255, 260 Technique 2, 6, 20, 200, 230, 251–252, 264 Territorialisation 20, 172, 226–227, 236, 245, 247–248, 250–251, 255–262 The Dispossessed 60–61, 74 The Passion of New Eve 122, 124, 126, 128–129, 134–135, 137 The Second Sex 12, 241 Theatre 3, 53, 99 Theatrical 35, 83, 92–93, 102, 134

Index Tolerance 11–12, 14–17, 21–24, 27, 29–31, 33, 56, 65, 98 Tosefta 25–27 Trans-corporeality 48–49, 51 Transformation 5, 14, 17, 20–21, 41, 44–46, 51, 58–60, 65, 68, 73, 113–114, 116–118, 123–124, 129, 131–132, 134–135, 142–143, 146, 155, 170, 219, 225, 237, 244, 251, 260–261 Transgender ix, 35, 82, 100–101, 153, 269 Trauma 59–60, 63–65, 67, 69, 72–73, 86 Truth 1–2, 84, 86, 118–119, 126, 178 Tumtum xi, 25, 33 Turley, Emma Louise 244, 249, 255, 258–259, 264

283 Unfolding 6, 20–22, 27–28, 31, 60, 153, 156, 189, 196, 217, 249–251, 258, 268 Unintelligibility 15, 22–24, 31 Uterine period 57–58, 60, 62 Variation 4, 7, 14, 16, 19–22, 24–26, 31, 207, 240, 252 Violence 15–16, 22–23, 25–27, 30–33, 35, 39, 62, 69, 82, 87, 92, 94, 102, 109, 129, 137, 191, 196, 200, 226, 256–257, 263 Weakness 28, 239 Weavings 1, 6–7, 55–56, 60, 67, 71, 83–84, 88, 142, 145, 147, 171 Wecker, Helene 167–169, 174 Weiss, Margot 244, 248–253, 255–258, 264