Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation 9781478002277

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V E X Y ­TH I N G

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VEXY ­T HI N G ON GENDER AND LIBERATION I M A N I P E R RY ...

D U K E U N IVE R SIT Y P R ES S Durham and London 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Text designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Cover designed by Julienne Alexander Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Westchester Book Group Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Perry, Imani, [date-­] author. Title: Vexy ­thing : on gender and liberation / Imani Perry. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018007282 (print) | lccn 2018017756 (ebook) isbn 9781478002277 (ebook) isbn 9781478000600 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478000815 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Patriarchy. | Feminism. Classification: lcc gn479.6 (ebook) | lcc gn479.6 .p47 2018 (print) | ddc 306.85/8—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018007282

Lezley Saar, Thérèse Raquin, 2111. Mixed-media painting. Courtesy of the artist.

for my sons issa garner rabb and freeman diallo perry rabb T O O U R C O L L E C T IVE L IB E RAT ION

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CONTENTS

acknowl­edgments introduction

ix 1

1  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seafaring, Sovereignty, and the Self 14 Of Patriarchy and the Conditions of Modernity 2  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Producing Personhood 42 The Rise of Capitalism and the Western Subject INTERLUDE 1  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

How Did We Get ­Here?

86

Nobody’s Supposed to Be ­Here

3  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Ether 98 Neoliberalism and Entrepreneurial ­Woman 4  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simulacra Child 129 Hypermedia and the Mediated Subject 5  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sticks Broken at the River 151 The Security State and the Vio­lence of Manhood

INTERLUDE 2  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Returning to the Witches

171

6  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unmaking the Territory and Remapping the Landscape 177 7  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Utterance of My Name 199 Invitation and the Disorder of Desire 8  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Vicar of Liberation 226 notes

255

bibliography

273

index

283

ACKNOW L­E DGME NTS

It is difficult to name every­one who taught you that freedom was a possibility. So I ­won’t utter all their names, but their number is vast, and their influence ranges from passing comments to lifelong lessons learned from beloveds, art, and letters. I am grateful for ­every single one. In par­tic­u­lar, I thank my brilliant editor Kenneth Wissoker for his faith and steady encouragement, and the entire Duke University Press community. Likewise, I gave a number of lectures related to this book and received wonderful feedback. I thank the Department of En­glish and Department of Africana Studies at Cornell University; the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University; the English Department at Washington and Lee University; the Department of En­glish at the University of California, Berkeley; the Department of En­glish at Emory University; the Department of Philosophy at Rowan University; and the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. Most of all, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my home Department of African American Studies at Prince­ton University, a fantastic group of colleagues as well as undergraduate and gradu­ate students whose thoughts inspire, whose work moves me, and whose support for my research and deep collegiality I cherish. In addition to communities, several friends and colleagues served as key interlocutors and motivators while I was writing. Thank you for reading my words and/or listening to my chatter about t­ hese ideas over the course of many years: Michele Alexandre (whose book Sexploitation is a direct inspiration), Joshua Bennett, Ashon Crawley, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (who read ­every word three times!), Farah Jasmine Griffin, Keeanga-­ Yamatta Taylor, and Simone White. My f­ amily is the beating heart of every­thing I write. Thank you to my ­mother, Theresa Perry, for constant encouragement and support; the entire Garner and Perry families; my friends who have become like f­amily; and especially my late grand­mother Neida Garner Perry, my earliest model of organic feminism, and my late ­father, Steven S. Whitman, who was the first to read the earliest versions of this book and praised it as “Radical.”

I am grateful beyond mea­sure to have grown up in a community of feminist intellectuals, activists, and artists. As far back as I can remember, I had abundant feminist models surrounding me and encouraging me, both face to face and in the pages of their writing. I continue to be fed by their lifelong work. They are part of my chosen f­ amily and genealogy. This book is pos­si­ble b ­ ecause of them. Fi­nally, I must thank my ­children. Their breathtaking beauty and brilliance are constant reminders to me that another world is pos­si­ble and necessary. I pray that I, and the many other p ­ eople who love and care for them: their ­father, our families, and our friends, can nurture them to become part of making it so.

x  Acknowl­edgments

INTRODUCTION ...

In noticing “oddity” within ordering, we learn a g­ reat deal about the structure of ­things. This is true with narratives, laws, and the stuff of ­human lives. Imani Perry, email to editor Ken Wissoker

The story of Aphra Behn, known as ­England’s first ­woman novelist, is filled with gaps and guesses. Few details are known for certain. ­There are scattered but intriguing tidbits. She was born in 1640. She appears to have lived in Surinam as a child. She likely was married to a Dutch merchant and then l­ ater was single. She served as a spy for King Charles in the Netherlands. In 1668 she found herself in so much debt that she served time in a debtor’s prison. And ­after that she became a writer, a prolific one. Her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, was produced in 1670 at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was a romantic comedy in which forced betrothals are corrected by true love. Some eigh­teen years ­later, with many other works in between, Behn wrote a story with similar plot points but with African protagonists. Oroonoko is considered a foundational text in the development of the En­glish novel. It remains fascinating and distinctive. I w ­ ill tell the story of the novel in some detail. Its publication was foundational in Western lit­er­a­ture, and it reveals so much about the idea and history of Western patriarchy, and therefore provides an apt beginning to this text. Named for its hero, Oroonoko is the story of two beloved Coromantie (Akan) youth, Oroonoko and Imoinda. They are, in the eyes of the En­glish female narrator, ideal types of each gender, though Black. Of Oroonoko’s form she says, “The ­whole proportion and air of his face was so nobly and exactly form’d, that bating his colour, ­there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. ­There was no one grace wanting, that bears the standard of true beauty.”1

His physical form was consistent with his capacity and integrity as a man. “Whoever had heard him speak,” Behn writes, “wou’d have been convinced of their errors, that all ne wit is conned to the white men, especially to ­those of Christendom; and wou’d have confess’d that ­Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, had as g­ reat a soul, as politick maxims, and was as sensible of power, as any prince civiliz’d in the most renowned schools of humanity and learning, or the most illustrious courts.”2 Imoinda was a similarly extraordinary character; of her the narrator says, “To describe her truly, one need say only, she was female to the noble male; the beautiful black Venus to our young Mars; as charming in her person as he, and of delicate vertues. I have seen a hundred white men sighing ­after her, and making a thousand vows at her feet, all in vain, and unsuccessful. And she was indeed too g­ reat for any but a prince of her own nation to adore.”3 At the beginning of the novel, Oroonoko takes the position of the king’s top general a­ fter the death of Imoinda’s f­ ather, the previous holder of the position. The two have married but not consummated their relationship. Their u ­ nion is disrupted by the king, b ­ ecause he has also fallen in love with Imoinda. He exercises his authority to make her his wife and a member of his harem. But through the assistance of other members of the court, Oroonoko is able to sneak into her bridal chamber, and they have sex. They are immediately discovered, and although Imoinda claims that Oroonoko has raped her (to protect him), she is nevertheless sold as a slave as punishment. Oroonoko ­faces the same fate. He is betrayed by an En­glish ship captain with whom he had what seemed to be a gregarious relationship, and to whom Oroonoko had previously sold slaves. This captain was a man below the station of Oroonoko, yet they had previously behaved in a mutually respectful fashion. Behn described him as follows: This captain . . . ​was always better receiv’d at court, than most of the traders to ­those countries ­were; and especially by Oroonoko, who was more civiliz’d, according to the Eu­ro­pe­an mode, than any other had been, and took more delight in the white nations; and, above all, men of parts and wit. To this captain he sold abundance of his slaves; and for the favour and esteem he had for him, made him many pres­ents, and oblig’d him to stay at court as long as possibly he cou’d. Which the captain seem’d to take as a very ­great honour done him, entertaining the prince e­ very day with globes and maps, and mathematical discourses and instruments; eating, drinking, hunting, and living 2 I ntroduction

with him with so much familiarity, that it was not to be doubted but he had gain’d very greatly upon the heart of this gallant young man. And the captain, in return of all t­ hese mighty favours, besought the prince to honour his vessel with his presence, some day or other at dinner, before he shou’d set sail: which he condescended to accept, and appointed his day.4 Once on the ship however, the captain springs on Oroonoko and places him in shackles. He makes a man into a slave. The captain plans to sell Oroonoko once the ship has reached Surinam. In protest, Oroonoko and the other Africans on board refuse to eat, preferring death to captivity. Only with the promise of emancipation at the end of the journey, and an immediate removal of the shackles, does Oroonoko begin to eat again and convince the ­others to do so, as well. Used to good faith, fair dealing, and re­spect from other men, he h ­ asn’t yet learned the slave’s wise distrust. Oroonoko is betrayed once again and sold when the ship reaches Surinam. ­There he is renamed “Caesar.” It is as though he has under­gone a baptism of undoing, given a Eu­ro­pean name, though not a Christian one. That detail is not troubling to Oroonoko. He finds the Christian trinity to be an absurdity. Though deeply skeptical of Eu­ro­pean religion, he has yet to learn how profoundly his status has changed in this rebaptism that takes him outside the scope of civil society as he knew it and into the new world order of Blackness in modernity. Oroonoko is cast from aristocrat to slave—­the same status as the other Africans—­although Behn describes him repeatedly as their superior in form, intelligence, and status. While Oroonoko is cast with the other Africans despite his status, the Eu­ro­pe­ans are puzzled by the Indians in their midst. They, like Oroonoko, are considered ­great, beautiful, and power­ful, though strange. Accordingly, the Eu­ro­pe­ans believed the Indians must be conquered, if not enslaved. A map of difference and its relations is unfolding. By remarkable coincidence, on the plantation where Oroonoko is held he finds Imoinda (whom he was told had been killed rather than enslaved). Although they are enslaved, they marry and live in a tentatively blissful domestic ­union. Soon Imoinda is pregnant. Their status trou­bles them both. They sense the fragility of their domesticity from the beginning of Oroonoko’s time on the plantation. But they are deceived by the master’s seeming re­spect. Before actually meeting Imoinda (now renamed Clemene) on the plantation, and having merely heard about an especially beautiful slave, Oroonoko asks his master why he ­hasn’t raped the enslaved ­woman: I ntroduction  3

I do not won­der (reply’d the prince) that Clemene should refuse slaves, being, as you say, so beautiful; but won­der how she escapes ­those that can entertain her as you can do: or why, being your slave, you do not oblige her to yield? I confess (said Trefry) when I have, against her w ­ ill, entertained her with love so long, as to be transported with my passion even above decency, I have been ready to make use of t­ hose advantages of strength and force nature has given me: But, oh! she disarms me with that modesty and weeping, so tender and so moving, I retire, and thank my stars she overcame me. The com­pany laugh’d at his civility to a slave, and Caesar only applauded the nobleness of his passion and nature, since that slave might be noble, or, what was better, have true notions of honour and vertue in her. Thus passed they this night, a­ fter having received from the slaves all imaginable re­spect and obedience.5 This “civility” of his master, Trefry, in not raping Imoinda is deceptive when it comes to the constitution of their ­family. Oroonoko, though thrilled to be married and expecting a child, learns how profoundly his social position has transformed in his current life as a slave by virtue of his inability to negotiate for his and his ­family’s freedom through exchange or contract: From that happy day Caesar took Clemene for his wife, to the general joy of all ­people; and ­there was as much magnificence as the country would afford at the cele­bration of this wedding: and in a very short time ­after she conceived with child, which made Caesar even adore her, knowing he was the last of his ­great race. This new accident made him more impatient of liberty, and he was ­every day treating with Trefry for his and Clemene’s liberty, and offer’d ­either gold, or a vast quantity of slaves, which should be paid before they let him go, provided he could have any security that he should go when his ransom was paid.6 At each stage, however, the Eu­ro­pe­ans with whom Oroonoko is dealing breach their words, their promises, and their contracts with him. They can do so ­because, as an enslaved African, Oroonoko has been forcibly removed from the social contract through which he can be a party to negotiated contracts. He no longer counts as a “Man.” Fi­nally, Oroonoko realizes that their slaveholder has no intention of setting them ­free and that no negotiation ­will succeed. They must fight for freedom. So he, Imoinda, and other Africans revolt. Even then, however, he continues to interact with the Eu­ro­pe­ans, acting as though he is a legally recognized man. When the Eu­ro­pe­ans defeat the Africans’ insurrection, Oroonoko and his second in command, 4 I ntroduction

Tuscan, attempt to negotiate the terms of their surrender. Behn writes that Oroonoko was overcome by his wit and reasons, and in consideration of Imoinda: and demanding what he desired, and that it should be ratify’d by their hands in writing, b ­ ecause he had perceived that was the common way of contract between man and man amongst the whites; all this was performed, and Tuscan’s ­pardon was put in, and they surrender’d to the governour, who walked peaceably down into the plantation with them, ­after giving order to bury their dead. But they w ­ ere no sooner arrived at the place where all the slaves receive their punishments of whipping, but they laid hands on Caesar and Tuscan, faint with heat and toil; and surprizing them, bound them to two several stakes, and whipped them in a most deplorable and inhuman manner.7 Unlike The Forc’d Marriage, this work has a tragic rather than a comedic ending. ­After Oroonoko’s defeat and torture (“bleeding and naked as he was, [they] loaded him all over with irons, and then rubb’d his wounds, to compleat their cruelty, with Indian pepper, which had like to have made him raving mad; and, in this condition made him so fast to the ground, that he could not stir”8) he intends to kill Imoinda (seeing himself still as a patriarch who maintains possessive control over her life and death) and himself rather than continue to live as slaves. He succeeds in killing Imoinda but is recaptured before he can complete his suicide. Instead of the noble ending he seeks, a return to life in Africa a­ fter death in the Amer­i­cas, he is drawn and quartered, sliced up like ­cattle a­ fter the slaughter. Behn’s work provides an instructive and foundational exemplum for this book. Among the remarkable t­ hings about this story is that in its moves from glory to abjection and death, patriarchy moves with it, shifting with tragic and horrific circumstances. Behn’s bifurcated tales of fortune and misfortune, The Forc’d Marriage and Oroonoko are, in turn, comedic and tragic. They are twin narratives of the development of modern patriarchy. Following the formulation offered by Cedric Robinson regarding Western “terms of order” through this and many other stories, events and cases,9 I am invested in tracing a more detailed architecture of patriarchy than what commonplace understandings in the U.S. offer, something more complex than the binary gender constructs of Western bourgeois domesticity. This book is about the praxis of reading as a feminist and, specifically, as what I am terming a “liberation feminist.” I am inviting I ntroduction  5

readers (of this text and of the world around them) to conceive of feminism not primarily as a set of positions or doctrines but as a critical practice for understanding and working against gendered forms of domination and against the way gender becomes a tool of domination and exploitation. This is a book that asks readers to engage in this critical reading practice with the stories, events, and cases presented. ­These stories, events, and cases are deliberately chosen to resist accounts of patriarchy that treat “patriarchies” in each society, culture, or subculture as a parallel set of structures that merely repeat themselves within each group, ethnicity, or nation-­state. In other words, this book does not say, “­Here’s patriarchy ­here—­and look: It’s also over ­there!” but instead explores the historical and philosophical relation between the ­here and the t­ here. This work, moreover, is not about the sexism within sociality (an impor­tant topic, just not mine). It focuses on the multiple forms of domination that grew ­under a structure of patriarchal authority that was globally imposed during the age of empire. I am interested in exploring t­ hese multiple iterations of patriarchy as ­shaped by the logic undergirding them all, one that spread across the globe through modernity and Eu­ro­pean conquest and capture. Hence, while I identify as an Americanist scholar, I have had to stretch myself beyond the borders of the U.S. nation-­state and even beyond this hemi­sphere to make an argument about what has happened to and across the globe. This work attends to the drawing and quartering, the institutional rape, the men who could not be patriarchs, the p ­ eople who could be neither patriarch nor lady, the captured and the excluded. It attends to t­ hose who stood outside the plantation fence, as well as ­those who sat on thrones in palaces. The way I use story and vignette, along with description, theorization, and analy­sis, is admittedly an “odd” structure, at least according to the conventions of academic writing. But within ­these portraits of gender and gendering, ones that reveal both rules and exceptions, and states of exception, the complex structure of patriarchy is revealed. The gift of such portraits is also that while I pres­ent readings, they invite another layer of reading from the reader, and, potentially, a dialogue. Let me apply t­ hese ideas to the foregoing story and its author: The opacity of Behn’s life is unquestionably a piece of the legacy of patriarchy. ­Were she a comparably achieved En­glishman of her period, we would likely have a fuller rec­ord. However, her characters, Oroonoko and Imoinda, who may or may not have been based on real p ­ eople she encountered in Surinam, lie even further under­neath the layers of relation that characterized patriarchy as it took shape in the modern period and through the

6 I ntroduction

rise of industrial capitalism. The account of patriarchy in this book, and aspiration ­toward its undoing, reads the lives of both the Aphras and the Imoindas, and many ­others betwixt and between, as a feminist praxis. Ultimately, that ­labor is rooted in an ethical commitment to undoing gendered domination as a critical goal of feminist politics and thought. ­Here is another story, strange and nonfictional: Almost two hundred years ­later, and many miles away, with substantial changes to po­liti­cal economy, law, and imperial formation, a distinct yet structurally consistent set of events took place. In the winter of 1885, David Dickson died. Dickson was a prominent Georgia planter and slave owner. He grew his wealth on Cherokee land that had been auctioned off to white citizens in 1838, with the use of innovative crop-­cultivation techniques executed by his slaves. Dickson left the bulk of his fortune to his ­daughter Amanda and her ­children. This included seventeen thousand acres of land in Hancock and Washington counties. Amanda was beloved by her f­ ather and doted on by her grand­mother. But this transfer of property was a prob­lem for most of the rest of Dickson’s f­amily. Forty-­nine of them contested the ­will. Amanda was not a legitimate inheritor in their eyes. Amanda’s ­mother, Julia, had been raped by Dickson when she was twelve years old. Julia was his slave and his victim. This ­wasn’t unusual. Sexual vio­lence was an integral part of the slave regime and economy. Rape was institutionalized. What was unusual was Dickson’s concerted effort to legally recognize Amanda and grant her the status of lady that was disallowed by law and custom for nonwhite ­women. Amanda was educated, despite laws against slave literacy, and in 1865, when she was sixteen or seventeen, Dickson arranged for her to be classified as white and to marry her white first cousin Charles Eubanks, a Confederate veteran. Amanda and Charles had two ­children, but by 1870 she had returned home, and she and her c­ hildren all took on the patronym Dickson. We can easily speculate about the difficulties Amanda faced as the slave-­born wife of a Confederate war veteran. It may have been terrorizing. And ­there would hardly be any larger social warmth ­toward a very wealthy freedwoman who entered public life precisely when the White South was smarting from defeat and suffering from economic disaster and military occupation. Amanda, unbound from her husband, sought further education at the recently established Black college, Atlanta University, between 1876 and 1878. She subsequently married a Black man, Nathan Perry. Ostensibly, she was accepting the social fact of her racial

I ntroduction  7

status, or accepting that it would be forced on her. And yet, David Dickson was also successful in ensuring that his d ­ aughter would live her remaining days in wealth and comfort, if not in whiteness.10 When I first read Oroonoko as a high school student, it struck me as an odd tale b ­ ecause of its respectful and sensitive account of Africans at an Ur-­moment in British letters. Now I read Behn’s narrative unmaking of the hero and heroine as one of modernity’s creation myths, a story about the world the slave masters made. When I first read the story of Amanda Amer­i­ca Dickson, she struck me as an oddly situated person, possessed of a life on the margins that reveal the contours of the color line. But more recent readings about her, as I have been working and writing on gender, have led me to read her history and attend to its details differently. Dickson was a patriarch in the modern sense of the world. He built wealth with unfree ­labor and was a settler on colonized land. He was an agent and perpetrator of the institutionalized rape that was not only a form of intrinsic vio­lence in the ­legal and social regime of U.S. slavery but also a harrowing form of wealth production. In fact, had Amanda not been treated differently, she likely would have been lucrative. “Likely” mixed-­race ­women ­were marketed for sexual exploitation in the slave economy. But Dickson treated Amanda differently. And the markers of this are the manner in which he tried to give her the features of a white lady, and exercised his power to make a white lady of her. He did so with marriage. And when that failed, she and her progenitors bore his name. And then not only did he grant her property, but he did so through the l­egal transfer required by inheritance law. Julia and Amanda, ­mother and ­daughter, w ­ ere distinctly, conventionally and unconventionally, situated in the architecture of patriarchy. The story of Amanda Amer­i­ca Dickson demands more than an observation of her oddity. For t­ hose of us who wish to use feminist analyses to understand the world, she is more than transcendent; she is caught between mechanisms of gendered forms of domination, which include her racialization as a Black ­woman and the attempt to remove her from blackness to whiteness. This is the type of story readers of this book ­will be called to grapple with as part of our understanding of gendering in both the modern and the postmodern world. The argument in this book is distinctive in another way: It resists doctrine. ­There are a host of positions that are, in the con­temporary moment, proxies for feminism, usually liberal feminism. In truth, I agree with most of them, at least in the pres­ent moment. But I have consistently 8 I ntroduction

noticed that ­behind concepts such as “slut shaming,” “street harassment,” “reproductive rights,” and “pay equity,” ­there is always a complicated architecture of relations of domination, one that often falls out of view in the assertion of the professed position. Occasions for deep interrogation and debate that might lead us to identify the sources of the injustice, vio­lence, and ethical failure differently are lost. That is to say, one might argue that “street harassment” is terrible or (taking a rather standard antifeminist position) that it is not. But in the pro­cess of simply taking a pro or con position as a doctrine, it is easy to neglect analyses of public space and the history of gender in the public sphere, over-­and under-­policing, gender socialization, race and class mythologies as applied to men, ­women and genderqueer ­people, the way some p ­ eople are expected to occupy public instead of private space and therefore potentially experience less protection, and the role of economic precariousness and existing on the “wrong side of the law” as a victim of harassment, to name just a few forces. All of ­these forces are relevant for understanding the repeated events of sexualized and harassing encounters in a public arena. To my mind, it is essential to seek deep understanding to pursue gender liberation. This requires both the past and the pres­ent. This book is, on the one hand, descriptive and analytical: It moves from modernity to the current complex and vexing historical conjuncture in which we are faced with a relatively new global economic order and technological transformation, as well as trenchant remnants of the old imperial order. However, it is also a theoretical argument advocating the primacy of praxis rather than position. Th ­ ose of us who seek gender liberation ­ought to think of feminism as a critical reading practice in which one “reads through ­these layers” of gendered forms of domination. Gender is complicated and demands careful analy­sis. But reading through the layers is especially necessary now, ­because some ideas that we conventionally associate with feminism are increasingly colonized by our marketized public sphere; at the same time, po­liti­cally power­ful neoconservative forces are rolling back the gains of feminist movements. This dynamic requires that I map both the “old” and the “new” o ­ rders, as it ­were, as well as the dizzying complex of forces ­today. The book is divided into three sections. The first chapter of the first section, “Seafaring, Sovereignty, and the Self: Of Patriarchy and the Conditions of Modernity,” is a reading backward. Through stories such as the two that begin this introduction, I provide exempla of how we can understand the history of modernity and globalization in terms of patriarchy as the foundational architecture for gender domination. I locate modern patriarchy at the intersection of three l­egal formations—­personhood, I ntroduction  9

sovereignty, and property—­that ­shaped relations of power in the ages of conquest and the transatlantic slave trade. In chapter 2, “Producing Personhood: The Rise of Capitalism and the Western Subject,” the structure of patriarchy is further elaborated in light of the industrial and technological revolutions in the nineteenth ­century, the end of slavery that coincided with the rise of colonialism, the transgression of gender bound­aries in metropoles, and the resulting punishments. It includes close readings of landmark l­egal cases, texts, and public figures. Stories of ­these ­people and works reveal the status of the nonperson in this global history as the “opposite” to the patriarch who was defined both by his relationship to t­ hose in his immediate environment and the status of public and po­liti­cal recognition in the global landscape dominated by Eu­ro­pean nations. Between the first and second section ­there is an interlude. It picks up the structure of patriarchy at the moment of its most dramatic confrontation: in the mid-­twentieth c­ entury, when anticolonial, civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements demanded major transformations in the social order of the dominant empire, the United States. ­Here I describe the truncated terms of its gains due to how feminist achievement (such as ones for racial justice and postcolonialism) became ensnared by the neoliberal logics that are the subject of concern in the second section. The chapters in the second section then take the construct of the first section and extend it into our understanding of the pres­ent moment—­ specifically, gender in the postmodern, eco­nom­ically neoliberal world. In this t­ here is both a structural repetition of the con­temporary landscape in the form of the chapters, as they move outward from vari­ous satellite points. This diffusion in the formal structure of the text is a reflection of the con­temporary condition. Th ­ ere is also a slight narrative shift. Throughout the text I write to readers as “we” as a mode of naming the collective (though virtual) pro­cess of writing, reading, and grappling between writer and reader. However, in the second section I begin to work with a conception of “we” that is specifically focused on how we are constituted as neoliberal subjects in the con­temporary era. Chapter 3, “In the Ether: Neoliberalism and Entrepreneurial ­Woman,” interrogates the prob­lem of neoliberalism for feminist thought, with an exploration of the figure of “entrepreneurial ­woman” and the ideology of “neoliberal feminism,” as well as the “gender artifacts” that circulate and are ­adopted as artifactual revisions of the material given and that have “exchange values” as products of both exploited l­abor and beauty markets.

10 I ntroduction

The fourth chapter, “Simulacra Child: Hypermedia and the Mediated Subject,” explores how hypermedia and the digital age transform how ­people exist in relation to one another in markets and shape our existence as po­liti­cal subjects. Th ­ ese transformations take place with a simultaneous inheritance of past gender formations and eruptions of the new and resistant gender formations, which all become part of the pastiche of a hypermedia culture. Chapter 5, “Sticks Broken at the River: The Security State and the Vio­ lence of Manhood,” focuses on the logic of the security state as the bluntest force of patriarchy, in terms of the rise of both militarization and the proliferation of guns and carcerality (prisons and detention centers), in light of neoliberal market logics. The final section follows a second interlude, a meditation on the continued analogical, symbolic, and philosophical usefulness of the trope of the witch, a figure who has troubled five hundred years of structuring patriarchy around rules of relation, recognition, and domination. This meditation is preparation for us to move away from the argument about the layered architectures of gendering, inherited and new, to suggest practices of insurgency relative to ­those architectures. It adds to the act of “reading” as a feminist that has animated the preceding chapters an argument for the explicit practices of witnessing, mapping, and transforming relations. The first of t­ hese three chapters, chapter 6, “Unmaking the Territory and Remapping the Landscape,” is an argument for the deliberate practice of mapping relations, populations, and landscapes differently, guided by a princi­ple of ethical relation. ­Here I use fiction writers as theorists of remapping—­specifically, Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones. Chapter 7, “The Utterance of My Name: Invitation and the Disorder of Desire,” takes up the phi­los­op ­ her Stanley Cavell’s idea of the “passionate utterance” and Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic to pursue an ethics of feminist engagement that disrupts the “performative utterances” that gender theorists have compellingly argued are integral to the creation and the coerciveness of gendering. Chapter 8, the final chapter, is titled “The Vicar of Liberation.” A play on the ecclesiastical term, it is an argument about the tending of our spirits in the ser­vice of an ethics and praxis that might liberate us from commitments to patriarchy and compel us to fight against it. This work of nurturance, I argue, is essential to emancipating ourselves from conceptions of what it means to “count” as a person according to the logics of patriarchy inherited from centuries past and the manner in which they

I ntroduction  11

have been extended in the neoliberal, hypermedia, and “security state” era in which we live. Throughout this book, I use stories and historical vignettes as examples of the structure of patriarchy. ­These mini-­narratives also serve as models of how we read layers of domination at work in a profoundly heterogeneous world. In each branch of the argument at least one exemplum is available, and a reading provided by the author, but the exempla are also set forth as an invitation for alternative readings. In this way, this is a deliberately dialogic work. It is suggestive and exploratory rather than doctrinal or utopic. Art is critical in this proj­ect—­visual art and literary—­for exploring how the artistic imagination is rife with philosophical arguments about ethical social and intimate relations and with the moral imagination of being in right relation with ­others in the world. Within the landscape of scholarly writing, this work descends from a substantial body of feminist criticism and gender and race theory. Yet I have tried to write it in such a way that it does not demand that the reader be well versed in the long history of such scholarship, although the citations are an encouragement for readers to follow the intellectual genealogy presented. That said, the arguments set forth are presented not as a debate with previous feminist criticism but, rather, as something influenced by previous work, yet distinct. The additional usefulness I find in writing in this way is that, given the plethora of meanings attached to the words “feminism” and “patriarchy,” it allows me to take up space to pres­ent an extended and par­tic­u­lar idea of what I take ­these terms to mean. The usefulness of that unpacking does not lie primarily in arguing for my type of feminism over that of another. Rather, it allows me to give the reader some historical and po­liti­cal mooring that serves as a tool for critical interrogation, regardless of ­whether the reader ultimately embraces the concept “liberation feminism.” Although the last word of the Oroonoko is “Imoinda,” it is a ghastly homage. The condition of slavery has led her “lord,” as Behn called her, to kill the “beautiful and constant” wife. This inversion of the patriarchal order of protection that was granted to lieges, a common understanding in the West, is an integral feature of the history of Western patriarchy—­ one that demands unearthing to pursue its undoing. Amanda Amer­i­ca Dickson died of neurasthenia. It was a disease that ­today ­doesn’t clearly fit into classification systems, although it was a popu­lar diagnosis in the nineteenth c­ entury. Fatigue, anxiety, fainting, headache, heart palpitations, and depression ­were symptoms. Commonly 12 I ntroduction

speculated ­causes for the disease included the growth of economic competition and the speed of city life. We ­don’t know what caused Amanda Dickson’s death. But in her we have a rec­ord of a life that surely must have been dizzying, anxiety-­rendering, and rife with heartache. In that she ­wasn’t alone; she certainly was a part of a staggering majority: ­those who failed to be and ­were failed by the patriarchs in their midst.

I ntroduction  13

chapter 1

S E A FARING, SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE S E LF Of Patriarchy and the Conditions of Modernity ... So spake the Patriarch of Mankinde, but EVE Persisted, yet submiss, though last, repli’d. John Milton, Paradise Lost

On a round ball A workman that hath copies by, can lay An Eu­rope, Afric, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, all; So doth each tear Which thee doth wear, A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mix’d with mine do overflow This world; by ­waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so. John Donne, “A Valediction: Of Weeping”

Sir Francis Drake was knighted by the Queen of ­England in 1581. Drake received this honor b ­ ecause he was the first En­glishman to circumnavigate the globe. But he began his seafaring ­career as a slaver. As a young man he’d accompanied his cousin on trips to West Africa, where they attacked villages or Portuguese slave ships. They then took their h ­ uman bounty to the Ca­rib­bean and sold Africans to plantation ­owners.

This time, however, Drake had another mission, pursued via a secret agreement with Queen Elizabeth: He was an agent in her b ­ attle with Spain for global power. Drake spent months of the early part of his intrigue-­filled voyage engaged in piracy against the Spanish along the coast of con­temporary South Amer­i­ca. His plunder was legendary: Drake granted his investors a forty-­seven-­fold rate of return. When he returned to ­England, he was not only wealthy but assured a place in history for his achievement. Buoyed by his success, he stood before Queen Elizabeth and presented her with a gift: a miniature ebony-­hulled ship with an African diamond embedded within. In return, Queen Elizabeth gave him double portrait jewels. One was a miniature of the queen; the other was a sardonyx cameo with an African man’s profile in the foreground and that of a regal Eu­ro­pean ­woman ­behind him. Large pearls hang at the bottom of each. They are affixed with fastenings that once allowed Drake to wear the jewel wrapped about his waist. ­These gifts, each of high monetary value, ­were symbolically power­ful. Drake’s ship stood for the expansion of E ­ ngland’s sovereign power. The miniature of the queen represented sovereignty in the form of the monarch. Art historians have speculated that the cameo featuring an African man in profile signified the assistance Drake received from African maroons while pillaging a Spanish mule train across the Isthmus of Panama. In that par­tic­u­lar act of piracy, he had brought home the equivalent of twenty thousand British pounds. Perhaps he was honoring the maroons who joined him to lash out against their former slavers. But given that Drake was a slaver, we o ­ ught at least to consider alternative symbolism. Maybe the jewel was a reward not only for his achievement but also for the meaning of his achievement, a symbol of the domination of the patriarch over t­ hose who would be enslaved and l­ater colonized (Africans) and, as symbolized by the white female profile, over “­woman,” a composite of his role. Queen Elizabeth, as the sovereign in this venture, was an exception to the rules of gender. In one body she was both a feminine ideal and an agent of patriarchy. She established the En­glish Protestant church and became its supreme governor. And while she was expected to marry and produce an heir, she did not. A husband would have reduced her power (as demonstrated by the fate of her s­ ister, Mary, who married King Phillip II of Spain). The nation responded to her savvy choice by reifying her virginity in lit­er­a­ture and art. She became analogous to the Virgin Mary, though in deed relative to the conquered she was more like Pontius Pilate. She was a double: imperial patriarch and her helpmate in one.

S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  15

Though not nearly so much as the queen, Drake has been remembered: a Chicago ­hotel, a mountain, streets, a shopping mall, and an island, among other places, bear his name. Scattered about are remnants of his legacy. He ­matters in the annals of modernity as one of the men who made empire. His valiantly rendered story has had both literal and symbolic significance to the dominant ideas and global order of the world of the past several centuries. Drake and other explorers found their discoveries of other lands matched by knowledge production. Maps made to scale by the Italian artist Baptista Boazio depicting his voyage entailed ideas about this relationship to the world.1 The ships approaching land in each of them are their most prominent feature. The landscape is green, with scattered settlements and ­battle plans. The voyages are charted, and the attacking battalions at each port are depicted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, charting and charters operated in tandem. Mapping provided dependable pathways to encounters that w ­ ere legally rendered as opportunities for control, domination, and exploitation. The colonial charters granted by King James, ­under whom, ­after the death of Elizabeth, the British Empire was united, gave grants of power for governance to companies or settlements. Boazio’s maps, charting before charters, which barely registered the indigenous populations in each location, are indicative of the ­legal regime that the charters would represent: one of Eu­ro­pean conquest. As Eu­ro­pe­ans encountered the other, they defined themselves. The philosophical period that followed, known as the Enlightenment was, I am arguing, an integral part of the juridical foundation that would establish modern patriarchy. It entailed the production of an ideology of knowledge that was articulated on a global stage and eventually provided for an accounting and a set of relations in which the entire globe was enfolded. Just as the Bible ­under King James removed mysticism and elaboration, and replaced them with parataxis and simplicity, Enlightenment phi­los­o­phers developed taxonomies and presented an orderly set of social relations that idealized patriarchy. In this focus on the juridical nature of patriarchy, I am interested in both the coercive power of ­legal words—to distribute, to punish, to kill, to reward—­and the clarity of the constructedness of all juridical decision making. That is to say, when law effects a par­tic­u­lar outcome, it is clear that “the law” is something that is made, an order established. Social construction—at least, the argument for it—­and, specifically, the social constructedness of gender are significantly more challenging to account

16 chapter  one

FIGURE  1​.­1   Map illustrating Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian voyage, 1585–86.

I­ llustrated by Baptista Boazio. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

for when we focus on culture and belief. At the same time, however, law shapes culture and belief; it has, as Eugene Genovese described it, a “hegemonic function.”2 Thus, law is an analytically useful metric for interpreting the creation of modern patriarchy. Yet I am also interested in the manner in which the juridical structure of patriarchy (and even its theorization) reveals its gaps, its failures, and its injustices when it comes to the treatment of t­ hose ­under patriarchal authority. Arguably the most impor­tant phi­los­o­pher in U.S. history and thought was the En­glishman John Locke, born thirty-­six years ­after Drake’s death. In his treatises on government, Locke presented theories of property and citizenship to be applied to this “new world.” Locke believed in a natu­ral law, “which obliged ­every one” not “to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” and u ­ nder which property rights existed even before they ­were granted by the sovereign. Locke argued, however,

S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  17

that “enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very insecure.” Therefore, it was reasonable for men to join a po­liti­cal society to find protection and secure their property. This explains why men would willingly leave the state of nature to join a po­liti­cal society: “The ­great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves ­under government is the preservation of their property.”3 As for the property regime that preceded sovereignty, Locke believed it was the consequence of ­labor: Though the Earth . . . ​be common to all Men, yet e­ very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The L ­ abour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his ­Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this l­ abour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men.4 In Locke’s framework, land was plentiful and owner­ship was produced by the l­abor relationship between man and environment.5 The use value was a ­matter of cultivation. Locke’s conception of the place of (Eu­ro­pean) ­women was more robust than that of some of his peers. He did not consider ­women mere property and instead described them as shareholders with a capacity substantial enough to allow them to function as leaders in the absence of patriarchy, a sort of patriarchy by proxy. Although they ­were collapsed into the citizenship of husbands and ­fathers, they entered the marriage contract freely and thus, according to Locke, ­ought to have some recognition in the common law. Locke further distinguished between (Eu­ro­pean) ­women, who, while subsidiary to men, w ­ ere part of the social order of contracting parties, and slaves. We see the full exegesis of his ideas of the enslaved Africans in both his words and his deeds. Locke was an investor in ­England’s Bahamas adventure of early settler colonialism and slavery. Thus, he garnered substantial wealth from the burgeoning slave trade. And he wrote the laws for the Carolina Charter of 1669. ­Virginia at that point had already defined slavery as a condition of matrilineal descent and lifetime status. In the Carolina charter, Locke echoed this jurisprudential framework, stating explic­itly that slavery was an absolute status:

18 chapter  one

Since charity obliges us to wish well to the souls of all men, and religion ­ought to alter nothing in any man’s civil estate or right, it s­ hall be lawful for slaves, as well as o ­ thers, to enter themselves, and be of what church or profession any of them s­ hall think best, and, therefore, be as fully members as any freeman. But yet no slave s­ hall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all ­things in the same state and condition he was In before. . . . ­Every freeman of Carolina ­shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.6 Locke warned against the idea that Chris­tian­ity might emancipate Africans and in the pro­cess distinguished between the category “freeman” and Negro as two distinct fundamental statuses, unlike that, for example, between indenture and freedom, which existed on a spectrum of categories of ­legal recognition. “Slave” meant someone without ­legal recognition. This served as an early indication of the manner in which patriarchy found its footing primarily in law, not religion, and that the status of slave versus ­free was part of the making of “man.” The construct of “man” for Locke was a relation of property. In this text, however, I am using a linguistically narrower term, “patriarch,” that I think is consistent with Locke’s “man.” I am making this move notwithstanding the useful critiques of the category “man” offered by Sylvia Wynter, among ­others.7 I’ve made this choice to keep better track of the relations between men, particularly ideal men or patriarchs versus “failed men” in my account. I’m also convinced that the colonized shadow of Western “man” and “­woman” in the purportedly universal accounts are always suggested and contemplated by the terms. The negation attends the form. Further, I believe the logic that makes that so is that of patriarchy. Locke’s definition was a relation that depended on sovereign authority. As Eu­ro­pe­ans traveled the globe, the sovereign authority granted them rights to property relations that w ­ ere also effectively rights of conquest. ­These are articulated in his work and in the deeds of his countrymen that preceded his philosophy. Drake plundered and killed along the way, even beheading a companion, an aristocrat who posed an economic threat and whom Drake tried as a witch. Making and unmaking the other was explicit in Drake’s “achievement.” It was a structure created and ultimately maintained through vio­lence. Locke’s articulation of the order of the society, which is one of the firmaments of Western patriarchy, was not in his estimation purely “natu­ ral.” He issued a diagnostic of ­people’s capacities for reason, equating S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  19

“savages” and “illiterates” and “­idiots” with ­children. Yet he also understood that the bound­aries of “man” w ­ ere contested. In this argument he used fantastical beasts as examples: chimeras such as creatures that ­were half pigs and half dogs. Indeed, Locke was a semiotician before Ferdinand de Saussure, noting that choices made about who counted as what ­were part of the practice of “understanding”—­that is, ­there was nothing absolute or definitive about signs, including “Man.” They always had their excesses that potentially undermined them. Relying at least partially on Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstris (1665),8 which depicted an imaginative corollary to the sense of the unchartered landscape—­living beings of all fantastical sorts, partially ­human, partially other­wise—­Locke’s definition of man was admittedly contingent and socially constructed. Language, as Locke understood it, categorized in ways that ­were inadequate to the complexity of the natu­ral landscape. Choices ­were made in the pro­cess. He wrote, The provision of words is so scanty in re­spect to the infinite variety of thoughts that men, wanting terms to suit their precise notions ­will, notwithstanding their utmost caution, be forced often to use the same Word, in somewhat dif­f er­ent senses. And though in the continuation of a discourse, or the pursuit of an Argument, t­ here be hardly room to digress into a par­tic­u­lar definition as often as a man varies the signification of any term; yet the import of the discourse w ­ ill, for the most part, if ­there be no designed fallacy, sufficiently nead candid and intelligent readers into the true meaning of it.9 That Locke was so facile in his rejection of entire groups of “savages” was undermined by his recognition of the fragility of the borders of definition. He knew he was deliberately (not organically or “naturally”) excluding. Such moves are critical to understanding the establishment of the global order in the modern period. Accounts of “­people of their time” who ­didn’t see “­others” as ­humans, are often wildly overstated. Rather, a system of law sorted out of po­liti­cal and economic desire and interest, not ­simple disaffection or misrecognition. This is useful as we interrogate the architecture of patriarchy established ­under modernity. It was not reducible to Christian tradition and its rule of the ­father; it was not genealogical in a sense that could be intuitively connected to ethnicity or “race.” In fact, Locke was not interested in an order that was a mere extension of the rule of the ­father. The rule of the ­father as an absolute authority was too limiting to his proj­ect of creating ­free citizens. Rather he i­ magined an individual Eu­ro­pean man who was to stand before the state on reaching maturity. Eu­ro­pean ­women 20 chapter  one

­ ere limited in terms of the authority over c­ hildren and their capacity to w choose the marriage contract—­that is, by “femme coverture,” which put them in a relation of subjection to husbands for the term of said contract. At the same time, the condition of the slave was without the exercise of social or po­liti­cal rights; “savages” ­were imaginatively excluded, and their decimation was therefore justified by the sovereign authority. So I begin with the proposition that the economic liberalism of which Locke was a foundational thinker—­and, specifically, the doctrine of personhood—­entails a system whereby the subject before the state or the law was made into e­ ither a patriarch, his liege (­woman), or someone outside l­egal recognition, w ­ hether slaves or what in that time w ­ ere termed “savages” but whom we can also term “nonpersons” in the juridical sense. The position of the nonperson is a fundamental supplementation of the idea of gender as produced by disciplinary power (essentialized concepts and rules for men and ­women) and the naturalization of binary gender categories that w ­ ere, and continue to be, applied to citizenries. ­Those who lie outside citizenship and the gender binary had distinct rules applied to them, which ­were often mechanisms for violent domination. In addition, the coercive power of the sovereign constructed nonpersons as possessing deviant forms of gendering and sexuality that could not be disciplined and thus demanded absolute domination by the “civilized” and “disciplined” Eu­ro­pe­ans. Hence, Hortense Spillers’s theory of the vestibular, Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland theory, and Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern are theoretical tools that emerge directly out of the ­human lacunae of Locke’s ideas. That some are left standing e­ ither in the vestibule (as in the case of the slave, who is of the plantation ­house­hold but not fully in it) or at its borders (as in the case of hunted yet desired atravesados) or outside yet ­under the thumb of hegemonic power is written into the idea of liberal subject. The modern Western subject articulated by Locke and ­others emerged in the ages of conquest and empire. The patriarch was created through three juridical forms: sovereignty, property, and personhood. Major phi­ los­op ­ hers disagreed on the details of the authority granted by t­ hese rules of law but not on their fact. Likewise, the regimes of Eu­ro­pean nations varied in form, including the structures of their colonial incursions, but across the differences, sovereignty, property, and personhood consistently structured patriarchy.

S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  21

WHO COUNTED?

Prior to the development of the concept of l­egal personhood, t­ here ­were already Eu­ro­pean concepts of the “person.” In its Latin roots, “person” referred to the figure an actor became when donning a mask, a character. Distinctly, in premodern Christian thought, to identify a “person” was a means of articulating the belief that the ­human spirit was an individual possession and that ­humans ­were made in the image of God. It was more than the fact of belonging to the species and referred to relationships between the h ­ uman and God, between the h ­ uman and other h ­ umans and the environment, and between the ­human and the frame of a public theater. The category of person was subsequently articulated and developed into a ­legal doctrine of personhood through both law and philosophy. For example, John Locke’s figure of the property owner and Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the contractor or contracting party as the subject of social membership ­were distinct yet comparable notions of personhood. The ­legal category of person would grow to describe a par­tic­u­lar relationship to the social contract and its laws. The status of the l­egal person has always been structurally distinct from the fact of being a ­human being. It was and remains more exclusive. Not all ­human beings ­were afforded ­legal recognition or standing before the law, and they never have been in the West. The definition of ­legal persons in the modern era became a ­matter of statecraft as rules of national sovereignty both asserted dominion over territory and sorted ­people into ­those who ­were legally recognized subjects and ­those who fell ­under the dominion of, or in a state of war against, legally recognized subjects. Even as the world changed dramatically over hundreds of years, the fundamental conception of personhood, or l­egal personality, in large part has remained the same. ­Legal personhood is necessary for a person to have the capacity to exercise rights and obligations u ­ nder the law. The right to own property; to enter into and be bound by, and to enforce, contracts; to participate po­liti­cally; and to maintain physical integrity or self-­ protection are all dependent on this basic form of po­liti­cal recognition. The category of ­legal person and the development of the sovereign imperial state ­under modernity rested on both public and private law. It was inseparable from market logics. Mercantilism, the economic system that established enslavement as well as empire, was an early species of what ­today is termed “public-­private partnership”—­one that made a ­human, who theoretically could be a citizen, legally a possession by means of private contracts, with the permission and protection of the state, and neither ­legal person nor citizen. Public-­private partnerships ­were consti22 chapter  one

tutive to the creation of nonpersonhood from the beginning of empire and conquest. As early as the mid-­seventeenth c­ entury, individuals with shared business interests could form an economic corporate body that possessed a ­legal personality. Significantly for our purposes, Western colonialism was corporate from the outset. Indeed, corporations w ­ ere necessary for its creation. The voyages of explorers ­were routinely funded by investor groups that had been granted trade monopolies by sovereigns, and settlement most often took place as a result of business charters. The corporate entities that benefited from public-­private partnerships ­were ­legal personalities. Mercantile capitalism of the early modern period was built on partnerships between merchants and the sovereign authority in an effort to increase power and compete with other nations. They did so through regulations, as well as warring. This was the origin of modern capitalism, and, as Zillah Eisenstein so astutely notes, the sexualized economy of the slave trade was an early stage of globalization and an antecedent of ongoing cycles of unfree and subsistence ­labor.10 Corporate personhood was and remains a ­legal fiction. ­Legal fictions are statuses that are not literally true but are, instead, recognized as such for the sake of executing the rule of law. A corporation u ­ nder the doctrine of corporate personhood is treated as a person in certain instances before the law. Corporations are rights-­bearing and obligated by some of the same duties as citizens. Hence, corporations in the age of conquest that extracted resources from and traded in Asia and Africa w ­ ere rights-­ bearing ­legal persons ­under the sovereign authority of Eu­ro­pean states. While t­ hese corporations ­were a species of ­legal persons, ­women who ­were the legally recognized wives, m ­ others, and d ­ aughters of Western male citizens w ­ ere only partially so. U ­ nder the doctrine of Femme Coverture, Blackstone wrote, “By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; the very being or l­egal existence of the w ­ oman is suspended during marriage or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband u ­ nder whose wing, protection and cover she performs every­thing.”11 Eu­ro­pean ­women who ­were unmarried ­were feme-­sole and had men who w ­ ere relatives in charge of their affairs. The f­amily, heralded by a man whose wife, ­children, and chattel attended, was the basic social unit. The patriarch represented and led the f­ amily. He was the one possessed of full personhood. P ­ eople to whom he was legally related as ­family (rather than as chattel) garnered ancillary benefits and partial benefits of personhood. The relationship between the patriarch and the other members of his h ­ ouse­hold was analogous to a king or parliament’s reign over the nation, and ­later, postmonarchy, the patriarch was analogous to the nation itself, which possessed a form of ­legal personality, as well.12 S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  23

The wife and c­ hildren of the patriarch w ­ ere collapsed into his l­egal person. The enslaved, the “native,” and t­ hose outside ­legal recognition ­under the authority of the sovereign ­were excluded from the status of personhood but, depending on their property relationships, also could be collapsed into the dominion of a patriarch. The ­legal ­family and the property it possessed, including h ­ uman property, ­were therefore constitutive to the idea of modern patriarchy. Nonpersonhood, then, was not simply exclusion from the rights and recognitions of l­egal personhood; it was also systematically enunciated as a par­tic­ul­ar status in intimate relation to it by means of laws. ­These laws not only categorized ­humans. They governed their be­hav­ior and movement and enlisted an entire society in the practices of surveillance that ensured that status was maintained. Excerpts from the South Carolina Slave Code illustrate this point: Whereas in his majesty’s plantations in Amer­i­ca, slavery has been introduced and allowed; and the ­people commonly called negroes, Indians, mulatos and mestizos have [been] deemed absolute slaves, and the subjects of property in the hands of par­tic­ul­ ar persons the extent of whose power over slaves ­ought to be settled and limited by positive laws so that the slaves may be kept in due subjection and obedience, and the ­owners and other persons having the care and government of slaves, may be restrained from exercising too ­great rigour and cruelty over them; and that the public peace and order of this Province may be preserved: Be it enacted, that all negroes, Indians (­free Indians in amity with this government, and negroes, mulatos and mestizos who are now f­ ree excepted) mulatos or mestizos who now are or ­shall hereafter be in this Province, and all their issue and offspring born or to be born, ­shall be and they are hereby declared to be and remain for ever hereafter absolute slaves, and ­shall follow the condition of the ­mother; and ­shall be deemed, . . . ​taken, reputed and adjudged in law to be chattels personal in the hands of their o ­ wners and possessors and their executors, administrators and assigns to all intents, constructions and purposes whatsoever.13 ­ ere, the law that slaves s­ hall follow the condition of the m H ­ other is depicted as ideal for the sake of both public peace and order; it is also a means by which subjection and obedience could simply be maintained. ­There is no consideration, of course, of the question of rights for the enslaved; rather, the concern is with how the structure of domination could best be sustained and normalized across the state. Th ­ ese rules governed not only domestic arrangements, in some ways akin to marriage laws, but also the expectations the sovereign state placed on all ­legal persons: 24 chapter  one

“If any slave who s­ hall be out of the h ­ ouse or plantation where such slave ­shall live or s­ hall be usually employed, or without some white person in com­pany with such slave, ­shall refuse to submit or to undergo the examination of any white person, it ­shall be lawful for any such white Person to pursue, apprehend and moderately correct such slave; and if such slave ­shall assault and strike such white person, such slave may be lawfully killed.”14 The authority over the enslaved, as previously stated, was both privately and publicly held. As Spillers argues, inheriting the condition of the m ­ other created a juridical “fatherlessness” for the enslaved.15 They ­were ­under the authority of individual patriarchs (who sometimes ­were their biological but not l­egal ­fathers)—­that is, their o ­ wners—­and ­under the authority of patriarchy writ large that cast them as socially excluded and punishable. L ­ egal ­fathers had subjects beyond their legally recognized sons, ­daughters, and wives. Locke was not the only phi­los­op ­ her who devoted considerable attention to theorizing the relationship between l­ egal personhood, most fully expressed in the form of the property-­holding citizen, and the authority of the sovereign state. According to many Enlightenment thinkers, ­those who ­were not literally or potentially possessors of property generally stood outside po­liti­cal membership. Among t­ hese thinkers, Hobbes was one of the most brutal in his estimation of t­ hose ­human beings who ­were excluded from membership in the social contract. According to Hobbes, the social contract dictated a relation of domination. He argued in Leviathan, his elaboration of social contract theory, that men entered the social contract to escape the state of nature.16 Hobbes’s vision of the state of nature was one of a constant state of war. This war making was inevitable, according to him, ­because ­every man had a right to ­every other ­thing (even ­others bodies) and therefore would always be fighting for possession. Once the social contract—­“the commonwealth,” in his language—­was established, members of the society ­were capable of making themselves safe by acting collectively against o ­ thers who w ­ ere not members of the society. Liberty then emerged when men could displace individual fear onto the power of the sovereign. Importantly, not all of t­hose whose lives w ­ ere framed by the social contract ­were consenting parties. Wives, ­children, servants, and the enslaved, according to Hobbes, w ­ ere appropriately dominated by propertied Eu­ro­pean men, ­either by force or by agreement.17 The private sphere was analogous to the larger ­legal regime, which recognized some and not ­others and entailed relations of domination. While he distinguished the power over wives and ­children from that over servants and the enslaved, both forms of power, to Hobbes, ­were binding contracts. When a husband S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  25

and wife married, she willingly exchanged protection for his absolute dominion. However, the “despotic” authority of master over the enslaved was also a contract, although one that became binding without the consent or negotiated participation of the enslaved party. No m ­ atter. The authority granted from force was as legitimate to Hobbes as that garnered through negotiation; furthermore, a healthy commonwealth required complete adherence to the w ­ ill of both the sovereign subject, in the form of property-­owning citizen, and the sovereign nation. Notwithstanding the substantial disagreement between Locke and Hobbes about the basis of the social contract and the origins of property, the status of being a ­legal person was fundamental to their philosophical explorations. For both Hobbes and Locke, “man” was not all men but, rather, ­those recognized as members of the social contract. Man was the one with whom they w ­ ere primarily concerned. The l­ abor of the slave did not grant him or her property, according to Locke. Only the ­labor of recognized “men” could perform that social-­contractarian alchemy. This exclusionary idea of personhood was, despite its narrowness, an expansion. Prior to Locke, the vari­ous En­glish parliamentary documents on rights had been specifically limited in their application to freeborn En­glishmen. They made no greater scope of recognition. However, Locke, along with other Enlightenment phi­los­o­phers, embraced a more abstract idea of who belonged as full members in a sovereign nation. The development of a body of rights to which persons could lay claim, both in the United States and in the En­glish parliamentary tradition, are signs of this expanded terrain. But that abstraction of “­legal person” nevertheless overwhelmingly excluded ­women and all ­those whose status was once defined by domination, w ­ hether enslaved, servants, or, eventually, the colonized. While “citizens” ­were subject to governance and had rights, sovereignty was also the work of producing the subjugated land or ­people, who ­were defined by not having rights or self-­determination, a key observation made by the con­temporary social theorists Achille Mbembe and Sylvia Wynter.18 ­Legal personhood was a theoretical concept that was executed in both territory and flesh.19 It covered vast as well as small tracts of land. The privately owned home, for instance, was a zone of private dominion, where the patriarch held authority over his ­family and possessions. But the public sphere, “the commons” which are often described historically as part of the “masculine realm,” also provided a structure whereby t­ hose who ­were l­ egal persons ­were set against ­those who w ­ ere not. In other words, the commonplace assertion that public life was for patriarchs while pri26 chapter  one

vate life was where w ­ omen and other subjugated p ­ eople ­were resigned is something of a mis-­description. The public domain provided theaters of patriarchal domination that included nonpersons. For example, the slave auction was a public site that drew sharp distinctions between t­hose ­people who w ­ ere deemed nonpersons and therefore could be purchased and t­ hose possessed of l­ egal personality who could buy and sell o ­ thers. In public spaces and, specifically the position one occupied in public space, the status of person versus nonperson and the relation of each to the sovereign was displayed. Nonpersons w ­ ere naked and shackled, their bodies poked and prodded, without the capacity to exercise bodily integration, and with no relations to one another recognized legally as contracts for their sale w ­ ere entered. Th ­ ese per­for­mances of nonrecognition took place u ­ nder the authority of patriarchs who, in buying and selling ­people, exercised their rights to contract and property. TITUBA’S WITNESS

In her classic feminist text Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici provides an account of the punishment of witches in the seventeenth c­ entury as part of the burgeoning logic of capitalism and the disciplining of domains of ­women’s work. The Salem witch t­ rials are an evocative example of t­ hese preoccupations in the Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Colony. An enslaved ­woman, Tituba, stood at the center of the events. She was one of three ­women accused of enlisting young girls into witchcraft. The other two ­were also ­women on the margins: one a beggar, and one a lady who had betrayed her respectable status by marrying an indentured servant. Of the historical witches, Tituba has most captured the imagination. She had been brought by her owner, Samuel, a minister, to Salem from Barbados. His paternal inheritance was on the island, where he resided intermittently. Eventually, however, he settled as a propertied minister in Salem, Mas­sa­chu­setts. Tituba is pres­ent in theater, fictional, and historical accounts, although now her repre­sen­ta­tion is called into question. Recent critics generally believe that Tituba was not African, as she is generally represented, but e­ ither Indigenous or both Indigenous and African. In any case, she was of a p ­ eople who w ­ ere outside or, at best, ancillary to recognition in the ­legal regime where they resided. Tituba was called to testify in the midst of the hysteria and executions about her knowledge of witchcraft. Tituba’s testimony of March 1, 1692, is generally understood ­today as having been made ­under duress. She had to have been contemplating how she was g­ oing to escape the murderous hysteria. S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  27

Tituba made a brave move. She claimed that she had indeed practiced witchcraft but had abandoned the practice, hoping that might save her. However, ­under pressure she identified ­others who ­were still involved. Tituba was ultimately executed, and her testimony was used as a basis for executing ­others. Tituba described how she refused the authority of the dev­il: “I saw a ­thing like a man, that tould me Searve him & I tould him noe I would nott doe Such t­ hing. . . . ​Thay tould me hurt the C ­ hildren & would have had me if I woud nott goe & hurt them they would doe soe to mee att first I did agree w’th them butt afterward I tould them I doe soe noe more.” When asked ­whether the devil wanted her to hurt the ­children, she responded, “Yes, butt I was Sorry & I sayd, I would doe Soe noe more, but tould I would feare God.”20 The devil enlisted vari­ous monstrosities to demand her loyalty, “sometimes like a hogge Sometimes like a g­ reat black dogge, foure tymes . . . ​one of them hath wings & two Leggs & a had like a woeman the ­Children Saw the Same butt yesterday w’ch afterward turned into a woeman.”21 A critical detail of her testimony is the account it provides of authority. In response to Gayatri Spivak’s now proverbial question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Tituba speaks of the arbitrary and corrupt nature of domination. Accounts of its moral relativism have been greatly overstated. Tituba says that the devil dictates what his subjects are to do and say. He is in charge of rituals and habits. It is an account that was based in the familiar. The dev­il’s authority was no dif­fer­ent from that of her master. She was servant to one and then to another. Her ­will was held captive between the two. The implications of the testimony, one of a sort that in the coming de­cades could not be provided at all, ­because she was not white, point to the architecture of nonpersonhood. As modern patriarchy developed, witches and their craft ­were treated as a l­ egal threat warranting punishment. Maria Mies describes this pro­ cess as one of dispossessing Eu­ro­pean w ­ omen of traditional forms of knowledge, an action that was philosophically consistent with destruction of the earth through new speculation techniques and colonization.22 Federici conceives of it as a mode of quashing ­women’s history of re­sis­tance to feudal domination and challenges to the church. In Caliban and the Witch, she contextualizes public acts of murder and torture of witches as moral panics around w ­ omen’s sexuality and po­liti­cal 23 identities. The perceived threat of witches was at once the literal product of a belief in the super­natural but it was also a symbolic threat, driven by a fear of what witches knew about dif­fer­ent possibilities of social order28 chapter  one

ing, specifically t­hose in which the feminine would not necessarily be subject to patriarchal authority. “Witch” and “witchcraft” ­were En­glish terms that ­were applied to global spiritual forms that lay outside Judeo-­ Christian traditions. Perhaps appropriately, the Oxford En­glish Dictio­ nary declares the terms’ etymology unclear. What is clear, however, is that ­under the designation of “witch,” belief systems outside the major world systems w ­ ere collapsed into a marker of danger. So I maintain the designation “witch” not to accept the perspective b ­ ehind the designation but to hold on to a sense of how language made thinking distinctly a basis for legitimized vio­lence. Witches ­were punished in Eu­rope through the seventeenth c­ entury. The practice became less frequent in the early modern period as urbanization and modernization lessened a fear of the super­natural and increased the sense that “Men” could fashion the world around them. Thinkers devoted to reason asserted that torturing witches had led to false testimony b ­ ecause, a­ fter all, they d ­ idn’t ­really exist. And the Witchcraft Act of 1735 declared witchcraft no longer a ­legal offense in Britain. But witches w ­ ere still sometimes punished by law. U ­ nder the new act the crime was “pretended” offenses. The offense was described as “pretence to witchcraft, sorcery, enchant-­ment or conjuration.”24 The punishments for violation grew milder and more sporadic, save for responses in rural communities that continued to kill and maim suspected witches extralegally through the eigh­teenth ­century. For his part, Hobbes argued that the belief in witches was at odds with the appropriate order of society, saying, “The pos­si­ble scenarios by which the Leviathan may be doomed and unhealthy include the sovereign lacking absolute power, subjects maintaining faith in the super­natural rather than submitting to the learned doctrine of the sovereign, ­matters of good and evil being deci­ded by individuals rather than civil law, and civil and religious authority being divided and ­under dif­fer­ent powers and imitating the governments of the Greeks and Romans.”25 Imperial ventures, consistent with this thinking, ­were marked by squashing and debasing that which was termed “witchcraft” among conquered and colonized ­people. Yet that sovereign also defined them as inferior due to their traditional spiritual practices termed “witchcraft,” which in fact ­were often similar to their own violently suppressed traditions. Federici’s interpretation of witches as not just violators but resisters. She argues that their nonpersonhood status was essential to the operation of capitalism in the form of expropriated ­labor. Further, the methodically expropriated ­labor of w ­ omen was connected to the colonial authorities’ expropriation of the land and ­labor of indigenous ­peoples. The witch for Federici, then, is a rebellious figure who battled against the status quo to establish the S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  29

distinction between self-­ownership and exploited ­labor. She, Tituba, and countless ­others ­were symbolic and literal resisters to personhood, sovereignty, and the property regime. They fought and lost. While Tituba escaped the devil, she ­didn’t escape the sovereign power of ­England by proxy of Salem. The evaluation of her soul lay subject to the logic of property. Tituba was bought and souled, sold and killed in the passionate exercise of creating order. CAP­I T­ AL­I ST FOUNDATIONS: OF PROPERTY AND PRODUCTION

The influence of the Enlightenment thought from the late seventeenth ­century to the eigh­teenth ­century pivoted Eu­ro­pe­ans away from the belief in witches but not from the structure of patriarchal domination. What ­were mystical conceptions of otherness became more fully elaborated philosophies of social organ­ization. The sovereign authority detailed the scope of po­liti­cal recognition and responsibility, and it remained exclusive. Adam Smith, often understood as the ­father of capitalism as the author of The Wealth of Nations, argued that ideas that w ­ ere foundational to patriarchy be applied to the nascent market and trading based economic order that would dominate the globe in the nineteenth ­century. According to Smith, the sovereign had three roles: to protect the society against outside forces; to mediate between citizens; and to erect and maintain public works and public institutions, “which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; ­because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a ­great society.”26 Setting aside for a moment how Smith’s attention to the public imperative lies in contrast to how cap­i­tal­ist theory is generally recounted ­these days, what is evident in his work is that this notion of the sovereign to whom the public is responsible is exclusive. The primary line of distinction that Smith identifies is between civilized and savage, and the secondary one is between men and ­women. And the distinctions had a ­great deal to do, according to Smith, with emotional capacity. In contrast to Hobbes, Smith believed that men w ­ ere not in essence selfish beings and instead that virtue and the virtuous society depended on the capacity of men to feel “sympathy,” as he terms it, for one another. The ability to feel the experience of ­others was at the heart of the social contract. It need not be, according to Smith, the precise emotion of another, but close enough for a fellow feeling and agreement to emerge that would allow for common ground. 30 chapter  one

Smith contrasted this necessary capacity to the emotional range displayed by ­those he termed “savages.” He describes “savagery” in terms of scarcity, striking one immediately odd formulation, given how much the logic of wealth production depended on the sense of limitlessness attached to discovery of other lands. The scarcity, however, is not attached to their lands but their limited h ­ uman capacity and skill, according to Smith, such that they have no “access” to the abundance. He believed that the superior substance of personhood of the Eu­ro­pean led to endless possibility, and constraint became definitive of “savages,” making them selfish. Smith wrote, “­Every savage undergoes a sort of Spartan discipline, and by the necessity of his situation is inured to e­ very sort of hardship. He is in continual danger: he is often exposed to the greatest extremities of hunger, and frequently dies of pure want. His circumstances not only habituate him to ­every sort of distress, but teach him to give way to none of the passions which that distress is apt to excite. He can expect from his countrymen no sympathy or indulgence for such weakness.” This produces an emotional deficit, according to Smith, ­because “before we can feel much for o ­ thers, we must in some mea­sure be at ease ourselves. If our own misery pinches us very severely, we have no leisure to attend to that of our neighbour: and all savages are too much occupied with their own wants and necessities, to give much attention to ­those of another person.”27 Hobbesian ideas of essential selfishness are something Smith applies only to the savage world. To Smith, the civilized, in contrast, can think beyond their own base desires. He writes, Among civilized nations, the virtues that are based on humaneness are cultivated more than the ones based on self-­denial and the command of the passions. Among rude and barbarous nations, it is quite other­wise: in them the virtues of self-­denial are more cultivated than ­those of humaneness. The general security and happiness that prevail at times of civic-­mindedness and highly developed society d ­ on’t call for contempt of danger, or patience in enduring ­labour, hunger, and pain. ­Because poverty can easily be avoided, disregard for it almost ceases to be a virtue.28 According to Smith, savages had to conceal passions and thus engage in “falsehood and pretence,” a fundamentally dishonest society in which passions become distorted. This idea he applies broadly to the “othered” of vari­ous sorts, saying, Every­one who has had any dealings with savage nations—­whether in Asia, Africa, or Amer­i­ca—­has found them equally impenetrable, finding S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  31

that when they want to conceal the truth t­ here’s no way of getting it out of them. They c­ an’t be tricked by artful questions, and not even torture can get them to tell anything that they d ­ on’t want to tell. But the passions of a savage, though never expressed by any outward emotional display and always hidden in the person’s breast, rise to the highest pitch of fury. Though the savage seldom shows any symptoms of anger, his vengeance—­when he gets to it—is always bloody and dreadful. The least insult drives him to despair. His countenance and discourse remain sober and calm, expressing nothing but the most perfect tranquility of mind; but his actions are often furious and violent.29 Smith’s observation brings to mind postcolonial critic Édouard Glissant’s account of “opacity.”30 That is to say, the account of impenetrability is a reflection of the colonialists’ desire to author and sort for the purpose of domination, as well as the re­sis­tance of the colonized. According to Glissant, such opacity is a re­sis­tance to the idea of universal ­human relations; it is a re­sis­tance to the reductiveness of humanism. Thus, we again see the roots of anticolonial and postcolonial criticism in Enlightenment formulations. They are already pres­ent in the gaps of the Eu­ro­pean phi­los­ o­phers’ account of the world. For Smith, the distorted and undisciplined, but also the dishonest, passions alienate ­others from the princi­ples of the social contract. The idea that ­those cast into the position of nonpersonhood w ­ ere unfit and undisciplined, as well as inscrutable, was a fundamental part of its structure. As Glissant writes, “If we look at the pro­cess of ‘understanding’ beings and ideas as it operates in Western society, we find that it [is] founded on an insistence of this kind of transparency. In order to understand and therefore accept you [,] I must reduce your density to this scale of conceptual mea­sure­ment which gives me a basis for comparisons and perhaps for judgments.”31 The impenetrability and the prospect of eruption are refusals that Smith builds into his mapping of civilization. Smith did something dif­fer­ent in his description of Eu­ro­pean ­women who existed in intimate association with patriarchy and yet subordinate. Eu­ro­pean ­women, according to Smith, have some capacity for feeling for ­others. This he calls “humaneness.” The incapacity of ­women was not in feeling, to Smith, but in ­doing. They ­were not generous. He wrote: The propriety of generosity and public spirit is founded upon the same princi­ple with that of justice. Generosity is dif­fer­ent from humanity. ­Those two qualities, which at first sight seem so nearly allied, do not always belong to the same person. Humanity is the virtue of a w ­ oman,

32 chapter  one

generosity of a man. The fair-­sex, who have commonly much more tenderness than ours, have seldom so much generosity. That ­women rarely make considerable donations, is an observation of the civil law. Humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow-­feeling which the spectator entertains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their good fortune. The most humane actions require no self-­denial, no self-­command, no g­ reat exertion of the sense of propriety. They consist only in ­doing what this exquisite sympathy would of its own accord prompt us to do. But it is other­wise with generosity. We never are generous except when in some re­spect we prefer some other person to ourselves, and sacrifice some ­great and impor­tant interest of our own to an equal interest of a friend or of a superior. The man who gives up his pretensions to an office that was the ­great object of his ambition, ­because he imagines that the ser­vices of another are better entitled to it.32 Men, according to Smith, are capable of the type of feeling that enables the social contract in action. ­Women in his account are limited to private affection. According to him, society requires public responsibility, to which w ­ omen are not suited. Sacrifice is read as only that which can be registered in public and only from the position of the dominator, not the dominated. It is absent from the l­abor of the subjugated in his account. With ­these absences, Smith pres­ents a picture that is streamlined and elegant (and incomplete in its accounting of humanity). Smith’s aesthetics anticipate the further developments of the nineteenth ­century that ­will mark it as the age of industrial capitalism. The society he imagines is a machine that operates effectively, one that demands virtue rather than vice but in which virtue demands public loyalty only to the civilized, not to the savage or the privately held: ­ uman society, when we contemplate it in a certain abstract and H philosophical light, appears like a g­ reat, an im­mense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects. As in any other beautiful and noble machine that was the production of h ­ uman art, what­ever tended to render its movements more smooth and easy, would derive a beauty from this effect, and, on the contrary, what­ever tended to obstruct them would displease upon that account: so virtue, which is, as it ­were, the fine polish to the wheels of society, necessarily pleases; while vice, like the vile rust, which makes

S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  33

them jar and grate upon one another, is as necessarily offensive. This account, therefore, of the origin of approbation and disapprobation, so far as it derives them from a regard to the order of society, runs into that princi­ple which gives beauty to utility.33 It is obvious, however, that this machine depends on the nonperson, and it is ­here that Smith’s social order reveals the fallacy of the attributions he has given to ­women and “savages” or “­others.” His landmark The Wealth of Nations is an argument for an economic alternative to mercantilism and ­toward the commercial landscape—­that is, capitalism, which depends on the production of wealth through l­ abor and trading. According to Smith, productive ­labor grows society. Trade provides even more possibility for the creation of wealth. Trade o ­ ught to expand beyond borders, creating a wide market landscape, more ­labor prospects, more wealth. This productivity, however, relied on the l­ abor of ­those who resided outside or on the margins of the social contract: the spinners of cloth, the pickers of cotton, the stolen, the unpaid. What Smith fails to term “generosity” when it comes to the unrecognized would ­later be compellingly described as exploitation. Fascinatingly, Smith goes back to the horrors of the seventeenth-­ century fear of witchcraft in his advocacy of his market model. By the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, the panics regarding witches w ­ ere regarded as a shame of the past, a feature of the superstition of the pre-­Enlightenment society. Fear of markets, according to Smith, was like fear of witches, an ascription of something terrifying to something as yet misunderstood. The popu­lar fear of engrossing and forestalling [speculative trading in ­England] may be compared to the popu­lar terrors and suspicions of witchcraft. The unfortunate wretches accused of this latter crime w ­ ere not more innocent of the misfortunes imputed to them than t­ hose who have been accused of the former. The law which put an end to all prosecutions against witchcraft, which put it out of any man’s power to gratify his own malice by accusing his neighbour of that imaginary crime, seems effectually to have put an end to ­those fears and suspicions by taking away the ­great cause which encouraged and supported them. The law which should restore entire freedom to the inland trade of corn would prob­ably prove as effectual to put an end to the popu­lar fears of engrossing and forestalling.34 Economic “freedom,” according to Smith, was akin to freedom from the forces of “othering” that w ­ ere attendant to the murderous fear of an earlier epoch. Yet his model of economic freedom itself rested on “othering” and domination. 34 chapter  one

This aspect of the architecture of patriarchy merits some distinction from some of the more influential philosophical accounts of the structure of society in the eigh­teenth ­century. For example, the poststructuralist phi­los­o­pher Michel Foucault argued that sovereign power was displaced by “disciplinary power” in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries.35 He defined sovereign power as that which was held u ­ nder the king. (Note that in this text, we are working with a broader conception of sovereignty than Foucault’s that is defined not by monarchy but by consolidated state power.) I want to sit with Foucault’s argument and language for a moment for the sake of argument. According to Foucault, when a person v­ iolated a law u ­ nder the sovereign, a violent punishment was made in public to demonstrate the absolute power of the sovereign and to deter ­those who might contest his power. In the eigh­teenth ­century, however, t­ hese forms of punishment evolved to become more corrective and less public and violent in nature. In the place of vio­lence, disciplinary power established norms and ultimately restored normative standards to t­ hose who might deviate from them at the same time that it diffused the exercise of power away from the single sovereign and into administrative institutions of vari­ous sorts. Surveillance through ­these agencies and institutions was or­ga­nized and hierarchical, and it served the goal of examination, evaluation, and correction. This account has been widely embraced by scholars. But how do we make sense of the ways in which the public exercise of brutal sovereign power persisted for the enslaved and the othered, or noncitizen/nonperson/­ subaltern, well into the nineteenth ­century and beyond? Public whippings, lynching, humiliation, mutilation, and torture remained mechanisms of domination. Moreover, gratuitous punishment without a clear disciplinary function established social hierarches in the West. Hence, repetitive vio­lence marked the status of the nonperson and did not operate simply to control. While Foucault may have been correct that discipline became the logic for keeping members of a society in check—­and by members, I mean ­those possessed of “­legal personhood”—­for ­those who ­were “nonpersons,” the more brutal forms of sovereign power continued in both public rituals and private expressions of vio­lence. His theory of discipline was applicable to putative patriarchs or citizens (and the two categories for the most part overlapped) and their relations with the state and one another when they failed to comply with the rules of their positions. But it does not adequately account for the mechanisms of domination as they related to ­legal nonpersons who fell outside or ­under the authority of patriarchs and patriarchy. That is another part of the architecture.

S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  35

THE KIMBER CASE

In 1791, the En­glishman John Kimber captained a ship carry­ing three hundred enslaved Africans from New Calabar to Grenada.36 On the ship, as was commonplace, the Africans experienced an occasional modest respite from the horrifying conditions of the Brooks model of slave ship transport. The vile technology of the Brooks model required that slaves be chained together, wallowing in waste and emesis, and packed tight, flesh to flesh. When they w ­ ere brought up from the hold for air and exercise, their relief was rendered perverse, an extension of domination in exchange for clear breath, as they w ­ ere also expected to dance as entertainment for the crew. One day, Kimber ordered one of the captive girls to perform. She refused. He demanded further. She still refused. Kimber lashed her with a whip. Then he had his crew suspend her in the air by one leg and drop her on the ship’s deck. Soon thereafter, she died. Her “no” had no perlocutionary effect. The ends sought, of being left alone for a bit, could neither be actualized nor recognized according to the Western rules of personhood. She went unnamed and was “unmade” by the captain of the ship and by the British empire.37 On April 2, 1792, the antislavery activist William Wilberforce made a speech before the British Parliament regarding the evils of the slave trade. He referenced the Kimber case in his testimony. He spoke of murdered girls (­there ­were two). This girl he identified as a “virjen,” emphasizing her innocence and youth in an effort to compel the court. In response to Wilberforce’s testimony, authorities arrested Kimber, and he was charged with murder.38 Kimber ultimately was acquitted. That was no surprise. This case was heard only a de­cade ­after the much more widely recounted Zong slave ship massacre.39 On the Zong, the crew had killed 132 Africans by throwing them overboard. The mass murder, according to the crew, was a solution to a prob­lem: Th ­ ere was insufficient ­water on board to keep the entire cargo and crew alive, so they killed the Africans. None of the Zong’s crew had been charged with murder. When the issue came before the court, it ruled that mass killings w ­ ere ­legal if they w ­ ere performed to ensure the survival of the ship and its crew. The crew members, unlike the Africans, ­were l­ egal persons. The crew members ­were liable, however, for failing to bring sufficient ­water to sustain the property. Therefore, the insurers of the slaves ­were not forced to make payouts for the financial losses incurred by the slaves’ deaths. The insurance corporation had rights. The enslaved did not. 36 chapter  one

But the Kimber case was dif­fer­ent. A man was tried for the murder of slave girls. That seemed to be a step away from the depths of cruelty in the transatlantic slave trade. However, despite the fact that Kimber’s case entailed some ­legal recognition that murdering ­human cargo was a moral and potentially a l­egal wrong, it effectively was yet another instance in which the status of the enslaved as nonpersons was evident. The murdered girls w ­ ere not protected by a patriarch or by a sovereign authority, and no sanctuary at the site of their torture was to be found from fellow slaves, who, had they fought back to save them, could have been murdered with similar impunity. It took Wilberforce’s standing as a ­legal person even to enable the case to be pursued. He sought, and failed, to have an enslaved girl recognized as a “virjen,” but the entire ­legal and social structure excluded her from being recognized by a term limited to ­those who stood in ­legal familial relation to patriarchs: girls and ­women whose partial personhood rested on that relation. Moreover, the ritual rape on slave ships served as a sign of the structure that made the claim so elusive. The space between the virjen and the lady, on one extreme of the “female” ­human, and the enslaved, on the other, is a fundamental part of the architecture of gendering and the construction of patriarchy in modernity, and Spillers’s term “vestibular” aptly accounts for it. ­These ­women ­were standing at the threshold of the domestic and the exotic, within the plantation ­house­hold and outside its protection, essential to the economic engine of the nation and without the capacity to hold property. To be vestibular was to be excluded from the rules of gender or the capacity to have authority over one’s own gendering. (Spillers describes the ­labor of enslaved ­women as being both reproductive and manual; they did w ­ omen’s work and men’s work.) To be vestibular was to be monstrous ­because they ­were (coercively) disordered according to the dominant rules of gender. To be monstrous also meant one was to be available for abuse, as well as use. U ­ nder the authority of the state, the patriarch was the one who held the authority to abuse and exploit, as well as the right to protect his possessions. But t­ here was also an analogical relationship between the sovereign authority of the state and the sovereign of one, including dominion of the patriarch over his domestic realm, including ­legal nonpersons. Laboring ­Women, Jennifer Morgan’s classic history of enslaved ­women, elaborates Spillers’s theory with evidence accumulated both from the fact of ­labor relations and the manner in which Black ­women’s bodies became the economic engine of the slave economy in the United States, as well as from the discourses about Black w ­ omen that emerged in early travel S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  37

lit­er­a­ture that depicted them as monstrous yet appealing, with extra breasts and giant-­like size.40 The idea, repeatedly exercised in accounts of encounters with Black w ­ omen’s bodies, was that their forms lay beyond the terms of conventional recognition and that their bodies lay in excess of the understood form of “­woman.” Claims for inclusion, made by Africans before Eu­ro­pean authorities, depended on arguing that individual Black ­people did in fact fit into the logics of patriarchy. As in the case of the murdered slave girl who was called a virgin, in the case of Boucaux v. Verdelin, the assertion for emancipation was made on the basis of the trappings of patriarchy: Jean Boucaux had a Eu­ro­pean wife and a home. Likewise, James Somerset, a Christianized African, argued before the En­glish Court of King’s Bench in 1772 that he could not be enslaved in ­England ­because ­there was no common law authority for slavery in ­England, depending on the testimony of his godparents.41 He was presented as a member of society in the ­legal proceedings and ultimately won his case. The ruling, however, was narrowly tailored by Lord Mansfield simply to stand for the princi­ple that no person could be removed from ­England against his ­will. Somerset’s victory did not end British participation in the slave trade. It did not keep escaped slaves from being captured in E ­ ngland. And it did not end the institution of slavery throughout the colonies. It merely made E ­ ngland a geo­graph­i­cal territory in which some modicum of ­legal personhood would be presumed, if not guaranteed, for ­those residing t­ here as long as they ­were not claimed by masters asserting their owner­ship over said Africans. But if a master did assert such authority, that act would return the Africans to complete nonpersonhood. Hence, Somerset’s victory announced a liminal status, at best. Just as, in general terms, ­women ­were kept out of the status of ­legal personhood/patriarch, notwithstanding the exceptional queen or female landowner, and ­were overwhelmingly subject to patriarchal control, so, too, w ­ ere the enslaved and colonized, despite the exceptional figure of someone such as James Somerset. Sir William Blackstone, the En­glish jurist and author of Commentaries on the Laws of E ­ ngland, argued against slavery within the borders of the nation-­state, an argument for a civil society that could be separated from the activity of conquest. He is worth quoting at length to illustrate the point: The conqueror, say the civilians, had a right to the life of his captive; and, having spared that, has a right to deal with him as he pleases. But it is an untrue position, when taken generally, that, by the law of nature or nations, a man may kill his ­enemy: he has only a right to kill him, in 38 chapter  one

par­tic­u­lar cases; in cases of absolute necessity, for self-­defence; and it is plain this absolute necessity did not subsist, since the victor did not actually kill him, but made him prisoner. War is itself justifiable only on princi­ples of self-­preservation; and therefore it gives no other right over prisoners, but merely to disable them from ­doing harm to us, by confining their persons: much less can it give a right to kill, torture, abuse, plunder, or even to enslave, an ­enemy, when the war is over. Since therefore the right of making slaves by captivity, depends on a supposed right of slaughter, that foundation failing, the consequence drawn from it must fail likewise. But, secondly, it is said that slavery may begin “jure civili”; when one man sells himself to another. This, if only meant of contracts to serve or work for another, is very just: but when applied to strict slavery, in the sense of the laws of old Rome or modern Barbary, is also impossible. ­Every sale implies a price, a quid pro quo, an equivalent given to the seller in lieu of what he transfers to the buyer: but what equivalent can be given for life, and liberty, both of which (in absolute slavery) are held to be in the master’s disposal? His property also, the very price he seems to receive, devolves ipso facto to his master, the instant he becomes his slave. In this case therefore the buyer gives nothing, and the seller receives nothing: of what validity then can a sale be, which destroys the very princi­ples upon which all sales are founded? Lastly, we are told, that besides t­ hese two ways by which slaves “fiunt,” or are acquired, they may also be hereditary: “servi nascuntur”; the c­ hildren of acquired slaves are, jure naturae, by a negative kind of birthright, slaves also. But this being built on the two former rights must fall together with them. If neither captivity, nor the sale of oneself, can by the law of nature and reason, reduce the parent to slavery, much less can it reduce the offspring. Upon t­ hese princi­ples the law of ­England abhors, and ­will not endure the existence of, slavery within this nation: . . . ​so that when an attempt was made to introduce it, by statute 1 Edw. VI. c. 3. which ordained, that all idle vagabonds should be made slaves, and fed upon bread, ­water, or small drink, and refuse meat; should wear a ring of iron round their necks, arms, or legs; and should be compelled by beating, chaining, or other­wise, to perform the work assigned them, ­were it never so vile; the spirit of the nation could not brook this condition, even in the most abandoned rogues; and therefore this statute was repealed in two years afterwards. And now it is laid down, that a slave or negro, the instant he lands in E ­ ngland, becomes a freeman; that is, the law w ­ ill protect him in the enjoyment of his person, his liberty, and his property. Yet, with regard to any right which the master may S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  39

have acquired, by contract or the like, to the perpetual ser­vice of John or Thomas, this ­will remain exactly in the same state as before: for this is no more than the same state of subjection for life, which e­ very apprentice submits to for the space of seven years, or sometimes for a longer term.42 The cases of Somerset and Boucaux ­were appeals to the sovereign authority about ­whether one would be propertied, a contracting party, or property. They, not unlike how Queen Elizabeth was an outlier for ­women, ­were exceptions to the rule connecting whiteness to patriarchy, yet all of them in many ways enforced the rule of status and the status quo. Moreover, they stood for the spatial geographies of patriarchal domination of othered ­legal nonpersons. Removing that domination to the chartered lands and, ­later, to colonized lands did not eradicate it. This was distinct from the U.S.-­based geography of domination, yet the arrangement of persons in the order was essentially the same. But it would also be too facile (and wrong) to imply that poor white men and w ­ omen could easily occupy this patriarch and liege-­helpmate status. The axis of patriarchy was not solely whiteness in the eigh­teenth ­century and the patriarch was not made of just “race and gender”—­that is, the structure of “personhood” but also of the protection of sovereign authority and property. Property was fundamental: not just ­human property, but also real property and wealth that so often depended on overseas adventures and investments. Although E ­ ngland’s slavery was remote, for the most part, its geography of partial personhood and even nonpersonhood was not. The work­houses that ­were formalized in the Relief of the Poor Act of 1782 (and elaborated in the Poor Law Amendment of 1834) systematically sorted the indigent out of conventions of sociality and into a liminal personhood status. Although quite distinct from enslavement, largely ­because one could exit the work­house at ­will, the utter domination and dissolution of privacy that resulted from extreme poverty became a variation on the structure of nonpersonhood. In work­houses, the mentally and physically ill w ­ ere separated from the sane and hardy; men ­were separated from ­women; parents ­were separated from ­children; and siblings w ­ ere separated from one another. Their heads ­were shaved, and their belongings ­were confiscated. They labored long hours.43 This was the punishment for failing to fit into the structure of f­ ree l­abor during industrial capitalism. The conditions ­were deplorable, and the residents ­were u ­ nder constant surveillance. The terrifying prospect of the work­house disciplined the En­glish working classes, and ­were intended as such. ­These sorting-­out systems, along 40 chapter  one

with t­ hose for pregnant teenage girls, orphans, and petty thieves in G ­ reat Britain, ­were or­ga­nized around a logic of punishment that addressed the vari­ous ways one might be deemed as failing e­ ither to meet the role and duties of patriarch or fitting inside his h ­ ouse­hold appropriately. In that failure they ­were removed from the protection of the sovereign, as well. Take, for example, the idea that Victorian ladies w ­ ere protected from reading about “prostitution,” as it was considered the province of men and potentially corrupting. But the majority of sex workers ­were, of course, ­women. Poor w ­ omen w ­ ere at the center of prostitution—­women who stood outside the bourgeois logic of domestic authority and therefore ­were without recognition, save for punishment. The multiplicity of ­people who ­were unrecognized legally ­were not, as many to speak simplistically of slavery, deemed “nonhuman.” Rather, personhood and patriarchy became a way to determine who counted and who did not among the ­human, and for what purposes when it came to vari­ous social and po­liti­cal concerns. Desire to be “included” rather than excluded from ­legal personhood also clearly became a basis for appeals to be included in the social contract. The work revolts and protests of nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pe­ans and Eu­ro­pean Americans took place largely on the terms of patriarchs and ladies, calling for expansions to the numbers of p ­ eople included in ­those categories, over and against t­ hose classified as “nonpersons.” ­There is therefore a cyclical loop to the production of patriarchy in the modern period. One might be born outside of it or fall outside of it. In ­either case, readings of such stories as fundamental to the history of patriarchy provide ample evidence that using the unmediated categories of man and ­woman fail to capture the scope of its operation.

S eafaring , S overeignty, and the S elf  41

chapter 2

PRODUCING PERSONHOOD The Rise of Capitalism and the Western Subject ...

Ran away from Joseph Reade of the City of New-­York, ­Mercht. the 14th of November 1732, a likely Mulatto Servant ­Woman named Sarah, she is about 24 Years of Age and has taken with her . . . ​a striped Sateen silk ­wast-coat, Two Homespun Wast-­coats and Petty-­coats; she is a handy wench, can do all sorts of house-­work, speaks good En­glish and some Dutch. New York Gazette, November 27, 1732

In 1792, at the dawn of the nineteenth ­century, the New York Stock Exchange was established a block away from the old slave markets. It was, in a sense, a triumph of Adam Smith’s philosophy. The Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, and the Constitution that followed it, had been ratified in the same year as Smith’s book was published. And in the new nation, while no longer a part of the British empire, the idea of “man” as patriarch retained its imperial meaning. Economic interests ­were woven into the Constitution, ­either as a limitation on the rights of Congress (as in the Fifth Amendment protection against being deprived of property without due pro­cess of law and requiring compensation when private property was taken for public use) or as a form of protection of private interests. ­Toward the latter ends, the Constitution declared that Congress could hold only limited land but had unlimited power to distribute public land to private parties, making property for the most part a m ­ atter of private interests. Congress also had the authority to punish piracy as a crime

against property, and the Fourth Amendment protected citizens against illegal search and seizure of private property. Federal courts ­were granted jurisdiction over interstate land claims and state debt to protect property across state lines, and the full faith and credit clause extended that protection to a requirement to recognize that property. In contrast to the broad national protection of economic interests, at the founding citizenship had l­ ittle meaning across the bound­aries of states. Rights w ­ ere local. Property was national. Property made citizens “big men,” to borrow a term from Maria Mies. While a m ­ atter of po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion, the three-­fifths clause that gave slave states a partial count of their enslaved population for purposes of congressional repre­sen­ta­tion, was a sign of how property holding amplified citizenship at the nation’s founding. Much has been made of the fallacy ­behind the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” in the thick of a slave society. Notwithstanding the shame of slavery felt by many at the Constitutional Convention, over the ­century the idea of “Man” remained exclusive and patriarchal, defined by property, ­legal personhood, and the new sovereign authority of the constitutions of the states and the federal government. ­Those who traded and t­ hose who w ­ ere traded belonged to dif­fer­ent categories of humanity, with some residing in between. Rights in the new nation could not be separated from economic interests or the expanded terrain of property. The American Revolution had not been against patriarchy, although it was against the previous structure of government. Democracy, like personhood, however, was not universal. Property retained its meaning in terms of the economic order; modern markets flowed from imperial charters. Systems of managing debt and investment grew specifically from the Dutch and British East India companies. Complex global economic relations, tightly bound to systems of unfree ­labor, ­were managed by meaning-­laden pieces of paper and moments of encounter between patriarchs, first in Antwerp and London, then in New York on Wall Street, a stone’s throw from where bodies w ­ ere once traded in the flesh. By the beginning of the nineteenth ­century, the dealings w ­ ere increasingly regionally remote from New York (which had begun gradual manumission of slaves) but no less integral to the economic development of the nation, which grew most dramatically through the cotton trade. Through the nineteenth c­ entury, in the expansion of slavery and the spread of colonial settlement of indigenous lands in the western territories, relations of domination ­were elaborated even further than their seventeenth-­century origins. In the 1820s, the move ­toward universal P roducing P ersonhood  43

white manhood suffrage in the United States, one of the remarkable features of the Herrenvolk demo­cratic proj­ect of the United States, was a signature feature of the expansion of both the patriarch and the po­liti­cal subject. Participation in the establishment of sovereign authority through suffrage, access to property through settlement and homesteading, and the granting of full status of citizen/legal personhood with rights, as well as responsibility, to working-­class white men ­were other key expansions in the reshaping of patriarchy in the nineteenth-­century United States. With each passing de­cade, patriarchy was further demo­ cratized, although the society was not. Globally, the nineteenth ­century is known for many ­things. Perhaps most significant is the way industrial capitalism rearranged the world. Over the c­ entury, major technological innovations swept the globe and worked in tandem to “maximize production” consistent with Smith’s theory. The turn to mechanization and rapid technological development during the industrial age, from spinning wheels and sewing machines to the cotton gin and railroads, radically transformed markets and geographies. Increased urbanization and industrialization heightened the sense of the “individual,” as opposed to the ­family, as the ­legal unit standing before the state. Th ­ ese nineteenth-­century changes also c­ reated what Karl Marx would term the “proletariat”: working ­people who produced goods but garnered far less than their fair share of the economic benefit. Exploited ­people w ­ ere of varying sorts, however. They might find the benefits of patriarchy elusive or completely impossible. This point is essential. It was a structural failure for theorists to account critically for the proletariat without also accounting for the nonperson, ­either domestic or in a relation of subjugation with the nation-­state. If we can acknowledge that forms of structuralist thought, from Marx to Claude Lévi-­Strauss, failed to account for the individual before the society, we must also recognize it also failed to account for t­ hose not contemplated as individuals before society. Both categories of h ­ umans fell into juridical rules, but nonrecognition must be understood as more than a yet unrealized potentiality in the early nineteenth c­ entury (e.g., an overly romantic account for the emancipation of the enslaved or the rise of property rights for ­women ­later in the c­ entury) but as a constant in the logic of patriarchy, a form of domination on which the law of property and sovereignty rested. As nineteenth-­century economies shifted from trade to production, ­those who w ­ ere most remote from personhood ­were most exploited in their productive ­labor. The United States r­ ose while other empires waned. Some empires died, and ­others expanded. Eu­ro­pean relationships to 44 chapter two

Africa and Asia moved from extraction of resources and ­people to colonial governance structures that excluded locals from participation in the pro­cesses of governance. Global migration and urbanization changed the daily lives of ­people all over the world. The economy of the new nation, the United States, was transformed by the rapid expansion of cotton production, made pos­si­ble by the enslaved and the cotton gin, as well as by the ­labor of the “mill girls” in the mills in the Northeast—­the unfree and the “wage slaves,” as they w ­ ere termed. The conceptual attachment of the body and humanity of some p ­ eople with the expansion of mechanical production was a central feature of industrialization. As Simone de Beauvoir poignantly noted, the factory workers first lashed out against their exploitation by breaking the machines, before asserting their rights before the bosses. To break the machine was in a sense to break the conversion of oneself into a machine for the accumulating wealth of another. It was one form amid a broad range of forms of re­sis­tance. Yet investment in the logics of patriarchy also proliferated, and conceptions of interpersonal patriarchal relations of domination of ­women and nonpersons ­were fully pres­ent amongst the Eu­ro­pean and American proletariat. Marx described this importation of the ideology of patriarchy as a primary cause for the division of ­labor, and pay gaps for working-­class ­women and men. Although gender in­equality was criticized by a range of socialist and anarchist theorists, it is also the case that features of an inherited ideology of patriarchy ­were fundamental to both socialist and anarchist arguments, as well as gains, in the era. The concept of honest ­labor and the critique of the ruling classes, de­cadently remote from production, reached back to Lockean conceptions of personhood and, specifically, to the idea that a (­legal) person had claims to the property or products resulting from ­labor. Moreover, many working-­ class ­people articulated a relation to technology of difference from it, of power and control over technology in their assertion of a subject status. Or­ga­nized l­ abor was a claim to personhood. Their claims w ­ ere responded to by generations of transformations in contract law, more complex than it is appropriate to discuss h ­ ere. Initially, however, the logic of “freedom of contract” theoretically focused on the freedom of workers to enter and exit contractual relations at ­will. ­These ­were often exploitative relations, but they ­were also a move away from feudal logics of status being tied to obligation. In addition, protections against deception and breach w ­ ere elaborated in the United States and ­Great Britain in the nineteenth c­ entury. Thus, contractual obligations, which at least theoretically placed contracting parties on the same footing, ­were heightened. Hence, while recognition of the personhood P roducing P ersonhood  45

of working class White men did not mean they ceased to be exploited or abused, it marked distinct categories of “producers.” Slaves, for example, or Indigenous ­people, for whom contractual obligations w ­ ere not protected, did not have the kind of recognized position within the architecture of patriarchy that working-­class white men gained, although the position of working-­class white men was one of relative disadvantage compared with that of elites. Writing in the ­middle of the ­century, John Stuart Mill articulated the fundamental tension between the status of slavery and the princi­ple of liberty of contract that made this distinction so critical: In this and most other civilized countries, for example, an engagement by which a person should sell himself, or allow himself to be sold, as a slave, would be null and void; neither enforced by law nor by opinion. The ground for thus limiting his power of voluntarily disposing of his own lot in life, is apparent, and is very clearly seen in this extreme case. The reason for not interfering, ­unless for the sake of ­others, with a person’s voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he so chooses is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him, and his good is on the ­whole best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it. But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he foregoes any ­future use of it beyond that single act. He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of himself. He is no longer f­ ree; but is thenceforth in a position which has no longer the presumption in its favour, that would be afforded by his voluntarily remaining in it. The princi­ple of freedom cannot require that he should be ­free not to be ­free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom. Th ­ ese reasons, the force of which is so con­spic­u­ous in this peculiar case, are evidently of far wider application; yet a limit is everywhere set to them by the necessities of life, which continually require, not indeed that we should resign our freedom, but that we should consent to this and the other limitation of it. The princi­ple, however, which demands uncontrolled freedom of action in all that concerns only the agents themselves, requires that ­those who have become bound to one another, in ­things which concern no third party, should be able to release one another from the engagement: and even without such voluntary release, t­ here are perhaps no contracts or engagements, except ­those that relate to money or money’s worth, of which one can venture to say that ­there ­ought to be no liberty what­ever of retractation.1 46 chapter two

Marx, writing economic philosophy in the early nineteenth ­century, described the United States as the primary example of the progressive industrial state. However, he also saw the United States as one such example that did not entail “patriarchy,” attributing that failure (or success) to the existence of slavery as the economic engine for the nation-­state. While I disagree with the formulation that the United States was not ­patriarchal, I agree with Marx that it was not what he conceived of as patriarchy. Rather, it was the primary example of the modern, post­feudal global patriarchal order. For Marx, a patriarchal order was based in the feudal domestic unit, or in the plantation h ­ ouse­hold that was self-­sustaining. He saw the expansion of slavery into large commercial markets as a d ­ istinct type of order. It was distinct, although it was most certainly patriarchal. The transatlantic slave trade, the first stage of globalization, made the theft of ­labor and land a fundamental part of wealth production. But it still relied on patriarchy, though proliferated, diffuse, and finding its recognition in public as well as in private, in the trappings of citizenship, wealth and relations of domination that ­were both intimate and public. In the United States, when patriarchs purchased slaves and Indian lands that ­were taken in violation of treaties, they entered contracts without the contractual participation of ­those who lost freedom and homes, and they incurred debts based on a use value that had no attendant negotiation on the part of the enslaved. The enslaved instead became extensions of the ­labor desert of the patriarch. Marx himself illustrated this point in terms of the structure of capital, saying, The price paid for a slave is nothing but the anticipated and capitalized surplus-­value or profit, which is to be ground out of him. But the capital paid for the purchase of a slave does not belong to the capital, by which profit, surplus l­ abor, is extracted from him. On the contrary. It is capital, which the slave holder gives away, it is a deduction from capital, which he has available for ­actual production. It has ceased to exist for him, just as the capital invested in the purchase of land has ceased to exist for agriculture. The best proof of this is the fact, that it does not come back into existence for the slave holder or land owner, ­until he sells the slave or the land once more.2 I am interested ­here in what this also says about the structure of personhood—­that is, that the slaveholder deducted capital for an expansion of his personhood. Taking this alongside Hortense Spillers’s theorization of vestibularity, what develops is a vexing picture. The slaveholder who worked the slave w ­ oman as a man yet depended on her reproductive ­labor to expand his personhood, as well as his property—­the l­abor P roducing P ersonhood  47

he could use for production in national and global capital markets—­also made sexual vio­lence productive. Rape, committed by masters directly or through forced coupling, was at once an intimate act of vio­lence and one that produced h ­ umans who would also extend the scope of the master’s “productivity.” Although Marx emphasized the “grounding out” of ­labor from the enslaved, focusing his attention on the Ca­rib­bean model of working slaves to death, his point about capital and personhood might be made even more strongly, given the reproduction of life among the enslaved in the United States, where slavery grew by “natu­ral increase.” As the classic work of Eugene Genovese and o ­ thers reveals, the patriarchal ideology of the U.S. plantation descriptively cast the enslaved as part of the domestic structure.3 Hence, within the intimate logic of gendering in the United States, Black p ­ eople ­were within the enclosure, part of the home yet homeless. In addition, the formal sovereignty of Indians was repeatedly robbed as spoils of “war” engaged in by the sovereign authority. This was how the American homeland was created. Marx provocatively described the fact that the enslaved could not exchange their l­abor as “valuelessness” (even the purchase of slaves was predicated on some ­future, not pres­ent, value), which suggests another dimension of property and personhood in the context of slavery: that of the “slave” as an “investment.” Thus, despite the fact that the slave economy was agricultural, it had features of commercial markets and capitalism rather early. The enslaved ­were not mere goods; they ­were extensions of the patriarchal self and investments through whom profits could be reaped. This was another way the slave’s person was collapsed into the ­human possibility of the master himself. A final observation in this line of thought: This condition of the enslaved as property anticipated colonization in the sense that the slave economy excluded the prospect of participation in governance for the enslaved. The sovereign entitlement—to a piece of land or chattel—­ was based in theft of life and indigeneity. The long suffering of Haiti, whose revolution began in the nineteenth c­ entury, is due to a Eu­ro­pean rendering of the revolution as a taking of property, maintained with the threat of nonrecognition of Haitian sovereign authority on the global stage. Marx wanted to treat U.S. slavery as anomalous, but the structure, while distinctly rendered, became global. The Eu­ro­pean workingman who clamored for recognition in the nineteenth c­ entury was structurally dif­f er­ ent from the vanquished. Th ­ ere was a tripartite structure of domination that hinged on the stratification of ­legal persons, with their attendant and ancillary w ­ omen and c­ hildren, and t­ hose outside of personhood who could not engage in any exchange. For the nonpersons ­there was no pos48 chapter two

session, no right of authority, and therefore no personhood. ­There was only being possessed. And like the savage or the monster who appeared in Enlightenment theory, the slave was an ever pres­ent eruption of the indeterminate being, named with language that, even to the namers, was admittedly inadequate. To call slaves “chattel” was a misapprehension of the role of intimate association and h ­ uman reproduction in domination, the ­legal contortions necessary to account for their humanity. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provided a literary example of the domestic anxiety regarding slavery and colonialism that resulted from this structure of relations. Although she opposed both slavery and colonialism, Frankenstein’s monster represented the fear of the monstrous products that threatened to flow from the peculiar institutions. The yellow-­skinned monster escapes the control of his creator, Victor Frankenstein, control and, according to the logic of the novel, must be tamed. The novel lends itself to being read as a response to slave revolts across the Atlantic world. But it can also be read as simply part of anxiety attendant to a brutal and intimate domination, one in which the impenetrability of the enslaved was always threatening. Motifs of chartering new territory, from discovery of the building blocks of a living humanoid being to the chase for the monster, across broad terrain are about the relentless demands of domination. Frankenstein is charged with maintaining his fragile patriarchal role. When confronted by the monster’s desire for partnership, he thinks, Even if they ­were to leave Eu­rope and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of ­those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be c­ hildren, and a race of dev­ils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless of his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that ­future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, per-­haps, of the existence of the ­whole h ­ uman race.4 STATE V. MANN

John Mann was a mari­ner.5 A single man, often out to sea and floundering in debt, he hired a slave who belonged to Elizabeth Jones. Her name was Lydia, and she was presumably hired to maintain his ­house­hold. P roducing P ersonhood  49

Mann was an unlikely possessor of a slave. He ­couldn’t have afforded one. He was so far in debt that he had lost his home and been jailed several times for it. But he was able to hire Lydia and pay Jones something for her ­labor. According to court rec­ords, Lydia failed to do something minor that Mann requested one day, and in response he shot her, permanently disabling her. Jones sued Mann for the reduced value of her property. Lydia would never be functional in the same way again. Jones had reason to believe she would prevail in this case. Previous ­owners had won cases against hirers who damaged the property value in their slaves. Although Jones was the litigant and Lydia’s owner, it was in fact her ­uncle who brought the suit.6 ­Under the doctrine of femme sole, it was commonplace for a man to stand in as l­egal representative for an unmarried ­woman. Although she had property and thus a legitimate claim to the sovereign authority, and was enough of a l­egal person to bring the suit, Jones’s was the relatively modest form of personhood that elite ­women possessed. Surprisingly, for many, the court ruled in ­favor of Mann. The logic of this case is instructive: The court determined that for a slave master to maintain his status as a master, the domination of the enslaved must be absolute; therefore, the vio­lence and wounds Lydia suffered while hired out ­were reasonable consequences of that relationship. Lydia was not a party to the contract. Her w ­ ill and wounds w ­ ere not her own possessions; they belonged to whichever party had authority over her at the moment. She was unmade by the courts. Had the court deci­ded the other way, Lydia w ­ ouldn’t have been party to the contract, ­either. That ­isn’t the detail that distinguishes this story. Rather, the resolution of the case describes something about the scope of nonpersonhood. Property interest was subsumed to the logic of domination. When threatened, dominance took pre­ce­dence over the investment value. It is analogous to the logic of war applied to the non-­European world, in which dominance was the foundation to extraction and exploitation. We ­ought to be mindful of how cases like this push us to think about animate property. Lydia was not like inanimate property, of course, not only ­because she possessed intellect, emotion, and the ability to interact (and resist) but also b ­ ecause owner­ship of animate property was defined not merely by the fact of l­egal possession but by the relation between property and property holder in real time. Returning a hired slave was not the same as returning a borrowed teacup with a crack in the bottom. The property status of the nonperson has meaning not merely in an abstract exchange value but in the flesh-­and-­blood relationship between 50 chapter two

the l­ egal person and the nonperson, the l­ egal person who charged the enslaved person with tasks or used her as a repository for rage and desire. Patriarchy in the relationship to the enslaved, as in the relationship with the ­family, was always a m ­ atter of intimate association, as well as a formal ­legal relationship and social arrangement. Lydia’s flesh and bone ­were altered by Mann’s hands. He held her embodiment. Hence, we might say that the classic feminist statement “The personal is po­liti­cal” has meaning that extends beyond ­family relations to which we usually apply it and is meaningful for all relations u ­ nder patriarchal authority. Mann was recognized as a man, and Jones, notwithstanding the fact that she was a ­woman, was recognized as someone with l­ egal personhood and patriarchal authority as a property holder in antebellum North Carolina. However, in another instance—­imagine, for example, if Jones ­were married and had a husband who beat and raped her—­Jones would have had no standing to pursue criminal prosecution against her husband. It is only by means of the ­legal relation of the propertied to property that Jones as a w ­ oman was able to behave as a patriarch. The l­egal relation of husband to wife, however, would have been another m ­ atter. In each, patriarchy existed, and its relations s­ haped the rule of law—or, rather, was served by the rule of law, albeit distinctly. Similarly, poor white men who worked as slave patrollers had the authority to stop, torture, whip, and even murder any enslaved person suspected of violating Southern slave law in the antebellum era. Slave patrollers in the antebellum South served to protect the safety of the sovereign state against both the attack and appeal of the enslaved. Sally Hadden described them this way: In the countryside, such patrols w ­ ere to “visit e­ very Plantation within their respective Districts once in e­ very Month” and whenever they thought it necessary, “to search and examine all Negro-­Houses for offensive weapons and Ammunition.” They w ­ ere also authorized to enter any “disorderly tipling-­House, or other Houses suspected of harboring, trafficking or dealing with Negroes” and could inflict corporal punishment on any slave found to have left his own­er’s property without permission. “Slave patrols” had full power and authority to enter any plantation and break open Negro ­houses or other places when slaves ­were suspected of keeping arms; to punish runaways or slaves found outside their plantations without a pass; to whip any slave who should affront or abuse them in the execution of their duties; and to apprehend and take any slave suspected of stealing or other criminal offense, and bring him to the nearest magistrate.7 P roducing P ersonhood  51

The power to police and dominate ­those nonpersons had to be complete for their status as nonpersons to be maintained. This order was maintained by ­those possessed of personhood often of the most fragile sort. Theirs was a public function attached to the rule of domination vis-­à-­vis ­human private property. That said, t­ here was (and remains) something of a slippery slope between ­those with a relatively vulnerable personhood status (e.g., poor white men in the antebellum period) and ­those without status or recognition altogether. For example, slave patrollers often ­were not property holders. Lower-­status possessors of personhood w ­ ere enlisted to maintain the boundary between personhood and nonpersonhood, both structurally and ideologically, even as their own personhood felt fragile. The boundary formed was always porous, giving t­hose on the margins of personhood even more reason to jealously police it, for fear of slipping u ­ nder the bar altogether. They ­were far less power­ful than plantation ­owners, and subsistence living could place them in a position of extreme vulnerability in relation to the propertied. But the distinction between one who possesses modest rights and recognition and one who does not is of such epistemic and existential significance that, notwithstanding the slippery slopes that are always pres­ent between groups of marginalized p ­ eople, it is essential to identify the difference as fundamental to the structures of domination that s­ haped the modern world. Moreover, it reveals how the structure of gendering—or, to be more precise, the construction of “man” “citizen” and “­legal person” (variations on a single theme)—­was at least as salient as class and wealth in the constitution of injustice and in­equality in the modern world. F ­ ree men who ­were recognized as such had some rights over ­others, even when they w ­ ere dominated other­wise. Stated another way, nonpersonhood is deeply connected to poverty, but as a ­legal status it cannot be collapsed into socioeconomic class, ­either past or pres­ent. J. MARION SIMS: MAPPING THE FEMALE BODY

The Westcott plantation was on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama. In 1845, one of the enslaved w ­ omen on the plantation, named Anarcha, endured a three-­day ­labor. Her master called in a doctor, J. Marion Sims, to assist with the birth. A ­ fter the birth, he called Sims again, hoping the doctor could repair damage to Anarcha’s body resulting from the ­labor (or, perhaps, resulting from Sims’s obstetric care). Anarcha had been left incontinent and incapacitated. Her value as property was greatly reduced. Westcott sought out the doctor a second time ­because he hoped to recover his investment. 52 chapter two

Sims had Anarcha position herself on all fours on top of his examination ­table. He penetrated her with a spoon that had a distorted shape, hoping to see inside her. According to Sims, this action allowed for her uterus to “pop” back into its proper position. Sims described his discovery on Anarcha’s body: “I cannot, nor is it needful for me to describe, my emotions when the air rushed in and dilated the vagina to its greatest capacity whereby its ­whole surface was seen at one view, for the first time by any mortal man.”8 Sims was excited by his success at creating a proto-­speculum that allowed him to see inside Anarcha’s body, and he sought more. He continued to conduct medical research on Anarcha, as well as on two other enslaved ­women, Betsy and Lucy, among ­others. None of them offered consent to the experiments. They c­ ouldn’t, legally speaking. The contractual agreement Sims struck was between master and doctor. Sims used tools crafted from his imagination on their bodies to learn about ­women’s reproduction. As a result of his discoveries, he became known as the ­father of modern gynecol­ogy. Sims opened a sixteen-­bed hospital and created seventy-­ one tools to use on the w ­ omen’s bodies. He did not give them anesthesia when he operated, believing that Africans felt no pain, and administered narcotics (as well as deprived them of food and w ­ ater) only ­after the surgeries so that his patients would remain still and not disturb his work as they healed. Wendy Brinker, a blogger who potently analyzes Sims’s history, provocatively refers to him as “­Father Butcher,” writing, Acting primarily as a plantation physician, Sims became known for operations on clubfeet, cleft palates and crossed eyes. He began to treat enslaved babies suffering from what he called “trismus nascentium,” now known as neonatal tetanus. Tetanus originates in ­horse manure, and it’s probable the proximity of the slave quarters to the ­horse stables was the direct cause of the high rate of tetanus in enslaved babies. In an article published by Sims on the subject, he comes to quite another conclusion that offers us a glimpse into his personal views. “Whenever ­there are poverty, and filth, and laziness, or where the intellectual capacity is cramped, the moral and social feelings blunted, t­ here it w ­ ill be oftener found. Wealth, a cultivated intellect, a refined mind, an affectionate heart, are comparatively exempt from the ravages of this unmercifully fatal malady. But expose this class to the same physical ­causes, and they become equal sufferers with the first.”9 Sims also argued that the movement of the skull bones during a protracted birth contributed to trismus, a subject he wanted to explore further. So he experimented on enslaved infants. He took custody of P roducing P ersonhood  53

them and with a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool used for making holes in leather, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment. ­Because he “owned” ­these poor, innocent ­children, he had ­free access to their bodies for autopsies, which he usually performed immediately a­ fter death. Sims routinely blamed “slave ­mothers and nurses for infant suffering, especially through their ignorance.”10 Whoever the f­ athers of t­ hose c­ hildren ­were, of course, could claim no patriarchal authority to them ­unless, of course, their ­fathers ­were their masters. In that case, their interest in the c­ hildren was more likely to be economic than filial. Sims, according to the rules of patriarchy, had authority over t­hese enslaved ­children, as well as over the w ­ omen. Moreover, his nonconsensual penetration of the bodies of enslaved w ­ omen during the Victorian era, in which such investigations would be taboo if performed on “ladies,” indicated the enslaved w ­ omen’s structural distinction from that designation, and any other form of l­egal recognition. His experimentation on Black ­children indicated the alienation of both maternity and paternity ­under the patriarchal relations of enslavement. Anarcha’s name was eerily appropriate. She lay outside po­liti­cal community,11 and therefore Sims had no obligations of mutuality to her as a subject of research and exploration. In the pro­cess of developing the field of gynecol­ogy, Sims destroyed. Descriptions of “mad” eugenicist scientists often fail to account for the centrality of knowledge production by means of vio­lence on ­those outside the po­liti­cal community and l­egal recognition in Western history. We like to think of knowledge as virtuous, but its production can be violent. Not only did Sims perform surgery on unanesthetized ­women, but his experimentation with vari­ous surgical materials gave some of his subjects infections that stayed with them u ­ ntil death. He disabled. While slavery was a disabling institution in general, rendering physical ailments, early death, scarring, and trauma, that Sims extended this to “know” something useful for the treatment and care of w ­ omen who ­were recognized as l­egal persons, even if partially so, is revelatory of the extractive and destructive structure of creating and protecting civil society. When his own health suffered, however, Sims took care of himself and moved north in hopes of improvement. ­There he also refashioned himself professionally. In his use of woodcuts accompanying his lectures, he portrayed his early female patients as white. Now that he chose to practice among white ­women of the upper and ­middle classes, he stated of his surgeries, “I thought only of relieving the loveliest of all God’s creation.”12 54 chapter two

He inverted his patriarchal vio­lence and refashioned it as patriarchal protection. In New York, with financial support, he opened a ­women’s charity hospital. ­There he did his experimentation on poor Irish w ­ omen, who although ­free ­were on the very margins of New York society. This included clitoridectomies and ovariotomies performed in front of groups of men and again without anesthesia. In contrast, when Sims, who had by then gained a favorable reputation, treated wealthy white w ­ omen, such as Empress Eugénie of France, he took ­great care to limit their pain and protect their privacy. For Sims, the bodies of dif­fer­ent categories of ­women ­were understood to be similar enough that he could acquire general knowledge from the lowest strata. The essential racial/ethnic difference was, by implication, constructed of mind and spirit rather than form. This reflects an embedded deception to the very concept of essentialisms: In truth, their vio­lence is in how they coerce ­people into categories rather than in the ­simple observation of difference. Many if not most ­people know that. They are philosophical fictions matching ­legal ones. Gender, then, was not only a ­simple binary applied to a reading of biological sex, but in terms of relations, it depended on a truncated reading of details of the form (of the body, of the society) that would instruct how the person would be treated. We might think back to John Locke’s and Adam Smith’s understandings of the bounded rationality that attended the creation of categories of beings, ­people, and places. Or we might keep in mind how Michel Foucault accounted for the disciplining of be­hav­ior (with ideas such as deviance and delinquency). In contrast, the gendered categories of humanity ­were disciplined by ascribing meaning to shade of flesh, national origin, or ­legal status. Spillers accounts for the utilitarianism undergirding the ungendering of enslaved Black w ­ omen: They produced wealth through manual l­abor and property through birthing and performed the maternal function of child care, just as they w ­ ere subject to punishment “like men,” although they ­were clearly sexed as female, for the production of wealth. In the case of Sims’s experiments, they became the objects through which a wealth of knowledge was acquired while they w ­ ere neither the beneficiaries nor the agents of said knowledge. Actions such as Sims’s set the terms of recognition in the hands of t­ hose who possessed and acquired accepted forms of knowledge and excluded the subjects of study, the objects of violently produced knowledge. Methodological rigor was generally expected, but medical ethics ­were limited to ­those who ­were part of the po­liti­cal community. The “cleanliness” of scientific method as P roducing P ersonhood  55

rendered by medical tools set out for display or by neatly composed and dispassionate scholarly articles betrayed the physical vio­lence of knowledge acquisition. The examination of facts, like the examination of bodies, produced destructive knowledge when predicated on the presumptive relations of domination. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) is widely renounced as one of the worst in the court’s history.13 In it, Scott; his wife, Harriet, and his ­daughter all sued for their freedom ­after having been taken as slaves into f­ ree territory. Scott’s d ­ aughter had in fact been born in f­ ree territory, which meant in many courts that one was necessarily f­ ree.14 Justice Roger B. Taney, writing for the ­Supreme Court, argued that Scott did not have standing to bring the case ­because he was not a citizen and could not be a citizen, as Africans had not been contemplated as such at the founding of the nation. Taney also ruled that Congress had no right to ban slavery (and name the Illinois territory ­free). The famous line of the case, saying that as a Black man Scott had “no rights which a white man is bound to re­spect” is generally read through the lens of race. That is appropriate. But it also is an assertion of patriarchy. By announcing that slavery was an essential status, not a relation, and that Scott, a man with a wife and child, could not be legally recognized, Taney was reaffirming the “Whiteness” attendant to U.S. patriarchy. Although Scott as the man of his ­family did serve as proxy for his f­amily in the case, he was rendered unrecognizable as a patriarch and man. The condition was permanent, it was not conditional, and it did not follow the rules of federalism. Slave status was a public status, a national one, one to mark where someone fit inside the ­house­hold as well as inside the production of knowledge, not in the body politic. LIT­E R­A­T URE AND LIFE

Queen Victoria’s reign lasted from 1837 to 1901. She was the most prominent female global leader of the ­century, a female patriarch in the midst of imperial expansion. Her leadership was admittedly somewhat symbolic. Monarchic power diminished relative to Parliament in her time. But she was, in significant mea­sure, the face of the kingdom as British sovereignty and expansionism codified the ideology of patriarchy as a global enterprise. When we use the colloquial term “Victorian,” we tend to mean the other side of the queen. She cut a power­ful figure, being a female patriarch in some ways akin to Elizabeth I, as discussed earlier. But her reign also coincided with conservative ideals regarding w ­ omen’s attire, man56 chapter two

ners, social codes, and mores. This Victorianism was a mode of disciplining ­women’s be­hav­ior and identity. In both ­Great Britain and the United States, a connected ideology took hold, called the cult of true womanhood or the cult of domesticity. It conceded some purpose for ­women in the world of learning and ideas, as they ­were the ones who nurtured appropriate values in their ­children. True womanhood, according to this ideal, meant being virtuous in domestic responsibilities and religious obligations. White British and American middle-­class to upper-­class ­women remained secondary, though relevant, by its rules. In 1850, the British aristocrat Victoria Welby, a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, toured the Amer­i­cas. She was a young teen then; however, she already had a sense of her own entitlement relative to the world, and she assessed and opined on whom and what she encountered in a book titled A Young Traveller’s Journey of a Tour in North and South Amer­i­ca during the Year 1850.15 In adulthood, Lady Welby would go on to become an autodidactic phi­los­o­pher of language and a regular interlocutor of well-­ known phi­los­o­phers, primarily the American pragmatist Charles Peirce, as well as William James, Bertrand Russell, C. K. Ogden, and F. C. S. Schiller. Reared as an elite lady, she would also become a theorist of a branch of the cult of true womanhood that explic­itly elaborated the role of the lady in the global and economic architecture of patriarchy described in this text. As a recognized intellectual, Welby was granted greater access to the world and the world of ideas than other w ­ omen, in large part due to her class, nationality, and race. Yet she never had the sort of public presence as her conversation partners. She was a lady to them, though rather high in the architecture of patriarchy relative to the rest of the world. Welby’s teenage travel diary reveals the social order in which she had been trained, one that structured even her most naïve observations. While she was in New Orleans, for example, gendering and personhood collided in her sense-­making of slavery. She wrote, “Our maids went yesterday to see the slave-­market, and they said it was quite a pretty sight to see them standing in a row, dressed neatly and even smartly. The blacks all seem to have a ­great sense of vanity; amongst other ­things we ­were told at General Taylor’s plantation that ­there was not a single black ­woman on the plantation that had not a silk or satin dress, or a man that had not a satin waistcoat or studs!”16 Welby’s admiration of this attire—­ elegant according to prevalent bourgeois gender ideals—is tinged with both surprise and humor: They w ­ ere slaves, not ladies and gentlemen. General Taylor, however, is depicted as a “good master,” as the elegance of his possessions indicates, at least according to Welby. At once the P roducing P ersonhood  57

patriarch is admired; the enslaved are marked as outside society, subjects of amusement and entertainment, neither lady to be nor lord, like she and General Taylor. Welby’s story of what her servants encountered in the slaves is followed by what she witnessed herself. She describes her and her ­mother’s request that a display be made of the slave ­children: We expressed a wish to see some of their ­little “piccaninnies,” so immediately all the black ladies that had any brought them to show us. One came ­after another till at last we had at least twenty jet-­black babies (all u ­ nder fifteen months old) in the room, on which Mr. Taylor sent word that ­there ­were enough, thereby stopping a long line of about twenty-­five more black mammas with their jetty “piccaninnies” each anxious to have the glory of being told hers was the prettiest. Strange to say, not one of ­these ­little ebony balls ever attempted to cry, or make any sort of noise, except an occasional chuckle intended for an attempt at a laugh.17 Welby’s entertainment in the form of the display of Black babies resonates with the previous entertaining spectacle at the “slave market” widely understood to be one of the most harrowing theaters of domination. Her reading of the moment is one in which she completely misunderstands the terms of the “contract” of that moment. She imagines the enslaved ­women, competing for appreciation of their babies, longing to be on display, when in fact it is quite well understood that such displays w ­ ere ­terrorizing events ­because they could easily portend the rupture of parent-­ child relations if a likely child was sold off. Welby finds it strange that the “ebony balls,” as she called the c­ hildren, ­were ­silent. But for the modern reader one has to contemplate what conditions must have existed for babies to already know their silence was demanded when on display. The public display itself is an axis around which the distinction of the manner in which the lady and the nonperson w ­ oman was constructed. Welby belonged to a category of ­woman who was to be protected in public and zoned for the private. The enslaved ­women ­were without access to the “private” both in terms of the body (a slave w ­ oman was i­magined unrapeable) and the domestic (no property, no contract, no marriage was recognized). Welby consistently takes visual plea­sure in the “other.” She physically describes Black and Indian ­women who are servants or slaves with a sense of awe, akin to her descriptions of the flora and landscapes across the New World: “Phillis, the slave-­girl that waits on us, is half Negress and half Indian; she cannot, however, remember the name of her f­ ather’s tribe. 58 chapter two

She has beautiful hair, im­mensely thick, jet-­black, and glossy as steel.”18 Of another, she writes, “I proceeded to sketch a very beautiful w ­ oman, who was certainly, without exception, the loveliest w ­ oman I ever saw. Her nose was a perfectly straight line; her eyes, which ­were of the deepest black, shone with a most brilliant lustre through her long eyelashes; and her mouth more resembled a rose-­bud than anything e­ lse I can think of. Her complexion was of a dark brownish red, quite Indian in tint, and her glossy, jet-­black hair hung almost to her feet in luxuriant masses. Her name was Manolahona.”19 Welby’s descriptions of the physical beauty of “exotic” and othered w ­ omen ­were similar to, and prob­ably in partial imitation of, t­ hose in travel lit­er­a­ture written by Eu­ro­pean men. Like t­ hose, in ­these moments the authority she claims in her gaze is palpable. To describe a Choctaw w ­ oman as the loveliest ­woman she ever saw is in fact to displace the role of “­woman as ornament” to the othered w ­ oman. Welby is authorized to lay claim to their forms, to assess them in this fashion, to be intellect in appreciation of beauty rather than object of such evaluation herself, only ­because of her relationship to the patriarchal order. That is not to say that all w ­ omen in Welby’s position did so. That is hardly the case. Rather, the point is that her capacity to do so illuminates the structure of patriarchy in that period. As an adult, Welby would attribute much of her intellectual development to her global travels. In fact, it was on one such excursion that her ­mother died, leaving Lady Welby alone in Syria ­until a ­family member could retrieve her. At the danger of stepping into the realm of pop psy­ chol­ogy, one has to won­der what sense Welby made of that moment, one in which she went from a position of power in the landscape to profound vulnerability, even if only fleeting. She must have had a keen sense in that moment of how contingent was the authority to which she had been born, that it rested on something other than her intelligence, study, and curiosity. Lady Welby as an adult became a phi­los­o­pher of language, who termed her work “significs,”20 a branch of semiotics focused on syntax. Analogously, and more impor­tant for our purposes, she was also an author of a eugenicist branch of the cult of true womanhood. Preceding first-­ wave feminism, the cult of true womanhood posed an argument for an expanded sphere of influence for w ­ omen on the basis of imperial ideologies or national aspirations. Welby’s version was rooted in a fear of imperial decline and was much more explicit in its racial commitment than other versions of mid-­nineteenth-­century ideals, which expanded the social role and perceived “value” of middle-­class and upper-­class Eu­ ro­pean ­women. P roducing P ersonhood  59

She called her version by several names: “­mother sense,” “race ­mother,” and “race womanhood.”21 The idea was that Eu­ro­pean w ­ omen should be educated to be effective partners in the preservation of Eu­ro­pean dominance amid decline in the British empire. This partnership was not solely domestic; in fact, it was based on a transcendence of the immediate circumstance and an ethical commitment to other ­people with whom one exists in the kind of relation that allows one to recognize the self. Welby believed that a universal order and sense of meaning should flow from that mutual recognition and commitment. The parties to this community, however, ­were solely Eu­ro­pe­ans. Welby elevated the sense of the role of ­mother or ­woman above cultivating ­children to be good members of society to include a theory of social relations rooted in empire and its maintenance. Her focus on s­ yntax, the arrangements of words in relation to one another, bore an analogous relationship to her focus on gender and, specifically, the “­mother” sensibility and “­father sense” that was much more widely recognized as essential to the larger meaning of social organ­ization. In her linguistic theory, she identified three distinct aspects of the linguistic sign. The first “sense” is the sensory dimension of the word; the second, the meaning or intended meaning of the word; and the third, the significance of the expression, which has moral implications. Therefore, according to Welby, language ­ought to be disciplined, and that discipline must be racialized. This was not the commonplace racial determinism based on the idea of some native racial differences in capacity. Rather, Welby was calling for the deliberate cultivation and ordering of language in the ser­ vice of good social arrangements among the race. Her work was par­tic­u­lar and distinct in terms of gender, too. Welby did not render m ­ other sense as the “emotional” terrain in contrast to reason, as a mediating force on it, an account on which many conventional accounts of gender depended. Instead, she placed the gendered sense of responsibility to care for o ­ thers within the realm of social, national, and international relations—­that is, the British must care for one another to preserve the empire. It was a preservation of the dominant, not of the dominated. Welby is a power­ful example of how something that could be read as a critique of one dimension of patriarchal domination (the kind that kept her out of formal recognition as a philosophy) could also entail deep commitments to patriarchy and to the status of the lady who was partner to the patriarch in subduing “­others.” Hence, on the one hand, Welby’s obscurity as a phi­los­o­pher unquestionably was a result of patriarchy and the resignation of “ladies” to the domestic sphere or, at least, to the margins of the world of ideas. On 60 chapter two

the other, she advocated for Eu­ro­pean patriarchy as a proj­ect of global dominance. She is a useful addendum to discussions of first-­wave feminism. The story of the fracturing of the admittedly fragile alliance between suffragettes and Black abolitionists in the United States over suffrage, and specifically the granting of suffrage to Black men before White ­women, implies a primordial tension between the strug­gles for gender equality and racial justice. But if we see the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury as a site of early feminism, and read it broadly, what becomes clear is that certainly it could not be contemplating all ­women. Moreover, the appeal for gender equality or claims to an expanded terrain of rights among elite Eu­ro­pean ­women, ­those who served as lieges to patriarchs, did not necessarily pose any fundamental challenge to the structure of patriarchy but was often limited to the economic distribution of its benefits among elites. While it is easy ­today to recognize the sexual conservatisms of reformers and suffragettes and first-­wavers as a limitation on their movements, it is more difficult, but arguably much more critical, to understand sexual morality as just one dimension of the assumed structural relations that ­were left intact or even protected in the first-­wave feminists’ imagination. Admittedly, ­there are better-­known and richer accounts of the architecture of gender in the thick of empire than Welby’s. Her work is intriguing, however, ­because she provides a rare opportunity for imagining the disaffection that we know flourished on the part of the most valued of the patriarch’s subjects (the wife) in relation to the o ­ thers he dominated and for exploring the early limitations of a bourgeois or elite notion of feminism vis-­à-­vis the structure of patriarchal domination. HEART OF DARKNESS

The navigation of the “other” in nineteenth-­ century lit­ er­ a­ ture and beyond—­gendered, racialized, as defined by nonpersonhood—­reveals at once the structure of gender in the context of mechanization, capitalism, and empire and the imaginative economy of humanity. An unflinching account of t­hese relations is found in Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad’s novella is perhaps the most influential fictional work about empire and colonialism in the nineteenth ­century. As Edward Said wrote of it, the imperial attitude is, I believe, beautifully captured in the complicated and rich narrative form of Conrad’s g­ reat novella Heart of Darkness, written between 1898 and 1899. On the one hand, the narrator P roducing P ersonhood  61

­ arlow acknowledges the tragic predicament of all speech—­that “it M is impossible to convey the life-­sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—­that which makes its truth, its meaning—­its subtle and penetrating essence. . . . ​We live, as we dream—­alone”—­yet still manages to convey the enormous power of Kurtz’s African experience through his own overmastering narrative of his voyage into the African interior ­toward Kurtz. This narrative in turn is connected directly with the redemptive force, as well as the waste and horror, of Eu­rope’s mission in the dark world.22 Like the travel narratives described in Jennifer Morgan’s work, Heart of Darkness traffics in what we might term “Afrophantism,” a corollary to Orientalism applied to ­people of African descent, a depiction that is excessive, repulsive, filled with humor and examination and chaos, and in constant demand of white or Eu­ro­pean or scholarly intervention. It is also a text in which we can see, in the context of late nineteenth-­ century capitalism and imperial adventure, an architecture of patriarchy. Kurtz, the subject of the first-­person protagonist’s Marlow’s fascination, has removed himself to the “Congo F ­ ree State” (to which Conrad had journeyed several years prior), where, not unlike Francis Drake before him, he is up close to the violent work of domination. The Congo ­Free State was the site of a genocidal proj­ect of economic extraction; as such, Kurtz is in control of “so many millions.”23 Marlow is his witness. Kurtz is not an aristocrat but a newly made cap­i­tal­ist, a man who in E ­ ngland was of too low a status for his intended bride, so he sought his fortune in the ivory trade. A number of characters in the novella have jobs that reveal the technologies and specialization that ­were part of the development of capitalism. ­There is the general man­ag­er, the chief accountant, and the trader. The l­ abor on which Kurtz builds his wealth is unpaid, not formally enslaved but effectively so given the violent domination that produces it. The Africans are not members of a proletariat b ­ ecause they cannot exchange their ­labor. Indeed, the encounter between Africans and Eu­ ro­pe­ans in the Congo ­Free State reveals the construction of nonpersonhood. Back at home, the intended bride is ever Kurtz’s liege, even a­ fter his death. But ­there in the Congo, he is surrounded by o ­ thers who are ancillary to him and who mark him as a patriarch according to the rules of modernity. The violently subjugated Africans are collectively embodied in the ­woman identified as his lover. She is a queer figure, ungendered and multitudinous. When Marlow first sees her, he says: “And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a 62 chapter two

­woman.”24 A ghostly form of a ­woman, she is beautiful and appealing, but not an individual. Rather, she is a synecdoche for the entire African population ­under Kurtz’s authority and yet always threatening. At his side is also a figure called the Harlequin, a Rus­sian who became a British sailor and ­here is a helpmate of sorts to Kurtz, as well as an interpreter of Kurtz to Marlow. The Harlequin and the African ­woman are both oddly attired, indicating their “queerness” in terms of effect as well as breaching conventions of “gender.” Of the w ­ oman he says: “She walked with mea­sured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre ­things, charms, gifts of witch-­men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at ­every step.”25 Of the Harlequin, Conrad writes: “His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland prob­ably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow—­patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, ­because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done.”26 The Harlequin’s comedic and pretty presence, and the African ­woman’s harrowing and imposing one, have a bricolage effect. They are interstitial figures, and they compete for Kurtz’s affection and attention. The Harlequin serves as the nurse to Kurtz and consistently tries to keep the African ­woman away: “ ‘If she had offered to come aboard I r­ eally think I would have tried to shoot her,’ said the man of patches, ner­vously. ‘I have been risking my life e­ very day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the ­house.’  ”27 However, it is the w ­ oman who drives the Harlequin away, notwithstanding his desire for Kurtz. The Harlequin has created a my­thol­ogy about Kurtz, conceives of him as a sort of God and proj­ects his admiration on the Africans. But his presence grows superfluous, and he is expelled. ­There is a sense in which the Harlequin is the romance of Africa; his romantic attachment to Kurtz is akin to the divvied-up Africa of the Berlin Conference. Unknown maps showed the unwieldy work of domination as a trea­sure chest of possibility. The gap between maps of conquest and the substance of the encounter, however, is substantial. The unfolding of the novella and the shifting cast of characters reveals this to be true. P roducing P ersonhood  63

When Marlow first walks into the com­pany office, he sees such a map: “Deal ­table in the ­middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. Th ­ ere was a vast amount of red—­good to see at any time, b ­ ecause one knows that some real work is done in ­there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a ­little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of pro­gress drink the jolly lager-­beer.”28 As a child, Marlow recalls, he had wanted to map the unmapped places; this is a driver for his journey. But he learns that in the interior ­things are hardly so neat. The queered Harlequin is driven away by Kurtz, displaced by the more pressing task of dominating the queered African w ­ oman. Although he wears the map of a divided Africa, she is the body and flesh of the territory: “She was savage and superb, wild-­eyed and magnificent; ­there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate pro­gress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the w ­ hole sorrowful land, the im­mense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.”29 The mirroring of the wilderness and the African w ­ oman, anthropomorphizing the land and making her indistinguishable from it, pivots around the words “fecund” and “passion.” Both the productive/reproductive work of the land and its soul are in the grip of captivity. Th ­ ere is the simultaneous recognition of her power and its undoing. The African ­woman’s mere utterances have power, a force of some unfamiliar law of repetition of herself in ­others through a single gesture: “­There was an eddy in the mass of ­human bodies, and the ­woman with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.”30 That is indeed the structure of both the common law and constitutional law; it repeats itself in other instances that are like but distinct. Conrad has a veiled accounting of the p ­ eople and social order that was being destroyed. It is filled with a familiar afro-­phantasm, yet it also is a haunting. The heads of Africans that Kurtz sets on posts are a doubled warning, to the Africans and Eu­ro­pe­ans both, of humanity destroyed and the establishment of a border between personhood and nonpersonhood. The Congo had been allocated to a private organ­ization at the Berlin Conference, to be ­under the remote authority of King Leopold II. It was a territory larger than most of Eu­rope, with a varied topography. Leopold granted the authority to maintain the land to a small cadre of adminis64 chapter two

trators, who managed the nationalization of the Congo and the distribution of land to private companies, many of which w ­ ere in rubber (a boom industry as a result of automobiles). A paramilitary force and absolute discretion gave the companies the power to dominate Africans ruthlessly. They w ­ ere captured and beaten; villages ­were destroyed; and tens of thousands of Africans ­were murdered as the rubber industry grew. The intersection of technology, vio­lence, and emotion in Heart of Darkness makes it a remarkable rec­ord of this period. Although the novella focuses on ivory, in real­ity it was rubber, necessary for the automobile industry that drove the mass murder in the ­free state of the Congo. Wealth production was necropo­liti­cal. It became a system of “useful” vio­lence according to cap­i­tal­ist logics. Conrad captured this in his fiction so much so that, in the report that Kurtz writes to the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs,” he concludes with the sentence, “Exterminate all the brutes.”31 His was a logic that depended on a distribution of emotional concern that enabled “feeling” for the intended bride, but not for the uncounted countless Congolese dead. Kurtz is a figure of empire, the patriarch drawn in relief, at the site of exploration and excavation rather than at “home.” It is a poignant detail that in this novella the imperial venture is about trading in plea­sure (ivory), not necessity. Like t­ hose of sugar, tobacco, and indigo, the ivory trade is a system of violent domination predicated on tastes and delight, concerns that ­were often feminized in popu­lar parlance. That is not to say that cotton or rubber ­were kinder or gentler or more justified systems of domination. Rather, the cost of such trifles, the cost of plea­sure, is striking and is a piece of what we might term the erotics of imperial domination. Marlow himself is the owner of a plea­sure merchant ship. On this venture, he is brought from the plea­sure at home to its production, where its ugliness is clear, although some conception of “plea­sure” is still pres­ent. Kurtz himself is a lust-­filled figure, who consumes as he destroys ­until the end. When Kurtz dies and is, in a sense, overtaken by the wilderness, Marlow returns to the ­mother country, where he consoles Kurtz’s intended while attempting to keep her innocent of the ravages of empire. She is a lady. Yet this is a queer moment, too. Conrad plays with the gender pronoun, writing, “Their [the Intended’s eyes’] glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she ­were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, ‘I—­I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.’ ”32 It is as though she and Marlow are twinned ­here. He is mourning a certain loss of innocence while protecting hers: “ ‘ Yes, I know,’ I said with P roducing P ersonhood  65

something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that g­ reat and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her—­from which I could not even defend myself.”33 The subject is uncertain, as is the principal grieving ­widow: “ ‘What a loss to me—to us!’—­she corrected herself with beautiful generosity; then added in a murmur, ‘To the world.’ By the last gleams of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears—of tears that would not fall.”34 Marlow has lost Kurtz; so has the unnamed intended bride. But the “us” is something larger, and that might be read in vari­ous ways. The critique of capitalism and the exploited classes in the novella, and the degradation of his insidious proximity of the colonized, leaves the moral economy of two types of subjects intact: the white male worker and the intended, his En­glish bride. We certainly can read Heart of Darkness as an exposure of the ravages of capital and an exploration of queerness in the midst of rigid Victorianism. At the same time, the manner in which the world, as it w ­ ere, pivots around Kurtz, the new capitalism, the new patriarch, is instructive of the time. Heart of Darkness might be read as a critique of capitalism, but it seems to leave patriarchy unscathed. WILDE’S WORLD Perhaps ­there may come into my art, also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art.—­Oscar Wilde

At the twentieth c­ entury’s turn, nearly one-­quarter of the Earth’s land surface was part of the British Empire, and more than four hundred million ­people ­were governed from ­Great Britain, however nominally. ­Great Britain competed with other empires to dominate the globe. The Dutch, En­glish, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Rus­sians all made maps and accountings of the world; with militaries and merchants and proselytizers they w ­ ere executed distinctly. Yet they also shared a conception of personhood that excluded the vast majority of “­others” and exported and imposed ideals of respectable gender formations and relations. At the same time that ­others ­were being disciplined away from a wide range of practices regarding gender and sexuality, growing urbanization and large numbers of single working-­class ­women in American and ­Eu­ro­pean cities put pressure on the domestic Victorian ideal. In this ideal, 66 chapter two

the sphere of w ­ oman’s influence was i­magined as private and domestic. Public life underwent transformation with capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. The middle-­class wife was not productive in that economy. Instead, her role was to prepare ­children to work and live in it in adulthood. She protected the hearth and the ­family and symbolized the sanctity of the domestic while imperial forces conquered the exotic. She was a consumer but not burdened by navigating the market. But by the late nineteenth ­century, some ­women had begun to reject the constraint of the cult of domesticity. They claimed public space, conceived of themselves as intellectuals, and revived the energy of the early first-­ wave feminists and abolitionists u ­ nder the banner “new w ­ oman.” Although they are not generally recognized as such, we might even consider ­radical figures like Ida B. Wells, Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons as “new ­women” and feminist figures. Goldman and Parsons are more frequently discussed in terms of their anarchist politics and Wells in terms of her anti-­lynching and racial justice work. But in the substance of their work each of them, in the midst of a period of widespread global transformations, clearly was puzzling through pieces of the architecture of patriarchy and challenging its conventions. Parsons, a Texas-­born Black and Native American who became an anarchist movement leader, was referred to by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a w ­ oman who was more dangerous than a thousand rioters. Often in conflict with Goldman, Parsons believed that an economic analy­sis of the domination of working-­class ­women was the most appropriate approach to liberation. She railed against the injustice of wage slavery, as well as marriage slavery, writing, We, the ­women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it, and the only way that we can be represented is to take a man to represent us. You men have made such a mess of it in representing us that we have not much confidence in asking you. . . . We . . . ​are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced the cap­i­tal­ist class use ­women to reduce them, and if ­there is anything that you men should do in the ­future it is to or­ga­nize the ­women.35 Further, Parsons argued that the state was illegitimate as long as the stratification of gender, race, and class was sustained. But for her, it was in a sense all about class, ­because she was primarily concerned with how economic exploitation was at the root of all of t­ hese forms of bigotry. Parsons’s criticisms of Goldman, a seamstress turned anarchist activist, ­were that Goldman’s emphasis on reproductive technology and plea­sure P roducing P ersonhood  67

was too far afield of the greater strug­gle over the economic domination of w ­ omen. She also criticized Goldman for speaking to large middle-­class audiences despite being an anarchist and abstracting the cause of feminism away from the question of class. Goldman’s efforts to seek emancipation with the greater cosmopolitanism and freedom of many urban ­women was, notwithstanding its too bourgeois focus for Parsons, a challenging stance to take in the nineteenth ­century. Likewise, Wells, though rightfully recognized as a champion for racial justice, consistently raised the theme of patriarchy in her work. She unflinchingly recounted the violent and economic forms of domination that fell u ­ nder the authority of the Southern men who w ­ ere patriarchs, ones who peddled in death and the destruction of all efforts of African American ­people to become property-­holding, legally recognized citizens. Civilization was a concept ripe for subversion in the hands of Wells, and she challenged the myth of the Black male rapist with the truth of the widespread history of white men raping black ­women: “The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the ­women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes. Very scant notice is taken of the m ­ atter when this is the condition of affairs. What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the ­tables are turned is a ­matter of small moment when the negro ­woman is the accusing party.”36 She described lynch law as filled with “all the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all the barbarism of the ­Middle Ages. The world looks on and says it is well.”37 While Wells did not directly reject the concept of patriarchy, she exposed the brutality under­ neath its illusions of order. ­These public figures, as well as the growing body of working-­class women who lived unmarried and in­de­pen­dently in cities and who, though exploited, maintained a greater degree of autonomy than their foremothers, ­were deemed threatening for their transgressions against the rules of the cult of domesticity, ­either by personal deed or by impassioned arguments against its premise and exclusivity. In the public imaginary the “new w ­ oman” was twinned with the images of “dandies”: de­cadent and deviant men, feminine men, who ­were likewise a threat for their vis­i­ble transgression of gender ideals. In fact, the nineteenth ­century was a period of disrupting gender conventions even as patriarchy was extensively articulated. To echo Foucault’s key insight, the discourses around disciplining gender and sexuality indicated the anxiety around their growing transgression and became a manner of acknowledging such transgressions. The new w ­ oman and the new man ­were features of urban landscapes. They breached ideals of femininity 68 chapter two

and masculinity. And both knowledge and law ­were produced that could account for them and sort them within the gender hierarchy. Sexuality was at the heart of the moral panic around ­these gender transgressors. And as divorce became available in ­England with the Marital Clauses Act, and w ­ omen’s presence in growing urban areas multiplied, the fear of female sexuality was amplified. This anxiety was evident in law. In ­England, Contagious Diseases Acts ­were passed in 1864, 1866, and 1869.38 They ­were described as efforts to protect the public against prostitution. But the method of d ­ oing so was to police and arrest poor and working-­class ­women who w ­ ere found in public spaces. A ­ fter arrest, ­these ­women ­were examined by physicians without consent and locked up if they ­were diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease. This prompted po­liti­cal organ­izing around the classism embedded in the legislation, and the act was fi­nally suspended and then repealed in 1886. However, in 1885 a dif­fer­ent law had been put in place.39 Titled “An Act to make further provision for the protection of ­women and girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes,” it included policing of both same-­sex and opposite-­sex acts. Section 11 reads, “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, ­shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof ­shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard ­labor.”40 In many ways, the 1885 law was an extension of the Offense against a Person Act, or “buggery law,” of 1828. Cases prosecuted ­under the 1828 law reveal both punitive sexual moralizing and a pattern of relationships occurring between elite and poor men,41 in which a substantial power imbalance existed. ­Those cases may have been prosecuted, given that ­these w ­ ere not the only same-­sex relations, for their transgression of status hierarches and the rules of patriarchy as much as sexual mores. The ­legal enforcement of sexual “norms” was (and is) one form of social control, but another is the spatial dimensions of their execution. They have been enforced not equally but according to the rules of hierarchy. It is necessary to understand the change in the late nineteenth ­century—­from a law regulating specific acts to a law regulating specific actors—­within the context of several ­things: the crisis in gender, which was an outgrowth of anxiety about imperial growth and urbanization; a fear of that which was not “­under control”; and the rise of the study of sexuality u ­ nder the rubric of “science” via medicine and psy­chol­ogy and treated with taxonomy and typologies. Late nineteenth-­century doctrines about appropriate sexuality and gender roles versus t­ hose deemed P roducing P ersonhood  69

deviant and unnatural gave an interpretive frame to the pornography and prostitution that became increasingly popu­lar and even flourished, and to the gender transgressions in their midst. They did not erase them; rather, they located them in an inferior position in the hierarchy of intimate association. Therefore, ­those who participated in such transgressions could be moved around in the social order, as well, somewhere above ­those deemed noncitizens but lower than respectable men and ­women. The professionalization of sexology in par­tic­u­lar produced space for “difference” even in some instances that it marked as deviance. Notwithstanding the moral complexity of doctors of sexology, who expanded ideas about sexuality, an accounting and disciplining of desire was still attached to the field. One in­ter­est­ing dimension of sexology is that, while it accounted and diagnosed in its endless variety of narratives, it revealed the complexity of gender. Non-­normativity was fully recognized. What also existed, however, was a belief in the fundamental non-­normativity of some groups. Deviant sexuality became definitive of group “otherness.” This threw them out of the accounts that Foucault so incisively identified as part of biopolitics, the network of government authority over ­every aspect of one’s life, including the flesh and intimate association. The forces of discipline (as well as p ­ eople reaching for liberation) revolved around the question of deviation from the ideal personhood tied to the Eu­ro­pean patriarchal category. At the same time, some ­were not capable of deviating or becoming deviants ­because they w ­ ere already essentially so. Order was made of the instability and contingency through ­legal decision making around violations of sexual rules and norms. While opinions w ­ ere not universal, ­there ­were contradictory opinions between jurisdictions in the United States and, of course, across the world. What is repeatedly evident is that efforts to maintain patriarchy are resilient, although the appropriate approach might be debated. The Irish playwright, novelist, and critic Oscar Wilde became a public symbol of the ascription of sexual deviant in the late nineteenth c­ entury. Although the rumors of his same-­gender desire w ­ ere rampant, and he played with the theme of same-­gender desire in his writing, the speculation came to a head when he entered a relationship with a man who was a class (if not an age) peer. Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas met in 1891. Wilde was an established writer at forty; Alfred was a twenty-­four-­ year-­old fan of his work. Douglas’s f­ ather, John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, was incensed by this relationship and its public nature. He left a calling card at Wilde’s club that read, “For Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomite.”42 In response, Wilde pursued a libel suit against him. In 70 chapter two

effect, the calling card was a declaration that Wilde was a criminal due to his sexuality. Queensberry was arrested and, to protect himself from conviction, sought evidence that the charge was true and that t­ here was a public benefit to exposing Wilde. This was the necessary procedure according to the rules for defending oneself against libel charges. ­After collecting such evidence through private detectives, Queensberry pursued criminal charges against Wilde, who faced a trial for sodomy in April 1895. At a preliminary bail hearing, chambermaids testified that they had seen young men in Wilde’s bed, and a h ­ otel ­house­keeper salaciously stated that ­there w ­ ere fecal stains on his bed sheets. He was denied bail. The prosecutors interrogated Wilde about depictions of relationships between men in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and accused Wilde of a number of relationships with younger men consistent with the novel. The second phase included a reading of Douglas’s poem “Two Loves,” about which Wilde was questioned. He responded by describing the history of male artists, Michelangelo and Shakespeare in par­tic­u­lar, testifying as to their deep affection for younger men. The jury ­couldn’t agree on a verdict. Through both the first and second phases of the proceedings Wilde was encouraged by friends to flee the country, yet in Crito-­like devotion to the authority of the state, he remained. Another trial opened on May 22, and this time Wilde was found guilty of indecent be­hav­ior with men. The judge remarked at his sentencing, “It is the worst case I have ever tried. I s­ hall pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard l­ abor for two years.”43 The conditions of his sentence including picking oakum, a prohibition on communicating with prisoners, and a requirement to wear a cap with a veil that prevented him from seeing o ­ thers’ ­faces. Wilde acted with deep loyalty for Lord Alfred during the t­ rials, first refusing to defend himself ­because he ­didn’t want to put Lord Alfred at odds with his f­ ather, then subsequently assuring Lord Alfred that he would not be a “deserter” to him. For this he lost the bulk of his possessions, and ­after his release, Wilde spent the remainder of his life in exile. During the four-­year period between when the Marquess of Queensberry first began to pursue charges and Wilde’s conviction, Wilde traveled to Algeria. In fact, Queensberry once attempted to interrupt a per­for­mance of Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest to announce his intentions while Wilde was ­there, but he was denied entrance to the theater. Algeria was u ­ nder French colonial rule from the invasion of 1830 onward. France established l­egal authority over the nation and named Algeria P roducing P ersonhood  71

a province of France. France exploited the nation’s natu­ral resources and changed Algeria’s economy to one that provided cash crops primarily to France, in addition to a robust market in wine. Geo­graph­i­cally, Algerians ­were displaced from urban areas to the mountains as Eu­ro­pe­ans flooded into the colony. France took possession of land owned by Algerians and redistributed it as they saw fit. In the pro­cess of displacement, the choreographies of colonization ­were commonplace: rape, looting, massacres, and the desecration of holy places. This pro­cess of violent occupation and displacement continued to the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury as France expanded its locus of control and defeated in­de­pen­dent Berber republics in rural territories. Throughout this staged conquest, Algerians and Berbers ­were declared French subjects as they came ­under French authority and eventually obtained a small degree of po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion, but they w ­ ere not French citizens. This was a critical feature of colonialism. Alexis de Tocqueville, that famous representative of liberal demo­cratic thought in po­liti­cal philosophy, considered the colonized in Algeria to be in a state of exception vis-­à-­vis the rights of personhood and the rules of the social contract. He wrote in 1841 that the total domination of Algerians was necessary: We absolutely must not separate domination and colonization and vice versa. ­There are two ways to conquer a country: the first is to subordinate the inhabitants and govern them directly or indirectly. This is the En­glish system in India. The second is to replace the former inhabitants with the conquering race. This is what Eu­ro­pe­ans have almost always done. . . . ​It has often been said that the French should limit themselves to dominating Algeria without trying to colonize it. . . . ​Studying the question has given me an entirely contrary opinion. . . . ​Colonization without domination w ­ ill always be an incomplete and precarious work, in my view. If we abandon the Arabs to themselves and allow them to build up a proper power at our backs, our establishment in Africa has no f­ uture. . . . ​I am ­under no illusion about the nature and the value of the sort of domination that France can found over the Arabs. I know that even if we h ­ andle it in the best pos­si­ble way, we ­shall never create anything but an often troubled and generally onerous government ­there. I am aware that such subjects ­will never add anything to our force. Therefore France must not seek domination as our goal; rather domination is the necessary means we must use for achieving tranquil possession of the coast and the colonization of a part of the territory, the real and serious goal of our efforts.44 72 chapter two

Elsewhere in the same essay he argues that battling the Algerians brought the French down to a “barbaric” level, yet it was essential to attain the desirable goal of their total subjugation u ­ nder French authority. The dividing line between civil society and the other was messy and yet clearly shifted moral norms. The ­legal structure u ­ nder colonialism mirrored Tocqueville’s arguments. France appropriated land that had been used for schools and denied the majority of Algerians access to education. A ­ fter the French conquest in 1830, a proto-­apartheid state was established, with racially separate geographies and categories of employment. At the same time, French colonial policy was s­ haped by Auguste Comte’s argument that France’s civilizing mission on colonized ­people included bringing positivistic thought and reason to them to save the colonized from cultural backwardness and lead them t­oward harmony with the ideals of the West, and of French republicanism in par­tic­ul­ar. This effort was pursued coercively. The colonial law of 1865 fi­nally allowed Algerians to apply for French citizenship if they rejected Islam.45 ­Later, Muslim Algerians would become citizens; however, in a sign of the ongoing apartheid state, voter rolls ­were kept separate (and unequal). In Algeria in 1892, the bud­get for the education of Eu­ro­pean ­children was five times that for Algerian ­children, despite the fact that t­here ­were five times as many Algerian ­children as French.46 In that de­cade, a small class of Algerians referred to by the French as “the evolved” ones, and who w ­ ere educated in French schools, displaced traditional Algerian elites and ­were established as the intermediate ruling class. A few Algerians who ­were incorporated while the rest remained outside po­liti­cal recognition and personhood.47 In that period, in Algeria, Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred, and their friend the writer André Gide and his companion, Paul, described relationships with Algerian “boys” in conventional Orientalist terms, with the added dimension of a transgressive sexuality made plain.48 Well into his memoir “If It Die” Gide encounters Wilde in Algeria, where Constance Wilde said he and Lord Alfred had gone to seek “exotic sex.” Gide notes in the encounter that Wilde had less discretion in terms of his same-­sex desire in Eu­rope than had Gide, a foreboding. He goes out to dinner with Wilde and Lord Alfred, who he reports took him affectionately by the arm “and exclaimed ‘All t­ hese guides are idiotic: it’s no good explaining—­they w ­ ill always take you to cafés which are full of ­women. I hope you are like me. I have a horror of w ­ omen. I only like boys. As ­you’re coming with us this eve­ning, I think it’s better to say so at once.’ ”49 Gide passively accepts the invitation. Gide finds Lord Alfred distasteful yet admires Wilde’s genius. He describes Lord Alfred as the dominant figure in the relationship, the reverse P roducing P ersonhood  73

of what the ­later court case regarding their relationship would suggest, and recounts the events of that eve­ning. While at a lounge, he writes, Wilde and Gide both notice an Arab boy named Mohammed, whom Wilde says is “Bosie’s,” his nickname for Lord Alfred. The assertion of possession does not limit Gide’s attention: As Mohammed plays the flute, he is enchanted. “His large black eyes had the languorous look peculiar to hashish smokers; he had an olive complexion,” Gide writes. “I admired his long fin­gers on the flute, the slimness of his boyish figure, the slenderness of his bare legs coming from ­under his full white drawers, one of them bent back and resting on the knee of the other.”50 Wilde breaks the spell of his enchantment by taking Gide into an alley, where he asks him, “Dear, would you like the ­little musician?” Gide’s discomfort registers strangely. He chokes on the word “yes,” even though he has previously described sexual encounters with Algerian boys in the text. ­There is something about the public nature of Wilde’s sexuality—it was well known back in Europe—­that makes the encounter register as more challenging in his presence. This private encounter with a publicly queer person, not his sex tourism alone, makes Gide uncomfortable. The Algerian boys, described in beautiful detail by Gide, are consumed and described with only the barest recognition that they may have interior lives. They are “nonpersons” in the social economy of ­these Eu­ro­pean artists, although Gide describes his experience with the boy as “joy unbounded.” Immediately ­after his meditation on the plea­ sure of that experience, he describes seeing Mohammed two years l­ater, changed, “not so much lascivious now as shameless.”51 Gide describes how at this l­ater date, with no hesitation of the sort he first displayed, he sits down at the t­able with his friend Daniel, with Mohammed sitting on the t­ able between them: “He pulled up the haik, which he was wearing now instead of his Tunisian costume, and stretched out his bare legs to us.”52 Gide witnesses Daniel “seize” Mohammed and carry him upstairs. The scene that follows is a rape: “He laid him on his back on the edge of the bed, cross-­wise, and soon I saw nothing but two slim legs dangling on ­either side of Daniel who was laboring and ­panting. . . . ​As he bent over the ­little body he was covering, he was like a huge vampire feasting on a corpse. I could have screamed with horror.”53 Gide goes on to describe his response in terms of the difficulty in understanding how ­others “practice love.” In contrast, the immediate next encounter he has with an Arab boy is with Ali, twelve or thirteen and another subject of Lord Alfred’s desire. This time, Gide feels discomfort not ­because the child is degraded but ­because he seems to think too highly of himself: “Ali was certainly very 74 chapter two

beautiful; fair complexioned, with a smooth brow, a well formed chin, a small mouth . . . ​but his beauty had no power over me; a sort of hardness in the nostrils, of indifference in the too perfect curve of his eyebrows, of cruelty in the scornful curl of his lips, checked ­every trace of desire in me; and nothing put me more off than the effeminacy of his w ­ hole appearance.”54 Perhaps Ali was too feminine and therefore too much the “­woman,” according to Gide’s gender ideas. I come to that speculation from the manner in which, many years ­later, James Baldwin confronted the patriarchal logics that ­shaped Gide’s be­hav­ior in his essay “Gide as Husband and Homosexual”—­later retitled “The Male Prison.”55 In the essay, he excoriates the patriarchal pedestal on which Gide puts his wife, Madeleine, saying, “He had entrusted, as it ­were, to her his purity, that part of him that was not carnal; and it is quite clear that, though he suspected it he could not face the fact that it was only when her purity ended that her life could begin.”56 He goes on to describe masculinity as a prison and the moral costs of “having one’s plea­sure without paying for it.” He also describes Gide (and implicitly, Wilde’s) adventures in Algeria: Gide’s relations with Madeleine placed his relations with men in rather a bleak light. Since he clearly could not forgive himself for his anomaly, he must certainly have despised them—­which almost certainly explains the fascination felt by Gide and so many of his heroes for countries like North Africa. It is not necessary to despise p ­ eople who are one’s inferiors—­whose inferiority, by the way, is amply demonstrated by the fact that they appear to relish, without guilt, their sensuality. It is pos­si­ble, as it w ­ ere, to have one’s plea­sure without paying for it.57 It should go without saying that their abuse of c­ hildren was not the product of sexual orientation; it was, in fact, consistent with how patriarchs behaved ­toward colonized girl ­children even more than boys. Rather, I use the example to illustrate how ­legal persons—­and, more specifically, very elite ones—­who ­were subject to one form of discriminatory discipline ­were in relationships of domination facilitated by colonialism and Orientalism. This is evidence of the layering inherent in modern patriarchy. In his memoir, Gide romantically describes Wilde’s exploits as a compelling hedonism, an irrepressible attraction to an alternative moral code that stood above that of commoners. The interior lives of the Algerian boys are absent or, at best, opaque, mediated through the impressions of the Eu­ro­pean men who described them. Wilde was presented before the British courts as a deviant for defying the rules of manhood in the motherland b ­ ecause he loved Lord Alfred. P roducing P ersonhood  75

He was punished for public intimate association with a class peer, even though he had had many other same-­gender relations before. Same-­ gender sexual intimacy was common at elite boys’ schools, and ­there ­were coded rituals in public rest­rooms for sexual liaisons between men. Same-­gender sex work was also commonplace enough that it was the subject of public debate. The distinction in the case of Wilde’s punishment was that he brought cloistered physical and emotional intimacy between two men fully possessed of personhood status into the public realm. The breach was not in the fact of the intimacy; it was the implicit demand for its recognition. Wilde in per­for­mance, in art, in the daily practices of his life was, as we would say ­today, “out.” His case should help us understand that the protection of patriarchy hinges historically on both what is recognized and what is actively denied rather than on what “is.” Wilde served several years in prison and died poor in Paris ­after his release. While incarcerated he deliberately distinguished himself from the many mostly poor men with whom he had been cast. He wrote, “The poor thieves and outcasts who are imprisoned h ­ ere with me are in many re­ spects more fortunate than I am. The l­ ittle way in grey city or green field that saw their sin is small; to find t­ hose who know nothing of what they have done they need go no further than a bird might fly between the twilight and the dawn; but for me the world is shriveled to a handsbreadth, and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead.” Wilde ­here collapses the public theater of humiliation into his status rather than imagining the public humiliation as a potential point of identification with the “Outcasts.” In fact, he understands the ­legal punishment as a betrayal rooted in his self-­conception based on his status rather than a collective injustice. He writes, “I am one of t­ hose who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”58 Wilde, unlike some o ­ thers, had not been punished for being with t­ hose men deemed beneath him: poor En­glish “rent boys.” And he certainly ­wasn’t censured in Algeria, where his partners ­were ­children, p ­ eople who could not consent b ­ ecause of age as well as the relations of colonial domination. The absent recognition of the Algerian objects of desire is a lacuna in this narrative. Only “failed” and transgressive patriarchs w ­ ere of concern to the court. The relative freedom to exploit in the colony, the abundance of “boys” that Gide describes, was pos­si­ble b ­ ecause it was a site of domination and projection. Wilde’s domination, and his aesthetics of domination, must supplement other readings of him—­for example, Eve Sedgwick’s classic reading of Wilde in The Epistemology of the Closet.59 Sedgwick describes the protective camouflage of the rendering of gay content and male desire 76 chapter two

as a reflection of the divided self, such that it can be read as, “I do not love him; I am him.” It is a compelling account of classicism in Wilde’s accounts of his affection for Eu­ro­pean men. The closet, then, is the duality of the prescribed and the proscribed, where the sociality and mutual recognition of men, the bonding that comes from what Sedgwick terms “male entitlement,” has within it a prohibition of same-­gender intimacy. ­There is the closet within the “house” (still an effective meta­phor for patriarchy), and then ­there are ­those in the vestibule and outside the ­house and colony. And we see what happens with same-­sex desire and intimacy ­there, something more akin to an erotics of domination that attends the colonial relation. What Wilde’s history further points us to is the per­sis­tent question of the limitation of the frame of a par­tic­ul­ar po­liti­cal community, even in the midst of its transgression. Wilde railed against what remains a popu­lar catchword, “respectability,” by likening himself to a Christ in the eyes of the Jewish elites in biblical times: “In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialism side of life and their ridicu­lous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem ­were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the ‘whited sephulcre’ of respectability and fixed that phrase for ever.”60 It is easy to see the ste­reo­types of the other (both Jewish ­people and “Philistines”) in this account. But add to that a simultaneous critique of capitalism (Wilde identified as a libertarian socialist); a deliberate politics of distinction vis-­à-­vis the working class; and an investment in the cap­i­tal­ist proj­ect of empire and Wilde’s limitations, rooted in the logics of patriarchy even as he transgresses some of them in terms of the laws of intimate association, are even more evident. Gide recalled that Wilde had failed ever to write with the fullness of his imagination. However, he did on several occasions mirror himself in his literary figures. With The Picture of Dorian Gray, we do see the art of same-­gender desire rendered as the extension of the self. But in another of Gide’s works, Salome, we see a more fully articulated account of desire and relations of domination. As he transgressed the role of “man,” Wilde’s character Salome, the star of his symbolist play that fi­nally premiered in 1896, a year ­after his conviction, transgressed femininity to occupy the role of “Man.” In Wilde’s play, the biblical character is transformed into a succubus who pursues John the Baptist (Iokannan) and ­orders his execution when he rejects her overtures. The play concludes with Salome kissing John’s P roducing P ersonhood  77

severed head. Salome subverts both the power of the “male gaze” and Christian morality as represented by John the Baptist, who figures in Christian theology as both a precursor to Christ and the one who communicates the good news and the promise of salvation to his flock. Edward Said, writing about Gustave Flaubert’s version of Salome, identifies the ambiguity in how she is celebrated. He writes, The Oriental w ­ oman is an occasion and an opportunity for Flaubert’s musings; he is entranced by her self-­sufficiency, by her emotional carelessness, and also by what, lying next to him, she allows him to think. Less a w ­ oman than a display of impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity, Kuchuk is the prototype of Flaubert’s Salammbô and Salomé, as well as of all the versions of carnal female temptation to which his Saint Anthony is subject. Like the Queen of Sheba (who also danced “The Bee”) she could say—­were she able . . . ​Kuchuk is a disturbing symbol of fecundity, peculiarly Oriental in her luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality.61 Orientalist depictions of the other figure “the Orient” as a zone rife with the possibility of sexual freedom. But that fantasy is rendered through a relation, ­imagined or literal, of domination by both Flaubert and Wilde. Wilde’s doubling of himself with Salome, however, is one in which she is also placed in a position of dominance vis-­à-­vis another. It is that which enables the parallel. The irony is that her dominance is a figure of monstrosity, a violation of the rules of gender, and yet she is hardly figured as “the least of ­these.” Wilde’s Salome does not succeed in her physical conquest of John the Baptist (although she secures his death through the coercion of Herod, her ­mother’s husband), but she does have sexual dominance over a character referred to in the play as “the young Syrian,” who commits suicide when he witnesses her desire for Iokannan. Textually, her physical whiteness ­matters along with her status as a princess to mark this impossible transgression. The Syrian says, in Wilde’s pen, “She is like the shadow of a white ­rose in a mirror of silver” and is told in response that he “must not look at her,” as this ­woman is above his station.62 Herod is also cautioned not to look at Salome, his lust a betrayal of her m ­ other. Salome is like Medusa, at first, with the capacity to destroy ­those who gaze on her, but then by the end of the play she becomes not Medusa but the killer of Medusa, displacing Medusa’s severed head with John the Baptist’s. This symbolic treatment of the other—­and of o ­ thers to that other—­ gave Wilde an imaginative terrain on which to proj­ect himself, a man who did not fit the conventions of patriarchy when it came to sexuality. 78 chapter two

In the play, Iokannan is depicted as a man who ­doesn’t love ­women, but Salome seems far more apt as an analogy to Wilde. She gave him license to dominate, as her freedom hinged on it. This is a per­sis­tent theme in Wilde’s corpus. Indeed, Wilde’s ventures in Algeria w ­ ere preceded by expressed ideas about the other in the United States. In ­those earlier accounts it is also clear that Wilde the aesthete’s sense of beauty in ­others did not challenge in his mind their resignation to nonpersonhood. ­Others functioned more as object and landscape than intimates who compelled recognition. In 1882, during his visit to the United States, Wilde took plea­sure in viewing Black men in Texas. ­After Reconstruction and in the terror of redemption, Black Americans had recently been stripped of all rights and ­were subject to unfettered vio­lence. Wilde’s reaction showed no awareness of this crisis. A reporter wrote of him: Mr.  Wilde was looking fresh and bright, and he expressed the plea­ sure with which he had viewed the striking and picturesque scenery of the swamps in Louisiana and Texas. The ­giant cypress trees towering above the dense jungle of undergrowth and tangled vines, while long streamers of gray moss waved in the wind from the ­great branches which the trees thrust forth into the sky attracted the poet’s attention, while he had much to say of the alligators, which sprawled and yawned in the sunshine on the trunks of fallen trees and on the muddy banks of the bayous and the ­great morasses. Nothing in the way of animal life, however, seemed to please the poet and art reformer so much as the young negroes. “I saw them everywhere,” he said, “happy and careless, basking in the sunshine or dancing in the shade, their half-­naked bodies gleaming like bronze, and their lithe and active movements reminding one of the lizards that ­were seen flashing along the banks and trunks of the trees.”63 This likening of Black men to animals is not incidental. It was a marking of them as both “natu­ral” and outside po­liti­cal community. And it was cruelly imaginative, particularly in the era in which, due to vagrancy statutes and the rise of the convict ­labor leasing system, a “languorous” posture for Black men led to arrest and imprisonment. Generally, Wilde enjoyed a fantasy of domination that traversed the United States to Asia and Africa. This fantastic habit demonstrated that even as he railed against the constraints of gender for a Eu­ro­pean with recognized personhood, he was quite comfortable with its broader logic. He made a big to-do for months about a Black manservant who temporarily abandoned his post while protecting Wilde in Baltimore. And he wrote in a letter from New York to a friend in London about “a black P roducing P ersonhood  79

servant, who is my slave—in a ­free country one cannot live without a slave—­rather like a Christy minstrel, except that he knows no riddles. Also a carriage and a black tiger (livery groom) who is like a l­ittle monkey.”64 Despite the fact that slavery had long since been abolished, Blackness registered to Wilde as slave and simian and, perhaps most revealing, like a Blackface minstrel. Unsurprisingly, then, Wilde saw an analogy not between Ireland dominated ­under ­Great Britain and Africans ­under the United States but instead between Ireland and the Confederacy, writing, The case of the South in the Civil War was to my mind much like that of Ireland ­today. It was a strug­gle for autonomy, self-­government for a ­people. I do not wish to see the empire dismembered, but only to see Irish p ­ eople ­free, and Ireland still as a willing and integral part of the British Empire. To dismember a ­great empire in this age of vast armies and overweening ambitions on the part of other nations is to consign the p ­ eople of the broken country to weak and insignificant places in the pa­norama of nations, but ­people must have freedom and autonomy before they are capable of their greatest result in the cause of pro­gress. This is my feeling about the southern ­people as it is about my own ­people, the Irish. I look forward to much plea­sure in visiting Jefferson Davis.65 In his account of his delight about visiting the Confederate leader, Wilde asserts the logic of the empire and aspires to “freedom” within its frames of exclusion. Wilde also enjoyed San Francisco’s Chinatown, saying, in the same year that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, that the “strange, melancholy Orientals have determined they ­will have nothing about them that is not beautiful.”66 Preceding the Chinese Exclusion Act was the Page Act of 1875,67 which excluded Chinese w ­ omen from entering the United States. By law, California could not exclude Chinese w ­ omen for being Chinese, so the act was presented as protecting public morals b ­ ecause Chinese ­women ­were seen as repositories for fatal sexually transmitted diseases and possessed of a culture that was fundamentally incommensurate with that of the United States. The Page Act passed Congress easily. The image of sexual deviance and danger in Chinese ­women and the deliberate efforts to prevent Chinese men and white ­women from marrying ­were ultimately expressed in the Expatriation Act of 1907.68 It declared that a wife took on the citizenship of her husband; like the antimiscegenation statutes and the depiction of Black men as rapists and Black w ­ omen as unrapeable, the law was a mode of protecting patriarchy. Again, although Wilde undoubtedly witnessed the domination of both Black and Chinese p ­ eople during his visit to the United States, he did 80 chapter two

not conceive of their exclusion as in any way akin to his own. He was ultimately punished for his active deviation from the very patriarchy that deprived Black and Chinese p ­ eople in the United States of status altogether, marking them as essentially deviant. TWENTIETH-­C ENTURY TURNS

Vari­ous critics have treated Salome and Wilde as iconic feminist and queer figures, and in some ways this is appropriate. But for the purpose of the sort of feminist readings recommended by this text, the absent presence of Algerian boys, Black and Chinese Americans, and the figure of the young Syrian are key for considering how we o ­ ught to read the play and Wilde’s history, as well as our collective history and f­uture. While Wilde and Salome ­were transgressors of codes applied to “persons” ­under patriarchy, they w ­ ere dominators vis-­à-­vis ­those who stood outside personhood. The expansion of Eu­ro­pean sovereignty gave them access to forms of transgression “outside the law,” as it ­were, ­because their victims ­were outside the terrain of ­legal personhood ­under the authority of British, U.S., and French law. This structure of patriarchy and sovereignty, and a companionate lit­ er­a­ture and philosophy, continued through the twentieth c­ entury. We need only look at Albert Camus’s landmark novel The Stranger (1942) to recognize it.69 The existentialist crisis of the novel’s protagonist Mersault reflects the moral crises posed by fascism and the dusk of empire. Mersault, a Frenchman living in Algiers, is incapable of emotion. He reacts passively to his ­mother’s death, as well as to his sexual partnership with Marie, a professional acquaintance. The climax of the novel comes when Mersault murders “the Arab” who had earlier confronted Mersault’s friend Raymond with a knife, b ­ ecause Raymond had been the Arab’s ­sister’s lover and had betrayed her. Mersault repeatedly shoots the Arab. His discomfort is described in the text as neither fear nor anger (and it definitely is not shame) but as precipitated by the Algerian heat and the brightness of the sun. The climate, literally and meta­phor­ically, is presented as the condition for vio­lence. Mersault is brought to trial and convicted. Unlike in previous eras, by the mid-­twentieth ­century ­there was some very modest (albeit rare) accountability to the colonized and Jim Crowed u ­ nder Western ­legal regimes. While Mersault ­faces death, this tragic consequence, in the logic of the novel, is a result of his alienation from the values of civil society. Removed by distance and context from his ­mother (read also as the ­Mother Country), Mersault has no feelings for her death; seeks no salvation from P roducing P ersonhood  81

the prison chaplain; feels no romantic love or remorse. Effected and affected by the Algerian landscape, he has become essentially “nothing” in a state of dispassionate nature, and that emptiness is mirrored in the Arab’s namelessness. The Arab is a categorical “nothing” parallel to Mersault’s spiritual nothing. But the other side of this is that the “use” of the other as a repository for desire outside the frame of acceptable patriarchy extended well into the twentieth ­century. Take, for example, Jean Genet’s banned Un Chant d’Amour (1950),70 a twenty-­six-­minute film depicting sexual desire between an old Algerian man and a young French man in prison. In some ways it is one of many pieces in which Genet reflects both literally and po­liti­cally on his own history of having been poor and imprisoned in his youth before he became an artist. Their intimacy is disrupted by the guard who beats the Frenchman and sticks a phallic gun into the mouth of the Algerian. Th ­ ere is a doubleness to how this can be read. It can be read as a criticism of the layers of domination attendant to the men’s prison. But given that it fails to abdicate the eroticization of patriarchal domination, and instead in effect extends it, it remains at best an observation of the matrix of domination rather than a full critique. Edward Said had a more generous reading of Genet generally than my own, finding him distinct from the standard Orientalist and writing, The challenge of Genet’s writing, therefore, is its fierce antinomianism. ­Here is a man in love with “the other,” an outcast and stranger himself, feeling the deepest sympathy for the Palestinian revolution as the “metaphysical” uprising of outcasts and strangers—­“my heart was in it, my body was in it, my spirit was in it”—­yet neither his “total belief ” nor “the ­whole of myself ” could be in it. The consciousness of being a sham, an unstable personality perpetually at the border (“where ­human personality expresses itself most fully, ­whether in harmony or in contradiction with itself”), is the central experience of the book. “My w ­ hole life was made up of unimportant trifles cleverly blown up into acts of daring.” One is immediately reminded ­here of T. E. Lawrence, an imperial agent amongst the Arabs (though pretending to be other­wise) half a ­century earlier, but Lawrence’s assertiveness and instinct for detached domination is superseded in Genet (who was no agent) by eroticism and an au­then­tic submission to the po­liti­cal sweep of a passionate commitment. Identity is what we impose on ourselves through our lives as social, historical, po­liti­cal, and even spiritual beings. The logic of culture and of families doubles the strength of identity, which for someone like 82 chapter two

Genet, who was a victim of the identity forced on him by his delinquency, his isolation, his transgressive talents and delights, is something to be resolutely opposed. Above all, given Genet’s choice of sites like Algeria and Palestine, identity is the pro­cess by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon ­those who, by the same identity pro­cess, are decreed to be a lesser ­people. Imperialism is the export of identity.71 But it is, in fact, that wrestling on the terms of the individual that makes Genet so vexing. If we see that he attempts to make of the other a self, tearing down the conventional borders of the closet and the vestibule, we must also reckon with the authorship of that rupture and its priorities that supersede ­those of the ­imagined other. Genet’s antiheroic impulse often finds its expression on the terms of his own imagination. This projection-­based identification, along with the distortions attendant to the colonial proj­ect as a ­whole, points to why we have found de­cades of postcolonial lit­er­at­ ure, and post–­Jim Crow lit­er­a­ture, revolving around recuperation of lost personhood and patriarchy—­work that was part of a strug­gle to participate fully in the terms of order. The mid-­twentieth c­ entury was a period of dramatic transformation. Colonialism was undone and nations ­were rebuilt, with the ravages reverberating and persisting, given that capitalism and empire remained features of the geopolitics of the postcolony and neocolony. The postcolonial imagination was delimited by global powers with differing economic ideologies but both retaining the logics of patriarchy and empire in large mea­sure. Stated another way, the colonial order had created the world, structurally as well as ideologically, in the image of patriarchy, and it remained a very difficult ­thing from which to get unstuck. Kamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation (2014) riffs on Camus’s The Stranger and the concept of estrangement.72 His narrative takes place through the eyes of the ­brother of “the Arab” in Camus’s work, whom Daoud names “Musa.” Harun, Musa’s ­brother, kills a Frenchman as revenge for his ­brother’s murder at the dawn of Algeria’s in­de­pen­dence. And like Mersault, Harun spends the novel awaiting sentencing. The outrage of officials in this instance, again, is less a response to the murder than to the absence of a par­tic­ul­ar po­liti­cal meaning ­behind it. Harun does not claim to be a member of the re­sis­tance against the French or an advocate of Islamism. He is not seeking the patriarchal control of ­women to replace the loss of “their land, their wells, and their livestock” a­ fter which “­women ­were all our guys had left.”73 ­Free w ­ omen, as represented by Meriem, a gradu­ate student who is writing her thesis on Camus and P roducing P ersonhood  83

with whom Harun falls in love, are tragically disappearing u ­ nder the new model of patriarchy, according to Daoud’s account. His character’s alienation from fundamentalist patriarchal aspirations is a threat to the social order and po­liti­cal imaginary, and he has been declared an apostate by at least one Algerian cleric. It is likely that The Meursault Investigation received such positive attention in the West ­because the novel is consistent in some ways with the con­temporary version Orientalism that posits the ­Middle East and Islam in essentializing terms as a threat to demo­cratic values, including and especially the formal pursuit of gender equity. The ­tables have turned, and a patriarchal model that was once imposed by the colonial order has been abandoned. The failure of the colonized nations to remain in step with the new models of gender in the West is a basis for marking them as newly deviant. Perhaps it is easy to digest the novel ­because it exposes patriarchal ideology in con­temporary Algeria, and the Western reader can consume it in ways not unlike nineteenth-­century travel narratives, novellas, and sex manuals, which marked the difference between “us” and “the other” through the structures of gender. Daoud’s critique of fundamentalism, while po­liti­cally impor­tant as an argument against Islamist forms of patriarchy—­particularly, postcolonial recuperative efforts at patriarchy—­might be read implicitly as letting both con­temporary and historic Western forms of patriarchy off the hook. But I think the deeper observation to be made by means of Daoud’s proj­ect, beyond the presumed ideologies of his readership, is how his novel reveals the complicated residual effects of colonial patriarchy and the simultaneous adherence to it. The response to colonial patriarchy, its humiliations and its exclusions, has often been to instantiate competing forms of patriarchy that refute not only colonial domination but also neo­co­lo­nial forms of global domination. The hope depicted in the text is that an alternative self-­determining patriarchy w ­ ill lead the geopo­ liti­cally dominated to freedom. This type of hope is pres­ent not only in branches of fundamentalist Islam but also in other postcolonial politics, particularly t­ hose initially supported by the West during the Cold War as a rejection of socialism. If we consider only the gender politics of current postcolonial states, divorced from the history of Western imperial patriarchy and its patriarchal domination, our reading is too limited. But it is also limited if we, particularly ­those on the left, neglect a critique of the alternative patriarchies of t­ hose resisting U.S. domination. Western imperialism continues to dictate global relations, including gendered ideas of control, conquest, extraction, and exploitation, and whose lives ­matter. The strug­gles against Western domination that so often have 84 chapter two

been recuperative proj­ects vis-­à-­vis patriarchy are also recuperative proj­ ects vis-­à-­vis sovereignty. The argument goes: Men who have been dominated should become patriarchs to restore power and autonomous to their p ­ eople. The perversity is, of course, that t­ hose efforts are now seen by the West as sexist or misogynistic precisely as the West attempts to reassert its domination over ­those places. This geopo­liti­cal manipulation does not legitimize patriarchal ambitions and practices when they are maintained by the formerly colonized and Jim Crowed. Not in the least. But it also is not easy to prescribe letting go, particularly when such commitments are not simply arguments but convictions that have sustained ­people’s conceptions of themselves in the face of degradation and diminishment. A belief in how t­ hings “­ought to be,” no m ­ atter how fragile the prospect, can sustain a spirit against the ugliness of how t­ hings are. So it is only the beginning, but a necessary one, to say that we must tell the full story of domination and its failure and develop an analytic that allows us to work our way all the way through its layers of real­ity, fantasy, and repetition ­toward liberation.

P roducing P ersonhood  85

interlude 1

HOW DID W E GET H­ ERE? Nobody’s Supposed to Be ­Here ... In the first half of the twentieth ­century, gender rules both fluctuated and calcified, depending on the par­tic­u­lar time, place, and group. But two impor­tant features of ­these de­cades in the West, and specifically in the United States, are impor­tant to mention ­here: First, the image of the ideal ­woman as domestic consumer and architect flourished. Long a­ fter the cult of true womanhood, ideal w ­ omen ­were i­ magined as t­ hose whose primary interaction with cap­i­tal­ist production was in the form of consumption and the cultivation of the domestic arena. Second, the structure of patriarchy included w ­ omen for whom this ideal was inaccessible as a result of class and racialization. ­Those ­women, by virtue of the sort of ­labor they did, often occupied public space, though they w ­ ere exploited differently from their male counter­parts. In the succeeding de­cades, white bourgeois w ­ omen entered public space, earning suffrage rights in the United States in 1929 and entering the workforce, with the greatest increase in the war effort of the 1940s. At the same time, the discipline of their relationship to patriarchy often came in the form of moral panic around c­ hildren and delinquency and around sexual freedom and sexuality—­that is, around their becoming too much like ­those “other” ­women. I would argue that gender discourses and geopolitics gained heightened importance as the structure of patriarchal domination softened, particularly ­after World War II. As some bound­aries of personhood softened within Western nation-­states, the language of who counted as legitimate “men” and “­women” and where ­people existed in a global po­liti­cal order was extended and even rearticulated to maintain hierarches of value. In the postwar landscape that colonized and Jim Crowed p ­ eople faced, Western nations made claims for universal h ­ uman rights and the recognition of personhood internationally, yet excluded so many ­peoples in the world. ­There was at once a nominal denial and a deepening of the idea

of nonpersonhood. The West had effectively constructed nation-­states and citizenship in the terms laid out in the previous chapters—as the patriarch as citizen—­and continued to exclude. The anticolonial imagination, as well as the civil rights imagination, ­were ­shaped by the terms of the West. ­Whether it was the recuperation of a lost “manhood” or what Homi Bhabha refers as “colonial mimicry” in which the colonized and Jim Crowed made claims to inclusion based on the terms of order of the colonizers, ­these strug­gles often (though not universally) demonstrated the manner in which the history of empire had a global impact with re­spect to gender. This has been a foundational problematic for liberation strug­ gles. Many have assiduously tried to articulate and address how gender is integral to the structure of empire, but the task is per­sis­tently difficult. Stories of the journey from then to now help us understand why. In March 1979, when I was six years old, the film Norma Rae, starring Sally Field, was released. It was based on the life of Crystal Lee Sutton, a thirty-­something-­year-­old ­woman who worked at the J. P. Stevens textile plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Sutton had worked at the plant since eleventh grade, and at thirty-­three she made $2.65 an hour folding towels. Organizers from the Textile Workers Union of Amer­i­ca came to Roanoke Rapids to encourage u ­ nionization. Sutton was inspired to join the ­union. Mill bosses tried deceptive mea­sures to prevent the workers from u ­ nionizing. For example, they tried to dissuade white membership by posting a flyer in the shop saying that any ­union started would be run by Blacks. (It was true that African American w ­ omen, along with Sutton, ­were an integral part of organ­izing the u ­ nion.) When Sutton transcribed the flyer to share with ­union organizers, against the rules of the shop, she was accosted by supervisors. The police w ­ ere called, and before she was kicked out she did something recounted powerfully in the film: “I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word ­union on it in big letters, got up on my work ­table, and slowly turned it around. The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet.”1 The police removed Sutton from the plant, and she was fired. In the case for her reinstatement filed by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Sutton was successful. She was awarded back wages and allowed to return to her job. Sutton did so only briefly. However, she continued to be a ­union or­ga­niz­er. Although the film stays fairly close to the facts, the larger story is revelatory. Sutton was not a lone hero, and her strug­gle was encased in a community that had long been eco­nom­ically exploited. She was born in a mill town; her parents and grandparents had worked for the same com­pany, which also “owned ­every shotgun h ­ ouse in Sutton’s neighborhood.”2 H ow D id W e G et H­ ere?   87

Despite her story’s im­mense popularity, Sutton was uncompensated for it: She was offered just $1 in consideration to turn her life into what became an iconic feminist artifact of the late twentieth c­ entury. Sutton would recall ­later that she was uncomfortable with the focus on romantic intrigue and that the story was presented as solely about her rather than about the ­unionizing workers as a group.3 In the years that followed the production of the film, Sutton lived an eco­nom­ically vulnerable life. She worked in fast food and as a ­hotel maid. In the first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century, she was diagnosed with meningioma. Her insurance com­pany initially refused to cover the treatment to fight the cancer. ­Because Sutton’s cancer was so fast-­growing, by the time she won her b ­ attle with her insurance com­pany, it was too late to successfully fight the cancer. She died in 2009. ­There is something about the space between Norma Rae, the fictional feminist heroine, and the life of her inspiration, Crystal Lee Sutton, that captures the cultural and economic moves of the late twentieth ­century and early twenty-­first c­entury. Norma Rae was a singular Hollywood tale, a blockbuster. Sutton was one of many voices of the mid-­twentieth ­century, the roar of social transformation. Social transformation reached across the globe in vari­ous forms. It is in the theory we read: poststructural, postcolonial, feminist, critical. It is in the changing landscape of the acad­emy in the late twentieth ­century, the change that allows me, a Black ­woman born in the Deep South, to be pres­ent within it. Born in Alabama, I was a child mi­grant to the North in the 1970s. I once interviewed a ­legal client who was ­doing day l­abor picking butterbeans and, with a jolt, realized that with a mere accidental change in fate, that might have been me. The same could be said of mill workers such as Sutton. Just the slightest wind that changed the outcome for my ­mother’s generation had put me in a circumstance dif­fer­ent from that of ­either of them. In the North I landed in Boston, the same place as many Black and Brown feminist activists, adults while I was still a child, but who also w ­ ere a hair’s breadth away from an agricultural or factory life. They had come of age with that knowledge, and in the social movements of the 1960s, and they had witnessed the po­liti­cal and imaginative possibilities of decolonization in Africa and Asia. It makes sense that they would turn to gender as a primary concern for liberation. Its realities coursed through ­every strug­gle. In Boston, the w ­ omen of the Combahee River Collective and the Boston ­Women Health Book Collective, which produced the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves4 gathered and ­imagined a feminist ­future. This Bridge Called My Back, a classic feminist text that centered the experience 88 interlude one

of w ­ omen of color and, specifically, lesbians of color was also published in Boston following a series of meetings in a local church.5 ­These par­tic­u­lar organ­izations recommended a feminism that was critical of all relations of domination that traversed from the terms of intimate association to economic power. For example, ­these words are in the brief, yet powerfully resonant, Combahee River Collective Statement: The most general statement of our politics at the pres­ent time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our par­tic­ul­ar task the development of integrated analy­sis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of ­these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black ­women we see Black feminism as the logical po­liti­cal movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all w ­ omen of color face. We realize that the liberation of all oppressed ­peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-­economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists b ­ ecause we believe that work must be or­ga­nized for the collective benefit of t­ hose who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses.6 They critically ­imagined, standing at vestibules and borders, a robust theoretical landscape that entailed the liberation of most of the globe. The nesting structures of domination would be upended with the “standing up” of t­ hose standing u ­ nder the weight of gender, sexuality, race, and class oppression. Their vision focused on the materiality of relations of domination and their fleshly consequences. Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live h ­ ere: the squint-­eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-­breed, the halfdead; in short, ­those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.”7 In this, Anzaldúa both names the “crossroads” space that excludes and the punishment of its transgression, which cuts in multiple ways but finds its point of origin in the logics of domination of the sovereign Eu­ ro­pean nations in modernity. H ow D id W e G et H­ ere?   89

­These and other critical feminist movements across the nation and world coexisted in the 1970s with a wide array of liberation movements. ­These movements ­were intimately, nationally, and internationally concerned and strug­gled with the vestiges of colonialism and Jim Crow, economic domination and the exploitative practices of ruling elites, militarism, white supremacy, poverty, and patriarchy, as well as with the often s­ ilent suffering and diminishment experienced by ­those considered less than “Man” and not full persons for the bulk of modern history. In the United States, t­ hese feminists, like o ­ thers, grappled with Martin Luther King’s haunting meta­phorical question about the value of integration into a burning h ­ ouse. It was a strug­gle that resonated across the globe as U.S. economic domination demanded allegiance to its authority. Mid-­century reckonings with the fact that it was an architecture that diminished the sovereignty of ­others proliferated. Po­liti­cal imaginations included ones that veered away from building plantation ­house­holds with more rooms. Blowing t­hings up, new structures altogether, w ­ ere ­imagined as a prospective ­future. I was one of ­those ­children who was reared watching the cult classic film The ­Battle of Algiers, about the anticolonial strug­gle in Algeria. The postcolonial imaginary flowed into the post–­Jim Crow, post-­patriarchal imaginary. And the postmodern turn challenged what we thought we knew about how the world worked according to the inherited rules of modernity. It was a complex time. It is common in the acad­emy to read theory of that period without an awareness of its po­liti­cal under­pinnings. Poststructuralist ideas ­were fundamental po­liti­cal interventions, albeit ­today remembered in terms solely of their intellectual, and not their po­liti­cal, expressions. In the United States, but also in Eu­rope, and particularly France, 1968 was a big year. The events of May 1968 in Paris, in which workers joined students in a general strike motivated by leftist politics that brought more than a million ­people into the street, ­were at the core of their cutting-­edge critical theories. Intellectuals from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Jean Baudrillard understood their work as a response to the call of t­ hese protests. However, in the pro­cess of undoing the concept of universal truths, meta-­theories, and objective real­ity, poststructuralists generally left a theorization of the structure of nonpersonhood undone and failed to fully reveal its architecture. The same critique can be made of critical ­legal studies, which proliferated roughly in the same period. Crits, as critical ­legal studies scholars ­were called, emphasized power, contingency, and the fictions of universalism. They often moved too quickly past the fact of the nonuniversal and extralegal non-­subject subject who was always 90 interlude one

in the midst of modernity. ­These w ­ ere essential interventions and yet still d ­ idn’t allow us to get to the structure of nonpersonhood as a point of origin and fundamental to modernity. Theorizing nonpersonhood, neglected in so much critical theory, was at the core of the previously mentioned work of Black and Chicana feminists of the 1970s. Identity politics—­whether in cultural studies, Black studies, or critical race theory—­that developed in this period ­were impor­ tant for many reasons but particularly for how they described structures that ­were too often neglected by poststructuralists and Crits. Some Black feminist, Chicana feminist, and postcolonial Marxist feminist theorists brought t­ hese modes of inquiry together. Their synthesis and integration of poststructuralist, Marxist, and identity-­political theory interventions was rooted in centering the position of the w ­ oman who existed outside personhood and theorizing from t­ here. In some ways, the foregoing chapters are a reading back from the 1970s and 1980s in light of t­ hese traditions, a re­orienting proj­ect to tell a story of modernity out of t­hose constructed as abject, presented for its own sake but also to prepare us for thinking about con­temporary challenges. ­Toward the end of the 1970s, two transformations occurred si­mul­ta­ neously that would profoundly shape their legacies, moves that at once served as a backlash against social movements and as an integration of some of their ideals into the dominant frames of U.S. society. The first was what we now call “the turn to neoliberalism.” It marked a shift in economic policy from prioritizing the full employment, economic stability, and productivity of working p ­ eople t­ oward beneficial (for elites) international trade relations and, ultimately, the globalization of ­labor, decline of manufacturing, and increase in long-­term unemployment and underemployment for poor and working-­class Americans. The steady departure of the United States from the social safety net and move ­toward the demonization of needs-­based assistance (often shorthand for “welfare”) and so-­called big government ensued. At the same time, we also began to witness a practice of incorporating small numbers of previously excluded ­peoples into vari­ous sectors of American society as a response to social movements. Affirmative action in higher education, employment, contracting, and media ­were examples of this move. Although affirmative action was met with hostility from the outset and consistently has been described by detractors as a ­favor rather than a right—or as right—it ­really ­ought to be understood as a very modest grant, an increase of opportunity for some among disfavored groups precisely at the moment that broad benefits w ­ ere narrowed. Rather than sharing prosperity, prosperity was made more competitive, exclusive, and slightly more diverse. H ow D id W e G et H­ ere?   91

Competition for “success” became open to ­people with types of bodies that previously had been left out, and w ­ omen and p ­ eople of color began to enter slowly into new arenas. This slightly open door, a pretense to equity, soon reinvigorated hostility ­toward ­those who ­weren’t among the few deemed “competitive” enough to make it, notwithstanding the vestiges of a long history of, and resilient pres­ent filled with, exclusion. And yet another form of hostility, a presumption of inadequacy, was placed on ­those who gained access to what previously ­were exclusively white men’s spaces. Nevertheless, white w ­ omen and ­people of color trickled onto Wall Street, with their power suits battling t­ hose presuppositions. At the same time, though, the welfare rights movement led by multiracial ­women was soundly defeated by politicians, and the image of the poor was tarnished with stigmatizing terms such as “welfare queen.”8 Internationally focused yet U.S.-­based feminists, as well as the more domestic liberal variety, experienced contraction in the face of the rightward turn of the United States. Internationally, decolonization was systematically undermined by Western and particularly U.S. neo­co­lo­nial­ist and ­neo-­imperialist forces of economic exploitation, extraction, and domination, as well as the manipulations of the two major superpowers in the midst of the Cold War. Domestic precariousness became explic­itly tied to exploitation internationally with the spread of multinational corporations. Even as feminist organ­izations ­were sustained, and U.S., U.K. and Ca­ rib­bean Black feminist writing flourished in the 1980s,9 it was a de­cade of more losses than wins for the utopic feminist imagination. ­There ­were victories. They ­were simply of a very par­tic­ul­ar and circumscribed sort: the inclusion of some “­others” and “outsiders” strictly along the terms of the liberal demo­cratic state, which had never been fully inclusive and remained closed to many. In the United States, expanded constitutional rights ­were to be protected in the abstract, but passionate inattention to the ­people on the margins was maintained. Feminist gains therefore became increasingly privatized and elite. We can see an example of this in how the ­legal framework for recognizing abortion rights was based in the right to privacy according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion Roe v.  Wade in 1973, not in terms of equal protection.10 The power of this example is heightened with an observation that the ability to terminate a pregnancy has been steadily eroded as access to public facilities is systematically denied to poor and working-class w ­ omen. So while the rights-­ based framework of the liberal demo­cratic state recognizes the right to have an abortion, it remains an abstraction. Hence, de­cades ­after the right was recognized, abortion is neither broadly protected nor widely accessible. 92 interlude one

Understandably, when social transformation is marked by the lives of the few rather than the many of a marginalized group, the few gain heightened importance both literally and symbolically. W ­ omen in Congress, Black mayors, feminist professors: they all became the ostensible f­ aces of the slowed march ­toward equality. Likewise, when freedom movements waned or ­were destroyed, many of the remaining organ­izations dedicated to social justice ends became bureaucratized and institutionalized to sustain themselves, requiring more money and infrastructure. They had to market themselves to funders and choose discrete, attainable goals within the dominant po­liti­cal framework to demonstrate their value, thus narrowing the potential po­liti­cal imagination of their members. Philosophical premises that ­were understood to be essential parts of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, such as community, nonhierarchical organ­ization, collectivism, mutual po­liti­cal growth, and care, do not fit easily within the order of this competitive society. In higher education, as well as in K–12 education, incorporation of some of “us” as new full “members” also meant that we ­were called to fit (and at times distort) feminist ideologies, books, and departments into a structure of knowledge production and credentializing and into institutions that w ­ ere mired in gender and racial in­equality at their very foundation. Of course, to become incorporated always requires a degree of capitulation to the status quo. This one, in a competitive and deeply unequal society, required evidence of distinction between the incorporated and the unincorporated. It has taken the form of performatives (language, style, gesture), credentials (degrees, appointments, contracts) and practices that, regardless of intent, always are implicated in exclusiveness. For critics who are s­ haped by legacies of the mid-­twentieth-­century liberation movements, an enormous challenge is presented by the overarching frame of liberalism in the discourses and mechanisms of mainstream con­temporary feminism. We often speak the language of liberalism even as our critical languages are Marxian. That is to say, the terms of our popu­lar feminist books, of our protests, and of our ­legal strug­gles are often constricted by the liberal demo­cratic proj­ect. The politics of inclusion overwhelm our strug­gles. Moreover, having a “seat at the ­table” as a precondition for our assertions threatens to overdetermine the ­table or to return to an earlier formulation; to place aspirations to the lady or the patriarch above the call to embrace the monstrosity. Our calls for an expansion of who can be patriarchs and ladies are such that we find the argument against the terms of liberalism difficult. We should not be ashamed of this or to admit this. It is a product of how we arrive at the institutional spaces where we have the conversations. We operate in the terms H ow D id W e G et H­ ere?   93

of liberal demo­cratic theory even when we think with the tools of mid-­ twentieth ­century Marxian/post-­structuralist or feminist thought, and our current economic model is another challenging m ­ atter altogether. We are constrained and implicated by that constraint. That is our condition. Nevertheless, vari­ous feminist thinkers from the 1980s through the 2000s have tried to grapple, on the narrow perch that exists, with both the inheritance of the logics of domination ­under modernity and the current economic order that has followed the backlash against the movements of the mid-­century. A few examples are in order to illustrate this point. Beginning in the 1980s, Zillah Eisenstein took up discourse theory in a materialist fashion, embracing the rejection of truth as a call to attend to the contingency of experiences of the world s­ haped by relations of power. She spoke to the multiple significations of the body, such that the body should not be read as an abstraction with coherent meaning. Rather, she argued, par­tic­u­lar renderings that led to dif­f er­ent conditions of embodiment ­were impor­tant. This model of feminist thought led her to make key interventions, including one mentioned earlier: that we o ­ ught to read the transatlantic slave trade as the first stage of globalization. Eisenstein’s work is consistent with Judith Butler’s, as ­those familiar with Butler’s corpus ­will immediately register. For both, an interrogation of law and, in par­tic­u­lar, ­legal recognition (and its absence) and coercion (of gender roles of imperial relations) ­were and are critical to analyses of gender. Butler influentially rejected essentializing conceptions of w ­ oman that ­were part of continental feminism. While Butler reluctantly accepts the usefulness of identity politics, I want to understand them not simply as po­liti­cally salient, but as gesturing t­ oward constitutive relations of domination. In this, I follow the lead of other scholars. Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks, for example, centered Black ­women inside an economic order, theorizing architectures of domination—an extension of the identity politics articulated by Combahee. From this, hooks developed the term “White supremacist hetero-­patriarchal capitalism” as a multidimensional analytic. Collins encouraged thinkers to recognize domination as a matrix with multiple layers, not a single axis. Thus, “representatives”—­either racial- or gender-­representative figures, so often elites—­she argued, stand in for an understanding of the logics of domination. Further, she contested models of “knowledge” production; thus, her work can be read as responding to the post-­structuralist critiques of “disciplinary knowledge” and discourses by locating the critique in lived practices as well as in theoretical interventions. The possibilities of the subaltern imagination are made “real” in this pursuit. Similarly,

94 interlude one

Davis explored the potentiality of t­ hose who w ­ ere legally nonpersons (the enslaved) to imagine nonpatriarchal relations, as they w ­ ere wholly excluded from its logics by virtue of their ungendering and ungendered domination. But the call that is perhaps most directly influential in the form of this proj­ect is Chandra Mohanty’s discouraging us from engaging in the theoretical apartheid that so often is part of feminist criticism.11 Like the aforementioned scholars, she has insisted on an understanding of capital, militarism, and global relations of power as fundamental to feminist criticism. She has challenged the category “­woman” in a way distinct from Butler. The singular category obscures relations of domination between the West and the rest; it also erases specificity. At the same time, the category “Third World ­woman” posited, in a parallel fashion to the West, as ­under the patriarchal thumb of “Third World man” as a static category abdicates the theoretical responsibility to think about domination fully, particularly in terms of neo­co­lo­nial and neoliberal formations, and erases the conditions of ­human experience. Mohanty’s insistence that we theorize both specifically and globally, through both categorical abstraction and lived experience, is a power­ful guide. I read her call not as a criticism of standpoint theory or of women-­of-­color feminisms as par­tic­u­lar and specific enterprises; instead it is a call for critical integrations of ­these bodies of work with ­others to think about gender ever more rigorously. The influence of her work on the relations between gendered l­ abor in Asia and sweatshops in the United States, for example, can be seen throughout the second section of this book. Likewise, her call for us to be feminists with a global theoretical proj­ect shapes this proj­ect. Following in the tradition of the aforementioned body of work, perhaps ironically, has led me away from focusing “identity” as a po­liti­cal category in this work, largely ­because in the post-1970s world, its overdetermination often obscures the work of neoliberalism and how vexations and relations of domination within identity categories may be as salient as the commonality of the identity. Yet I know that this work is pos­si­ble ­because of the interventions made by ­those who used identity as a category for critical interrogation and that the ascribed and a­ dopted identity of subjects is very real. However, as w ­ ill be further explored in the next chapter, I choose to decenter it as a mode of analy­sis b ­ ecause of how the intersections of identity are so frequently taken up as an understanding of the personal possessive rather than an articulation of relations. Theoretical work is challenging, particularly in light of the dissembling of meta-­theory that attended the postmodern turn. The shift away from

H ow D id W e G et H­ ere?   95

materiality and systems ­toward meanings and discourses has seemed at times to threaten endless abstraction that pulls us away from the fact of ­human life and our ethics within the world. While contingency did and does exist, laws, language, and discourses had coercive outcomes. They produced material realities. And while it was essential to challenge the idea of the universal, it is also essential to interrogate theoretically the condition of ­those resigned to the nonuniversal. The truth is that training in feminist theory frequently relies on postmodernism and poststructuralism rendered in a de-­historicized or narrow fashion rather than in a tradition of multiracial and multinational feminist theory. ­Those who are trained in the latter are often seen in the acad­emy as less critical and less rigorous than the former, as simply ­doing the work of “representing” identities and social history without a theoretical footing. This is an unacceptable diminishment of the scope of their work. The scholars mentioned earlier have written against the narrowing of feminism to bourgeois repre­sen­ta­tion. Theirs has proved a Herculean task. They broaden although are often depicted as limiting. Despite their breadth, they (with the exception perhaps of Butler) are largely marginal to mainstream “feminist” discourses. Take a look at any bookstore, academic or other­wise: The latest rich feminist tome w ­ ill be at the front of the store; t­ hese writers w ­ ill be in its margins, despite the fact that their works concern a much broader terrain than do the corporate elites focused on in a bestseller such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Neoliberalism, the shift in the po­liti­cal economy that drives so much of the dynamic of which I speak, has not defeated feminist theory. But it has produced challenges for feminist analytics in real time. The next two chapters ­will propose modes of analy­sis to meet this challenge. The bricolage of critical work that facilitates an accounting of this landscape demands attention to both inherited forms of patriarchy and their new iterations. The postmodern condition entails modernism. Neoliberalism has liberalism wrapped up in it. In the “post-­feminist” era, feminism remains essential. Race still ­matters; gender still constrains; and empire newly unfurls. The imperative to reject theoretical apartheid is heightened to best describe what it is we are confronting with the changes wrought in the post-­movement twentieth c­ entury and the challenges of the twenty-­first c­ entury. In this endeavor, we must extend the idea of standpoint theory, a focus on par­tic­u­lar positions of marginalized ­people, to insist that the root of the architecture of patriarchy is found in ­those places under­neath layers of domination. We must do what Hortense Spillers demanded of 96 interlude one

us in 1987: embrace the monstrosity. That is a core task for a critical under­ standing of patriarchy: to embrace the monstrosity, not the celebrity; the monstrosity, not the representative; the monstrosity, not the ideal. To embrace the monstrosity is to wrestle with the world from the status of the outside. The task is hard and demands that we read the world we occupy rigorously.

H ow D id W e G et H­ ere?   97

chapter 3

IN THE ETHER Neoliberalism and Entrepreneurial ­Woman ... At sixteen, I worked ­after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured ­legal pads: Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. No gloves: fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper, and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin, hidden. Then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punchclock.

Ten years ­later, in law school, I knew that ­every ­legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts, that ­every open lawbook was a pair of hands upturned and burning. Martín Espada, “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper?”

Paper is foundational. Notes, sketches, doodles. But also doctrine, rules, law. Like the word, it is the surface on which life and death are written. It has a plethora of uses. And its very creation has suffering embedded in it. Paper is manufactured from wood pulp (and other fibers) in mills. Thousands of workers in paper mills create this essential product. Among their tasks: bleach the pulp, press it into sheets, coat it, dry it, and cut it. As Martín Espada writes in verse, paper cuts back. Literally and figuratively. Over the years, paper mill workers have inhaled asbestos and other carcinogens. The paper industry, like many ­others, bleeds danger into the surrounding areas. For example, the San Jacinto River in Texas is poisoned by the dioxin chemicals used in the paper production of the International Paper Com­pany. Residents are told not to eat any fish or crab from the river and not to camp or picnic in its proximity. Many burn for the perfection of paper. The twin forces of globalization and neoliberalism have had an impact on the paper industry. Since the 1990s, multinational paper companies increasingly have moved into tropical markets, where rapidly maturing trees can meet the increased demand for paper production. Manufacturing outfits are often in dif­f er­ent nations from the pulp providers, and the markets for consumption are global. Notwithstanding the digital age, paper still proliferates. The paper industry, as with so many areas, stands at a crossroads between old and new ways. Neoliberalism is a relatively new global economic order. However, the structure of our relationships to the neoliberal economic order extends the old logic of patriarchy: Property, personhood, and sovereignty continue to m ­ atter. But neoliberalism also disrupts some of the stability to that structure as the global economy pushes against the borders and bound­aries of sovereign nations. This chapter is an exploration of what has been termed the postfeminist moment in light of the rise of neoliberalism. In the E ther  99

We are witnessing the simultaneous incorporation of some features of feminist thought into the mainstream of U.S. politics at the same time that trenchant gender ideologies, particularly ­those championed by neoconservatives, persist. Past and pres­ent collide. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the current economic order poses distinctive challenges for feminist criticism. ECONOMIC MAN TO ENTREPRENEURIAL W ­ OMAN

Neoliberalism entails the deregulation of financial institutions, a freeing up of capital exploits described as facilitating “­free” trade (for corporations), maximizing corporate profits, and slicing up the safety net of the welfare state. But it is much more. Competition is not simply left to be “­free” ­under the neoliberal philosophy; it is treated as gospel that must be staged and promoted. The state itself is enfolded and animated by market rationality, a step beyond a classical cap­i­tal­ist focus on business profitability. It is the inverse of early cap­i­tal­ist mercantilism: Then, business served the state; now the state serves business. Therefore, all or most state functions are infused with cost-­benefit analyses. As Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval write, “Competitive capitalism was not a product of nature, it is a machine which requires constant surveillance and regulation.”1 States produce competition. Public institutions and ser­vices are displaced by private corporations and businesses, and support ser­vices are increasingly outsourced and subcontracted. Individuals and business that fail in ­those “ser­vice” marketplaces are shuttered. Nevertheless, the market is construed as something that is natu­ral to ­human beings. We tend to believe the my­thol­ogy that markets are naturaal ­because we are now constituted as members of society according to market terms. This organ­ization is shown colloquially in how we import market language into our daily lives with talk about branding and risk and efficiency in areas far removed from business. Neoliberalism, as such, is competitive citizenship and consistently demands more competition in e­ very area of our lives. We are on an endless hamster wheel. Th ­ ere is no steady ground. Dardot and Laval use the term “entrepreneurial man” to describe the subject status produced by neoliberalism. Entrepreneurial man is a descendant of “economic man,” or “homo economicus,” that figure of nineteenth-­century philosophy most influentially articulated by John Stuart Mill. Mill described him as “an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, con­ve­niences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of 100 chapter  three

l­abour and physical self-­denial with which they can be obtained.” Homo economicus is seen as “rational” in the sense that well-­being as defined by the utility function is optimized given perceived opportunities. That is, the individual seeks to attain very specific and predetermined goals at the lowest pos­si­ble cost. Note that this kind of “rationality” does not require the individual’s goals be “rational” in some larger ethical, social, or h ­ uman sense, only that he tries to attain them at minimal cost.2 In Mill’s economic thought, po­liti­cal economy “does not treat the ­whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the w ­ hole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end.”3 The economic motivation had to have some checks on it. They w ­ ere, according to Mill, appropriately limited to the question of harm to ­others. He wrote: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his ­will, is to prevent harm to ­others. His own good, ­either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear ­because it ­will be better for him to do so, b ­ ecause it ­will make him happier, b ­ ecause, in the opinion of ­others, to do so would be wise, or even right. . . . ​The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns o ­ thers. In the part which merely concerns himself, his in­de­pen­dence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.4 Another ­legal personality of the nineteenth ­century was the Reasonable Man. The doctrine of the Reasonable Man developed in Anglo-­American law as a ­legal personality who could aid the interpretation of the responsibilities of a citizen and ­toward other citizens u ­ nder the sovereign authority. The doctrine had its origins in the En­glish tort law case Vaughan v. Menlove of 1837.5 In the case, Menlove built a hayrick to hold his hay at the border between his own land and that of Vaughan, the plaintiff. Menlove had built a chimney for the hayrick that was intended to prevent fires, but his precautions failed. The resulting fire damaged Vaughan’s property. Menlove had been warned several times before the fire that the hayrick ­hadn’t been built properly. The court ruled that Menlove was guilty of committing a tort against Vaughan ­because he had not taken the precautions that a reasonable and prudent man would have taken. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the most influential American judges and jurisprudes, explained the theory b ­ ehind the reasonable person standard as stemming from the impossibility of “mea­sur­ing a man’s powers In the E ther  101

and limitations.”6 According to Holmes, individual, personal quirks that inadvertently injure the persons or property of o ­ thers are no less damaging than intentional acts. For society to function, “a certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities g­ oing beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare.”7 Thus, a reasonable application of the law is sought that is compatible with planning, working, or getting along with ­others. As such, “His neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish decline to take his personal equation into account.”8 Holmes heralded the reasonable person as a fictional ­legal personality whose conduct ­under any common set of facts is selected by the courts according to compelling and general public opinion. The Reasonable Man doctrine became a mainstay of contract law as well as tort law. An economic figure like “homo economicus,” he stands for the princi­ple of objectivity in the midst of conflict. However the Reasonable Man is a l­ egal personality who mediates the self-­interested purity of Economic Man. The Reasonable Man has limits imposed by the social contract as reflected in the law. In the neoliberal era, however, the mediating function of the reasonable man is delimited by the expanded reach of entrepreneurial man. Although the now gender-­inclusive reasonable person still figures in contract interpretation and tort law, the significance of the figure has been significantly muted as the competitive terrain of homo economicus has expanded. The transition from economic man to entrepreneurial man is a question of scope. Entrepreneurial man must perform, constantly and without end. E ­ very aspect of his or her being is in a competitive field, viewed in terms of marketability, and failure constantly threatens. Hence, entrepreneurial man has to corral resources, skills, and traits to position himself for maximum advantage. We are encouraged to treat all of our actions as part of this effort, with scarcity or failure ever worrying us as we consider the benefit and utility and marketability of all that we do. We are rewarded or punished accordingly. Each person is supposed to calculate for self-­interest and self-­maximization above all ­else, including the common good. And, to provide a concrete example, economic deregulation is but one mea­sure of the reduced checks placed upon reckless self-­interest. This understanding of neoliberalism as an overarching order is the source of my frequent use of the word “we” in this text. It is true that we live with the inherited distinctions of citizen and noncitizen, l­egal person and nonperson, for example, that are signs that ­there is no universal “we.” Yet the imperatives of neoliberalism travel across the lines of ­legal and social distinction. That is, we are all called to be entrepre102 chapter  three

neurial, although the distribution of risk and resource in that endeavor is a function of juridical and conceptual distinctions that, in day-­to-­day life, ensure that our experience of “we” is not universal. So ­here is one of the many vexations in proffering this account: At ­every “we,” ­there is a potential danger of over-­representing the West, the bourgeois, the literate, a boasting ignorance regarding the plethora of global economic and social relations. I pres­ent my “we,” however, in the spirit of the Derridean sous rature, visually represented as the word that has a line through it ­because it is as a signifier that is not quite right but is necessary to illustrate the point. The striking out of the term “we” occurs, at least conceptually, by attending to the zones of erasure in po­liti­cal recognition and social acknowl­edgment. A confession is necessary, too. I hold on to “we” for another reason. I believe, that for the critic, the intellectual, the student, and the activist (the anticipated readers of this text), the posture of distance in which one is not implicated in the mechanics of domination ­because one is not at the top of the global cap­i­tal­ist heap is untenable and unethical. That is to say, to claim a “we” in this morass is to deliberately disavow innocence. We are deeply and terribly guilty. Guilt, of course, is not equally distributed. But seeking innocence is a distraction of the highest order to critical thought. We are called to think through our own socio-­political sins. ­Under neoliberalism, each of us, as entrepreneurial man creates the self. But at the same time the neoliberal order creates and re-­creates the “other,” the exotic, the nonperson, to serve consumption and desires among market winners. Wendy Brown cogently describes this phenomenon, saying: In popu­lar usage, neo-­liberalism is equated with a radically ­free market: maximized competition and ­free trade achieved through economic de-­regulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range of monetary and social policies favorable to business and indifferent t­ oward poverty, social deracination, cultural decimation, long term resource depletion and environmental destruction. Neo-­liberalism is most often invoked in relation to the Third World, referring e­ ither to nafta-­like schemes that increase the vulnerability of poor nations to the vicissitudes of globalization or to International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies which, through financing packages attached to “restructuring” requirements, yank the chains of ­every aspect of Third World existence, including po­liti­cal institutions and social formations. For progressives, neo-­liberalism is thus a pejorative not only b ­ ecause it conjures economic policies which sustain or deepen local poverty and In the E ther  103

the subordination of peripheral to core nations, but also b ­ ecause it is compatible with, and sometimes even productive of, authoritarian, despotic, paramilitaristic, and/or corrupt state forms and agents within civil society.9 Domestically, the unfree l­ abor of the incarcerated and the coercive conditions of undocumented ­labor, along with exploited under-­the-­table and gray economy work, generally happen along a spectrum of subjection, and ­under surveillance and ghettoization, while serving the market desires of neoliberal market winners. Hence, the “­free” market as a theoretical framework depends on the “unfreedom” of t­ hose who are on the margins or outskirts of market activity and who are often dominated by t­ hose who employ them or extract their ­labor (in the cases of prison or trafficking, for example). In the United States, ­women who are recognized members of the society (citizens, ­legal residents) have greater access to participation in the market ­under this neoliberal economic order than they have ever had before. A parallel observation might be made about groups that ­were formally categorized as “nonperson” by virtue of their ascriptive racial or ethnic categories but who are now among the citizenry. This produces some surface appearance of economic inclusion. However, given the structure of monetary inheritances, long-­standing forms of economic exclusion and in­equality persist. This doubling of in­equality—an in­equality that exists among t­hose who are qualified persons, and between ­those who are qualified and ­those who remain excluded from that category—­demands rigorous analy­sis. The old architecture of patriarch through property, personhood, and sovereignty remains, but t­ here are fewer absolute exclusions yet more intensive competitive demands that disadvantage ­those who w ­ ere once absolutely excluded. A thought exercise can facilitate reading through the layers of this moment. I want to posit the figure of “entrepreneurial w ­ oman.” I mean to explore this not as an embrace of a binary gender frame but rather to think through position of both the w ­ oman as “lady” and the category of the nonperson, including, according to the logics of patriarchy, failed man. Entrepreneurial ­woman confronts neoliberal arrangements. But the particulars of her situation potentially position her in widely dif­fer­ent relationships to them. Let us begin with the entrepreneurial w ­ oman who is a “market victor.” In mainstream discourses, t­hose ­women, who are “leaders” by virtue of being eco­nom­ically power­ful or po­liti­cal representatives, are presented as feminist heroes. This phenomenon has extended so far that even ­those who oppose what are commonplace feminist doc104 chapter  three

trines (reproductive rights, equal pay) are not infrequently described as feminists (à la Sarah Palin). The competitive logics for the victorious entrepreneurial ­woman bifurcate: They demand a strict set of gender performatives, on the one hand (one must pres­ent like a lady), and, on the other, they depend on a mea­sure of success along terms of conventional patriarchs. Revealingly, when we read the resentment of “failed” men of eco­nom­ically successful ­women, ­there is a discourse of displacement, a sense that what is theirs by divine right has been taken. The most potent and articulated lingering resentment of this sort is found in the rise of neoconservatism. Con­temporary neoconservatism is an appeal to return to old arrangements that has the effect of returning traditional forms of patriarchy, much of it effectively oriented ­toward limiting the participation of w ­ omen in the body politic (restoring them to domesticity) and undoing mechanisms to bring ­people of color into the ­middle classes. It answers the turn to identity politics with a counter-­identity predicated on the superiority of their identities: white, Christian, conventional cishet gender arrangements rooted in the very patriarchal ideas about which we have been primarily concerned in this text. The rise of the right wing in the 1980s was heavi­ly dependent on a discourse about “values” that have been destabilized—­those values being endemic to patriarchy. It entailed a rejection of w ­ omen moving out of the position of liege and a rejection of modestly reparative mea­sures of inclusion instituted in the 1960s and ’70s vis-­à-­vis ­those relegated to nonpersonhood. The right wing appeals to Higher Law philosophically, however discursively, in the public sphere. Their focus is often on the U.S. Constitution—­specifically, the first two amendments, with their provisions about “speech” weaponry and religion, as though they hold more virtue than the concepts of equal protection and privacy. In postcolonial states, this conservatism has dif­fer­ent dimensions. Some are similar turns to Chris­tian­ity as a more righ­teous “order”; for ­others, the conservatism is ­imagined as having a reparative function, a restoration of traditional indigenous forms of patriarchy lost through the colonial adventure, even though they are taking place in light of global forms of domination in which the United States continue to exercise domination over the words and deeds of nations. But focusing h ­ ere, it is impor­tant to understand that neo­conservatism, by and large, is a ­battle against social liberals over the terms of neoliberalism, not a counter-­political imaginary. Wendy Brown further disrobes misapprehensions about neoconservatism, including the commonplace liberal account that blames it for being the primary agent of in­equality and, in par­tic­ul­ ar, sexism. She writes: In the E ther  105

It is commonplace to speak of the pres­ent regime in the United States as a neo-­conservative one, and to cast as a consolidated “neo-­con” proj­ ect pres­ent efforts to intensify U.S. military capacity, increase U.S. global hegemony, dismantle the welfare state, retrench civil liberties, eliminate the right to abortion and affirmative action, re-­Christianize the state, de-­regulate corporations, gut environmental protections, reverse progressive taxation, reduce education spending while increasing prison bud­gets, and feather the nests of the rich while criminalizing the poor. I do not contest the existence of a religious-­political proj­ect known as neo-­conservatism nor challenge the appropriateness of understanding many of the links between ­these objectives in terms of a neo-­conservative agenda. However, I want to background this agenda in order to consider our current predicament in terms of a neo-­liberal po­liti­cal rationality, a rationality that exceeds par­tic­ul­ar positions on par­tic­u­lar issues. . . . ​I want to consider the way that this rationality is emerging as governmentality—­a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one which produces subjects, forms of citizenship and be­hav­ior, and a new organ­ization of the social.10 Stated another way, even the fight against neoconservatism, including what we colloquially term the “war on ­women,” for example, happens largely on the economic terrain of neoliberalism. The lack of full reproductive health care for many ­women is inextricably linked to the loss of a public sector, yet the popu­lar discourse often occurs solely on the basis of rights and choice. Neoconservatives’ efforts to control w ­ omen’s access to contraceptives and abortion, as well as regulate sexual partnership, are combated with discourses about autonomy and liberty rather than in­equality partly ­because the ideological ­battle for public resources and funding has also already been lost. Neoconservatism and neoliberalism, therefore, cannot be understood as simply parallel competing ideologies. Rather, neoliberal conditions undergird the entire po­liti­cal spectrum in  wealthy Western nations and shape geopo­liti­cal relations of ­every sort. Neoconservatives want to destroy the welfare state while neoliberals marketize it. The public loses ­either way. It is like Espada’s ­legal pads: Neoliberalism is the surface on which we all write, with its even lines and perfect shape, presumptively correct, while some p ­ eople’s fin­gers burn and bleed from its production. The effect of this is also to argue for a contracted terrain of competition. It is an argument against precariousness for traditional patriarchs. So this begs the question of how we read entrepreneurial ­woman. By that I mean: How do we read the post-­feminist postcolonial subject who 106 chapter  three

can lay no claim to the conservative right’s conceptions of how patriarchy should be and yet also finds herself in the post-­movement landscape? How does she deal with the inheritances of patriarchy, the depth of global and domestic inequalities, and the eruptive potentiality of the neoliberal market that might include her while it still excludes most? ­There is sexism for her to navigate, but ­there is also so much more to patriarchy, some of which might benefit to her. At the very least, I would argue, we must understand that a neoliberal feminist approach is woefully limited as a response to patriarchy. Part of what is produced by the neoliberal feminist approach to the state “entrepreneurial ­woman” is that the ­woman or feminist leader or thinker is encouraged to pursue analyses of gender or other forms of social in­equality in a way that is instrumentalized for self-­maximization and the marketing of identity, just like every­thing e­ lse we do ­these days. This impedes thought beyond one’s conception of self or self-­interest. As a result, “identity” becomes troubled. This occurs not b ­ ecause where we are situated vis-­à-­vis our identities in social arrangement is not impor­tant. It is very impor­tant. However, to critique the way identity might be deployed as a commodity is not the same as critiquing identity. Before getting to that point, however, it’s worthwhile to describe how identity as a social or po­liti­cal category remains salient. Th ­ ere are at least two distinct strands of its ongoing significance. One is that it operates as a marker to track the per­sis­tence of forms of exclusion or domination. Critics of identity politics on the left often want to use class to displace other cleavages, but in truth ­those cleavages have mechanics of distributing suffering or resources, opportunity and exclusion. ­These are rendered not only eco­nom­ically but also in terms of encounters with vio­lence and persecution, imprisonment, expulsion from homes or domestic environments, and more. The ­legal gains in making claims based on identity markers in arenas such as the recognition of po­liti­cal asylum in international law or through domestic antidiscrimination laws are at once insufficient to capture the broad and systematic nature of identity-­based forms of in­ equality and yet essential in terms of providing a language and acknowl­ edgment that identity ­matters. ­These ­legal procedures and rules ­matter in the lives of individuals and in our popu­lar understanding; however, they do not stem the tide of identity-­based vio­lence and discrimination. Another strand of the ongoing significance of identity is in the dance between the self and the community. Identity is not merely ascriptive; it is creative and dynamic. For ­those who breach the rules of gender stratification, the creation and cultivation of identity itself operates as a mode of transgression, of offering up possibility for a distinct and potentially In the E ther  107

more liberatory set of social relations. Thus, identity m ­ atters in terms of both what it is and what it reaches for or might be. But while identity ­matters, or perhaps ­because identity m ­ atters, the marketization of identity becomes a particularly vexing terrain. At a certain level this vexation is inescapable ­because we live in a commodity culture. Th ­ ings we purchase for ourselves or sell about ourselves are the stuff of our self fashioning. But even more vexing is the fact that as the public sphere increasingly exists on corporate or commercial platforms, ­those platforms become locations where attention and spectacle are mechanisms for participation. Self-­marketing is de rigeur to get in the conversation. It is increasingly difficult to disentangle identity from its marketization in the West. This is even true in the realm of l­egal claims regarding discrimination that so often are rendered in terms of economic exchange through financial settlements. Again, that is not to suggest that discrimination settlements should not be sought. They are, in fact, the primary deterrent to discrimination in the current social order. Rather, the point is that neoliberalism colonizes identity in much the same way that it acts voraciously on so many of our noble ends. Hence, we have to be mindful of the egotistical drift (I am borrowing this term from Rajini Srikanth) of identity in the context of neoliberalism, both among groups in power and among marginalized groups, and the ways on which that egotistical drift might be traded. This challenge was anticipated by Norma Alarcón in the essay “The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back.” In this essay, Alarcón describes how the normative subject of Anglo-­American feminist theory remained the liberal subject—­autonomous, self-­making, and self-­determining, who appropriates difference when it is introduced. The absorption of difference that characterized forms of colonialism has been taken up by the market. In contrast to this liberal demo­cratic subject of mainstream feminism, Alarcón accounts for the manner in which woman-­of-­color feminism pursued multiplicity and plurality of consciousness. But ultimately, the image of multiplicity has been taken up by markets, too. She writes, “It is clear that the most popu­lar subject of Anglo-­American feminist theorizing is an autonomous, self-­making, self-­determining subject who first proceeds according to the logic of identification with regard to the subject of consciousness, a notion usually viewed as the purview of man, but now claimed for ­women. . . . ​And believing that in this re­spect she is the same as man, she now claims the right to pursue her own identity, to name herself, to pursue self-­knowledge, and in the words of Adrienne Rich to effect ‘a change in the concept of sexual identity.’ ”11

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The terms for multiplicity have been colonized, and the kind of access and position required even to speak as a woman-­of-­color feminist in the context of the world ideas is subject to this logic. In other words, the individual “self” of the spokesperson, particularly as it has been marketized, threatens to overdetermine the very concept of community ­under neoliberal conditions. In broader terms: in consumer markets sensational ambiguity sells, and as politics are market-­based, this sensational ambiguity has become a deliberate part of our politics and that which is po­liti­cally ambiguous has the potential to reach a larger market. Something can be marketed as feminist and follow conventionally feminine norms, and at the same time also adhere to the structural rules of patriarchy that recognize only ­those with property, personhood and access to the protections of the sovereign imperial nation. At the same time, the sedimentation of neoliberalism, with its vari­ous marketplaces of ideas that are always popping up in new forms, has made it harder to identify singular social values from dominant discourses, slogans, and televisual images. And while the market makes it almost impossible to insist on singular interpretations, we critics are supposed to place stamps of approval of critique that often get circulated as positions to affirm or reject (like purchases) rather as than nuanced deliberation—­for instance, “Is Beyoncé a feminist or not?” Thus, a market of competing interpretations, and book sales and jobs, exists. Popularity pays. So do polemics and absolutes. Hence, this opens a somewhat self-­reflexive and self-­reflective critique of what I think is a commonplace problematic of bourgeois liberal feminism (even among relatively marginalized feminists of color) who are at risk of identifying with other w ­ omen only through the potential other ­women provide to confirm their anx­i­eties or experiences and to identify the work of feminism overwhelmingly through the particulars of their experience. That is not a unique prob­lem. The entrepreneurial ­woman representative is beckoned to do the same as every­one ­else: treat the self as commodity, and to see oneself as an entrepreneur. Moreover, in the market of self-­promotion, experiences ­today can function as capital. The personal experience with gender can be appropriately used at times as the partial basis for a po­liti­cal perspective and argument. But in the marketplace of po­liti­cal ideas, it may, even further, be treated as irrefutable b ­ ecause it is as much possession as argument. When I warn against this deployment of experience, however, I am not talking about the use of experience as the basis for a narrative that gives texture, insight, gravitas, and comprehensibility to evidence of in­equality.

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I am instead bemoaning the use of experiences as the source of infallible marketable authority. The prob­lem occurs when a credentializing experience makes one stand as authority in the stead of analy­sis so that “experience” becomes the meaning itself, not evidence that helps us analyze or understand a prob­lem, or give greater expression to a value. In fact, to represent a group with individual experience in this manner may actually be to obscure a group. To represent a group may be a form of branding that ­doesn’t entail accountability to said group. In other words, identity can be a brand, a marketing device, a platform without the ­people. Feminist thought, then, must insist on reading ­behind this phenomenon, just as we read beyond the lean in corporate feminism, of privatized choice feminism, of market winner representative feminism, and of governance feminism (a branch of feminism that appeals to prisons as the remedy to misogyny, an institution that performs one of the most brutal masculinist forms of domination in our midst). This critique, I should add, should be foisted not on individual actors primarily, but on the conditions that produce certain kinds of market winner-­based repre­sen­ta­tion. ­Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Critics and activists must be particularly attuned to this dynamic. To quote Trinh Minh-ha, “Between the twin chasms of navel gazing and navel erasing, the ground is narrow and slippery. None of us can pride ourselves on being sure footed t­ here. Feminism can be iconoclastic . . . ​ but we have all let ourselves be infected with the leprosy of egotism.”12 And to make reference again to Srikanth’s work on empathy, we o ­ ught to be careful of the danger of egotistical drift particularly in the scholar, activist, or politician as racial or gender representative whose identity and politics function as a form of currency ­under an increasingly neoliberal era in the university, politics, and public sphere.13 PROB­L EM OF REPRE­S EN­T A­T ION

An extension of this problematic are the conditions ­under which individuals emerge as representatives of “­women’s ­causes,” “lgbt ­causes,” or gender liberation generally. We are in a po­liti­cal moment in which the accountability of representatives to their constituencies is diminished by virtue of the role wealth plays in both electoral politics and nonprofit organ­izing. Po­liti­cal representatives are often “entrepreneurial ­women,” and they operate within a marketplace of ads, lobbyists, donors, and news, in which the capacity to trade is unequally distributed, yet that in­ equality is profoundly obscured. The relation between the one speaking and the ones spoken for is fractured by economic interests. It is true that 110 chapter  three

all representative-­based politics raise questions about power—­who decides what kinds of representatives make representative examples; who decides what counts as good repre­sen­ta­tion; who speaks for what and for whom? What do they actually say “for us,” and does it ­matter? But ­these questions are exacerbated ­because market “winners” win in politics, not just in markets. The w ­ oman representative who “represents ­women” is nevertheless always impor­tant ­because she destabilizes one logic of patriarchal subordination: that w ­ omen must be below men. But it is far more likely to be the case that her election is understood as an outlier event, disciplined into standard inherited structures of domination. This is so ­because neoliberal capitalism loves to absorb and co-­opt “difference.” It feeds on novelty in the form of a par­tic­u­lar transgression as long as said novelty submits to overarching market logics. New products sell. They d ­ on’t disrupt the market. This realization should destabilize presumptions of individual ­“oppression” or identification with dominated groups based on identity categories. ­Today, individual identities of otherness can be sold and traded on as “representative” in lieu of re­distribution or radical demo­cratic structures. ­There are no better examples of this than the ascent of President Barack Obama and the po­liti­cal ­career of Hillary Clinton. Their identities are meta­phors for social transformations that are not actualized for the overwhelming majority of ­people in the groups they represent. Even as they indicate how late capitalism makes it pos­si­ble for superelites to be both men and w ­ omen, and of many dif­fer­ent races, they do not ultimately disrupt the general patterns of gender and race domestically and globally. Nor do they disrupt the ideological under­pinnings of the architecture of gendering, b ­ ecause they both possess property, personhood, and the benefits of sovereignty, while the many continue to be excluded. At the same time, the aggressive hostility and bigotry t­ oward both, symbolized, for example, in the election of Donald Trump, is unquestionably a sign that a significant sector of our society maintains neoconservative investments in rolling back the inclusions of the mid-­twentieth-­century movements. But insofar as we disproportionately focus our attention on the hostility directed to the most elite of disfavored categories, instead of also confronting the structure of domination, we implicitly reify the very status that creates so much of our suffering. The conflicted nature of repre­sen­ta­tion t­ oday, I would argue, marks an interest convergence between the self-­congratulatory posture of the neoliberal state, spectacle-­driven late cap­i­tal­ist consumer culture, and a bureaucratized feminist (and civil rights) movement. Now, power­ful ­women and even nominally feminist organ­izations can do big business In the E ther  111

while pursuing modest nonprofit mea­sures that do not ultimately challenge larger structures of domination that are flourishing. Malini Schueller concisely describes this practice and its dangers, saying: An analy­sis of self-­conscious and empathetic feminist discourses is vital at a moment when neoliberal imperialism is aggressively consolidating itself, when cultural tolerance has become part of a common vocabulary, and ngos and ­human rights activism are being seen as preeminent sites for enacting social justice. The point is not simply a criticism of identification per se, although g­ oing native, as we know, is a supremely imperial gesture, but also a recognition of the new forms ­under which feminist imperialism can remake itself. At stake is the need to decolonize not just blatantly imperial feminism, which has been ­under critique since the advent of third wave feminism, but also a neoliberal imperial feminism which uses the languages of egalitarianism, humanitarianism, or even anti-­imperialism.14 The Baskin-­Robbins–­style “31 flavors” diversity of market representatives is apparent in how many kinds of organ­izations (including the kind I work in: universities) address difference. An array of representatives can stand in the stead of a critical interrogation of how the organ­izations address or fail to address the question of gendering and domination throughout their hierarches. A celebrated w ­ omen’s studies department or feminist scholar can coexist with the casualization of ­labor such that staff and lecturers are barely making ends meet while serving students and faculty. It can coexist with a university’s failure to seriously address the per­sis­tence of sexual assault on campuses. Not only can the feminist representative and repre­sen­ta­tion be presented in a fashion that is not responsive to the par­tic­u­lar suffering or exclusion or concerns of groups that face gendered domination, but that person may trade on membership in said group for personal advantage in ways that may even lie contrary to the larger group’s well-­being. Now, we might say that the professor should not have to be a representative. Her task is not to represent groups; in fact, her function is an in­de­pen­dent analytical and or critical one. Indeed, this may be true. But the argument for the diversification of the acad­emy has hinged so greatly on the idea of repre­sen­ta­tion of student or social constituencies rather than an investment in the guild itself that we cannot avoid raising questions about the substance of repre­sen­ta­tion. And yet at the same time, as students are conceived of as consumers, market-­based repre­sen­ta­tion threatens to overwhelm the critical function of the scholar. The acad­emy, then, like so many areas, reveals the vexatious role of the entrepreneurial w ­ oman. 112 chapter  three

CHOOSING AND BEING CHOSEN

Feminism that is framed around neoliberal market winners privatizes feminism. Th ­ ese representatives may be able to reveal some aspects of gender domination, but they should not take up most of the space for its contemplation. Related to this phenomenon, however, is a more demo­c­ ratized form of neoliberal feminism that emerges with the market—­ what Linda Hirshman calls “choice feminism”15—in which a conception of feminism can be reduced to a range of market-­based choices (about ­whether to participate in the workforce or not or w ­ hether to wear sexy or femme clothing or not; about how many p ­ eople to sleep with) without adequate consideration of how economic constraint shapes “choice,” making choice far dif­f er­ent from freedom. Somewhat ironically, a species of this commodity-­based neoliberal feminism includes a practice in which certain kinds of consumption patterns (clothing, material culture) and alliance to par­tic­u­lar nonprofits (which are also now highly marketized) or advertised “­causes” are used to mark(et) oneself as feminist. I have my own feminist T-­shirts to prove it. ­W hether to consume pornography or not, which popu­lar tele­vi­sion shows to watch, what kinds of shoes and dresses to wear, what slogans o ­ ught to adorn one’s shirts, how many drinks to have, and how many p ­ eople to sleep with are all presented as forms of freedom based increasingly on superficially demo­cratized yet also deeply privatized notions of feminism. Choice feminists believe that a wider berth in terms of consumer choices is at the core of feminism. They reject second wave feminists’ critique of the demands of constrained gender per­for­mances as often Victorian and dismissive of the function of plea­sure. While it is undeniable that control over ­women as lieges’ bodies, and over the bodies of men who did not count as patriarchs and w ­ omen who did not count as ladies, has always been a part of patriarchy, the adornment of the body, the artifacts that attach to it, o ­ ught not be mistaken for the entirety of the control over the body. In fact, fashion is a weak substitute for other forms of emancipation from the domination of ­women such as sexual assault or the lack of reproductive rights. Choice is also part of the question of conventional hetero-­patriarchal concepts of desire—­that is, of being chosen. One cannot so easily disentangle what one wants from how one is wanted, despite clichéd proclamations of “­doing it for myself.” Nor can we easily disentangle desire from the proliferation of economies of desire in which we are raised. That said, gendered conventions in the economies of desire are varied and contingent. Class, region, subculture, and religion all play a role in the gendered In the E ther  113

per­for­mances and artifacts that are part of our consumerist choosing and being chosen. The strict gender performative demands of “being chosen” entails a doubling of its own, not unlike that of the “Madonna-­whore” paradigm. What appears to be progressivism on sexual politics may be adherence to the market fetish of sexiness. A rejection of adornment or certain forms of grooming may privilege t­hose who fit, unadorned into conventional beauty ideals. And the individuation of such “market victors” may put them in a state of exception and advantage vis-­à-­vis ­others. At the same time, the motivation for the neoliberal feminist may not be any sense of feminist gain that is collective. The markets of artifacts for gender pre­sen­ta­tion parallel the dif­fer­ent conventional routes for self-­presentation. ­There are bourgeois forms of self-­creation; working-­class forms of self-­creation; forms based in ethnicity, subculture and occupation. This is consistent with the idea b ­ ehind “choice” feminism. Neoliberal feminism’s individual success story of the ­woman who rises to feminist prominence according to neoliberal logics is matched by the sense of market-­based citizenship that produces choice feminism, a dimension of neoliberal feminism that is rooted in freedom from conventional constraints but registered in terms of the ability to purchase and consume rather than as liberation in the context of more comprehensive social relations. Spanx and rows of respectably ash blond and golden brown hair color boxes in drugstore beauty aisles are artifacts of but one ideal. The ser­ vice of current ideals is not found in a single set of idyllic repre­sen­ta­tion. ­There are many types of w ­ omen and ladies, categories into which p ­ eople are sorted. Moreover, ­there are gender contracts everywhere: Some are consented to, and o ­ thers are coerced. They are large, such as adoption and marriage, and small, such as shoes and nail polish. They reflect relations and self-­conception. Both the wealthy and the poor participate. They are also promiscuous. In terms of commodity, ­there are artifacts of gender that are “normative” in the form of suits and heels and makeup. But ­there is also a broadening market for middle-­class Western ­women purchasing the fantasy of a bad girl “underside” in the form of stripper heels and poles, a symbolic consumption of w ­ omen on the margins as well as a consumption of the artifacts associated with them. ­These consumer goods are seen as transgressive of the Victorian strand of second wave feminism by some third and fourth wave feminists. But the goods are consumed while the stratification of ­women that characterized the Victorian eras, and ­others, remains intact, as does the relative lack of sanctuary when sex workers are confronted with sexual vio­lence or economic domination. 114 chapter  three

The view is dif­fer­ent when we look into the production of ­these artifacts abroad, u ­ nder conditions of absolute domination, or when we look to the conditions of domination that make ­people vulnerable to trafficking. We consume gendered artifacts to produce the ideology of gender, even at times to play with it, and the consumption of ­those artifacts is implicated in other layers of domination that emerge from colonial histories of gendered domination of satellites to the ­mother countries. The layers are thick. For sex workers, modifying the body to compete in the marketplace can be a financially wise, albeit dangerous, decision. The spate of cases in which w ­ omen, some sex workers and many not, die a­ fter having illegal butt injections is evidence. Th ­ ere are also transnational flows attending this practice in which U.S. w ­ omen travel to the Dominican Republic or Brazil to evade the regulation and high cost of surgery in the United States yet also assume more physical vulnerability in the pro­cess. More vulnerable ­women are in the position of greater risk in a more volatile and less dependable market on which they have to trade themselves. Public spheres of this sort are fraught. To be “attractive” by means of bodily modification is unquestionably a production that occurs ­under pressure, even as it may also be a source of plea­sure and a means of self-­creation. To be “attractive” by means of bodily modification is often narrated as an invitation to vio­lence, yet so is the failure to modify. Think of the pendulum between “she was asking for it” and “she’s a man hater” and how artifacts or the lack thereof are proxies for the spitting resentment in both formulations. It is “damned if you do and damned if you d ­ on’t,” as it ­were, when it comes to the artifactual per­for­mance of gender. The implants and wigs and high heels that scar and shorten the Achilles tendon injure even as they delight. Comfort is read as antisocial, or as “serious” and therefore “smarter” and more worthy of re­spect than conventionally “feminine” or sexy. This is well-­known terrain in feminist thought, but the stakes are heightened as we have become increasingly entrepreneurial subjects. Self-­creation is colonized by the marketization of every­thing and overdetermined by the “readings” we are socialized into when it comes to feminine per­for­mance, so much so that even transgressive femininity that challenges gender conventions gets caught in t­hese webs. Even if we understand that symbolic communication and play through decoration of the body is a beautiful part of h ­ uman culture, as well as identity, we must acknowledge how neoliberalism infests that to such an extent that we often uncritically describe our desires as normative and even essentialist (that includes individual, if not group, essentialism—­that is, “I ­will just feel better about myself with ­these implants; I’m ­doing it for In the E ther  115

myself”). Moreover, as stated earlier, attention is a commodity we are encouraged to seek in the neoliberal hypermedia world. It is compensation; it can be traded on and, supposedly, purchased. Hence, to do for oneself cannot be wholly separate from the market transactions by which we create the public self. Let us take as an example the marketing of self-­love to ­women in Western nations. Through ubiquitous advertising, ­women are consistently told by cosmetic companies from which they buy products, by the magazines and books they purchase, and by the media they consume to love themselves despite their divergence from gender ideals of race, size, shape, conventional beauty, and the like. The use of ­women who are termed “real” w ­ omen—­women whose bodies are closer to t­ hose of the majority of w ­ omen and vary from what is standard in the fashion industry—is a tactic of marketing and promotion: The consumer might become a “model,” and therefore a winner, by making the right choice. This marketing of self-­love and self-­care (through being a client in the ser­vice economy) is highly dependent on a sense of expanded inclusion in visual repre­sen­ta­tion. Love yourself, it says, irrespective of your size or age or color, by purchasing this product or ser­vice that functions to destabilize the conventional female beauty by which you feel marginalized and allows you to enter the status of lady that you may have been denied or that you fail to meet perfectly ­because of some perceived defect. Some campaigns even invite the inclusion of consumers to heighten the association between a personal achievement and repre­sen­ta­tion. The implicit politics of t­ hese practices suggest that esteem o ­ ught to be highly connected to the external self and that the integration of the non-­ normative or non-­ideal into a respectable place of “looking decent” is a central goal of inclusion. Can we ­really expect the commercial cele­bration of the debased or devalued category, in a commoditized form, to be a pathway to gender justice? Is esteem, particularly beauty esteem, even a useful goal, or is it a kind of red herring in a world in which ­people suffer horrifically from violent and cruel domination, despite the fact that we have platforms on which we can represent ourselves easily? I am inclined to believe the latter. Many body transformations are in essence a form of consent to injury. ­There is a range. The blisters and, ultimately, the shortening of the Achilles tendon that comes of wearing high heels, for example, is dif­fer­ ent from the impact of major surgery. As a ­matter of course, most of us pass judgment on what constitutes legitimate injury for the sake of body modification. But let us set aside judgment and just ­settle for a moment into the real­ity that consenting to injury is a commonplace of grooming

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practices for w ­ omen and choosing injury and, in some instances, even disabling is a market ­gamble that is “rational” even when it is devastating. It is not simply an aesthetic. It falls u ­ nder the category of market imperatives. When it comes to efforts to approximate the ideal, another kind of critical investigation and evaluation occurs ­after the modification: Is this person’s beauty au­then­tic or artifice? Take, for example, the constant questioning of ­whether a celebrity’s breasts or ­behind or waist or hair are “real.” Or take the far more devastating practice of attempting to identify ­whether a ­woman is trans or cis as an evaluation of w ­ hether she is “real.” The accusation of “artifice” is intended to take her down a peg, to mark her as inferior to the original ideal, which ­doesn’t require modification to be what it is. This is part of the danger of the ideal. It gets scaffolded by our aspirations, ultimately making almost all of us losers, ­either by failure to achieve the ideal or failure to be “authentically” ideal—­that is, without some modification. And ­because all of our bodies change over the course of our lives, even ­those who ­were once idealized ultimately turn from the ideal into something ­else. Therefore, when ­women attempt to recapture their youth, as in the case of celebrities who modify their bodies as they age, they also become subjects of ridicule. Even health and fitness are traded on, and sickness ­isn’t good for one’s brand. But odds are at some point each one of us w ­ ill have a deep intimacy with being ill. This is a Faustian bargain, at best. That said, critiques of gender beauty ideals that are removed from a consideration of market forces, and the pressure not just to buy but to self-­create to compete, are not merely insufficient but too easily turn into moralizing, particularly when engaged in by w ­ omen who e­ ither pursue ­these ideals in simply a more conservative form or who have enough “other ­things” on which to trade (education, wealth, bourgeois physical pre­sen­ta­tion) so that the sexualization of their bodies recedes. Moralizing about ­whether one shaves ­under one’s arms or gets one’s eyebrows waxed or has implants ­doesn’t ­really address the fact that the female and feminized body is a site of exchange. Moreover, adornment is fundamentally ­human. The difficulty lies in how it has been captured by the market b ­ ecause we have been captured by the market. The entire consumer market for making revisions on the body—­decorative, surgical, and photographic—­and the flows of the law of tort and insurance that go along with them are not best described as acts of “freedom” and therefore paths t­ oward gender liberation. But neither are they sins of internalized sexism. Instead, they are a useful

In the E ther  117

vector through which we can understand the created meanings of gender as expressions of masculinity and femininity and the desire for each as expressed in the plea­sure and pain that attend such revisions. Within the context of the precariousness created by neoliberal global capitalism, self-­creation through artifact and modification is, in part, a way to make some stability by making oneself as marketable as pos­si­ble. Economic and physical vulnerability are critical motivations. We buy gendered expressions of self in response to the prospect of death (premature death is the essence of marginality) and the immanence of one’s h ­ uman fungibility. So the manipulation of the body and of body play, while not a product of capitalism, has become a primary sector of cap­i­tal­ist economy. This has been part of consumer culture for generations, of course, as de­ cades of work on gender and beauty culture attest, but it is exacerbated now as we “market” ourselves on social media sites and develop personal “brands” in our personal lives. While this praxis is universal, the association of ­woman with “body” heightens the focus on the body as a site of manipulation, marketing, and negotiation, not only for w ­ omen, but also for ­those men and gender-­nonconforming ­people who are feminized. When the act of self-­creation deviates from norms, gender or other­ wise, it does not escape this market matrix. On the one hand, we who seek gender liberation must support expressions that are non-­gender normative yet acknowledge that, to the extent that ­these expressions are dependent on market-­based choices, they also become part of the web of the market problematic. The commoditized artifact and the sellable self-­ creation become proxies for the distinct “self” across the board. In addition, t­ here are ways that spectacular deviations from norms are marketized and traded on not for plea­sure and appreciation but for revulsion and mockery. The individual set up for such mockery may gain wealth on the basis of speaking up for suffering on the margins or ­because she pres­ents herself for mockery as much as cele­bration. Again, this form of marketization works to alienate entrepreneurial ­woman from the communities to which she belongs and that experience subjugation. The celebrities of real­ity shows, with sparkling gowns and pancake makeup, for example, are depicted as spectacularly fallen or failed w ­ omen who deserve the shame heaped on them as proxies for the ones they “represent.” ­People consume them while claiming they and their ilk do not “deserve” the attention they receive. This grants the audience a feeling of superiority even as they evidence their desire for t­ hese ­women. And the cycle is further perpetuated as we also seek to promote ­those who “deserve” attention, in contrast, ­because they are “au­then­tic” or “respectable” or other­wise ideal

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types, who are deployed to shame o ­ thers. Entrepreneurial w ­ oman has varying expressions in the same economic form. ENTREPRENEURIAL W ­ OMEN ARE ALSO MEN

What further complicates and expands the question of entrepreneurial ­woman is that ­labor in general u ­ nder neoliberalism is feminized. U ­ nder it, workers in the West have moved from production to ser­vice, and the desirable skills for ser­vice providers are often feminized. Whereas among the ­great transformations of the industrial revolution was that it allowed middle-­class ­people in the West leisure time, time for intellectual and social pursuits, and a greater remove from industry and agriculture, our laboring has shifted further in the current age. Its locus is transformed. Ser­vice rapidly began to displace industrial-­age forms of production in the 1970s. The support industry grew as part of the broad architecture of the welfare state. The matrix of care providers expanded. Th ­ ere ­were more social workers and more branches to the health industry. A growing number of ser­vice providers in an expanded leisure industry made vacation and dining out accessible to a much wider array of p ­ eople of the working and ­middle classes. In addition to the rise of consumption in the form of cheap consumer goods and downsized luxury labels that ­were available to almost every­one, the consumption of ser­vices expanded, and servers w ­ ere needed to serve nearly every­one. The ser­vice economy depends on relations, not just productivity. It includes physical intimacy, attention, and entertainment. The ­great bulk of working-­class p ­ eople in the United States are now called to engage in conventionally feminized per­for­mances or ­labor, from serving food to cleaning homes. Ser­vice is often ­labor that traditionally would have been performed by female intimates rather than on an à la carte market basis. In action, the relation of ser­vice mimics and markets conventional gender relations. Take, for example, the ser­vice component of so many products we purchase ­today. ­There are dial-in numbers, ser­vice centers, websites that give live assistance. The interactions in all of ­these arenas follow a ­choreography of engagement that is largely soft-­tempered and palliative, regardless of what the consumer does or says. We rant and rage; they sweetly tell us they are d ­ oing every­thing they can and stick to the script. Each ser­vice provider manages a collection of consumers and may be e­ ither an in­de­pen­dent contractor or part of a ser­vice industry, dog walkers and burger flippers alike. The work of ser­vice providers is precarious and dependent on the whims of consumers—­increasingly so, depending on how “unnecessary” their ­labor

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is regarded. Ser­vice work is generally poorly paid, with notable success story exceptions in ­every industry, and it is always at risk of being under­cut further, particularly as u ­ nionization is steadily displaced by the solitude of neoliberal competition. Likewise, the global flows of migration and market competition push ser­vice providers to reduce the prices of goods and ser­ vices, creating a situation in which workers are in increasingly pre­carious situations, as wages race to the bottom. As Judith Butler writes, “Neo-­ liberalism works through producing dispensable populations; it e­ xposes populations to precarity; it establishes modes of work that presume that ­labour ­will always be temporary; it decimates long-­standing institutions of social democracy, withdraws social ser­vices from ­those who are most radically unprotected—­the poor, the homeless, the undocumented—­ because the value of social ser­vices or economic rights to basic provisions like shelter and food has been replaced by an economic calculus that values only the entrepreneurial capacities of individuals and moralizes against all t­ hose who are unable to fend for themselves or make capitalism work for them.”16 Think for a moment, then, of the nail salons that are scattered throughout cities. This relatively inexpensive beauty indulgence exposes workers to toxic chemicals all day long, with the barest protection afforded by thin masks. It is arduous physically, requiring fine motor precision, a tensed spine, and working hands all day long. At any moment, another salon may show up that undercuts the first salon’s prices, and a once busy enterprise w ­ ill be empty. Or a regulatory agency may inspect and find that in the nonstop hours of work someone has forgotten to sanitize a bowl properly, and the business w ­ ill be shuttered. Business can falter, and all of its workers can become unemployed, in an instant. Ser­vice and the servile alongside precariousness places the worker in a position of intimate vulnerability. Although this relation is in some re­spects familiar to capitalism, neoliberalism has a broader reach than traditional capitalism. For example, Aihwa Ong’s work describes how both socialist and authoritarian regimes make themselves competitive in the global economy by adopting neoliberal forms of governmentality, using as examples the special market zones in China and science as industry in Singapore.17 Consistent across dif­fer­ent models of neoliberalism is an order in which marketability is critical to membership. Moreover, while l­abor in general is increasingly feminized, the most feminized forms of ­labor (cleaning, cooking, body care) are least valued, and t­ hose jobs are often held by ­people resigned to con­temporary versions of nonpersonhood status ­because they are undocumented, without papers, or even stateless. Ser­vice work is pursued, despite t­ hese constraints, despite the exploitation that characterizes so much of it, ­because it can bring one closer to 120 chapter  three

being able to “make a living” when living is hard. The logic of consent that is implied when it comes to ser­vice ­labor (i.e., someone has chosen to take that job) enables ­those of us of the ­middle and upper classes to passively expect relations of domination throughout our daily lives. Likewise, we rarely think of the constraint that defines so much of this work. This willful ignorance is facilitated further by the decentralization of many of the worst sites of domination. The computers on our desks at work require sweatshops abroad. Elegantly appointed gourmet meals require the ­labor of dishwashers and busboys in the back of the restaurant whose fate lies literally in the hands of their employers. Both vis­i­ble and invisible relations of domination are pres­ent in our Western cities. Fictions of absolution exist along with invisible domination (we are not held accountable for the suffering we do not witness) and relations of shame and mythologies of inadequacy for vis­i­ble domination (they made bad choices, they have bad homelands and must come ­here to find freedom). In the United States, p ­ eople who, ­under conditions of danger and secrecy, travel across borders to do the work of entrepreneurship into which we are all forced and fill jobs in the neoliberal economy are often perceived as competitive threats in low wage markets rather than as vulnerable, b ­ ecause that, indeed, is how they are constructed structurally ­under this form of governmentality. They are at once on the wrong side of the law and therefore more available to punishment and “in demand” market competitors who are set up against the domestic poor. The cause of workers as a collective category thereby becomes depoliticized and, instead, a question of economic imperatives. Even supporters of immigrants often say, “They take the work Americans ­won’t do” rather than something like, “Every­one o ­ ught to be earning a living wage. This driving down of wages and forcing competition among the most eco­nom­ically vulnerable is unconscionable.” And so, according to Johanna Oksala, “The feminist analy­sis of neoliberalism cannot therefore be limited to issues of economic re­distribution: how wealth can be distributed more evenly among the sexes, for example. We must also raise more fundamental questions about the limits of the markets and of economic rationality itself. Feminist theory and politics should form a strong and vocal strand in the public, po­liti­cal and moral debate on the acceptable limits of the markets—­a debate our socie­ties acutely need ­today.”18 I agree. Moreover, feminist thinkers must confront how neoliberalism reinscribes gender domination and complicates or contracts our thinking regarding how to undo it. The gendered aesthetics of ser­vice are certainly central to its operation, and it feminizes ­labor generally, leaving the lowest value for the most traditionally feminized forms of l­abor. But it also co-­opts feminist In the E ther  121

(and other progressive) identities into the logic of marketized identity and capital accumulation. Feminist analytics are necessary to think through all of ­these layers. ENTREPRENEURIAL W ­ OMAN AS NONPERSON

At the same time that repre­sen­ta­tion threatens to distort the condition of “­women” or the contours of patriarchy, nonpersonhood persists. One way to render this is through the understanding that neoliberalism entails an expansion of the terrain in which contract prevails. The proliferation and maximization of private contracts, such that they displace much of what was once part of the social-­contract relationship between the individual and the state, occurs in a world in which historically and currently the right to negotiate and enter contracts is exclusionary (think, for example, of ­human trafficking) and bargaining power is grotesquely imbalanced (think, for example, of sweatshop ­labor or the ­labor of any ­people who are formally stateless). This structure of relation is legitimized by a set of moral assertions about who deserves what and too infrequently challenged conceptions of ­legal status, capacity, and crime. Hence, neoliberal logic can encourage greater cruelty ­toward the nonperson. We are socialized to presume inferiority of t­hose who are unable to “compete” and justify punishment when they are overwhelmed by fines, taxes, and deprivation. However, neoliberal logic may also provoke a charitable response that allows the successful market actor to engage in publicized maternalistic or savior-­like be­hav­ior without rescinding a position of market advantage or challenging the production of such deprivation, in some instances extending market advantage through the promotion of his or her generosity. One way to tease out the slippery slope where entrepreneurial ­woman meets ­legal nonperson is to follow the conjunctural and transnational economies of gender artifacts. Take, for example, the market for artificial hair and knockoff designer bags. In the urban working-­class centers of cities you can find many beauty supply stores. They cater to Black girls and ­women primarily, but not exclusively. In them, t­ here are walls covered with long hair, and in the aisles or sometimes b ­ ehind the c­ ounters, ­there are bleaching creams, hair straighteners, combs, curlers, gels, and more. Artifacts most vulnerable to theft are kept b ­ ehind walls and in cases but still are fully on display. The hair is sometimes plastic, sometimes animal, including that of ­humans, and produced at manufacturing plants in East Asia. The hair that is cut from ­human heads usually has been harvested from Hindu 122 chapter  three

t­ emples or sometimes has been bought from poor ­women in Asia. H ­ uman hair cycles through manufacturing in East Asia, where it is dyed, permed, and sorted and then sent to the West. It is marketed u ­ nder names that tell stories: Wet and Wavy, Ocean Wave, Rio Wave, Indian Beach Wave. ­These are neo­co­lo­nial fantasies about islands of leisure, exotic desirability. They entice consumers with the promise of fitting into the ­orders of desire established in centuries past, in some recognizable, albeit marginal, way. They are aspirations to images: among celebrities, in films, in ­music videos. However, ­there are also iconic ­women who are aspired to in the use of beauty artifacts, brown w ­ omen who approach the status of the lady to the patriarch. Th ­ ese ­women are both real and fictional: figures such as Michelle Obama and Olivia Pope. The mimicry of t­ hese figures entails even more artifacts: shoes and bags and suits. Look on Instagram; it is apparent. Among the ­things that mark one as a desirable ­woman, and by that is meant a ­woman who has status, are consumer goods. W ­ omen of color who have seemingly transgressed vestibularity are draped in beauty— in hair, in bags and shoes—­and thus provide a certain appeal and, perhaps, hope for poor girls of color. ­These artifacts are signifiers. The sale of this hair, t­ hese nails and bags (often sold counterfeit in hair shops or on street corners), is one type of flow, among many, in the traffic jam of gray economies. The economic real­ity of U.S. income in­equality is such that knockoffs have become quotidian. In our hierarches of gender artifacts, counterfeit goods are not as good, regardless of how good they actually are, ­because they are not “the real ­thing.” But they are the best many ­people can afford when even the prices at the outlet mall are too high. Besides, one can get a bag that looks like Beyoncé’s for $50 rather than $2,500, and that seems like a very good deal. On many of the same streets that the hair is sold, bags in the likeness of the high end are sold, as well. Some years ago, the luxury shoe retailer Christian Louboutin sued Yves Saint-­Laurent, arguing that Saint-­Laurent copied his trademark red-­bottomed s­ oles that are de rigueur subject m ­ atter for mainstream rappers. Louboutin lost that suit, but his claim was limited not to worries about Saint-­L aurent but encompassed the expansion of desire for his products and the inevitable downscale market flow and imitation that has resulted. Now t­here are counterfeit Louboutins all over the globe. From the hair to the bags and the shoes, we see a drag ­here, an effort to look authentically elite and or higher status, b ­ ecause “real” is more beautiful and therefore has greater ­human worth. Case in point, Cardi B famously sings in her hit song “­these expensive, ­these is red bottoms, In the E ther  123

t­ hese is bloody shoes.”19 And represents the market victory of a stripper turned celebrity. Like much of our clothing, particularly affordable clothing, counterfeit bags and shoes are usually made in sweatshops. Frequently, sweatshop ­labor is not simply coercive and inhumane; it depends on the small bodies of ­children and w ­ omen. Dana Thomas describes the conditions she witnessed in sweatshops: “I remember walking into an assembly plant in Thailand a ­couple of years ago and seeing six or seven l­ittle ­children, all ­under 10 years old, sitting on the floor assembling counterfeit leather handbags. The ­owners had broken the ­children’s legs and tied the lower leg to the thigh so the bones ­wouldn’t mend. [They] did it ­because the ­children said they wanted to go outside and play.”20 Somewhere before artifactual items appear on the corner or in the corner store t­ here is a person in cramped quarters, likely abused, likely hungry, sewing together the pieces of artificial leather for this market. The exploitation of the l­ abor, of poor p ­ eople in poor countries, to satisfy the desires of poor ­people in wealthy countries (if we can even describe countries rather than individuals according to wealth when half the p ­ eople in the richest country in the world experience economic insecurity) show the residual effects of a series of economic and po­liti­cal eras that mark nonpersons and partial persons as symbolically inferior and render them inferior. The critique of the counterfeit, however, is in truth largely about intellectual property rights. Consumers are told that they are supporting the theft of property, or­ga­nized crime, and tax cheats when they buy counterfeit goods. And they are reminded of the thoroughly abject conditions ­under which p ­ eople are forced to work for counterfeiters. But in truth, l­abor practices for legally legitimate enterprises are also often obscene. The property rights may be disciplined, but the status of being considered “outside the law” for p ­ eople working at the bottom of t­ hose industries is similar. Take, for example, Chinese sweatshop workers for Gucci in Tuscany whom local residents call fantasmas (ghosts) b ­ ecause they live in the shadows and formally “off the books.” Gucci continues to brand its products “Made in Italy,” a signifier of superiority in contrast to “Made in China” in the global markets for goods. “Made in Italy” suggests the products are being made by Italians (a signifier of ideas of racial as well as cultural superiority) while, in fact, they are often being made by Chinese ­people in similar conditions as ­those in China. A similar structure can be found in sweatshops in Los Angeles, where “Made in the USA” tags are sewn into clothes in workplaces that are sites for abuse, exploitation, and unsafe l­abor conditions for a grossly underpaid immigrant workforce. 124 chapter  three

The situation I am describing obviously is applicable not only to gendered artifacts. Apple, the computer com­pany, has been investigated repeatedly for its abusive and unsafe (and underpaid) working conditions. But what is in­ter­est­ing ­here to me is the conjuncture of gender culture and gendered ­labor ­under neoliberalism and how witnessing this o ­ ught to deepen our feminist analyses. The disabling operation of sweatshop ­labor is at the core of neoliberalism. It produces the desired artifacts: the tools of our production (even of the production of this manuscript). The gendered artifact carries with it a history of both production and meaning that must be unearthed. To attend only to its symbolic gender meanings repeats the work of producing nonpersonhood. However, the Marxian impulse to trace power of production fails to attend to what the ser­vice economy in the West, and the globalization of production, tells us about the multiple layers of domination that are foundational to the competitive markets in which we all compete. ­There is a reason poor ­women in the West try to look like rich ladies around the world while all of their efforts, including ­those of the dominated, depend on the domination of o ­ thers. That is what the logic of patriarchy has wrought. Another arena of formal nonpersonhood (like prisons and sweatshops) is found in sex work. The zones in which ­people enter contracts for titillation or sexual connection are often also the gray economies in which sex trafficking, eco­nom­ically orchestrated rape, and slavery occur. They are indistinguishable before state power, such that every­one who is a sex worker is criminalized, and none is treated as truly worthy of protection. Moreover, just as laws against prostitution effectively pile on sex workers who are already marginal, pushing them into nonpersonhood rather than providing protection from the patriarchal state and other forms of vio­lence to which they so frequently are subjected, mea­sures against trafficking engaged in by the security state generally do so without disturbing the larger structure of patriarchy to which trafficking belongs. Anti-­trafficking mea­sures can also become forms of domination heaped upon p ­ eople who are trafficked. In Cambodia, for example, a nation often singled out for sex tourism and trafficking (although they are pres­ent everywhere), the government reportedly responded to U.S. demands to crack down on trafficking and prostitution by rounding up ­women and rescuing them from dire abusive conditions (although some of them reported that they ­weren’t trafficked but ­were simply working as sex workers b ­ ecause it is one of few v­ iable employment opportunities available to poor ­women in poor nations).21 This seemed like a humanitarian effort. But then the ­women faced a Sophie’s choice of sorts: They w ­ ere offered the choice of remaining in detention or in the custody of traffickers or, in In the E ther  125

exchange for freedom, directed into new ­careers working in sweatshops. A mini-­documentary for Vice News described the training facilities for sweatshop l­abor as “prison-­like—­a place in which [the Cambodian ­woman being interviewed] was locked without any option of leaving. She was never compensated for her time in the training program.”22 This forced ­labor serves the Cambodian clothing industry, which supplies garments to the world. ­Women are rounded up to supply cheap essential ­labor for this sector of the Cambodian economy: cogs in the wheel of a global consumer economy. Westerners with disposable income still go to Cambodia, and to many other poor nations and poor neighborhoods in their countries of origins, to use their greater wealth to satisfy their sexual desires, with ­little thought or accountability regarding the im­mense imbalance of power that ­those dollars create. Meanwhile, we Westerners at home wear the clothes produced, also without accountability or thought. In the West, the arms of the security state exact punishment for sex work. Yet we have widespread practices in which we engage in spectacular consumption of it. We read articles in ­women’s magazines about the horror of trafficking abroad and are encouraged to contribute to nongovernmental organ­izations that fight against trafficking without asking questions of what alternatives exist and how our government may be implicated in the constraints that exist for ­women abroad. Audiences increasingly watch and consume the lives of transwomen celebrities ­without, for the most part, insisting on an end to the vio­lence of policing or the violent terms of the sex work that transwomen often do or the widespread employment, health care, and housing discrimination that they face. Trans and queer organ­izations are for the most part left to do that work alone. Indeed, ­there is a haunting parallel between the re­ sis­tance of many feminist organ­izations to consider the gendered domination experienced by transwomen as part of the cause of gender justice and the re­sis­tance of first-­and second-­wave feminists to considering the domination experienced by enslaved and colonized w ­ omen part of their fight. Similarly, even as choice feminism rejects moralizing over sex work, it generally d ­ oesn’t engage questions of markets and ethics that mean that choices may not be meaningful choices. W ­ omen far afield of sex work purchase clothes that are signifiers of sex workers and consume videographic imaginings of it while tacitly consenting to the unequal distribution of risk for ­those “outside the law” in the neoliberal marketplace. The risk for every­one operating in the economic gray zones of neoliberalism is incarceration, which takes one “out of the game” and out of even the most modest trappings of personhood. The ­labor of the incar126 chapter  three

cerated is subsistence-­level coercion akin to that of sweatshop ­labor. It is a quite widespread global social practice that we have social ­orders, supported and scaffolded by a juridical order, that e­ ither prohibit or make absent from popu­lar acknowl­edgment a large set of ­human relationships between ­those with access to personhood and ­those without, or ­those that breach the rules of patriarchy in general terms. This invisibility i­ sn’t about erasing their existence; it is, instead, about zoning t­ hose relationships and interactions into the gaps of our worlds (prisons, red light districts, refugee camps). In the gaps, individuals who are less power­ful are more vulnerable to exploitation (e.g., interns and protégés in ­these interactions) and are often without sanctuary yet widely available to patriarchs. They are everywhere and yet out of public view in the sense of the public sphere as a recognized sphere of demo­cratic engagement. Gap dwellers are always in our midst. “Invisibility” may not be precisely the right term, as we have lots of media depictions of ­these zones; perhaps it is more accurate to say that t­ hese ­people are placed at a remove from the terms of personhood, from the discourse of participation. They are in a place to be seen but not heard or witnessed. They are consumed. The fantastic repre­sen­ta­tion in film and tele­vi­sion of t­hose in such gaps dissociates the viewer from the violent economies that are produced ­there and yet enables a per­for­mance of care or identification. Th ­ ere is a vanity in the consumption of the suffering of ­others. We share the notice of films and tv shows that reflect impor­tant issues, but t­ here is always the risk that we share simply to self-­define, especially when that care ­doesn’t translate to our interpersonal ethics. At the same time, the relative enormity of fantastic repre­sen­ta­tions that pres­ent ­those in the gaps as savage and that romanticize domination continue to guide how we encounter ­people in the flesh. When efforts are made to join w ­ omen in t­ hese differently situated spaces, what often happens is a species of imperial feminism: a mode of condescension and an avoidance of the implication of the West or the white in the suffering of other communities. ­There is ­either an identification based on a fictional singularity of the sign “­woman” or a focus on ideological commitments to patriarchy but not to the ­actual, large forces of patriarchy in the lives of the ­women being “saved.” This is colloquially called “white feminism,” but the prob­lem with that term, though rooted in the history of empire and the structural category of the “lady,” is that it often neglects the role elite ­women of color, global elites and other­wise, also participate in the overrepre­sen­ta­tion of their own interests in the articulation of feminism. Moreover, the singular signifier “­woman” has functioned as part of U.S. “diplomatic” efforts to justify incursion into In the E ther  127

other nation-­states on the basis of “feminism” that disregards the larger structures of patriarchal domination in which the United States and ­those who are power­ful in the nation-­states are implicated. ­Here is where I think we find an opportunity to think about liberation feminism as a form of feminism that insists on a feminist analytic that does not consider ­woman as such in the abstract but in the particularities of the layers of domination in fact, artifact, repre­sen­ta­tion, and fantasy. Yet I must repeat, fantastical and imaginative creations are essential parts of who we are. They are key to h ­ uman creativity and exist within the spectrum of ways we exercise the ­human impulse to create art and exercise intellect. The insidiousness of the system ­under which we live is that it stakes a claim to even the most fundamental and beautiful parts of ourselves, including adornment. Trying to wrest ourselves back from it is hard work that is made harder still by another transformation of the past several de­cades: the rise of the digital age.

128 chapter  three

chapter 4

SIM ULACRA CHIL D Hypermedia and the Mediated Subject ... Someone has made a gif that is circulating on Twitter. It is of a cat. It has a lion’s mane, constructed of golden fabric, wrapped around its head. The cat is knocking down a toy giraffe. I show it to my son. He is half-­asleep but perks up a bit. He says, “That ­isn’t real.” And I say, “Yes it is.” We go back and forth. He becomes a bit confused. “It’s not real, ­those are toys,” he says. “Yes, but the cat is real, and it’s footage of the cat playing.” “Oh.” “With a fake mane on.” “Oh!” Suddenly the narrative ­behind the visual comes together for him, and his anxiety is over. This conversation put me in mind of Thomas Kuhn’s use of the gestalt switch as a meta­phor for scientific revolutions.1 From a dif­fer­ent ­angle, the same signifier may appear to be an entirely dif­fer­ent ­thing—­that is, the silhouette of a duck can become that of a rabbit if you turn it on its side. This was an apt description of how paradigm shifts in scientific theory could make it pos­si­ble to integrate previously irreconcilable pieces of information into coherent scientific knowledge. In this chapter, following the work of another critic, Jean Baudrillard, and his readings of spectacles and simulacra, I am encouraging readers to think about how we might interpret the hypermedia age in which we live, arguing that it demands some paradigm shifts in gender criticism. We are inundated with digital media. It is in our hands, pockets, before our f­aces, by our bedsides. The virtual world is a constant companion. Baudrillard describes this virtual terrain as the simulacra and theorized its expansion and the manner in which it was transforming our society by saying, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—­precession of simulacra—­that engenders the territory.” According to Baudrillard, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”2

It is not simply the presence of media, although its pervasiveness surely shapes our lives, but the substance of it that produces this impact. Digital media is a source of ever pres­ent information (both false and true), but it is so much more. It produces desire; it promises to endow us with interpretive frameworks for e­ very aspect of our lives—to educate us, titillate us, shame us, and provide us with therapy and spiritual guidance. It is church and palliative care, yet also stimulation and excitement. We communicate with o ­ thers through it, increasingly and incessantly. Even our financial transactions take place on media platforms. We have moved from cash to cards to numbers and codes entered without a ­human involved and to consumer choices made through images rather than touch and flesh. This “we,” of course i­sn’t universal, but it is global. The relative fa­cil­ i­ty of digital sociality is a product of access to wealth and wiring and networks. The enticement of digital sociality travels in nearly e­ very corner of the globe. But in many places—­prisons, rural and remote areas—­ sophisticated bricolage and creative jerry-­rigging are necessary to travel on the information superhighway. As with virtually ­every other domain of in­equality, however, when the excluded gain the skills that are required for access, it is ­either cast as theft or inadequacy, while relative ease, facilitated by wealth and its attendant classes and ser­vices and assistances, is treated as virtuous efficiency. Along the spectrum, however, we have become the cyborgs Donna Haraway portended.3 Significant parts of who we are are cultivated and exist within the context of digital platforms and via digitized repre­sen­ta­ tion and communication. The self emerges in the context of digital self-­ representation and communication, in phones, on screens, and in hard drives. As such, we are beckoned to attend as much to ways of being seen as to ways of seeing. Many of the old conventions remain in this new terrain. ­Whether or not we learn to code, our fa­cil­i­ty with technology, the reliance on photographic self-­representation and avatars, and the power of computer-­ generated repetition of ­those images and repre­sen­ta­tions often conform with traditional gender ideals. Airbrushed and manipulated bodies, the marketization of the self—­and particularly of the feminine self—­abound on the plethora of platforms. The entrepreneurial w ­ oman is encouraged to proliferate the proxy self and to amplify desirability. Yet it is also true that ­these are insurgent spaces. Social movements circulate on digital platforms. From Arab Spring to Black Lives ­Matter, digital communities challenge domination of vari­ous sorts. Even at the individual level, the curation of ideas, stories, quotations, and images 130 chapter  four

boldly confronts what we inherit from the powers that be, old and new—­ kingdoms, statecraft, empires and corporations. But complicating this insurgency is the corporate owner­ship of even the most insurgent and demo­cratic digital spaces. While we often think of t­ hese as public spheres, they are, legally, private spheres that we occupy at the whim and grace of their o ­ wners. Increasingly, consumers are beginning to understand this through the manipulation of what we actually see through marketing algorithms and their differential responses to violations of their companies’ codes of conduct based on the identities of violators. Yet it is still difficult to dispose ourselves of this sense of a public sphere on ­these corporate platforms. It is a misconstrual not simply of the public but also of the private that the digital arena encourages. We often feel a private sense of owner­ ship over our borrowed spaces on them. (All manner of private communications, for example, happen in in-­boxes that do not in fact belong to us.) As part of the market logic of self-­presentation, ­people seek to claim intellectual property on t­ hese platforms, often in the midst of social critique. ­These property-­based claims take place even as it is unquestionable whose property the platforms are and who receives the greatest pecuniary benefit for the shared ideas on them. (Hint: it is not us.) But the claims to symbolic, if not ­legal owner­ship, of ideas reflects both our sense that social media is a public sphere and the ever expanding intellectual property regime u ­ nder which we live. Despite that sensibility, the fact that our “public spheres” are private corporations is characteristic of neoliberalism, and that it is virtual and somewhat intangible is characteristic of the age of the simulacra. It is both highly structured and opaque and indeterminate. Another confusion still is in some ways an inheritance of a generation or two of real­ity tele­vi­sion programming, in which Andy Warhol’s prophesy regarding every­one’s fifteen minutes of fame has morphed into a diffuse and broad impulse of celebrity making of oneself that has the fantastic possibility of a lottery ticket, with far better odds. That said, Guy Debord’s argument, published in 1967, that the commodity form would completely colonize social life in a spectacle-­driven society is limited by the disruption that takes place within the context of digital age simulacra.4 We are at once saturated by gender and racial narratives and ste­reo­types, yet we are constantly invited to refute them, as we have ready pathways to counter-­hegemonic assertions about gender and race on digital platforms. This is a two-­way street. Consumption and per­for­ mance in the simulacra are primary modes of engagement with, and contestation of, gender and racial repre­sen­ta­tion, particularly as democracy S imulacra C hild  131

succumbs to neoliberal priorities. It is a stage for popu­lar dissent, and yet it is also dependent on corporations and disciplined by oligarchic control of market flows, as is evident during moments in which corporations choose to silence certain forms of critique (e.g., Twitter suspension in the midst of the 2016 campaign of the @GuerrillaDems account that created the #WhichHillary hashtag to criticize Clinton’s waffling on liberal and progressive issues). Although technology is a tool, it most certainly has stakes and structures that are imbricated with the po­liti­cal economy. As Haraway wrote more than twenty years ago, “Technology is not neutral. ­We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. W ­ e’re living in a world of connections—­and it ­matters which ones get made and unmade.”5 We steadily learn how to negotiate each new platform for display. Some are text-­heavy, ­others are image-­, sound-­, or film-­heavy. ­Others still are a combination. The pro­cess of learning to navigate to participate deepens the sense of collective membership. As such, experience and identity are frequently (dis)placed onto simulacra. Once we figure out how to arrive, we pres­ent ourselves to the community and engage. The structure of social media consists largely of “posting,” a form of pre­sen­ta­tion. However, it is a form of pre­sen­ta­tion that immediately becomes “repre­sen­ta­tion,” as the post instantaneously at once is an artifact that represents one and is repeated on the screens of ­others who follow or are connected with one. Ideally (according to economies of attention) the post ­will be repeated again and again. This presentation-­cum-­representation may be a textual statement, or it may be an image, a picture or film, or a statement, but it functions as a form of self-­authorship (not just authorship). As a form of repre­sen­ta­tion, it sets out who we are (and not just what we say or show at a given moment). To be clear, ­there are some occasions for engagement and not just pre­ sen­ta­tion/repre­sen­ta­tion, as evidenced in robust debates on social media and even more so as social media has become a vehicle for po­liti­cal orga­ n­izing. When ­people note that posts of ­others are not endorsement, they attempt to wrestle away the “pre­sen­ta­tion” as repre­sen­ta­tion of the self and t­ oward pre­sen­ta­tion as the possibility of engagement. It can be successful as such, although that is structurally challenging, given that the artifact that is the single post potentially travels outside the grasp of its author so rapidly. I issue the caveat ­because I make t­ hese observations not as absolute criticism of social media but as an entry point for critical engagement with the formal difficulties that are relevant for this proj­ect of reading as a liberation feminist. The pre­sen­ta­tion/repre­sen­ta­tion form of social media, when ignited by populist rage, at times produces cyber-­mobs that can feel and be ter132 chapter  four

rorizing. ­Those who have been attacked on them with misogynistic, racist, queer-­antagonistic, and transphobic outbursts w ­ ill tell you that the ­owners of the platforms provide l­ittle remedy. Th ­ ere are pro­cesses for complaint, of course, which is consistent with the palliative logic of the ser­vice economy. Th ­ ese pro­cesses generally appear to provide a pathway to remedy but in fact rarely do, even in egregious cases of slurs and threats. Private entities do not have the same l­egal responsibilities for protection that public or publicly funded entities do; nor do they have the same rigorous requirement to protect speech. In other words, they could do something. They do not. The failure of t­ hese social media platforms and Internet ser­vice providers to penalize harassment has to do with their interest in accumulating wealth. Providing space for bigots and misogynists to bluster is eco­nom­ically valuable. ­These spaces therefore can be decidedly unsafe, even though they are virtual and even though it is relatively rare for the psychic trauma meted out in them to convert to a physical threat. But the imagination takes hold in harrowing ways (with anonymous threats, with strangers calling names) and tellingly: the attacks come at self-­identified ­women, queer, and Black and Brown p ­ eople more often than at o ­ thers, reflecting the lingering inherited idea that some of us do not have as much right to speak in the public sphere. ­There are enough episodes of ­actual vio­lence resulting from the digital threat to make the prospect quite “real.” This is part of a spectrum. On one end are the spectacular evaluations of gender-­conventional “Instagram models” in which lust, schadenfreude, shaming, and cele­bration explode around two-­dimensional repre­sen­ta­ tions of p ­ eople to whom we have very minimal access but on whose images meanings are made. The dynamic is reminiscent of something John Berger wrote many de­cades ago: A ­woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her ­father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct ele­ments of her identity as a ­woman. She has to survey every­thing she is and every­ thing she does ­because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.6 On the other end of the spectrum, t­ here are concerted attacks—­attacks that so often seem to be devoted to a recuperation of the traditional S imulacra C hild  133

patriarchal order and a reflection of lingering anx­i­eties about the mid-­ twentieth-­century changes that allowed the reasonable man to turn into the reasonable person and that opened the door of ­legal personhood to more “­others” in the West than before. Histrionic cries for traditional patriarchy abound around the virtual globe. But as mentioned earlier, this is not a closed system. The late twentieth c­ entury ushered in transformations in a variety of ways. The category of personhood broadened in the West, despite the fact that nonpersonhood remains as a social and po­liti­cal category. And the digital public sphere has been harnessed for ­those on the margins to speak in public, despite the fact that ­these public spheres are private entities. A remarkable eruption, one that—to borrow a now old-­fashioned critical term—­subverted the “gaze” and its power occurred in October 2015 on Twitter. Overnight, a story told by a w ­ oman known as “Zola,” Aziah Wells, went viral. Zola’s story of a harrowing road trip and life in the “gaps” lasted for 148 tweets and captured the attention of celebrities and lay ­people alike. It began, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch h ­ ere fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” Wells’s storytelling was fairly universally recognized as brilliant, and reportedly she got publication offers soon ­after. Reading the story in real time, I was stunned by how unusual it was as a first-­person account in the public sphere. Wells identified herself early on as a “dancer”—­that is, stripper—­and named her work “hoeism.” She described meeting another dancer with whom she traveled on a road trip to work in Florida, a place where the market is good for dancers. “Now I’m skeptical like damn bitch we just met and we already taking hoe trips together????” she tweeted, “but I had went to FL 2 months prior & made 15K.” The story continued with vari­ous twists and turns. In the pro­cess, Zola described the economic order of sex work. For example, she explained that clubs that require some body coverage are less lucrative. ­Later, Zola found herself unaware that her new friend Jess was “trapping” or “tricking” (sex work that includes intimate sexual contact). Although blindsided by being connected to a realm of sex work in which she did not participate, Zola intervened to protect her acquaintance from being exploited. Jess was making too l­ittle money through her pimp, so Zola set up advertising to get her friend $500 instead of $100 for fifteen minutes. Her efforts at advocacy w ­ ere met with several theaters of masculine domination over Jess—by her boyfriend, her pimp, and locals, men who ­were threatened by Jess’s “taking control” over her own sex work. Zola served as a witness to the layers of domination in Jess’s life, and as a witness to the men around her, including Jess’s boyfriend, who committed 134 chapter  four

suicide ­after being humiliated (a pimp had intercourse with Jess in front of him) and abandoned. The specter of failed masculinity sent him over the edge. As a reader, one feels terror for Zola. The immediacy of the risk she ­faces is palpable, notwithstanding her wisdom and brilliance as a n ­ arrator and a navigator of sex-­work markets. As a narrator she elicits both sympathy and investment. At e­ very moment it is clear she may be the victim of vio­lence, and it could be at any number of hands: police, traffickers, pimps, drug dealers, even her “friend.” Importantly, Zola does not posit herself as an “innocent” or a “lady” in contrast to o ­ thers in her midst. Rather, she is a ­woman of personal integrity navigating a dangerous marketplace. The Internet reactions to Zola’s story ­were varied. Many focused on it in a way that was akin to popu­lar reactions to an action film. This is unsurprising, and t­ here w ­ ere ele­ments of her storytelling that w ­ ere consistent with the action film formula. But the story pulled the reader/viewer into a landscape that is not familiar in film or tele­vi­sion: the interior experience of an entrepreneurial ­woman who navigates the world with heightened risk. It was an instance in which we could see that the simulacra may trou­ble conventional narratives of w ­ omen (sex workers, specifically) who tend to be rendered in narrow ways. Zola is much more nuanced than the Pretty W ­ oman “prostitute with a heart of gold.” Tellingly, however, the story did not lead to Wells’s being recognized as an authority on trafficking or sexual vio­lence or as someone who might speak to the emotional landscape of gray economies. The most robust discussion about what would follow for Wells had to do with how much money she could make for her story. Indeed, it was marketable, and it seems to me unquestionably better when the stripper is paid well, as opposed to the pimp or the screenwriter who traffics in fantastical repre­sen­ta­tions of dancers. Hence, my argument is not that Wells should not be paid but that the economy of attention in the simulacra is often captured by neoliberal logics of exchange and market, even when the opportunity to learn about structures of social relation/economic relation and domination are evident. That is the case with expository stories and, in many instances, with activism as activists who capture public attention find themselves courted with media deals and moneymaking opportunities of vari­ous sorts, often far afield of the subject of protest and organ­izing. Setting aside for a moment the ethical questions that emerge when po­liti­cal mobilization is co-­opted by market exchange, what stands out is that, in general terms, the order of the simulacra depends heavi­ly, though not exclusively, on market exchange, ­either literal or reputational. That is to say, regardless of intent, market logics are the order of the day. S imulacra C hild  135

Perhaps this is why another gendered terrain in the simulacra has grown popu­lar: the public b ­ attle royal. It is a masculinist (though not resigned to man-­identified) faceoff in a hypermedia public that occurs in front of “fans” of one side or another. It is a virtual boxing match, with a choreography that is reminiscent of boxing videogames: punches thrown and screams of approval; collective chiming in about success and defeat. It is pleas­ur­able for the audience and performative, though often brutal for the boxers. Th ­ ese theaters remind us that the intersection of consumer culture and the simulacra d ­ oesn’t only manufacture consent. It creates situations in which certain ostensibly demo­cratic spheres may become stages for ugliness, celebratory conflict, amplified public humiliation, and gleeful insult. Pop­u­lism, we are reminded, is not necessarily the same ­thing as demo­cratic deliberation. This is not simply the tyranny of the majority, popu­lar and power­ful with re­spect to ideas, but often a systematic calculated bludgeoning of the scope of ideas and membership as represented by virtual p ­ eople. Viewed from a dif­fer­ent frame, spectacular digital ­battles reflect the voraciousness of neoliberal capitalism, the drive for content, spectacle, and the “new” perspective/battle/identity through which to create audiences and to market products and selves as products. The terrain is prone to constant eruption and wealth generation through such eruptions on this landscape of endless repetition. It also wounds flesh-­and-­blood ­people in the pro­cess, at times irreparably. Given the marketization of self in the neoliberal digital age which demands that we communicate often not just to share information or connect but also to seduce o ­ thers for our entrepreneurial ascent on one of the plethora of market spaces in our lives, the simulacra can be even more alienating. Even what appear to be sites of contestation on social or po­ liti­cal questions are also sites of market competition. Po­liti­cal candidates depend heavi­ly on ads; nonprofits have eye-­catching log­os; and insurgent eruptions that challenge standard mores that are explic­itly feminist queer, antiracist, or anti-­classist can even be collapsed into market form quickly with the popularity of likes, shares, re-­tweets, re-­posts, and attention from news and televisual media corporations driven by social media attention. It is hard to separate out sharing and mobilization from (social/cultural and economic) capital accumulation. This is even truer b ­ ecause ­these eruptions occur alongside advertisements and silently build the wealth of the corporate platform on which they occur. Recognizing this vexation d ­ oesn’t render digital po­liti­cal eruptions meaningless. The past ­couple of years reveals the vast potential they hold, but the context always threatens to overwhelm even the boldest challenge presented. That precariousness is the “at best” prospect in the simulacra. 136 chapter  four

­There is a school of thought that sees the digital arena as purely instrumental. It is a tool, it is said, like the typewriter or the telephone, no more and no less. Tools, of course, can be revolutionary, and they influence the social and po­liti­cal imagination. ­These tools of the digital age challenge us in a plethora of ways. For instance, we must ask questions of the following sort: If a lecture is tweeted by third parties in an audience, where does the audience actually exist? Is the criticism of a virtual audience adequately informed? Does the lecturer “own” her perspective so rendered? What if ideas are “stolen” by someone who ­isn’t even pres­ent in the flesh? ­These questions flow from simply one type of example. They reveal how it is impor­tant to see digital technology not as purely instrumental. It can serve as a tool, like the typewriter or the mimeograph machine, but it is in effect much more than that. It trou­bles the scope of intellectual property and at the same time extends the commoditized self. We cannot treat it as a neutral device simply to be put to uses, good or bad. ­Today it constructs the expression of identity and politics in power­ful ways that are not neutral. For example, on this multimediated palimpsest of identification and identity, posting can invite or initiate exchange, but in its primacy it is a form of commoditized display. Displays of our selves offered over for the accumulation of corporate wealth interface with one another more frequently than our flesh-­and-­blood thoughts. Sociality, then, is flattened, except when the forms are rigged and supplemented other­wise. Even the transmigration of the term “meme” tells this story. Whereas the term once referred to any be­hav­ior, phrasing, concept, or style that circulated within a culture, ­today it is overwhelmingly used to refer to artifactual digital images. They are sources of humor, commentary, and ideas, including po­liti­cal ones. For example, memes of solidarity around breast cancer awareness or solidarity a­ fter the Pa­ri­sian bombings, as described by the journalist Megan Garber, “work[ed] to covert solidarity into currency. And in the pro­cess, into data.”7 Of course, it is all data: ­Every bit of you is being collected—­your accounts, your e-­mails, your demographics. Even the posts you write and delete before posting are collected and recorded and analyzed. This is part of the surveillance state, for sure, which is considered further in the next chapter. But for this chapter, it is a signature feature of how the simulacra work as a means of capital accumulation. The data are “profitable” and traded on. They are at times intercepted for the sake of theft and another parallel set of gray-­ market accumulations. To offset this, we are sent advertisements for ser­vices that ­will protect us against data theft, and the cycle continues. Unsurprisingly, we find, in greater quantity than anything that gestures ­toward gender liberation, the inheritance of modern patriarchy S imulacra C hild  137

always at work, and flourishing in the simulacra. It is found in the accumulation of pornographic, hetero-­cissexist, and racist histrionics on the Internet. In the 1970s, second-­wave feminist thought challenged the “male gaze” and, in par­tic­u­lar, the manner in which w ­ omen ­were reduced by being the subjects to be seen and possessed. Now, in the digital age, the cissexist male gaze has expanded. ­Women’s bodies are on constant display. Image itself has become a pathway to entrepreneurial fame via the repetition of pictures of feminine beauty, attractiveness, or sexiness. Internet models abound. Visual stimulation is aided by structures that curate and manipulate the images to heighten the experience of the viewer: filters and photo-­altering technology to change the shape of the body, the color of the flesh and hair, the orientation of the photo­graph, the sequence of a series of photo­graphs. Makeup can be added and pimples can be removed with software. Stories of luxury, domination, and exploitation are told with virtual images. The seduction relies on an artifice that resists nakedness and the organic, with all of its decay and unpredictability. Repre­sen­ta­tion then becomes a prob­lem in yet another way, and our standard critiques around it cannot adequately capture the con­temporary problematic. Some history helps reveal this. Back in 1994, two impor­tant books dealing with the prob­lem of repre­sen­ta­tion ­were released: Elaine Scarry’s Resisting Repre­sen­ta­tion and bell hooks’s Outlaw Culture: Resisting Repre­sen­ta­tions.8 Scarry was concerned with the difficulty of representing certain aspects of ­human experience. Hooks was concerned with pushing back against dominant repre­sen­ta­tions of ­people, particularly w ­ omen and Black folks, and their impact. The prob­lems they identified continue and are exacerbated in this moment. We still have dominant repre­sen­ta­tions at work that marginalize and diminish, as hooks noted. ­Legal personhood, property, and sovereignty are ­imagined as exclusive domains; hence, the per­sis­tent conservative discourse around the reclamation of the United States as a white, Christian, cis-­man led nation that led to the election of Donald Trump, with jeremiad-­like pronouncements that all w ­ ill be destroyed without such a return. Across the mainstream po­liti­cal spectrum, the “injury” to traditional patriarchs who now feel as though they are “failed men” has become a recurrent theme. It has been rendered as the crisis for the “white working class.” And, indeed, economic precariousness affects white men, along with the rest of the U.S. populace. But the emphasis on that par­tic­ul­ar population indicates that they continue to be seen as the cornerstone of citizenship in the United States. Reading more broadly, both within the nation-­state and beyond it, we still cannot or do not adequately capture the range of h ­ uman suffering. Our attention and expressions of care accumulate according to historical 138 chapter  four

ideas of “who counts.” In fact, given how overwhelming the simulacra are, we have in some ways further truncated care for o ­ thers as the register developed frequently cuts off a range of senses. I am reminded of Proust’s observation that photo­graphs failed insofar as they ­didn’t give you access to all the senses. Digital images on technological devices d ­ on’t ­either. In par­tic­u­lar, one loses the sense of the most primordial sense on them: touch. In 1995, Susan Maslan published an article titled “Resisting Repre­sen­ ta­tion: Theatre and Democracy in Revolutionary France,” in which she described theater as a sphere in which “the ­people” could resist the po­ liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion of elected representatives.9 She described theater as an impor­tant site for the consideration of po­liti­cal theory. If po­liti­ cal repre­sen­ta­tion failed, we could act out a dif­fer­ent range of concerns and ideas and deliberate over them. But t­ oday, po­liti­cal performance— at least in the simulacra—is often flattened, too. It exists on a register that is ideational but ­doesn’t necessarily translate to our flesh-­and-­blood existences. Just several years ­after t­ hese three works on repre­sen­ta­tion w ­ ere published, the questions they posed changed as the age of the Internet descended. We are now so inundated that it appears as if every­thing is represented. ­There are accumulations; some t­ hings are attended to and seen more ­because of wealth or b ­ ecause of bigotries, desires and ideologies. We do have some means to challenge the control over repre­sen­ta­tion, although ­those means are not equally distributed. But we have to think about how the competitive landscape, the Wild West (and that meta­phor is deliberate, as the Wild West was a ground for genocide) on which they exist, impacts their capacity to be challenging. The demo­cratic potential of po­liti­cal theater is likewise always ­under threat, particularly as spectacle and theatrical per­for­mance are such integral parts of display and increasingly part of the wheels of production, commoditization, and attention. At the same time, ­there are market-­based spheres of theatricality inundated with conventional patriarchal desires to “win” by domination, accumulation, and vio­lence. ­Those are more pervasive than the ones that seek to undo them. Think of the plea­sure vehicles that traffic in fantastic masculinity—­the way in which the viewer is enlisted in violent videogames that tell old stories about gender, sexuality, and race, or in interactive (or fictionally interactive) pornography. Modes of playing the patriarch facilitate escapism and the idealization of patriarchy yet threaten each “man” (proverbially, if not literally) with the awareness of the possibility that he w ­ ill fail. They celebrate patriarchy and give an aestheticized taste of it to ­those for whom patriarchy is only collateral in form. It is again S imulacra C hild  139

the simulacra of demo­cratic participation, and its spoils are ugly. Th ­ ese videogames, like pornography, exist in a feedback loop with state vio­lence. They allow us to taste vio­lence that i­ sn’t sanctioned, to revel in it, to break rules. But they also legitimize state repression in the imaginative world of patriarchy. We steal cars in our play, and in our politics we believe that the state must punish ­those who do that to make a living in analog life. Law, in this landscape, is ever pres­ent, yet remote. Criminalized activity is the subject of fantasy and threat. Harassment is filled with proclamations of intended or desired vio­lence. In the simulacra ­there is ­little limitation on the sort of vio­lence enacted historically on nonpersons. It is a virtual world of restoring the roots of patriarchy. It is also a smaller world of patriarchy’s fugitives finding one another, imagining liberation, and networking the visions and actions taken ­toward that end. The ever pres­ent danger is that ­these fugitivities w ­ ill be overtaken—in the simulacra and in life—at the hands of ­those proclaiming patriarchy, or even by the very technological forms they deploy as a result of how as they exist in the po­liti­cal economy. As the prurient appeal of patriarchy and competitive entrepreneurial subjecthood that occurs through simulacra seriously challenge demo­ cratic possibility, the pastiche that is part of the simulacra makes critical consideration of the landscape we occupy incredibly difficult. Pastiche is imitation of par­tic­u­lar forms, styles, or articulations (as in art or in the pro­cess of self-­creation) that is cut off from a more complex fabric of engagement. It is signifying without the signified, or, as Fredric Jameson describes it, “blank parody.” According to Jameson, “The Faulknerian long sentence, for example, with its breathless gerundives; Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated by testy colloquialism; Wallace Stevens’s inveterate hypostasis of nonsubstantive parts of speech (‘the intricate evasions of as’)”; ­etc. . . . ​[u]ndergoes a transformation in the postmodern world to pastiche,” leaving us with nothing but “a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm.”10 The “new” form is at once derivative and imitative, yet it is also disconnected. Examples of how this manifests are found in the rapid circulation of historically inaccurate information, or the manner in which sequential time is displaced by the elliptical cycles of the Internet such that “deaths” of famous ­people or tragedies happen over and over again, and the public continuously responds as though the death is “new.” It happens in the way that historical narrative is truncated and treated humorously but ­doesn’t have as a companion the detailed story. So, for example, the popu­lar ­T-­shirts that read “Rosa Parks 1955 ‘Nah’ ” are clever, yet they coincide 140 chapter  four

with the repetitive failure to get a fuller account of Parks’s po­liti­cal activism around gender and race in the mid-1950s. This failure persists despite the publication of two impor­tant books on Parks’s life in recent years. Said failure is not due to the clever shirts, obviously. But truncation, ­whether in quips, gifs, memes, or one hundred and forty (or two hundred and eighty) characters, inhibits detailed analyses of the world and its history, ­unless ­there is deliberate ­labor to the contrary. Modes of recounting the history of gender and racial injustice on the simulacra worry me. A structure of feeling, or that sense of the “lost” past, increasingly depends on a memory of an image that stands in and signifies a sentimental “loss” or transformation rather than deeper knowledge. This i­sn’t simply a question about the truth or lack thereof regarding a set of material conditions from whence we came, although it could be that. Much more significant, I think, is that “memory” is captured in ways that contort the imagination into a sense of “linear pro­gress” on gender issues and the politics of gender justice. Hence, we must consider what choices we inadvertently are making with memory due to the power of image circulation. What goes out of view with talk of the “bad old days” (especially in­ter­est­ing with re­spect to a long and complex history of queer and trans expression, activism, and experience)? What of the dialogic, the conflicted, the dif­f er­ent experiences of the same turn of events? I was reminded of this when I taught a course on the Civil Rights Movement. When we ­were covering the Black Panther Party, many students reacted with disbelief in response to the Panther leader Huey Newton’s statement in support of gay rights. Even having historical documents in front of them, they trusted the power of the truncated image (rendered visually) of the Panthers as misogynistic, violent, and hypermasculine over documentation to the contrary. Pastiche authorizes truncated information, and it makes every­one an expert without the demand for study. It is enough to signify the po­liti­cal position with symbol, to circulate images of ­children dressed up as historical figures even as the space for the serious study of history is contracted in American education by means of the neoliberal turn in schooling. The pastiche of memes moves ­people to believe that they “know how t­ hings ­will go” and treat o ­ thers and themselves as part of a cast of characters, with roles that cannot change (for better or worse) and sensibilities that cannot grow. Such thinking inhibits growth and connection; if one is playing a part, one is less likely to push beyond its bounds, and if one thinks every­one ­else is playing a part, we are less likely to believe that they might become dif­fer­ent. This is particularly damaging for social movements that thrive on the possibility of transformation. S imulacra C hild  141

We see the world getting smaller based on the circulation of artifacts, but in that pro­cess the obscured often becomes more obscure in the delusion that open access makes the digital arena demo­cratic. Further, outrage is often produced in relationship to attention, image, and circulation, not necessarily in relationship to the seriousness of incidences or their prevalence. Of course, outrage is quite often a good ­thing. We watch footage; we respond; we protest. But that often occurs according to the ways the event viewed matches narratives and priorities at our disposal and therefore is captured by gender ideologies. Moreover, ­today’s outrage is often registered without deliberation. Clicking on a petition, liking a post, even being in a protest and getting in the picture are useful but do not necessarily portend the forms of deep engagement that are necessary to push us to be differently. And to challenge neoliberal patriarchy, we must be differently. A case in point: As many Black feminist activists have noted, publics are more reticent to respond to state vio­lence against Black ­women (especially trans Black ­women) and queer or nonbinary ­people or transmen; and more willing to or­ga­nize around straight cis men, partly b ­ ecause we have an easy basis for contesting the inaccessibility of patriarchal actualization for Black ­people. The narrative goes, “Black men ­aren’t allowed to be men, State-­ sanctioned killing is the evidence.” Yet the sin lies in patriarchy itself. It lies not in the fact of its exclusion of Black men but in its violent operation to dominate ­those who d ­ on’t qualify as patriarchs, regardless of gender. This po­liti­cal real­ity led to the creation and circulation of the #SayHerName hashtag on social media, an insistence on treating the deaths and abuse experienced by Black girls and w ­ omen at the hands of police, as well as in intimate associations. The critical response to #SayHerName has generally been some version of, “but state vio­lence is meted out to Black boys and men at the highest rate.” That is true. But that truth ­ought not operate as an ideological validation of patriarchy; rather, we might read it as a dimension of how patriarchy is at once a gender and a racial proj­ect (and always has been). It is easy to identify how elusive patriarchy is for Black Americans. It is harder to challenge patriarchy altogether, including our ideological commitments to it. So we find it much harder to respond to the abuse of Black ­children, Black queer ­people, and Black ­women, for example, b ­ ecause ­under the logic of patriarchy, ­these categories of ­people in some sense are supposed to suffer from abuse in ways that ­those who seek to be ideal “men” are not. This has shifted some, largely ­because of the work of activists who use digital media to disrupt dominant gender ideologies. But the shift t­ oward greater awareness of the par­tic­u­lar forms of domination experienced by Black w ­ omen has happened in a discursive space 142 chapter  four

that often posits dominated ­people (in this case, Black men and ­women or Black queer and straight ­people) in competition for attention rather than collaboratively seeking liberation. This competition is not the “fault” of advocates and activists. Rather, it is a result of the marketization of identity and entrepreneurial subject status. Each of us is in categorical, as well as individual, competition, and that lies in tension with conceptions of interdependent communities. Zero-­sum games abound. Patricia Hill Collins’s landmark work on matrices of domination merits revitalization. We are not all subjugated in the same way, but the interrelationship of forms of subjugation ideally forge creative pathways ­toward alliance rather than competition. We have to grapple with how to be in po­liti­cal community given the constraints of the simulacra and how to avoid the pitfalls of self-­marketing as po­liti­cal activists. Clicks, hits, followers, all driven by spectacles/adversarial moments and public attention, can be quite an impediment to po­liti­cal development. We already have generations of impor­tant critical work on the perils of image. Susan Sontag, for instance, made a number of interventions about the mass-­culture form of photography.11 Photo­graphs, she noted, ­were like the shadows on Plato’s cave, tokens of consumption. They flattened experience, displaced or acted as surrogates for real encounters with objects narcissistically collected. Sontag may have overstated her point. Or perhaps it was simply prophetic about l­ ater forms of image. With the hindsight of history, I think: At least then we collected photo­graphs in physical books. We looked at them, often with o ­ thers; cherished them; and told stories about them, and a flood of memories could return. We pondered them. But now the image loses much of its sensory possibility. Do we still experience the smell of a freshly developed photo, the tender effort not to smudge its surface, the sitting alongside someone, in a home, telling a story attached to it? ­Every time a person’s death circulates on Facebook or Twitter, I won­der: Would it travel around so shamelessly if it ­were a photo­graph at a party. Would we pass around the height of h ­ uman vulnerability, consume it, share it without a thought, looking at a person’s terror and entrails, as a form of sociality if it ­were held in the flesh? Photo­graphs and footage on platforms ­today often substitute for fleshly experiences. We d ­ on’t hold image close to our bodies nearly as much. We curate images on corporate platforms more than we collect them, and they are showcases for a large public rather than intimate acts of connection with visitors. They narrate identities more than events. If Sontag was correct that photography was once an appropriation of the world, it is now a mode of mythmaking about the self. The inventory of all of us ­doing this is massive—so much so that it is beyond our comprehension S imulacra C hild  143

(we remain conceptually innumerate) and yet also at our fingertips at a moment’s notice. Images are easy to create and share with a phone and a click; they require virtually no ­labor or discretion, ­because ­there is no deliberation. We depend on the fundamentally unfamiliar archival system to authorize us and deprive us. What do we r­ eally have in our hands? It is ­really enough? What of the archives of ­others? Are they not bigger and better? We behave as though we must be chosen. We act like paupers, passively and passionately wishing for favorable depiction and attention. DISREGARDING THE PAIN OF O­ THERS

One cannot adequately discuss the simulacra without discussing the rise in sexually explicit material on the Internet. It is a billion-­dollar business, accessible at fingertips. And it is everywhere. Simply Google-­search “girl” or especially “Black girl” or “Asian girl,” or “breasts” or “vagina”—­really, anything associated with ­women or with sexuality—­and provocative images hop to the forefront of our landscape. I am reticent to call all of this pornography. In colloquial parlance, all sexually explicit material that is not identifiably “fine art” is deemed pornography. That noun may have to stand. But I want to contest the adjective. What is sexually explicit should not all be categorized as “pornographic.” “Explicit” and “pornographic,” it seems to me, are two dif­f er­ent metrics—or, at least, should be. The ­legal categorization of something as pornographic is insufficient.12 It depends on social conventions, purportedly, but the ethical values are insufficiently articulated. “Pornographic” cannot legitimately mean nudity or even explicit sexuality, given our varied artistic and cultural traditions. Moreover, t­ here should be a difference between distinguishing culturally based ideas of appropriateness in certain contexts and naming something pornographic—­that is, appealing to the prurient interest—­ especially if we reject the idea that sexuality is prurient. As a working definition of the pornographic, I would argue that it is a relationship, not a status. The relationship between viewer or consumer and object, or person, is one in which ­there is a conquest and consumption of the other, at least symbolically, in which the person consumed dis­appears completely b ­ ehind the body. Pornographic material depicts objectification although it may in fact not be. It produces images of the erotics of power up front, while what is ­behind the scenes is a distinct negotiation (although perhaps with a similar set of power relations at work). Whereas the relationship between a self-­created webcam creator and audience may not be pornographic, the viewer’s relationship to the product and person may nevertheless be a pornographic, or pornotropic, one 144 chapter  four

that hearkens back to imperial forms of patriarchy. As Anne McClintock writes, during the age of conquest “­women figured as the epitome of sexual aberration and excess. . . . ​In the minds of t­ hese men, the imperial conquest of the globe found its shaping figure and its po­liti­cal sanction in the prior subordination of ­women as a category of nature. . . . ​ ­Women ­were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest zone. . . . ​In myriad ways, ­women served as mediating and threshold figures by means of which men oriented themselves in space as agents of power and agents of knowledge.”13 The way we might appropriately respond to this landscape requires a ­great deal of thought. More than moral right or wrong, we have to consider constraint, demands, and how we are all constituted as subjects. The debate that has grown between pro-­and anti-­porn feminists is illustrative of why such care is essential. Anti-­porn feminists appropriately draw attention to the material conditions u ­ nder which porn is created: how often the choice to enter the industry is produced by limited economic choice and how often coercion becomes force. They speak to the vio­lence that is prevalent in the sex industry and in the traffics of desire that fuel the production of image and footage. Pro-­porn feminists appropriately recognize the full humanity of t­ hose participating in porn: that they are often market actors making decisions and providing ser­vices that are wildly popu­ lar, although widely shamed. The Victorianism embedded in the shaming is part of what drives the economy underground and therefore facilitates vio­lence in the industry. Both lines of thought often lack something critical in their analyses: Anti-­porn activists often replicate the object status of t­ hose who act in pornographic film. They treat the actors solely as objects who are being exploited, even as they criticize that status. They fail to distinguish between ­those who are violently dominated into porn and t­ hose who have chosen it as a form of work. However, even the most feminist porn—­that which imagines a female consumer and centralizes w ­ omen’s pleasure—is often neoliberal in its orientation. Some pro-­porn advocates fail to confront questions about the impact of marketization on h ­ uman sexuality—­ one of the most fundamental ele­ments of our humanity, like love, like the need for ­water. As Johanna Oksala writes, The sex workers’ rights position thus operates according to the same economic logic as neoliberalism aiming to only ameliorate the destructive effects of f­ree markets through the implementation of l­abour regulations. It is therefore impor­tant to consider how such a purely economic approach to sex work may contribute to the increasing difficulty S imulacra C hild  145

of raising critical questions about the moral limits of markets—­the fundamental question of what we as society believe should be for sale. If part of the appeal of the ­free markets lies in the fact that “markets do not wag fin­gers,” I believe that t­ here are new reasons to insist that feminist politics must, in many instances, continue to do so.14 At the same time, pro-­porn feminists are correct when they argue that we must move beyond discourses of objectification b ­ ecause, in fact, the person who is being underpaid or sexually commodified is not an object any more than any of the rest of us who are subject to the viciousness of the market. ­There is a fundamental prob­lem with objectification talk ­because of the erasures it makes. An actor may be cast into the fiction of nonpersonhood in the fantasy world of pornography, a world that trades on the eroticization of the absolute domination of ­women and, in par­tic­ u­lar, girls and yet actually be a full member of the sociopo­liti­cal world. The experience of ­doing porn is not the same as the artifactual pornographic film, in terms of what comes both in and out of view with each. So what if, instead of taking a position against or for porn, we deci­ ded to think about a practice of reading through the layers of domination at work—in pornographic images; in low-­wage ­labor markets and underground economies of drugs, illegal sex work, child sexual abuse, and sex trafficking that abut and sometimes overlap with porn; on sets of pornographic films and in the films’ owner­ship and distribution? What if, instead of demonizing the desire for sexualized imagery, we raised questions about the expansion of marketized sexuality and why it so often accumulates according to conventional patriarchal logics? This work ­can’t happen meaningfully without the perspectives of the actors, as well as consumers. The veil between them must be taken down. Even if we come to very dif­ fer­ent conclusions, based on varying po­liti­cal ideologies or values—­and, of course, we ­will—we ­ought at least to be dedicated to thinking through the matrix fully. To note the pornographic as a relationship between individuals or between individual and artifact may not be a particularly useful ­observation in terms of seeking a ­legal definition appropriate to First Amendment definitions of obscenity. But I think it is useful for thinking about regulatory frames as applied to sex work, and it certainly is essential for thinking about the ethics of our social ecol­ogy. Material that is pornographic then, with this definition, is an unjust refusal. It is a relationship in which the imagination is deployed in ways that diminish humanity rather than expand it. Hence, it has every­thing to do with exploitation. In art and play, unlike in the pornographic, the imagination works to open rather than 146 chapter  four

diminish. Perhaps such a working definition and distinction leaves appropriate space open for ­those who advocate explicit material as a natu­ ral part of healthy sexuality, yet also allows for a necessary critique of practices of marketized sexuality that ­isn’t beholden to the terms of conservative Judeo-­Christian morality. Moreover, it might encourage us to consider our pornographic relations (I believe most of us have them in ways far afield of sexually explicit images) and how they influence our capacity to recognize other h ­ uman beings. If we understand, in retrospect, that the ways of seeing p ­ eople who ­were enslaved ­were profoundly dehumanizing and prompted vio­ lence and indecency, we ­ought to now consider how ways of seeing and consuming ­people, in an ongoing fashion, through the simulacra continue to pervert our capacity for fellow feeling. Imagine if, for example, every­ one who regularly consumed Internet porn actually assumed a po­liti­cal identity that saw the ­people who do the ­labor on t­ hese plea­sure vehicles as a community whose well-­being was part of their po­liti­cal concern. It would be a revolutionary move. The barrier to such po­liti­cal alliance is how pornographic consumption also performs an event ontology on the body, marking badges and incidents of domination, like other forms of sex work, that are treated in the imaginative landscape as justifying vio­ lence against ­those who are actors in the pornographic or pornotropic simulacra. Beyond the footage, t­ hose “shameful p ­ eople” ­aren’t registered or ­imagined as part of the po­liti­cal community. Pornographic repre­sen­ta­ tion is a stand-in for ­actual engagement and purports “knowledge” that is actively disregarded with re­spect to the excluded category of ­people being watched. Again, I draw the distinction between pornographic and explicit. Not all explicit material fits this description, but much of it does. And not every­thing that is pornographic is sexually explicit. We must be mindful of that relation, as well. De­cades ago, when critics first talked about the Western gaze, it was not simply about seeing but about what that visual consumption meant regarding relations of power. T ­ oday, t­ here is a proliferation of consumers with fantasies of domination that demand the same critical eye. This is sharpened ­because pornographic images and footage on digital platforms often (though not always) happens without the interactive power plays or subversion that can exist, no m ­ atter how modestly, in strip clubs or in in-­the-­flesh sex work. When it is depicted, it is chosen, and if it i­ sn’t appealing it can simply be turned off with a click, thus expanding the aesthetics of power. The consumption of pornographic material is one of ­those arenas in which neoliberalism captures us with our pants down, as it w ­ ere. Seduced by the promise of choice in the marketplace, care of S imulacra C hild  147

­ thers diminishes. Then it also fuels decontextualization. ­People see a o byte or a segment that they like, and then that t­ hing (person, institution) can be fetishized and decontextualized from its production or from the larger landscape in which it is produced. The uses to which it can be put are varied, of course, and that is the good news. The analytical alienation it can lead to is the bad news. ­There is a parallel ­here to the performative spectacles of real­ity tele­ vi­sion that often hinge on gender performatives that are at times conventionally idyllic and at other times depicted as grotesque for violating conventions of the lady and the lord. At their most popu­lar they are vehicles for depicting desire “run amok.” The evaluation of the characters and ­whether they are “positive repre­sen­ta­tions,” or ­whether viewers ­ought to feel shame or plea­sure at watching them, is standard but seems to be a far less pertinent question, and even a red herring, than the exploration of the fact of the market-­based flattening of h ­ uman beings pres­ent in ­these artifacts. In the simulacra, real­ity show stars are two-­dimensional fantastic forms of femininity and masculinity that inspire desire and revulsion. The public reading encouraged by the televisual simulacra is often placed on the self-­represented simulacra controlled by the person (tweets are directed at them. and they might respond; they appear for a fee at parties, where lots of pictures are taken and posted; they cut rec­ords that circulate digitally) in ways once reserved for celebrities with a more complex corporate architecture ­behind them. Repetition opens up space. ­There are more stars, but ­there is perhaps less flesh and blood. Repetition must not stand in the stead of the organic. We need ecological awareness at the heart of feminist analytics. A way of being in the fleshly world with life and death and air and creatures is especially impor­tant when plea­sure makes pain invisible or, at least, encourages a willing suspension of disbelief. Kara Walker’s installation The Marvellous Sugar Baby (2014) at the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn has been one of the most provocative artistic signifiers of gender in the age of simulacra and neoliberalism. It was “high art,” the opposite of real­ity tele­vi­sion, although it covered some of the same terrain. The sugar baby evoked the history of enslavement, empire, and colonialism with an enormous, exposed mammy white sugar sphinx and fungible sculptures of enslaved ­children made of molasses who melted away. The enslaved man, importantly, was absent. When I visited the installation, I was overwhelmed by the stench and decay, the sense of temporality and loss that goes along with anything and every­thing that is organic. The dramatic feminine and feminization of enslavement rendered through our addictions—to sugar, to grotesque 148 chapter  four

race and gender ideologies—­were discomfiting and also overwhelming. The installation was Walker’s rendering of artistic inheritances, from the African American artist Lorraine O’Grady’s “Ma­de­moi­selle Bourgeois Noire” persona who whipped herself with cat-­o’-­nine-­tails while wearing a cape made of white gloves, to Bettye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, who, in all her ste­reo­typical rendering, held a gun. With Sugar Baby, Walker participated in a tradition of Black female artists using race and gender symbols and sensorium for emotional and po­liti­cal charge. However, on social media the proj­ect worked as a marketing device for the Domino Sugar factory. Viewers w ­ ere encouraged to photo­graph the exhibit and share pictures on social media, to represent and repeat the body, to proliferate it in a static form. That proxy experience was quite dif­fer­ent from the direct encounter. Before I went in person, I had developed a set of averse feelings about the exhibition via social media that at first seemed a complete mismatch to my in-­the-­flesh experience of the art. But instead and in fact, the two reactions ­were of a piece, parts of a complex relation to the art. Online, the two-­dimensional images seemed cartoonish, pastiche-­like, and prurient as visitors produced photo­graphs that made it appear that they ­were sexually manipulating a prone sugar baby. It struck me as a neoliberal trafficking in ambiguous imagery, a way to draw attention to the past but with the easy effect of making it entertaining and laughable. It was both success and failure in terms of making public a vestibular history. It was at once exposure and spectacle and reproduced that subject in a manner that reminded us that the habit of making the nonperson is still with us. It is something we still do. Walker has built a c­ areer on stunning expositions of that truth. What we make of that truth is vexed. No ethical impulse is necessarily attached to it, and that fact alone is highly instructive. The multisensory effect of the in-­person exhibition demanded something quite dif­fer­ent. To be nauseated by the smell, to be forced to contend with being in person with the discomfort or plea­sure or curiosity of o ­ thers in the same space, was discomfiting. The vast whiteness of the sphinx reminded the viewer that she was a product of a Western Eu­ro­pean imagination, her contours bound up by whiteness. Waiting in line and wondering at the meaning of the crowds, the desires that made us wait to see her image, held greater potential. Debates over the sugar baby ­were also telling. ­Today when criticism of the publicity of provocative art objects is issued, the response is often to accuse the critics of being “respectable” or practicing the politics of respectability. This happened with the sugar baby. It is often inadvertently a mode of easily slipping into the logic of neoliberalism that is defined in S imulacra C hild  149

large part by “liberty” rendered in market libertarianism—­the freedom to say, sell, and show what­ever one chooses. The truth is that, on the side of the critics and of the defenders, something is happening that is part of a very old logic of gender. For hundreds of years, t­ here has been a domestic and respectable place that is removed from prurience (in theoretical and ideational terms, though often untrue literally); then t­ here are outside and often exotic spaces that are reserved for the prurient. While we o ­ ught to critique the punishment and the assumption that t­ hose who occupy ­these spaces outside respectability ­ought to be available for mistreatment and domination, we ­ought not to fetishize the spaces they occupy as more liberatory. Our relation to them might easily fall into the logics of domination, just like ­those of ladylike respectability, especially when the desire for them is sold to us by the power­ful and shared in unrepentant cycles of spectacular consumption.

150 chapter  four

chapter 5

STICKS BROKEN AT THE RIV E R The Security State and the Vio­lence of Manhood ...

The found­ers of a new colony, what­ever Utopia of ­human virtue they might originally proj­ect, have invariably regarded it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter—­Second Edition

Jeffrey Fort, the son of sharecroppers, was born on February 20, 1947, in Aberdeen, Mississippi. Several months l­ater, on July  27, 1947, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act into law, creating a postwar national security framework. The intersection between the development of the security state and Fort’s life story, a journey that took him from being a child of the southern plantation economy to infamy as a gang founder and leader—­and, ­later, as an incarcerated “terrorist”—­ reveals layers of patriarchy at work in our current world order, specifically around weapons, incarceration, and militarism. The National Security Act entailed major reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the foreign policy and military establishments of the U.S. government. As Noam Chomsky wrote, in the context of World War II, “high-­level planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar world the United States should seek ‘to hold unquestioned power,’ acting to ensure the ‘limitation of any exercise of sovereignty’ by states that might interfere with its global designs.”1 They recognized further that “the foremost requirement” to secure ­these ends was “the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament,” then, as now, a central component of “an integrated policy

to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.”2 To this end, the National Security Act entailed a merger of the War Department and the Navy Department into a single Department of Defense ­under the leadership of a Secretary of Defense, along with the Department of the Air Force. The act also created the Joint Chiefs of Staff to serve as advisers on the military to the president and defense secretary. It was a new architecture of authority. Most dramatically, the act established the Central Intelligence Agency (cia), which since then has served as the primary civilian intelligence-­ gathering organ­ization in the government. While the Federal Bureau of Investigation retained internal security functions, and serves as the primary intelligence and law enforcement agency within the United States, the cia does so throughout the rest of the world. The passage of the National Security Act initiated what we currently describe as the modern security state. The rise of the security state is central to the logic of modern patriarchy and has found extension and new expressions ­under conditions of neoliberal governmentality. To read through security as an expression of patriarchy, critically, we must push past simply following along with conventional interpretations of democracy, Marxian thought, or capitalism and simply unpack. Some critics have described the National Security Act as a philosophical extension of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, in which competing states defended and defined themselves and their sovereignty through a security regime that included protection of territory and geography claimed by the state, the maintenance of the po­liti­cal and economic order ­under which the state is structured, and elimination of “threats” to “shared values.”3 The changing war technologies and global rearrangements over hundreds of years, however, mean we ­shouldn’t over-­read the modern era as a ­simple extension of the Treaty of Westphalia. Indisputably, however, the National Security Act was a founding l­ egal framework for the Cold War. Further, its passage followed the suppression of leftist po­liti­cal dissent that was part of the l­abor movement. It was in some sense a culmination of the b ­ attle within coalescing with the b ­ attle without to create militaristic and juridical discipline. Sovereign power was rendered both within the nation to maintain stratification internally and internationally through weaponry and military might. Policing operated as a tool of social control within, while the military did so abroad. ­There ­were women/natives and ­others both inside and outside the nation who ­were seen as threats to the patriarchal power of the state. As part of this, control over who was where, inside and outside the nation, became a national concern. While border patrol was 152 chapter five

established in 1924, it was ramped up during the war years. In 1940, control over immigration was moved from the Department of L ­ abor to the Department of Justice, and the size of its staff more than doubled: over 1,400 ­people ­were employed by the Border Patrol in law enforcement and civilian positions by the end of World War II: “During the war, the Patrol provided tighter control of the border, manned alien detention camps, guarded diplomats, and assisted the U.S. Coast Guard in searching for Axis saboteurs. Aircraft proved extremely effective and became an integral part of operations.”4 The border became a sort of war zone itself. Through the early 1950s, patrol of the border expanded further, and in 1952, agents ­were granted the right to perform raids anywhere in the United States. This was when undocumented immigrants w ­ ere first subject to arrest. A few years a­ fter this form of surveillance and punishment was affirmed, Fort and his ­family (he was the second of ten ­children) moved from Mississippi to Chicago and settled in the Woodlawn neighborhood. They followed many ­others in the G ­ reat Migration, seeking l­abor opportunities and a less violent system of racial domination in the Midwest. Fort is rumored to be dyslexic. Perhaps this is why he dropped out of school ­after the fourth grade. He soon found himself arrested repeatedly for petty crimes and sentenced to serve time in the Illinois State Training School for Boys, also known as the State Home for Delinquent Boys, in St. Charles, Illinois, at around age ten. The institution, which sat on 901 acres of farmland, was one of the many created in the early 1900s ostensibly to combat the prob­lem of juvenile “delinquency.” Th ­ ese institutions ­were sites to discipline and socialize working-­class urban youth into vocations and manual or semiskilled ­labor. The stated purpose of the school was to provide the boys with a strong education in both intellectual and vocational studies so that, ­after they ­were released, they could live a life of “usefulness.” They received religious instruction and military training. In the first half of the twentieth ­century, the home was touted widely. It was described in one newspaper article as the “greatest institution of its kind, in ground plans and scope of possibilities, that has ever been attempted in Amer­i­ca, if not in the known world.”5 Some sixty years ­after it opened, the institution was described in an exposé as having the appearance of a “Nazi concentration camp.”6 It was enclosed with barbed wire and chained fences. Steel doors lined the cell blocks where the ­children lived. The only ­running ­water was cold. Tranquilizers ­were given frequently, and without psychiatric consultation, to control youth. At the institution, a site of discipline and punishment, the elementary school-­age Fort befriended another Black mi­grant child named Eugene S ticks B roken at the R iver  153

Hairston. During their time ­there, newspapers reported that state authorities ­were focused on preventing boys’ frequent attempts to run away from the fa­cil­i­ty. We can guess what kind of conditions prompted them to run. It is hardly surprising that Fort and Hairston formed a gang when they ­were released. They had learned to protect themselves. They called themselves the Blackstone Rangers, named ­after the ave­nue on which they lived. Another well-­known Chicago gang, the Vice Lords, was also founded at the State Home. C ­ hildren, mi­grants from the violent and segregated South, who landed in the segregated and violent North and ­were then held ­under conditions akin to that of prisoners of war created organ­izations to defend themselves in their neighborhoods and in this world. Fort’s name in the gang was given to him by his ­mother, “Angel.” Childlike sensibilities remained in more than his name as they grew. As a ’tween, Fort wanted the gang to take control of the area around 63rd Street and Stony Island, where the sex and drug trade flourished, and turn it into an “enchanted city.” In his imagination, Fort hoped to create a place that was safe for “the Junebugs,” the ­little kids, governed by rules of engagement rather than brute force.7 Perhaps he got the idea of an enchanted city from seeing the popu­lar movie The Thief of Baghdad, an Orientalist spin on the Arabian Nights tale.8 In the film, magic transforms the desert into an enchanted city; a young thief becomes a prince; a genie answers wishes; and flying carpets, ­horses, and an all-­seeing eye can take one wherever one wants to go. The enchanted city never happened, but the Blackstone Rangers succeeded. They or­ga­nized ­under a new name, the Black P. Stone Nation, with an elaborate, state-­like hierarchy. Gwendolyn Brooks would famously refer to them in her poem “Blackstone Rangers” as “a nation on no map.” By 1966, Black P. Stone Nation had 1,500 members. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and social-­justice organ­izing, and in the same year that Martin Luther King Jr. spent three storied months in Chicago, the Black P. Stone Nation began to go “mainstream.” It accessed grants through the Office of Economic Opportunity and philanthropic organ­izations, with the goal of serving poor Black Chicagoans with job skills development, pursuing employment opportunities, and community development. Chicago’s infamously racist Mayor Richard Daley was enraged by King’s drawing attention to racism in his city and by the Black Stone Rangers garnering federal funds. They both threatened the order of the Demo­cratic Party machine through which Daley controlled the city. Daley began a harassment and arrestment campaign against the Rangers. Fort was arrested for murder and kept in jail for five months, ­until March 1968, when the 154 chapter five

charges against him ­were spontaneously dropped. The retaliatory campaign took place in the media, too: The Chicago Tribune reported that the gang was mismanaging funds and extorting ­people, and corporations that had pledged to hire newly trained gang members ­were scared away.9 Ultimately, the Black Stone Rangers ­were brought before a congressional committee to determine the expenditure of federal funds they had received. The bulk of the money was found to be unaccounted for, and the grant was revoked. Fort refused to testify and was convicted for the misuse of federal funds. In prison, Fort converted to Islam and created a new organ­ization called El Rukn. When he was released, El Rukn bought a former movie theater in Chicago and converted it into a mosque and community center. It reportedly also served as the center of El Rukn’s drug operations. The organ­ ization bought a substantial number of housing units that it leased out to community members.10 In 1983, Fort was convicted on drug-­trafficking charges and sentenced to thirteen years in prison, along with two of his lieutenants. (His operations ­were found to lead all the way back to his home state, Mississippi.) While he was incarcerated, again, the police monitored Fort’s calls. Th ­ ere it was determined, through decoding hidden messages, that Fort was working with Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-­Gaddafi, a socialist Arab nationalist. Gaddafi was an opponent of the United States and leader of the Libyan government, and he and Fort ­were reportedly collaborating on an arms deal. El Rukn, according to court documents, agreed to trade rockets and a promise to commit terrorist acts in the United States for a $2.5 million loan.11 As a result of this discovery, Fort was tried and convicted for conspiring with Libya to perform acts of terrorism. He was sentenced to eighty years in prison in Marion, Illinois. Fort, with his personal story, his actions, his imprisonment, is deeply embedded in the security state, a symptom, an agent, and a consequence. During the Cold War, the distribution of arms in exchange for po­liti­cal, economic, and military allegiance became a frequent practice of the world powers. In name, for both the United States and the Soviet Union, this be­hav­ior was a reflection of an ideological commitment to national values and the protection of a superior way of life. In truth, ­these values ­were never adhered to when it came to the least of ­these among ­either of ­these two largest superpowers. Access to personhood was never equally distributed within t­ hese nations or among t­ hose nations with which the allies ­were aligned. Rather, the security archipelagos created during the Cold War reinscribed the structure of patriarchy and collateral patriarchy in the midst of realignments that took place in the aftermath of S ticks B roken at the R iver  155

the Bolshevik revolution, world wars, and decolonization. This occurred both through categories of membership and how and where p ­ eople ­were zoned, as well as through the distribution of wealth and goods and how movement was regulated or even prohibited. ­Today, sovereignty is diffuse and has smaller domains that are still guarded by militarism and weaponry, even as the United States remains the dominant global power. But in its repeated forms, capture, containment, vio­lence, and death are still primary mechanisms of domination. At the same time, precarity and competition push the movement of ­people and capital, leaving many p ­ eople fugitive and living u ­ nder coercive conditions. In their travels, they encounter aggressive security regimes that control movement or punish it. It is a high-­risk world for ­people who are vulnerable and transient. Weapons, within this frame, are tools to both dominate and escape domination, in ­every pos­si­ble po­liti­cal configuration. And weapons manufacturing is a trillion-­dollar global industry. Or perhaps it is the other way around. As Arundhati Roy has said, “Time was when weapons ­were manufactured in order to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured in order to sell weapons.”12 The weapons trade is driven by the concept of security and territorialism, the desire to control and dominate and assert oneself with that most masculinist of expression: the gun. The plethora of guns grants means for the violent patrol of space. The trade in arms defies ideology in its elaborate network of markets. Or perhaps better stated, it signals the ideology of neoliberalism applied to technologies of destruction. This market for death and injury makes and unmakes nations, communities, and ­people; it is filled with vitality and destruction across the globe. The porousness of borders with re­spect to ­people is exceeded by the porousness of borders for the movement of arms. The $60 billion weapons market is both formal and recognized and informal and ­legal and illegal.13 Weapons manufacturers make money through both l­egal and illegal means. In popu­lar culture, we often distinguish between the two. But that limits our analyses. Given that we know that the very concept of legality hinges on forms of exclusion and recognition that cannot be accepted simply as objectively “good” or “right,” they must be interrogated, as must the distinction between l­egal weapons and murder and that which is described as illegal. The very question of illegality is one of framework and context. It depends on the sovereign authority. Such notions of legitimate authority are inherited from the carving up of the world during colonialism and extended through symbolic po­liti­cal speech about freedom and democracy laid over coercive mea­sures. Who has a right to have a weapon, and 156 chapter five

where, is dictated by authorities that have sets of par­tic­u­lar interests, one of which is maintaining or wresting control. So much flows from that logic: How do we assess the normative and the deviant? How do we categorize be­hav­ior in social sciences and institutions? The logic of authority is so tightly bound with the structure of patriarchy that we consistently see identical be­hav­ior treated in profoundly distinct ways, depending on where a party is situated in terms of power over property, membership in a sovereign nation, and the relative power of that sovereign nation in global affairs. Too often this hierarchy of values is discursively escaped by focusing on the individual instance instead of the proliferation of events, such that mass murders are legitimized while individual ones are treated as completely distinct forms of horror. Black-­market weapons trading is most robust in local or regional areas marked by conflict over territory or control. Numerous small shipments over porous borders eventually lead to zones flooded with weapons. Oftentimes, the illegal trade is identified as worse ­because it is associated with civilian rather than military casualties. But the definition of “civilian” itself merits questioning. Who exactly is legitimately deemed to be at war? Of course, ­there are treaties and conventions dictated by world powers that define war. But the moral question is more difficult. If we take as an example the way the U.S. military in its official capacity defines civilian casualties, the difficulty becomes clear. All men of military age within a military strike zone are defined as combatants u ­ nless ­there is explicit intelligence ­after their deaths that proves other­wise. They are guilty u ­ ntil proven innocent and dead. Likewise, terms such as “collateral damage” a general term for unintentional deaths, injuries, or other damage inflicted incidentally on an intended target are euphemistic, as though unintentionality is a mea­sure of the degree of harm. Its companion: “military necessity” is yet another term that merits deconstruction. Used in international humanitarian law it refers to violent mea­sures that are indispensable for the sake of war.14 ­There are three limitations upon it: the attack must be intended and tend t­ oward the military defeat of the e­ nemy; attacks not so intended cannot be justified by military necessity ­because they would have no military purpose.15 Second, even an attack aimed at the military weakening of the ­enemy must not cause harm to civilians or civilian objects that is excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Third, military necessity cannot justify violation of the other rules of international humanitarian law. It ­isn’t difficult to see how the language of “necessity” justifies death. Weapons ensure it. As Achille Mbembe notes, in this era weapons are deployed in the hands of sovereigns “in the interest of maximum destruction S ticks B roken at the R iver  157

of persons and the creation of death-­worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”16 While not literally dead, and not without the capacity for love and re­sis­tance, ­legal regimes that mark p ­ eople as appropriate for death due to military necessity, or as existing as de facto assumed combatants or casualties of war, abound. For his planned arms deal, Fort was the first American convicted of a “terrorist plot” in the United States. Fort’s aspirational patriarchy, complete with military-­grade weapons, killing, property owning, sovereignty over the block(s), and negotiations with foreign nations, w ­ ere on the wrong side of the law. He is resigned to prison for the remainder of his days plus more. The number of deaths for which he is responsible, however, is infinitesimal compared with the number of deaths deemed ­legal ­under the authority of the U.S. military. Fort’s crime was to act outside the authority of the most globally power­ful sovereign nation. Commentators remarked that it was ironic when Fort and Larry Hoover, his fellow Gangster Disciplines leader, remarked in late 2015 that they ­were appalled at the level of reckless gang vio­lence in Chicago.17 But the remark reflects how the diffusion of sovereignty and the proliferation of weapons fuels international and local warring alike. ­Things have changed, and just as capital has run amok, without a clear basis for battling against its damage, so has vio­lence. Even street rules d ­ on’t rule the street. Between Fort’s first conviction as an adult and the pres­ent moment, the incarcerated population in the United States has massively expanded. More than two million p ­ eople are incarcerated in this country, including ­those in jails, prisons, and detention and deportation centers. The mechanics of incarceration are technologically sophisticated, as well as brutally old-­fashioned; they range from digital surveillance to beating and torture. And the reach of the system includes not just p ­ eople who are and ­were incarcerated but also their families and communities. ­Under the logic of law and order and public safety, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And while the number of ­people literally ­behind bars has slowly decreased in recent years, the number u ­ nder state supervision, including the formerly incarcerated, grows. Jose Padilla followed in Fort’s footsteps. A generation younger, Padilla was born in 1970 in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents who had moved the ­family to Chicago when he was a child. As a teenager, from 1985 to 1988, Padilla was incarcerated at the same State Training School as Fort (the fa­cil­i­ty is now known as the Illinois Youth Center–­St. Charles).18 Padilla joined a Chicago gang in his youth, the Latin Kings, and was incarcerated 158 chapter five

multiple times as a result. Like Fort, he underwent a conversion to Islam during one of his sentences. This conversion led him to study in Pakistan. Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, in May 8, 2002, as he returned from Pakistan. He was held for months as a material witness to an alleged plot to set off dirty bombs in the United States. Although no ­actual bombs w ­ ere identified, Padilla was ­later designated an e­ nemy combatant in the midst of the post-9/11 panic and the presidency of George W. Bush. Padilla was tortured during his three-­and-­a-­half-­year detainment in a military brig. Prolonged periods of solitude and sensory deprivation of the sort he experienced are psychologically damaging and even debilitating.19 Attorneys working on Padilla’s behalf petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court ­under a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the president had v­ iolated the federal Non-­Detention Act, providing that no citizen may be imprisoned or detained by the U.S. military ­unless that action is pursuant to an act of Congress. Padilla’s attorney argued that the post-9/11 legislation authorizing military force did not include the detention of U.S. citizens. The court ­didn’t decide on the issue, arguing that the case should have been brought to a South Carolina District Court, and therefore the habeas petition was improperly filed.20 Before that case proceeded, the Bush administration indicted Padilla on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim ­people overseas. He was moved from the military brig to a prison and went to trial on t­ hose charges. The resolution of that case was a conviction and sentence of seventeen years and four months. Padilla’s attorneys ­were not allowed to introduce evidence of his torture while in the military brig at his criminal trial. Incarceration was once ­imagined as a more humane alternative to the physical vio­lence of older forms of punishment at the hands of sovereign authority. But currently it is a system defined by vio­lence as well as containment. William Penn philosophized that solitude in the penitentiary, named ­after him, would allow for spiritual redemption. Instead, solitary confinement is one of many forms of torture that are commonplace in carceral facilities. It is the ultimate removal from both markets and sociality. Yet neoliberal economic policies exist in robust form throughout the system. ­There are private prisons, of course, but t­ here are also private corporations that supply food and clothes and supplies for the incarcerated, and at wages that are far below the market level (and well below the minimum wage), prisoners “work” ­under coerced conditions. In the exception provided by the Thirteenth Amendment, the prison is a legally sanctioned place of slave ­labor, as well as abuse. S ticks B roken at the R iver  159

Another way to think of this is that the prison is one site of an industry of deprivation. Consumption occurs on a continuum, from subsistence to modest cheap goods to luxury items. But ­there are also systems of being used for the sake of consumption, of laboring to serve consumption, that take place on a continuum from total exploitation to well-­remunerated expertise. The incarcerated are exploited, taken from, but also consumers of goods, and residents of edifices marked as inferior or appropriate for a state of relative deprivation (not unlike work­houses) suited for consumption ­under conditions of deprivation: of air, of nature, of mobility, of escape. The stuff that goes to the confined, and that is produced for the confined, is stamped with the imprimatur of “less than.” ­There are differences between the bareness of subsistence poverty, particularly in poor nations, and the poverty of the poor in wealthy consumerist nations that is produced by industries of deprivation, where the detritus of commodity artifacts and the cheaply produced and polluted accumulate around the “least of ­these” who are both defined and constrained by deprived productions. In this way we can see that the market of neoliberalism at once is never ending but has vari­ous points of capture where one is not just functionally unfree but literally so. Ending up in prison in the United States is overwhelmingly a consequence of existing in the high-­risk gray zones of the neoliberal economy. In ­these places, the competitive imperative is heightened even further by relatively minimal marketability, yet it takes place in the midst of the gray economy—­“off the books,” as it w ­ ere—­among p ­ eople with marginal or nonpersonhood status. Being out of the control or authority of the state, or engaging in work that is ­either out of recognition or understood as threatening to its policies, makes one subject to the force of the security state. In other words, prisons are full of entrepreneurs. The terrain on which ­those who wind up in prison do their high-­risk work is generally filled with ­people who are considered fungible by power­ ful states on both sides of global conflicts. They are the ones most subject to school suspensions and expulsions, to juvenile detention facilities and deportation, to child removal. They are cast out over and over again. “Casting out” is a mode of maintaining security and order. It humiliates and trains disaffection between t­ hose inside and t­ hose pushed out. And outside the city walls, as it w ­ ere, life is more dangerous. It is the unsafe zone b ­ ecause the security forces often can act with greater impunity ­under the cover of night, outside bureaucratic structures or institutional rights regimes. Standing outside, as it w ­ ere, places one repeatedly in confrontation with the prospect of vio­lence.

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The vulnerable of the gray zones, the vulnerable of the vulnerable, are subject to the manipulation of gangsters like Fort and his fellows, as well as predatory lenders and landlords. They are subject to the whims of agents of the police power, from cops and judges to wardens. They are subject to the vexations at the intersection between the dominant patriarchal order and the patriarchy seekers. Much of their suffering comes through the administrative work of institutional authority. The structures of ­social ser­vices and education, and even the importation of social science into policing, assert a desire to reduce physical vio­lence and maintain order, but they also rest on punitive bureaucratic structures that, while ­reducing the immediate brutality of certain forms of vio­lence, often by patriarchy seekers, do overwhelmingly still fall into the logic of patriarchal order and domination. ­Children, for example, are appropriately removed from ­violent homes, but, ­because of disinvestment in the poor and b ­ ecause vulnerable safe alternatives often remain elusive, the vulnerability of the loved ones from whom they may be separated persists.21 That some of the administrative social ser­vice roles are feminized complicates the ­matter. Social workers, social ser­vice agents, and school resource officers do not simply do care work. They also do security work. They sort p ­ eople out for punishment. Yet they are made fungible, too, forced into competition with other privatized agencies, and they are overworked and undercompensated as a result. Th ­ ese ser­vice providers are supposed to be softer and gentler than police, but their work is often ancillary to police work. They must report, knowing that reporting too often leads to punishment rather than treatment. They become liege to the patriarch, structurally, and with tender expression they are to exercise his authority, as well. Their work is the cult of true womanhood re­imagined for the twenty-­first ­century. At the same time, ­behind ­these gentler façades, brutal vio­lence threatens. ­There is the school resource officer who throws a child up against a wall and handcuffs her. ­There is the child predator who lives in the foster home. Among the ­others who are subject to state power, t­ here is the man who beats his pregnant girlfriend. ­There is the priest or minister who, instead of ministering to the poor child, exploits him or her. ­There lie the victims of layers of patriarchal power and desire. ­There are entire groups of p ­ eople who occupy spheres betwixt and between neoliberalism and the status of personhood. They are the ones who have part-­time employment, unemployment, and underemployment in off-­the-­books markets and marketplaces, cobbling together a way to live and living in deep precarity ­doing what p ­ eople must do to survive ­under the thumb of the security state. While we are all in some ways caught in

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its matrix, only some of us experience its full terror. The most vulnerable in poor gray economic zones far outnumber drug dealers, hustlers, and predators who may achieve some modest, fleeting success at aspirational patriarchy. Among the most vulnerable are w ­ omen, men, and c­ hildren. ­These residents of the poorest communities experience the highest rates of sexual vio­lence, of debilitating illness, of premature death. Their lot is “collateral damage” caught in the crossfire, both literally and structurally. Saying this does not mean that it is acceptable to create a false equivalence. Gang leaders, even the most successful, do not have as much power and certainly cannot mete out nearly as much suffering as Congress and local elected officials. The distribution of harm between the law-­abiding and the lawless dominators is not equal. ­Legal vio­lence is always greater. But it is nevertheless essential to consider how domination is consistently layered by the aspiration to, the ideological commitment to, and the social imperatives of patriarchy ­because we need the aspirants to move to the side of liberation. Likewise, we should notice that socialist or other­wise eco­nom­ically redistributive philosophies may entail patriarchal commitments just as capitalism does, notwithstanding the long tradition of feminism in socialist thought. While the concentration of economic power at the top so characteristic of capitalism leads to greater suffering for a greater number of ­people, re­distribution itself is no salvo against patriarchy in the private or po­liti­cal domain; nor is being a victim of traditional patriarchal domination a guarantee of a liberatory imagination. That is an aside, although I think it is an impor­tant one. The larger point is that the logic of patriarchy is a competitive one that travels from the poor to the rich, from the lawful to the “lawless.” The logic of patriarchy amplifies death and death worlds, repeats them and generally distributes death and suffering based upon relative vulnerability, and must be challenged as such. This can be counterintuitive. We are not generally socialized to see the “lawful” exercise of patriarchal authority in the same way as we do the lawless—­that is, Fort is in prison; George W. Bush is f­ ree. Yet if we read the layers of domination, the ideological similarity is uncanny. Fort breached a border beyond which his form of patriarchy could not be recognized. Borders—­both t­ hose instituted by social order and literal geographic ones—­are strong determinants of punishment and praise. ­Today, walls and borders remain the symbols of sovereignty even as sovereignty has transformed. Wendy Brown elucidates this: states are new forms of governmentality producing who the “we” is: who’s in, who’s out, who’s needed, who’s not needed, identities that are 162 chapter five

racialized, ethnicized, and “religionized,” sometimes in incoherent yet consequential ways. For example, in US post-911 discourse, ­there is a constant interchangeability between the dark, the Islamic, the Arab and the M ­ iddle Eastern that scrambles who p ­ eople actually are. So yes, ­there are ­these new forms of governmentality and securitization, and ­there is an intersection between what happens at the borders and what happens within. Th ­ ere are forms of policing, securitizing, categorizing and identity-­making that saturate the internal lives of nations engaged in them, and that do not just happen at their borders. All this is very impor­tant.22 Borders w ­ ere always porous, although they are more so now. For centuries, Western nations, to maintain patriarchy and domination, have depended on the movement and ­labor of ­people who ­were outside recognition, ­whether through the transatlantic slave trade or peonage or the importation of sex workers for ­labor camps. In ­these dominated bodies, capital traveled. Borders, furthermore, are literal but also categorical, marking who belongs where, who is acknowledged as a participant with rights and protections, and who is subject to power but no protection. Woodlawn itself, the neighborhood in which Fort first moved when he came north, was the product of borders that limited Black Chicagoans due to private property contracts referred to as racially restrictive covenants. He became a criminal ­because he breached the rules of a range of borders. Military intervention that is termed “humanitarian,” even when intended to quell the horrific patriarchal be­hav­ior of ­people in power in foreign nations, is engaged in according to patriarchal logics (i.e., the United States as a government behaves as though it is the world’s ­daddy). It demands subordination and does so through bigger weapons and practices of confinement/containment. For example, in Af­ghan­i­stan ­after 9/11, the U.S.-­led intervention initially was justified in terms of self-­defense. But ­after the Taliban was defeated in Kabul and skepticism grew among the American public regarding the intervention, given that the 9/11 attackers ­didn’t hail from Af­ghan­i­stan, the public conversation shifted to a focus on the patriarchy of the Taliban and the humanitarian assistance offered to Afghanis—in par­tic­u­lar, girls and w ­ omen. A number of critics, most notably Jasbir Puar, have noticed how an emphasis on gender oppression has been used as a justification for U.S. interventionism. However, what I am interested in focusing on is less a revelation of the true motives of American intervention ­under the guise of “feminism” or the inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex and Asexual (lgbtqia) ­people and communities, although that is certainly an impor­tant point S ticks B roken at the R iver  163

to make. Rather, the point h ­ ere is a contracted conception of feminism that, u ­ nder the banner of “democracy” or “lawfulness,” masquerades as one of the most power­ful forms of global patriarchy. The manner in which the United States has treated ­those termed “­enemy combatants,” such as Padilla, reveals a ­great deal about the patriarchal sensibilities of global politics. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s book Guantánamo Diary recounts the story of his detention as an e­ nemy combatant on the island military prison.23 A Muslim Mauritanian, Slahi joined the mujahideen in Af­ghan­is­tan in 1990  in their fight against the communist-­controlled government. At that point, the United States supported the mujahideen. Slahi trained with al-­Qaeda. He disputes the timeline of his ties with al-­Qaeda that has been reported by the U.S. government. The U.S. government maintains that he kept his affiliation beyond the point at which relations had deteriorated between the United States and the mujahideen. He claims his relationship with them ended in the early 1990s. In ­either instance, he was questioned about a plot against the U.S. government in November 2001 and detained for seven days. Then Slahi was sent by the cia to a “black site” in Jordan, where he was held for eight months. He reports that he was tortured t­ here. Subsequently he was flown to Af­ghan­ i­stan for two weeks and fi­nally sent to Guantánamo Bay in August 2002. Slahi describes long interrogations and beatings that left him bloody and struggling to breathe, as well as sexual assault by two w ­ omen at Guantánamo. Similarly, Majid Khan, now a witness cooperating with the government, was captured in Pakistan and held at a cia black site from 2003 to 2006. Khan said interrogators poured ice w ­ ater on his genitals, twice videotaped him naked, and repeatedly touched his “private parts.” Sexual assault and other forms of physical brutality are part of the arsenal of the patriarchal police power of the United States in its encounters with ­those deemed enemies. And black sites where such vio­lence occurs are found not only abroad; they are h ­ ere in the United States, as well. In Chicago, at an interrogation site called “Homan Square,” city police have “dis­appeared” more than seven thousand p ­ eople, the vast majority of whom ­were Black.24 The procedures ­were not recorded in any public databases. ­Lawyers and families ­were not informed of the whereabouts of ­those held. ­Those detained ­were not formally booked. Their captivity was “off the books.” ­There ­were also reports of sexual assault of the detained by police at Homan Square. Angel Perez, one of the detainees, described police saying to him, “­They’re gonna think ­you’re a ­little sexy bitch in jail. . . . ​I hear that a big black nigger dick feels like a gun up your ass.” Further, as Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian reported, 164 chapter five

Perez claims he was bent over in front of the bench and a piece of detritus. He recalled smelling urine and seeing bloodstains in the room. The police officers pulled his shirt up and slowly moved a metallic object down his bare skin. Then they pulled his pants down. “He’s talking all this sexual stuff, he’s r­ eally getting fucking weird about it, too,” Perez stated. He began shaking, the beginnings of a panic attack. “They get down to where t­ hey’re gonna insert it, this is where I feel that it’s something around my rear end, and he said some stupid comment and then he jammed it in ­there and I started jerking and g­ oing all crazy—­I think I kicked him—­and I just go into a full-­blown panic attack. . . . ​The damage it caused, it pretty much swole my rear end like a baboon’s butt.”25 The police l­ ater informed Angel that they had raped him with a handgun. Guantánamo Bay, cia black sites, and prisons exist along a continuum of confinement. Being confined and contained marks one as having slipped from the vulnerable margins of neoliberal marketplaces fully into the condition of nonpersonhood. Capture means you become a commodity as well as a commodity producer. You are traded instead of trading. If we think of the forms of domination, including physical and social constraint in confined spaces, rape, subjugation, ritualized vio­lence without sanctuary, and formal nonpersonhood, it is evident that ­these are zones inherited from conventional patriarchal domination. Then and now, we cannot be too quick to make ­simple analogies between the domination experienced by the lady and the domination experienced by the nonperson, although they are related. The prevalence of sexual assault and domestic vio­lence in the lives of even affluent w ­ omen reveals that domination still travels from top to bottom. Each of us bears a relationship to the patriarch, ­whether inside or outside of personhood, w ­ hether inside or outside of the domestic arena, that is many generations old and worthy of structural consideration. The h ­ ouse is ­imagined as a zone of protection, but it can be so only insofar as it protects its residents from t­hose other than the assigned party who has dominion over them. Th ­ ose outside of the ­house go without it altogether. Public law and f­ amily law have muted some of the harshness of this real­ity, but that safety is the product of the apparatus of the security state. Even when U.S. law rejects vio­lence, it relies on it. One of the greatest perceived gains of what has been termed by Janet Halley and o ­ thers “governance feminism” has been how some feminist concerns have been integrated into the law, in par­tic­u­lar into criminal law.26 Simply put, governance feminism has been successfully operationalized S ticks B roken at the R iver  165

through fines, courts, and imprisonment. The Vio­lence against W ­ omen Act (vawa) of 1994 provided more than a billion dollars for investigation and prosecution of violent acts against ­women. Renewals of the act have been subject to ideological b ­ attles between liberals, moderates, and conservatives over the inclusion of gender identity and same-­gender c­ ouples, as well as the scope of protection against traditional forms of patriarchal dominion. However, the act stands as of this writing. While it includes impor­tant provisions to support community-­based organ­izations working against gender-­based and domestic vio­lence, its banner achievement is criminalization. It extends the scope of criminal penalties with provisions such as increased pretrial detention and mandatory hiv testing that, like the crime bill to which it was attached, disproportionately punish ­people in poor communities of color.27 It is well established that the crime bill increased mass-­incarceration dramatically, and it has been widely criticized for that. But the Vio­lence against ­Women Act has not had similarly widespread critique from the left for the way it incorporates feminist language into carceral logics. A notable exception to this silence has been the growth of a community of self-­identified anti-­carceral feminists. But their voices are given relatively short shrift in the spectrum of what is concerned feminist thought and organ­izing. This re­sis­tance to anti-­carcerality is due in part to the fact that domestic vio­lence is often literally a life-­or-­death issue. Abusers who continue to have access to intimate partners that they have abused often escalate their vio­lence, notwithstanding state intervention. Locking up abusers saves lives. Domestic vio­lence and sexual assault are commonplace practices. They are a dimension of “collateral patriarchy,” meaning a practice of abuse and domination that ­doesn’t require property or personhood or even the protection of the sovereign but finds its ideological root in the idea of the patriarchal figure having dominion over ­others. ­These practices of collateral patriarchy range from sexism to the kind of devastating vio­lence that vawa attempted to address. Hence, I d ­ on’t want to diminish the seriousness of circumstances that led to vawa or the usefulness of the ser­vices it provides (rape counseling, housing assistance); rather I want to posit that we have to seriously interrogate the po­ liti­cal and juridical structure of such laws. We have to disrobe the fiction ­behind governance feminism that the integration of feminist ­causes into ­causes of action actually works (­there is thus far no empirical evidence as to the efficacy of vawa in reducing domestic vio­lence and sexual assault) and we have to question why even its best provisions are rooted in a ser­vices model, which, as previously described, is plagued by market-­

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based precarity for ser­vice providers, rather than a rights-­based model (to housing, to food, to livelihood). Another question regarding the model is pressing: Why is this expression, as well as most other expressions, of governance feminism dependent on a system of punishment mired in patriarchal domination? Policing and prisons are sites for the reproduction and repetition of gendered forms of vio­lence, and given the frequency of sexual assault and other physical abuse of prisoners, it is clear that prisons are some of the most power­ful iterations of patriarchal state vio­lence. Given the high rates of domestic vio­lence perpetrated by police officers, the relation between the collateral patriarchy of intimate association and the patriarchy of the state o ­ ught to be evident. When I refer to incarceration as a site of gendered vio­lence, I should be clear: I am not speaking about the par­tic­u­lar gender identification per se of the person experiencing the vio­lence, although gender expression certainly is a key in prison, as elsewhere, to who is subjected to the most vio­lence (hence the constant and horrific jokes about rape in prison; the greater vulnerability of queer men and trans p ­ eople in prison; and even the per­sis­tent criminalization of sexuality via statutes that criminalize hiv).28 Rather, I mean for the term “gendered vio­lence” to refer to all of the ways relationships entail forms of vio­lence based on conceptions of classic gender binaries: weak–­strong, female or feminized–­male or masculinized, submissive–­dominant, and, ultimately, fucked–­fucker. While this inquiry ­doesn’t mean that vawa ­ought to be struck down, it does challenge the scope of the “victory” it claims. Like war zones, prisons, black sites, and gray zones are sites where the law often fails to protect but where capital and arms move p ­ eople around, trade them, and trade over them (part of the logic of zones of non­­personhood); domination is stacked ­there, and the deck is stacked against every­one. This is the zone where the weapons are fired by t­ hose deemed “the law” as well as the lawless. The order of domination is raw. The rules are blunt instruments, capturing the vulnerable ­whether they are seeking patriarchy and threatening it or not. Partly b ­ ecause the religion of the market and governance has diminished sovereignty as a central framework, it is challenging to describe the precise contours of the slippery slope from the gray economy to incarceration. Segregation laws and laws against w ­ omen owning property are gone. Yet the forces of policing and surveillance and the staging of competitive markets create vulnerability and set the stage for society to abandon any modicum of recognition for millions of p ­ eople. Even t­ hose who ­were once agents of the security state may fall. No better evidence exists of this

S ticks B roken at the R iver  167

than the plight of disabled veterans. Th ­ ose who have done the work of the United States abroad, who have literally fired the weapons and asserted the domination, often return to this nation and find themselves living in the gaps, underemployed, addicted, homeless, and vulnerable to the ravages of the street. Their bodies are no longer scaffolded with ­legal weapons and therefore are subject to deprivation and deterioration.29 Another potent example is found in the emptiness of criminal procedure t­ oday, as more than 90 ­percent of U.S. criminal defendants do not have an a­ ctual trial.30 Their cases are not subjected to deliberation and truth seeking; instead, they overwhelmingly plead out. They are convicted u ­ nder threat of the power of the state. Or we could turn to another example in how c­ hildren who have been abused can be, and sometimes are, sent to juvenile facilities when ­there is nowhere ­else to ­house them. ­People can easily slip out of a brutal market and into nonpersonhood. Race, poverty, and being “without papers” (i.e., lacking official documentation that mark one as belonging to a state and having rights, domestically and/or globally) are obviously major determinants to this status. But the status of nonpersonhood is also central to the logic of gendering. It is to be outside of patriarchy and its protections, despite the fact that experiencing nonpersonhood does not necessarily diminish patriarchal desire. In fact it often heightens such ambitions. ­After all, patriarchy is the way to win. Being caught ­under multiple layers of domination has some of the most devastating effects. As stated earlier, transwomen, who, due in significant part to discrimination in employment and education and the categorical exclusions of state and social institutions, often find themselves employed in sex work and heavi­ly subject to the wide scope of domination by criminal law, including laws that are often used to target them (such as statutes that allow police to arrest ­people ­under the assumption that they are engaged in sex work). Transwomen—­particularly poor transwomen of color—as a group are largely relegated in the United States to the terrain of unrecognized and unacknowledged desire. In the zone of sex work they are placed outside the law, subject to police vio­lence (like sex workers as a ­whole, they frequently report sexual harassment and assault at the hands of police), as well as to that of johns and passersby, without sanctuary or remedy. Cece McDonald, one of the few Black transwomen whose stories have been widely shared in popu­lar media, defended herself from assault outside a bar one night.31 She was threatened. She stabbed her assailant in fear. He ­later died from the wounds. Her attorney argued that Cece was acting in self-­defense, and with a reasonable fear of serious harm. We need

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only look to the staggering data around the murder of transwomen of color to understand how this was a reasonable fear. McDonald was offered a plea bargain by the prosecutor. The second degree murder charge brought against McDonald was plead down to second degree manslaughter, for which she was required to admit criminal negligence rather than murder. The deal entailed a forty-­one-­month sentence. During that time, McDonald, a w ­ oman, was h ­ oused in two men’s prisons. She was violently caged by the state. As activists who worked with McDonald to draw attention to her case and to fight against her prosecution argued, she, like so many transwomen, experienced inordinate punishment as a result of a gender identity that could not be easily divorced from the act for which she was punished. W ­ ere transwomen of color not ­under such threat, ­were this not a nation teeming with vio­lence and weapons, perhaps McDonald ­wouldn’t have needed to walk around with a knife. By locking her in a men’s prison, the state extended the society’s transphobic vio­lence. The logic of punishment around gender and sexuality in our society has always been a species of patriarchy, and even as feminist goals are imported into some aspects of it, the structure of domination undergirding it persists. The prison system gave McDonald her hormones to maintain her chosen physical expression of her gender yet h ­ oused her in a men’s fa­cil­i­ty, a punishment for and rejection of her identity. It was a concession to one aspect of expression alongside an act of violent social ordering, exclusion, and enclosure that ensured a literal institutionalization of rape, an old practice in a new form. This is all of a piece. The steps in the story are of a piece, but the story is also of a piece with the history of gendering. All of this indicates that feminist readers must be skeptical of the ease with which we might identify and ­either condemn or justify vio­ lence as “illegal” or “­legal” or in our interests or not. Reading as a feminist requires more care. ­There was a much larger public outcry when the world witnessed military-­grade weapons being used in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Nonviolent protests in response to a police officer’s killing of a young Black man named Mike Brown prompted police to use weapons that the military uses in official war zones. This was horrifying news, but it ­wasn’t new. The use of military-­grade weapons on poor and Black domestic populations in the United States had been g­ oing on for well over a de­cade, and not only by police. Arms markets had been siphoning military weaponry into civilian hands long before. ­Those who paid attention to the news in the 1990s ­will recall the discussions about assault ­rifles making their way into the

S ticks B roken at the R iver  169

hands of gang members in poor communities through the underground arms market. That moral panic was swift, and the carceral logic rained down on the low-­level assailants. Yet police, even in the aftermath of Mike Brown and hundreds upon hundreds of killings of unarmed civilians, continue to act with impunity. It is so basic it almost ­doesn’t bear repeating to say that guns are masculinist. They are the crudest, yet some of the most basic, tools of patriarchy. They are used to protect property, dominion, and territory. Usually, the one who holds the biggest weapons, and the keys to the prison, can enact the greatest domination. What I hope to emphasize ­here is that ­whether it is the gangbanger or the state who has the weapons, in both instances the weapons are tools for domination and for the exercise of patriarchy— or, at best (or least), to protect oneself against such domination. While for the most power­ful ­these weapons are tools to maintain domination, for aspirational patriarchs they represent an effort to wrest some of the domination away, to save oneself and one’s ­family from being swallowed up by the ravages of market forces. Regardless, ­those who exist ­under the most layers of domination suffer most from the click and the blast.

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interlude 2

RETURNING TO THE W ITCHE S ... In her classic essay A Room of One’s Own, V ­ irginia Woolf meditates on the following question from the perspective of an upper-­class En­glish lady in 1929: What does it take for a ­woman to write? Her scope of concern was narrower than what we scholars mean by “­woman” in twenty-­first-­century feminist criticism, but Woolf’s question remains relevant in many ways, especially as the group of ­people who translate ideas into letters ­isn’t as diverse as our publics. Even t­ oday, the weight of the history of letters tilts to elite men. In developing her answer, Woolf notes the suggestive gestures of the past that w ­ omen would-be writers and thinkers left us to find. She unearths an archive of the unwritten writer, of the creation not actualized. In that section, she speaks of witches: Genius of a sort must have existed among ­women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a ­woman possessed by dev­ils, of a wise w ­ oman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a ­mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.1 Woolf resolves the prob­lem of a w ­ oman writing by recommending the accoutrements of patriarchy: a room (spatial control with a lock on the door, both property and sovereignty of a sort, and personhood as recognition as the property holder) and ongoing monetary resources. For her, the witches ­were the product of frustrated possibility that could be realized with inclusion. Even their “incandescence,” as she describes it, is hopeful only as part of the pathway to recognition. But I want to stay

with her witches, and o ­ thers, where they are—to sit with their fact, and its frustration. I want to reject the implied Cartesian anxiety regarding the gap between their minds and bodies, ­because the witches are not simply about stagnation but about witnessing something unseen and yet seen, haunting yet deeply felt. Unlike Woolf, I do not want to focus on how injustice leads to misguided or stagnant creative energy. I am ­doing a compensatory reading instead, using that term as i­magined by Thadious Davis.2 Witches ­were more than what they failed to be or w ­ ere excluded from. They bent the naturalized landscape. They had transformative power. The conditions of what we accept as normal, the logic that dominates our understanding, was disrupted by their magic. So I am asking that we rest our thoughts, at least for a moment, on their symbolic value for feminist thought. In this book, they carry us across the bridge from the first two sections, which offer descriptive readings of conditions and structures that create, sustain, and extent patriarchy, to the final section, which moves through an imaginative landscape in which we might ignite the capacity to make our way out from ­under the force of patriarchy on our minds and ­will. We find an echo of Woolf in Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our M ­ others’ Gardens” some fifty years l­ater.3 In that essay, she describes the gardens of Black Southern ­women as the lens for seeing the artist’s soul among ­those denied that category in the social worlds in which they existed: They stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hope. In the selfless abstractions their bodies became to the men who used them, they became more than “sexual objects,” more even than mere ­women: they became Saints. Instead of being perceived as ­whole persons, their bodies became shrines: what was thought to be their minds became t­ emples suitable for worship. Th ­ ese crazy “Saints” stared out at the world, wildly, like lunatics—or quietly, like suicides; and the “God” that was in their gaze was as mute as a ­great stone. Who ­were ­these “Saints”? ­These crazy, loony, pitiful w ­ omen? Some of them, without a doubt, ­were our ­mothers and grand­mothers. In the still heat of the Post-­Reconstruction South, this is how they seemed to Jean Toomer: exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey, toiling away their lives in an era, a c­ entury, that did not acknowledge them, except as “the mule of the world.” They dreamed dreams that no one knew—­not even themselves, in any coherent fashion—­and saw visions no one could understand. They wandered or sat about the 172 interlude two

countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the ­mother of Christ in charcoal on court­house walls. They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay. And when ­those frail whirlwinds fell, in scattered particles, upon the ground, no one mourned. Instead, men lit candies to celebrate the emptiness that remained, as p ­ eople do who enter a beautiful but vacant 4 space to resurrect a God. Walker’s witches, Saints, and grand­mothers ­were unbound from their vestibularity. They could see beyond it, fly above it, and scatter themselves. Par­tic­u­lar and vestigial, being windswept is not a theory; it is an encounter. As Jacques Rancière says, “Art is a work on the distribution of the sensible. Sometimes, but not very often, it rearranges the set of perception between what is vis­i­ble, thinkable, and understandable, and what is not. This is the politics of art.”5 ­These witch-­artists, as Walker named them, preserved a semblance of self through diffusion and rearrangement. We began this book with the practice of reading through layers. We now turn to their tradition of rearrangements and a dedicated witnessing of their legacy. From Erica Jong’s Witches through Maha Marouan’s “Witches, Goddesses and Angry Spirits” and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Sula, and Song of Solomon, many feminist thinkers have looked to the trope and magic of the witch to enable us to do this.6 Walker, in this tradition and unlike Woolf, does not seek ultimately to make the w ­ oman artist a patriarch, but she claims a dif­fer­ent designation for the witch/saint and that is simply “artist.” With a slight modification of Walker, the sense of art as living and art as an opening, more than the status of the artist herself, is the register sought in ­these pages. Bewitching creative energy appears in Jamaica Kincaid’s story “In The Night,” in which a Ca­rib­bean girl dreams of growing up to marry a “red skin ­woman with black bramblebrush hair and brown eyes, who wears skirts that are so big that I can easily bury my head in them.”7 She does not bear the designation artist, but her i­magined life is a creative and liberating one. This deep queer yearning occurs in a small place at the crossroads of race, gender, sexuality, and empire. Thus, she breathes in a matrix, and like the flowers in her midst, she is ­shaped by the beings, earth, air and sea, growing and living, alternately pruned and reckless. Caught in an underbrush, she and her home are vexed. Writing of her environs and their mirroring effect, Kincaid says, “In the night the flowers close up and thicken. The hibiscus flowers, the flamboyant flowers, the Returning to the W itches  173

bachelor’s buttons . . . ​the flowers on the dumps tree, the flowers on the papaw tree, the flowers everywhere close up and thicken. The flowers are vexed.”8 Kincaid’s girl has yearnings that chafe against all maternal efforts to discipline her according to gender rules that threatened to fail her sense of herself. This analogy to nature is extended. At night in the Ca­rib­bean, the flowers are vexed, unlike the flowers in the tamed En­glish garden. On the small island, duppies—­legal nonpersons, as Colin Dayan describes them in The Law Is a White Dog—­literal nonhumans but as alive as anyone ­else walk among the wild flowers. They do the same in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, where they haunt the protagonist Jadine, with her bourgeois perfection and affectations. They ­settle past scores; remind us of their presence. We are drawn into their spells, and that is not simply an intoxication, it is also an argument. Alive, vexed, bewitching, and intoxicating argument is the work of witches. I should say, I like the imaginative conjuring of the term, but ­really they might be called something ­else. Language is contingent. We can use vocabularies to create endless meanings. The larger point is that in the gaps of the terms of order, dif­fer­ent relations can be created. This truth alone provokes a challenge to the oft-­presumed ideal of our given (and abstracted) po­liti­cal and ­legal order in the United States, with its formal terms and ­legal fictions. The witnessing of alternative grammars for the moral universes in the act of creativity, in art or witchcraft, is an invitation to think in dif­fer­ent ways. To me, most importantly, in the works discussed in the following chapters the alternative grammars push us beyond integrationist feminism that simply calls for inclusion in the po­liti­cal and intellectual grammars of Western personhood. It revives the radical feminist imaginary that stretches back through the twentieth ­century, nineteenth c­ entury, eigh­teenth ­century, seventeenth ­century, and further. This goes beyond seeking patriarchy, ladyhood, or personhood for more ­people. It goes beyond sovereign nations and property holding. Witches, unlike legislatures, do not prune. Their laboratories include not only the sum total of the natu­ral world but also the speculative one, including both past and pres­ent. That our bewitching foreparents w ­ ere punished and are gone, with no or minimal recognition, does not diminish their power to speak powerfully about the world in ways that transcend the immediate and reach from the specific to the philosophical and theoretical. Nor does it prevent us from situating our thoughts and feelings in their tradition. Phi­ los­op ­ her Susan Bordo describes the Cartesian anxiety that plagues so

174 interlude two

much of continental philosophy as deriving in part from a fear of the messy natu­ral world, with all of its decay and contingency that undoes the structure we try to impose to describe, sort, and capture it.9 But a willingness to be of and inside the messy world is a signature of both witchcraft and art. This is where we have to sit. As described in the previous interlude, the twentieth-­century history of the politics of inclusion in the United States demanded a set of performative gestures. ­These gestures initiated the pro­cess of extending the ­legal imagination in both literal and abstract terms to include “­others” and to respond to the vio­lence of injustices. Of course, as necessary as we generally understand such proj­ects to be, they have also been met with some ambivalence by t­ hose who doubt the decency of the basic l­ egal and economic structure of the United States, who raise questions about its categories and assumptions as well as its rules, about the value of integrating into a burning ­house. By invoking witches, I am ­suggesting we sit with that ambivalence. Implicitly, it is also a move away from the external account of monstrosity to the recognition of willfulness in the witch. The witches are engaged in d ­ oings that are challenging; they are presenting ideas and ­orders that threaten to open up the dominant logic, shift the terrain of what is regarded as mattering. The point, then, is not wholly or even mostly about the designated (by self or other) witch. It is about recuperating the energy signified by the witch, restoring it to our social and po­liti­cal imaginary. Hence, an invocation of witches is more than anything a door opening. Patriarchy is made of personhood, sovereignty, and property. This entails laws and citizenship and nation-­states. But land and flesh have remained feminine and feminized. The witches’ relationship to the natu­ral world and the ­human community resists the ­disciplining forces of patriarchy as the ultimate arbiter of ethics and values. Choices, interpretations, actions of “witches” are always contingent on something beyond the dominant structure and order—­something vital; something intellectual and sensual at once; something emotional and affective. The meta­phorical realm of witches, and that of their literal descendants, restores the fullness of the senses and sensibilities. As Karl Marx wrote, “One sees. One must see, at first sight, what does not let ­itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself. For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible.”10 Ultimately, this haunting of the unseen, the sensorium that ­isn’t immediately evident according to the conventions of “visibility” or “recognition” for Marx’s purposes, had a rather choate form that he applied to deconstruct capitalism. I am suggesting something with less form

Returning to the W itches  175

than his. I am suggesting something closer to Martin Jay’s rendering of why the discipline of philosophy turned to novels: that art could name truth and allow phi­los­o­phers to serve as imaginary witnesses.11 The slippage ­here, from witchcraft to art making, is intentional. Each is a partial name for the same ­thing: creative living work that is communal and soulful at the same time.

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chapter 6

UNM AKING THE TERRITORY AND  REM APPING  THE  LANDS CA PE ... Write into the emotion. Not away from it. Write into the wound. Not away from it. Write into the joy. Not away from it. Write into the scar. Not away from it. Write into the height. Not away from it. Write into the love. Not away from it. Not away from it. Not away from it. Write into it. Nayyirah Waheed, “Untitled”

The poem is about destinations and directions. The mapping Waheed calls for is ­toward emotion and reckoning, and away from dispassion. Implicit in this call is a rejection of the fictions of objectivity and reason that are used to hold up the (purportedly) abstract princi­ples that shape our world such as law, citizenship, and geography. The writing she prescribes is a corrective to the coercive ­legal word of Robert Cover’s classic account.1 Instead, she incants a form of scribing that disrobes injury and recognizes the wounded. Waheed emotionally maps suffering, as well as joy, and encourages us to do the same. The science of geographic mapmaking is embedded in empire and modernity. Cartography developed rapidly during the age of conquest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Prints made from engraved copper plates and globes showed coastlines, bodies of ­water, and navigation aids to be used for commerce, military expeditions, and expansion. Amer­i­ca,

as a geographic and po­liti­cal location, was designated as such by Martin Waldseemüller’s w ­ hole world map of 1507 based on the letters of Amerigo Vespucci. It is believed to be the first to depict the entire earth. Cartography was and is a necessary exercise for establishing sovereignty. Textually and visually it marks owner­ship, established or prospective, and it guides movement, including invasion. It sorts and divides up the world into nation-­states. The map is imbricated with the ideas of property, both in the sense of belonging to and in the sense of detail regarding the properties of landmasses and bodies of w ­ ater so that they might be traversed, navigated, or used. Cartography makes sense of both the natu­ral and the constructed landscape and manages space. And, of course, maps are always po­liti­cal and subjective. The direction of the map, the choice of center, the axis taken, the naming of territory—­all of ­these decisions have ideological implications and yet it is also true that ­great care is taken with ­pursuing mathematical precision in their creation. For example, the geographer Halford Mackinder famously presented his “Heartland Theory” to the Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society in 1904, essentially arguing that Rus­sia and Central Asia ­were “the pivot of the world’s politics” and that controlling of the spatial pivot was necessary for control of the globe.2 This rather subjective theory influenced geopolitics for most of the twentieth ­century. Accuracy and contingency coexist. Sometimes the ideological contingency of mapping is such that two separate maps can give opposing senses of a single land mass. Take, for instance, the choice to place the United States, versus the African continent, at the center of a map. Or the question of scale (due to perspective, maps often make Africa appear smaller in relation to the West than it actually is). This puts me in mind of an exchange in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland between Alice and the Red Queen: “When you say ‘hill,’ ” the Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.” “No, I s­houldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill ­can’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—” The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”3 The queen may be using geography meta­phor­ically, echoing the hyperbolic language we use for emphasis—­that is, compared with a big hill that ­little hill is like a valley. Or perhaps she is speaking about perspective when it comes to repre­sen­ta­tion. If you turn a parabola upside down, it dips into the shape of a valley. Think about the visual confusion that is 178 chapter  six

created when, ­after years of looking at world maps drawn according to one perspective, you see another flipped upside down. What the queen says sounds like nonsense, but it may not be at all. Maps are contingent and po­liti­cal. Consider again the first chapter of this book, and Boazio’s map that depicted Drake’s pillaging, and the second chapter of this book, in which the map in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was described as a rough guide to violent domination in the Congo F ­ ree State. We have witnessed mapping as a tool of the sovereign authority, and its agents, in the form of men-­cum-­patriarchs. It bears noting that every­thing that is mapped is at once a depiction of a relation between t­ hings and a repre­sen­ta­tion of t­ hings. As the world was mapped and named, so ­were its inhabitants classified as savage, noble and civilized. The idea of the darker races’ being inferior coincided with accounts of their geographies of origins in Western science, as did their conquest that depended on the technology of mapping. This technology, cartography, is continuously developed and contested. But still, each map, as a tool, mediates one’s engagement with a place by means of partial knowledge. It is necessarily bounded and selective. If it ­weren’t, the map ­wouldn’t be useful. It must weed out. It cannot account for every­thing. In another of Carroll’s works, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, a character named Mein Herr describes how cartographers in his country had developed their science of mapping bit by bit, starting at six inches to a mile, then moving to six feet to a mile, and on and on, u ­ ntil the map became so large that it threatened to block out the sun and destroy the crops. So they abandoned the venture. Mein Herr says, “We now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”4 That a map that includes every­thing is unusable, and yet a map that ­doesn’t include every­thing is to some extent inaccurate, is known as “Bonini’s Paradox.” The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges took up this interlude of Carroll’s in “On Exactitude in Science.”5 In that short story, a fictional character describes an empire that developed the science of cartography so far that “only a map of the same scale would suffice.” This map also suffered demise. He writes, “In time, ­those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who w ­ ere not so fond of the Study of Cartography, saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray ­under the Sun and winters. In the Deserts of the West, still t­ oday, ­there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land ­there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”6 R emapping   the  L andscape  179

Attempting to depict every­thing became in fact nothing. In an even more extreme literary example, the fictional diary “Tristram Shandy” depicts an effort to map out a single day, but the detail given is so g­ reat that it takes the writer a year to describe a single day.7 Again this is useless. And it threatens to lead us into infinite regress, ­because to map every­thing then includes mapping oneself mapping and a map of that ad infinitum. ­These writers invite a consideration of the absurdity of a certain kind of obsessive faith in “science” in the abstract, without a sense of purpose. It is impossibly silly to not have a purpose. So then we have to ask with each map: What was and is the purpose of such mapping, both intentional and implicit? The map is a tool; the point is not only or even primarily the fidelity of repre­sen­ta­tion but efficacy of the tool for making sense of the territory and distinguishing both from the organic land. We often hear p ­ eople repeat Alfred Korzybski’s dictum that “the map is not the territory,”8 meaning both that we ­mistake the repre­sen­ta­tion of something for the truth of a t­ hing (rather than choices about depiction) and obscure our own choices and power in the pro­cess. But perhaps we can avoid this failure. So I want to turn to the idea of maps as sites of contestation, as places for alternative imaginings and naming of relations and repre­sen­ta­tions. If the purpose of maps is to draw our attention to one set of t­ hings rather than another, in meta­phorical form of symbol or color or letters, to do something, then that something always has values and ethics attached to it, ­whether vis­i­ble or invisible. Values and ethics ­matter. Remapping terrain, history, and the body have been impor­tant means of challenging and even dismantling neo­co­lo­nial cartographies of ­human value. Further, alternative maps guide us to think deeply about and confront the ethics of what and who garners our attentions and commitments. In Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, one character stands as the “remapper”: Pilate Dead.9 Her name indicates this role. It is biblical, but her f­ ather chose it not in tribute to Pontius Pilate, the antihero who calls for the execution of Christ, but b ­ ecause of the beauty of the letters. It is a rec­ord of spatial visualization, not a reference. The homonym with Pi­lot indicates that she ­will be a guide rather than a destroyer. But “Pilate” is also in a sense in opposition to Christ and yet Christ-­like, too. Her opposition is to the patriarchal trinity, the recognized personhood of Chris­tian­ity—in the form not of a king but, rather, of one who might be slave. The mirror image, of Pontius Pilate and Pilate Dead, extends the biblical structure. And we find that the story of Pilate Dead, another sacrificial lamb, another prophet, in the body of the “nonperson” entails its own po­liti­cal theoretical claims. 180 chapter  six

Pilate drops out of school in the fourth grade despite excelling ­there, especially in geography. But she carries her geography book with her into adulthood and throughout the novel. When Pilate’s nephew Milkman first sees her, she has “one foot pointed east and one pointed west,” an echo of Revelations 10:2: “I saw another strong angel coming down out of heaven, clothed with a cloud; and the rainbow was upon his head, and his face was like the sun, and his feet like pillars of fire; and he had in his hand a ­little book which was open. He placed his right foot on the sea and his left on the land; and he cried out with a loud voice, as when a lion roars; and when he had cried out, the seven peals of thunder uttered their voices.”10 It is the first evidence of how Morrison creates Pilate as a navigational hero. While admittedly a novice geography expert, Pilate is the angel of revelations. She is like Odysseus (and similarly fallible), except that she wanders for twenty years rather than ten. But her heroism is decidedly nonpatriarchal. She stands in dramatic contrast to her ­brother, Macon, who obsessively acquires property and pursues “manhood” on the terms of the society that systematically excludes Black folks like them, and especially Black ­women like her. Pilate’s possessions are modest. Even her natal connection is invisible. She is born without an umbilical cord and climbs out of her ­mother’s womb like Athena from Zeus’s head. She is an outcast. As a mi­grant worker she is expelled from groups several times a­ fter her unusual body is discovered by fellow workers. Lovers leave Pilate (who loves bigger and wider than anyone) ­because her body frightens them. Morrison brilliantly places Pilate, a disabled Black ­woman akin to both Lydia and Anarcha and countless ­others, as the guide to decent h ­ uman relations in this novel. That she is cast out among outcasts pushes the question of injustice presented by her story beyond the relation between patriarchs and nonpersons, or aspirational patriarchs and t­ hose deemed less than them, beyond elites and the poor, to include relations at the most intimate level. At Pilate’s crossroads/conversion moment, ­after enduring so much cruelty, this is how her new philosophy is described: Although she was hampered by huge ignorances, but not in any way unintelligent, when she realized what her situation in the world was and would prob­ably always be, she threw away ­every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair. That was one ­thing she ­didn’t want to have to think about any more. Then she tackled the prob­lem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? R emapping   the  L andscape  181

What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-­year-­old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: since death held no terrors for her (she spoke often to the dead) she knew ­there was nothing to fear.11 Pilate is asymmetrical, an old w ­ oman with super­natural physical strength and a smooth belly; her flesh does not adhere to the cycle of life as we have learned to understand it. She denaturalizes what has been naturalized. Her embodiment contradicts the way we learned high school biology and the drawings of the natu­ral ­human body that hung on the wall in our classrooms, ­those images of slim, well-­muscled, and perfectly symmetrical bodies—­usually a man in outline with Ken doll hair and sometimes a ­woman with a flip. How much more would we learn in biology from witnessing the range of figures and experiences we have in the flesh? Imagine a series of drawings, dozens, hundreds, in a single anatomy book, each an example of the striking distinctiveness of each body, filled with the t­ hings that make us us: short legs, long neck, one arm, wide waist, flat feet, appendectomy, a goiter, a hump, a growth, a long trailing scar, a chokecherry tree on the back. The real­ity of natu­ral bodies is that they are alarmingly specific. Breasts, penises, waistlines, feet, hands noses, their shape color size and proportion are wildly divergent. Close to 2 ­percent of the population ­doesn’t even fall into the two sex classification. In addition, once we understand bodies as not static but ever changing, the binary conception of gender is increasingly unsatisfying. Over the course of one’s life, one may not have breasts, have breasts, and then no longer have breasts. Bunions grow. P ­ eople, often desperate ­people, sell organs and rent their wombs. Our reproductive functions change in the longer terms of a lifespan, but also in the shorter cycles of menstruation. Bodies change as a result of temperature, sexual excitement, illness, dietary habits, surgery, hormones, and aging. A person may begin one’s life classified as able-­bodied and may ­later be blind or an amputee. Disease and disability are universal and herald discoveries in the lives of ­those who confront them. And that is every­one on God’s green earth. The ability spectrum is not fixed in any person’s life. Th ­ ose considered fully able are only fully able for a portion of their lives. The truth is, our capacity shifts over the course of days, weeks, months, and years, with the changes in, and demands of, our flesh and innards and the wounds and gifts of our experiences working on our minds and bodies. Every­one has lived without the ability to walk, w ­ hether in infancy or old age, ­because of injury 182 chapter  six

or through permanent loss. Every­one has been confused, ­whether from exhaustion or medi­cation or Alzheimer’s disease or schizo­phre­nia. Depression strikes many of us, some due to grief and heartbreak and ­others due to an unexpected upheaval in the body chemistry. The disabled and infirm should never feel marginal or alone, but we have tricked ourselves into thinking they are. Pilate, in her physical difference and vulnerability, reminds us of this. She is an imaginative personage consistent with Mia Mingus’s feminist analy­sis in critical disability studies that centers a critique of ableism: Ableism cuts across all of our movements ­because ableism dictates how bodies should function against a mythical norm—an able-­bodied standard of white supremacy, heterosexism, sexism, economic exploitation, moral/religious beliefs, age and ability. Ableism set the stage for queer and trans ­people to be institutionalized as mentally disabled; for communities of color to be understood as less capable, smart and intelligent, therefore “naturally” fit for slave l­abor; for w ­ omen’s bodies to be used to produce ­children, when, where and how men needed them; for ­people with disabilities to be seen as “disposable” in a cap­i­tal­ist and exploitative culture ­because we are not seen as “productive”; for immigrants to be thought of as a “disease” that we must “cure” b ­ ecause it is “weakening” our country; for vio­lence, cycles of poverty, lack of resources and war to be used as systematic tools to construct disability in communities and entire countries.12 Akin to the cross-­sectional salience of disability, Pilate is the distinctly and distinctively universal. She is cast out of outcasts. But she is also transcendent and can “fly without ever leaving the ground,” as her nephew grows to understand, with a vast capacity for love. This i­ sn’t a sentimentalist fable, however. Her love d ­ oesn’t make every­thing right. Pilate finds it impossible to save all the p ­ eople she loves, or even her own life. Pilate’s operative logic is to love the marginal, a logic that fails in its capacity to create justice or fairness or a felicitous conclusion writ large, but with which we as readers are confronted. A demand is placed that we do something about it, and the possibility is appealing. Pilate makes ­mistakes. She misinterprets the one word uttered by her ­father’s ghost, a regular visitor, as an admonition for per­for­mance: “Sing.” It is not a call to sing, in fact, but the name of his beloved, Sing. The error ­doesn’t make Pilate’s song irrelevant. It ­matters that she sings. Instead of acquiring property, like her b ­ rother Macon, Pilate writes a song, a created and claimed inheritance through which she transmits the f­ amily lore; this allows what is below, the valley, to rise. Morrison writes that Pilate’s R emapping   the  L andscape  183

basement home “seemed to be rising from rather than settling into the ground,” and she transcends the ­family name “Dead” from a position in the earth, rejecting all who might name her socially dead, or nonperson. The reader is consistently reminded that Pilate is the opposite of her ­brother, the prosperous Macon Dead. He has approximated the trappings of patriarchy: recognition and wealth. And he has imparted them to his son, Milkman, a spoiled and selfish young man. In contrast, Pilate’s domesticity is both literally and symbolically beneath ground, outside the codes of ideal gendering and social organ­ization. Three generations of ­women—­Pilate, Reba, and Hagar—­live together in a bricolage ­house. Hagar is romantically devoted to Milkman, who merely uses her. He is his ­father’s son. The novel is in part his Bildungsroman. Over its course, Macon, consistent with the drive for accumulation, sends Milkman to find ­family trea­sure buried by his f­ather and to deceive and steal from Pilate in the pro­cess. When his theft does not turn out to yield trea­sure, Milkman instead follows a song his aunt repeatedly sings, believing it ­will lead him to the trea­sure that Macon believes is buried in a cave where Macon and Pilate hid out as ­children, ­after their ­father’s death. The trea­ sure is not recovered, but Milkman eventually has a conversion experience in which he is reborn as something much more than a patriarch in the making. Milkman is the novel’s journeyman. His is a long, shameful road to conversion. Milkman’s original sin, according to the community, is too much intimacy with his brokenhearted ­mother, a ­woman who, in her loneliness and alienation from her husband, nurses Milkman too long. The shame of that event becomes his public designation. He is too indulged and becomes selfish, a man who, according to his s­ ister, meta­phor­ically urinates on every­one around him. ­After he robs Pilate, his guilt for betraying his aunt opens space for him to pursue something more than trea­sure and to see the ugliness of his habits of establishing dominance and status over ­others. His journey shifts from economic gain to mapping a history and genealogy, taking him from Pennsylvania to Danville, V ­ irginia, and to the ­family hometown of Shalimar. Throughout the journey, Milkman is being chased by a man named Guitar Bains. Guitar believes that Milkman, who owes him for his assistance in the theft from Pilate, is trying to cut him out of the trea­sure. Guitar is a member of Seven Days, a vigilante group of Black men that plots to take a white life for e­ very time a white person kills a black person; most recently in the action of the story, he finds himself seeking retaliation for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, 184 chapter  six

that killed four Sunday school girls. The Seven Days’ eye-­for-­an-­eye ethic has been blurred, slid down a slippery slope, as demonstrated by Guitar’s hunt for Milkman. Guitar nearly kills Milkman. In the moment that Milkman is being strangled, the ­woman he has cast aside appears before his eyes. When Guitar returns home, he tends to Hagar, who has gone mad with grief over Milkman. It is as though both men are called to confront the wounds of their desire for patriarchy, a recuperation of what slavery and Jim Crow denied Black men, but one with terrible costs. Milkman has other encounters, too, that force such a confrontation, and through the confrontations we witness his transformation. In V ­ irginia, he encounters an ancient w ­ oman named Circe, a midwife who is guardian to a decaying mansion. Among the hundreds of babies she brought into the world ­were Macon and Pilate. Tragically, however, Circe ­couldn’t save their m ­ other, Sing, who died in childbirth. The Dead c­ hildren faced another tragedy in childhood: Their ­father, also named Macon, died at the hands of the Butler patriarch for whom Circe had once worked. Among the hauntings of this place is the story of how Butler murdered the first Macon Dead (Milkman’s grand­father) to steal his land. The space and its history are exempla of the architecture from patriarch to nonperson. Milkman witnesses this through Circe, who remains in residence at the plantation where she and Milkman’s f­amily once labored, too old to be living and sitting vigil not to protect the plantation but, rather, to witness its destruction. A spectral presence, Morrison’s Circe is a repetition and subversion of Homer’s. She and the classical goddess bearing the same name live in mansions surrounded by wild dogs. Homer’s Circe threatens to destroy Odysseus’s manhood and must be warded off. Morrison’s Circe threatens patriarchy as exemplified by the plantation itself, but h ­ ere that is not a terrible threat that must be defeated. It is a meaningful beginning. Another one of Milkman’s critical encounters is with “Sweet,” a sex worker with whom he is intimate. Their relationship, unlike his relationship with Milkman’s Hagar, is not exploitative or mean. They are tender with each other. He bathes her. She salves his wounds. He cleans her bathroom. She feeds him. He is pres­ent with and witnesses Sweet, another transgression of the rules of status and gender. Milkman displaces exploitation with care and responsibility. And fi­nally, Milkman returns to Pilate. Hagar has died, and it is a death for which Pilate insists that Milkman take responsibility. Among her gospels is an assertion that if you take a life, it is yours. To Pilate, moral obligation attends to relations that, in the logic of the society, are R emapping   the  L andscape  185

often dispassionate domination, acceptable exploitation, or disregard. It is an obligation that Milkman accepts and that is part of his conversion. Together they return to their home in Shalimar to bury Macon Sr.’s bones. Guitar encounters them, and, intending to kill Milkman, he accidentally shoots Pilate. Her last words are a repetition of another piece of her ethos: “I wish I’d a knowed more ­people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.”13 As she lies d ­ ying, Milkman sings for her: “Sugargirl d ­ on’t leave me ­here / Cotton balls to choke me / Sugargirl d ­ on’t leave me ­here / Buckra’s arms to yoke me.”14 He has a­ dopted the song of the w ­ omen in his ­family. ­After Pilate’s death, Milkman’s voice—or Pilate’s voice in Milkman’s voice— is amplified “louder and louder as though sheer volume would wake her.” Her stirs the birds, and one of them “dived into the new grave and scooped something shiny in its beak before it flew away.”15 It is Pilate’s earring. As the bird takes flight, Milkman realizes “why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly.”16 Then Milkman is left to face Guitar Bains. Duplicating the flying leap of his famed ancestor, without “wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees,” he leaps off the mountain: “As fleet and bright as a lodestar, he wheeled t­ oward Guitar and it did not m ­ atter which of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his b ­ rother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ­ride it.”17 The ambiguity of the action is meaningful. Has he learned to fly like Pilate? Has he deci­ded to die with Pilate? Has he merely escaped Guitar? The answer is unclear, but he has undoubtedly chosen to be with Pilate and to reject being the kind of man his ­father taught him to be. The novel’s early phrase, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down,” applies in a multitude of ways but powerfully for this text: It applies to the ideological commitment to patriarchy. The interlocking stories of Pilate and Milkman are exempla of the kind of relations that the phi­los­op ­ her Jacques Rancière argues are necessary for the pursuit of demo­cratic possibility in an unjust society. Rancière insists that one must not simply identify or care about the marginal but also must engage in a pro­cess of dis-­identification with the dominant order and its representatives. According to Rancière, it is only ­after that rejection of the terms of order that alternative social and po­liti­cal ­orders emerge. Demo­cratic community depends on “a community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through which egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectification: intervals constructed between identities, between spaces and places. Po­liti­cal being together is a 186 chapter  six

being-­between: between identities, between worlds . . . ​between several names, several identities.”18 The repetition of the same name, the lost names, the nonsensical names, that Morrison grants her characters is an invitation into being in between, the contingency and indeterminacy of social relations, no m ­ atter how codified they seem, that open the possibility for transformative ruptures that disrupt hierarches and relations of domination. Milkman, whose relations break—­with Hagar, with his ­sisters, with his ­father, with the Seven Days—­ultimately adopts Pilate’s gospel of love. He chooses to abandon patriarchy and operate instead in intimate recognition and relation to the ­women in his midst, particularly Pilate. Although attachment to his m ­ other is his natal shame, by the end of the novel his passionate attachment to a ­woman, filial not sexual, and his attachment to the feminine has been transformed from shame and even sinfulness (a coerced role in which he filled the emotional anguish and loneliness of his ­mother) into love and care. It becomes his inheritance. In this reclaiming of a lost inheritance, Morrison composes an opera of detachment and rearrangement, a remapping, guided by the wisdom of Pilate. THE KNOWN WORLD

Edward P. Jones’s novel The Known World is about slavery. It is filled with stories of oddity and exception in the peculiar institution, stories of the sort that instruct the reader that exceptions are as essential to understanding the structure of the patriarchal order.19 In the work, a classic map—­the Waldseemüller map—­figures prominently. Published in 1507, it is the first map printed with the word “Amer­i­ca.” Eu­ro­pe­ans, still ­under the impression that the West Indies w ­ ere part of Asia, w ­ ere introduced to a revolutionary concept in this map, which designated the New World a second continent to be named in honor of its most distinguished explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. The novel begins in the mid-1840s. The Waldseemüller map hangs in the office of the figure who represents law: Sheriff John Skiffington. His office is also the town’s jail. It is a space of punishment and empty procedure, outfitted with a series of questions to be filed about e­ very prisoner, ­after which brutal summary judgments are rendered. Sheriff Skiffington is the law, yet he and his wife are personally averse to the institution that shapes the law and economy of antebellum ­Virginia: slavery. So when they are given a slave girl named Minerva, they decide she is more d ­ aughter than slave to them. Yet unsurprisingly, they find themselves unable to commit to the proclaimed relation. For the sheriff, Minerva becomes an R emapping   the  L andscape  187

object of lust. For his wife, she becomes a servant. And Minerva is held captive, rather than freed or sent north, so that the Skiffingtons can save face with the white community. The map is controlling, even when the Skiffingtons’ stated values lie in conflict with its order. But ­there are two other maps in the novel, both drawn by Alice Knight. And they are of a dif­fer­ent sort. Alice, an enslaved ­women, has been driven mad by being kicked in the head by a mule. Her ­mental disability becomes the vehicle for greater freedom. B ­ ecause of her “half mind,” she is allowed to wander late at night around the town. Her exploration of the town prompts her mapping. Her two maps are organic assemblages rather than prints. Without technology at her disposal, she uses clay and cloth, and the map rises into three dimensions. One of her maps is of the estate on which she is enslaved; the other is of the county in which she resides. The map of Manchester County is described as “what God sees when He looks down,” with exacting ecological attention. It is not populated, but the one of the plantations is: It includes all objects and living beings—­the chickens, the h ­ orses, and all the p ­ eople, both dead and alive, including all of the enslaved. While the Waldseemüller map depicts Africans huddled and “primitive” on the outskirts of the cartographer’s map of civilization, Alice’s map reaches for the vitality, and asserts the relevance, of each and ­every enslaved African, of life itself. Alice’s disability, her maladjustment to the conditions of the world, including her domination, can be read as a clever ruse to garner some freedom, but it can also be read as the potential for insight that emerges from difference to standard ways of thinking and ­doing. She refuses to see what m ­ atters according to slave law and the rules of property and sovereignty and instead bears witness to her own sense of “what m ­ atters.” Knight’s first owner is an ambitious black man named Henry Townsend, who unusually “­rose” from slavery to plantation owner. He is, in terms of values, her opposite. He echoes the figure of Macon Dead in Song of Solomon, although the action in Jones’s novel takes place many de­cades earlier. Henry marries Caldonia, a ­woman from a slave-­owning Black ­family and the d ­ aughter of a particularly unfeeling mistress, Maude, who, p ­ eople believe, murdered her husband with arsenic to prevent him from freeing his slaves (and who subsequently begins a sexual relationship with one of her slaves). Henry dies, leaving Caldonia widowed before she has turned thirty. Caldonia begins a romance with the enslaved plantation overseer, Moses. He sees Caldonia as his path to freedom and makes moves ­toward asserting higher status for himself relative to the other slaves. A ­ fter he begins the sexual relationship with Caldonia, he encourages his wife and child to run away. Subsequently, while Caldonia has sent slave catchers 188 chapter  six

to find his wife and child, Moses continues to make appeals for his own emancipation. Fi­nally, he runs away and is captured and maimed. Th ­ ere are also echoes h ­ ere of Oroonoko, with the failed ambition of the enslaved man to seek liberation and recognition according to the terms of patriarchy. But ­here the slaveholder is a Black w ­ oman. All of ­these details are signs of how Jones complicates commonplace workings of race and gender in the novel. Black ­women are among the ruthless slaveholders. Moses is the vulnerable figure in relation to the sexual dominance of Caldonia. The white ­people who are opposed to slavery hold slaves. However, Jones is not simply revealing unusual events in the history of slavery. Nor is he marveling at the fact that blackness and black individuals could exist in a state of exception in the order of empire and patriarchy. What the oddities reveal is something profound about relations of domination. The claim-­making on a beloved, economic rather than in the form of appeal or emotional relation, corrupts ­human affection. Again, the structural relationship of slavery destroys the intimate association, notwithstanding how the intimate association might transcend convention. ­These are lessons about domination suited to t­ oday. At the postbellum conclusion of the novel, Caldonia receives letters from her ­brother Calvin, who lives in Washington, DC. He describes two maps of their home that he has seen in an art gallery. He learns that they are Alice Knight’s maps. H ­ ere, the re-­presentation of the paintings seems to do implicit work. Calvin is queer. Caldonia is now married to the man he loved. Calvin is a man whose yearnings—­for love, for a cosmopolitan life in New York—­haven’t come to fruition. They are nevertheless per­sis­ tent. He keeps a possession with him, representative of that yearning: One of the first photo­graphs ever taken of life in New York City—­a white ­family sitting all along their porch. They seemed to live on a farm in that city and on ­either side of their ­house Calvin could see trees and empty space rolling off and down into what appeared to be a valley. . . . ​In the front yard, alone, was a dog looking off to the right. The dog was standing, its tail sticking straight out, as if ready to go at the first word from someone on the porch. . . . ​From the first second Calvin had seen the photo­graph he had been intrigued by what had caught the dog’s attention and frozen him forever. . . . ​­There was a ­whole world off to the right that the photo­graph had not captured. Alice Knight’s maps excite Calvin’s desire for that which is not “captured,” for that which exists off the edge of the picture. They are not scientific but creative; they map the landscape they occupy with a dif­fer­ent set of relations, a witnessing of the dominated nature and p ­ eople. When he R emapping   the  L andscape  189

says, “Map is such a poor word for such a wondrous ­thing,” Calvin revels in the truth of what Alice Knight sees and values that lies in excess of the social order. Alice Knight’s maps make space for each being, as all of the figures gaze upward (­toward God?) and for land that might flourish without marks of territorialism. Caldonia and Calvin’s epistolary repetition of Alice Knight’s art is productive. It captures what Alain Badiou describes as the value of art in terms of its immanence.20 Badiou was uninterested in art as s­ imple faithful depiction or mimesis. Instead, he was interested in how art might arrange and rearrange to reveal submerged truths. Of course, in retrospect slavery was unjust and inhumane. It was also pervasive and constitutive of the U.S. nation-­state. Alice Knight’s remapping and rearrangement of concern performed a rupture in the laws of ­human value, in the order of the society. Badiou believed that witnessing such ruptures could bring one closer to “truth.” While I am hesitant to fully accept Badiou’s idea of “truth,” I do embrace the larger point about the emancipatory potential of witnessing the rupture, and the analogy we might draw between Calvin and Caldonia and our pres­ent world is manifold. How might it encourage us to reimagine our relations? Consistent with Alice Knight’s praxis, feminist geographers have explored how to pursue ethical relations when it comes to mapping, ones of shared knowledge of methodological openness, of mutuality.21 Alice Knight’s two maps show two dif­f er­ent kinds of mapping: one of land and one primarily of p ­ eople. But they assert dif­fer­ent purposes from that of the Waldseemüller map. If we understand that domination is always a relation—­one that we see ranging from intimate association to geopo­ liti­cal relations—­then ways we have to put ­things up against one another are necessarily rife with meaning and possibility. They have a grammar, a sense-­making pro­cess, even though they are always contingent, given that relations change. The word “relation” indicates connection: genealogical and ­legal. It also refers to “telling” and “correspondence.” What story we tell about one ­thing or one being alongside another is paramount for both the existence of and challenges to domination. We cannot naturalize how we traditionally account for one or another if we are trying to challenge how and why the world is the way it is, particularly with regard to its most trenchant realities. What Morrison and Jones do through their (anti)heroes is something greater than subversion. Domination is depicted faithfully in t­ hese texts. They do not seek to “turn the ­tables,” as it w ­ ere. Instead, ­these figures have an anaphoric presence: The meaning denoted by their lives is clearly ­shaped by the frame of reference, the sentence one writes, the story one 190 chapter  six

tells, the names one gives. The referents, we are reminded, have meaning in context, and context is driven by princi­ples. In their cases, the princi­ ples are love and grace.

... In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first wife who is now held captive as the “madwoman in the attic,” is described this way: In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backward and forward. What it was, w ­ hether beast or ­human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.22 Bertha, a disabled person, a white Creole Ca­r ib­bean ­woman, is ungendered. Perhaps it is the tragedy of too intimate an association with vestibularity that makes her such. She is, in Jane’s eyes, neither fellow ­woman nor fellow lady (a position to which Jane herself had to “rise” from the working class) but a beast. In the also now classic novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys does a compensatory reading of this figure.23 She renames Bertha Antoinette Cosway and renarrates, as well as remaps, her journey as one that includes her interiority. Rhys describes how Antoinette is the recipient of Rochester’s abuse; he directs it at her and at the blackness of her homeland and potentially of her origins (she is suspected of being “half-­caste” and therefore necessarily debased). Rhys narrates the events that precede Jane’s encounter, positing and prompting a dif­ fer­ent conclusion regarding the “madwoman in the attic” altogether. In this way, Rhys pushes the reader to consider the ethical error in the classic text that tucks the shameful w ­ oman away in the attic. But it is also a reminder of what Édouard Glissant terms “opacity,” or incomprehensibility when it comes to encounters with ­those who have been “othered” and who are outside the conceptual filiation.24 Glissant describes this opacity as something that is treated not simply as that which is misunderstood or unknown, but more than that, as an obstacle to the ordering of society that therefore, according to the dominant power, must e­ ither be made transparent or destroyed. Or, I would add, mapped in ways that mark them, if not for absolute destruction, then for systematic debasement and punishment. Returning for a moment to earlier chapters, the ordering of society through law and the ideal of reason, and the naming of ­those who had access to reason, distinguished persons and nonpersons R emapping   the  L andscape  191

and sorted them for dif­f er­ent tasks and relations to vio­lence accordingly. And this included and includes ­those for whom violent death is treated not only as something other than tragic but also as something requisite for the maintenance of the sovereignty of the nation-­state and the protection of its borders and spoils. If the encounter is defined by the ­illegibility of another, or the projection of fantastic conceptions of the other, we potentially find ourselves in an ethical morass, a willingness to lock Antoinette up in the attic and throw away the key. Rhys, like Morrison and Jones, pushes us to do something dif­fer­ent, and that is a form of witnessing. H ­ ere, witnessing takes on its multiplicity of meanings. But it also confounds o ­ thers. Jane Eyre saw Bertha. But she could not act as a witness ­because she was incapable of reading her—­her movements, her story. Witnessing implies knowledge that is relevant. It rests on relations of mutuality and re­spect, tenderness. Of course, I am not speaking then of witnessing in the form of judicial procedure. That kind of witnessing is generally ­little more than sensorium and surmise. Rather, what is being invoked is a deeper philosophical sense of witnessing that emerges from the relation of the witness to the witnessed and from the interior pro­cess of being a witness. To be a witness is spiritual knowledge that impels and compels testimony. Lezley Saar’s “Madwoman in the Attic” series of paintings feature ­women who are surrounded by small circles filled with hauntings, memories, and artifacts. They are also the subject’s thoughts. ­These ­women are connected to t­ hese perfect circles through tentacles made of hair and roots, although they ­don’t quite or barely touch. The viewer is drawn into the smaller images and to imagine the relations among the ­woman, the places and ideas from whence she came, and what she considers, what shapes her. In the Saar painting that covers this book, the w ­ oman at the center is footless and rooted, a chimera of past and possibility, as brown as the tree limbs into which she spreads. She is made of nature and swathed in Victorian sartorialism. She floats but cannot walk. ­These images, like the stories Saar references, remind us that testimony may be singular, but the territory they cover can never be. The multiplicity, however, should not lead us to anxiety about the fact that it seems impossible to tell and witness ­every story. Rather, we should consider the “whys” ­behind the stories we do tell and their usefulness. Form must be supple, too. Not every­thing fits easily into a straightforward narrative. Narratives prune and require a structure that ­doesn’t always account for all we need to attend to. So to use poetics, song, and other forms of art making, rather than relying solely on the narrative form, is also impor­tant for the active work of discernment and interpretation with 192 chapter  six

re­spect to the motivating “why” ­behind what we share. I want to say that this is something dif­f er­ent from “display” or “pre­sen­ta­tion” of the sort that we are inundated by in the midst of simulacra, although the printed novel, of course, finds itself cut, copied, pasted, and reposted, as do works of art. But I am not interested in quibbling over form. I am interested in the stuff of the h ­ uman encounter with art that requests deep engagement. Hence, I want to turn to a con­temporary artist whose work bears an analogous relationship to Alice Knight’s works and Pilate Dead’s bricolage, as well as to Saar’s and Rhys’s layering on Brontë. Wangechi Mutu’s paintings are chimerical. They are often of ­women with distorted anatomies, including chicken’s feet or ­horse’s hooves. Her pro­cess is layered. On cut-up sheets of shiny Mylar she spills and melds ink, sometimes organically and at other times with stencils and deliberate brushstrokes and shapes. Collages of body parts—­eyes, breasts, lips from pornographic and fashion magazines—­are adorned with the artifacts of femininity, such as high heels and long nails, which sometimes are actually talons. The paintings are grotesque and captivating, excessive and yet reliant on a few power­ful signifiers of femininity and, to a lesser though not insubstantial extent, masculinity, blackness and otherness, torn apart and reworked into vibrant and striking beings. Refiguration as a remapping of the body, rendering wound and disability as potentiality rather than partiality, is critical for the proj­ect of liberation. In “I Put a Spell on You” (I suggest the reader look the image up on the Internet; it is easily found and a useful companion for this section), Mutu ­invokes Nina Simone’s haunting composition, which finds Simone saying, repeatedly, “I put a spell on you, ­because ­you’re mine.” In Mutu’s hands, this intoxication i­sn’t pure. What she is working with is not simply the creative imaginary, but also the unpleasant stuff of our world repre­sen­ta­tions of the feminine body. The gender-­ambiguous figure that centers the painting has a monkey on her back, holding on for dear life with legs splayed open in an unsettling invitation. Together they make a triangle, but an off-­kilter one, an unsteady ­wholeness. The eyes are panic stricken and covered in heavy makeup. Mutu’s refiguration, which is also a remapping of the body, is not idyllic. But it is stunning. The instability is essential to the power of the work. This enterprise of remapping is not one of replacing neatly, of tidying up repre­sen­ta­tion or images to assert status for the debased. It is to both acknowledge and forge relations that are at once messy and potentially beautiful. The witness, as it w ­ ere, in Mutu’s work can be read as the witnessing of the self, as a testimony to that which has created us, including the ugliness. She does not expunge. Rather, she reworks the relations to it and within it. This puts me in the R emapping   the  L andscape  193

mind of Mary Shelley’s dream regarding the creation of Frankenstein’s monster, that iconic figure of monstrosity in En­glish letters: “I saw—­ with shut eyes, but acute ­mental vision,—­I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the ­thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some power­ful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”25 Like Frankenstein’s, Mutu’s creative imaginary “galvanizes” in the literal sense. Unlike for Frankenstein, ­there is no imperative to destroy the magnificent creatures created. Mutu is meeting Hortense Spillers’s call to “embrace the monstrosity.”26 Mutu performs surgery, excising and incising, a technocrat and artist of the imaginative body. What emerges is beautiful yet grotesque. Whereas the images of beauty created by Jones’s Alice Knight are haunted by the surrounding narrative of slavery, Mutu puts the haunting and the beauty, the ugliness and the haunting beauty, in touch with each other. She imaginatively wrests the power to create categories of the h ­ uman from the authority of the “civilized man” who creates an “other” and claims it for herself: an “other” who creates an other­wise. REMAPPING HISTORY

Rosario Ferré’s novel The House on the Lagoon begins on July 4, 1917, the day President Woodrow Wilson granted Puerto Ricans second-­class citizenship.27 The novel is a contested (his)story of the island in the twentieth ­century. Its protagonist is Isabel, who is writing a novelistic account of the upper-­class, white Puerto Rican families of she and her husband. Quintín, her husband, a historian educated at Columbia University, is her foil. He discovers Isabel’s writings and is outraged by them. He peppers the margins with angry comments, seeing her creativity as fiction and shame. Ferré places his pen in the third person and Isabel’s in the first. We are intimately connected to Isabel’s testimony, which is far less flattering to the elite world to which the c­ ouple belongs. Isabel’s portrait of Quintín’s ­father, a Spaniard descended from Francisco Pizarro who stands as a figure of colonial domination, infuriates Quintín. She depicts him as a white supremacist with a penchant for impregnating African w ­ omen who bore his unacknowledged c­ hildren, a man who sided with fascists during World War I, a person both violent and misogynistic. Quintín has inherited his character from this ­father, at least in part, as demonstrated by his brutal beating of a young man who serenades Isabel. In defense of patriarchy and his status inheritance, Quintín is committed to keeping his ancestral history, as told by his wife, away from the public eye. 194 chapter  six

Although Quintín purportedly worships his ­mother, Rebecca, he is also horrified by Isabel’s sympathetic recounting of her descent into “madness,” precipitated by her husband’s beating her brutally when he catches her in a per­for­mance of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Isabel writes, “When he saw Rebecca he ­didn’t say a word. He simply took off his cordovan b ­ elt, livid with rage, and flogged her ­until she fell unconscious to the floor.”28 Quintín and his f­ ather both justify the brutality as necessary “to make her come down to earth.”29 Not unlike Wilde and his character Salome, Rebecca, according to Isabel, displaces her suffering onto exploiting ­those who are blacker and more distant from the authority of patriarchy than she is. As she ages, ­these ­others are tasked with diligently tending to her deteriorating flesh. The book, a history as it ­were, is one way to map time. Isabel’s book bears the same title as the novel we are reading, and she is victorious in producing it for us (we readers are reading it), though not without contestation of official history as voiced by the f­ amily patriarch. Another mapping in the novel is geographic and represented by the plantation ­house­hold of Quintín’s ­family. It is destroyed and remade repeatedly over the course of the c­ entury. Quintín, for his part, wants to remake it to its early glory, to retain its original form with full extravagance in the hope of turning it into a museum. But it bothers him that it cannot ever quite be the original; that it is only, at best, a repetition of the memory of the grandeur he recalls from his childhood. Ultimately, Isabel and Quintín’s son, who believes Puerto Rico should be in­de­pen­dent of U.S. control, burns the h ­ ouse down. The ­house, like Spillers’s vestibule, is both a literal rendering and a meta­phorical one, of patriarchy and its ambitions. It is situated “where the mangrove swamp met the private beach of the lagoon,”30 between wildness and the zone that marks property. Liberation demands its destruction. Yet Isabel’s narrative is not “wild.” It is deliberate and revelatory. However, it cannot be easily described as a “counter-­narrative” or a competitive one. According to Quintín, “­There was true and a false, a right and a wrong in his mind,” and she breaches both with how and what she chooses to reveal.31 In contrast, according to Isabel, “Nothing is true, nothing is false, every­thing is the color of the glass y­ ou’re looking through.”32 This is not a simplistic relativism. Rather, the color of the glass is a lens; it brings some ­things into view and ­causes ­others to recede. For her, the vio­lence of domination, physically rendered, geo­graph­i­cally rendered, through law and enslavement and neo­co­lo­nial­ism come into view not simply as a po­liti­cal question but in the very substance of their intimate lives. Her mapping, through colored glass, is necessarily incomplete, as R emapping   the  L andscape  195

perspective always is. It acknowledges the work of interpretation, which is always the product of priorities and values. But it also asks the reader: What ­will you map as you tell the story of who you are and where you come from? PALIMPSESTIC MAPS

The painter Julie Mehretu maps history in a pres­ent visual archive. Edifices, city maps, and charts are layered with paints and fantastical markings, some crisp and some smudged. They are at once geometric and spinning with a variety of shapes and sizes. Cityscapes of the past and pres­ent transformation happen si­mul­ta­neously. Mehretu says: I think of my abstract mark-­making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-­place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a meta­phoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place.33 This search to understand systems of creation is sympathetic to the larger proj­ect of this book. The marks over the canvases destabilize the sense that the structure that one finds, or one creates, might be all encompassing. Instead, it is ­under and over the whirlwind of existence. In Mehretu’s series, which is dedicated to the revolutionary energy of Arab Spring, the viewer feels the instability and energy of change, and its vexations, as the undergirding structure still holds on to the canvas. One of her paintings, “The Round City: Hatshepsut” (again, I suggest the reader look it up online) takes its name from two sources. The “Round City” is ancient Baghdad, which was mapped with the king at the center so that e­ very border was equidistant from him, an elegant rendering of the referentiality between citizen and sovereign. “Hatshepsut” is the name of one of the few female Pha­raohs of ancient Egypt. Significantly, although she was always u ­ nder siege and erased from history for many years ­after her reign, Hatshepsut was recognized as a king, bearing all of the royal titles and garbed in the traditional beard in addition to performing as “Man.” Roundness has been fractured in the image. Only the faintest traces remain of a cityscape. ­There are a few bold “straight lines” that 196 chapter  six

suggest directedness and clarity, but they are immediately made unstable by the suggestion of an antiphony of mountains and markings in shades of gray. The order of kings, or of a queen made king, of a city planned according to doctrines of sovereignty and the management of space, are thrown into disarray, and the markings creep outside what­ever circle lies under­ neath. This is the image of revolution and transformation that Mehretu offers. It is messy. More importantly, it is not utopian. For ­those seeking liberation from patriarchy or economic domination—­whether capitalism or totalitarianism—­utopian visions have been compelling. They are motivators. They can drive decisions in the short and long term. What Mehretu suggests, if not argues, is the difficulty and, perhaps, unsatisfactory work of utopian visions in a world that is so fragmented, contingent, and subject to being swept up by markets, ­whether commercial, image-­driven, or headed for death and destruction. Constant risk is our lot. The artistic impulse and creative possibility—­and, perhaps most impor­tant, an immediate sense of the urgency of ethical relation—­ought to be our guides rather than telos. ­There is also refusal—­refusing to be oriented ­toward accepting conventional Western presumptions about the order or the map of the good society and good ­people; refusing the benefits of patriarchy, property, personhood, and sovereignty, and choosing instead to challenge the myths regarding the legitimacy of vio­lence. In the very thick of all of the above, this is what lies under­neath and drives t­hese philosophical and artistic contemplations of how to remap the world, our flesh, and our relations. This becomes a means of suggesting, I believe, that the best response to vestibularity may be not to enter the h ­ ouse while leaving it intact, but to raise questions while standing in the vestibule about the stability of the structure of the h ­ ouse, about both enclosure and how some are cast outside of its doors. It may mean dismantling it and reconfiguring it anew. We must remember, however, that each map, even when we remap, is a form of repre­sen­ta­tion. The map is never the territory. This is the case ­whether we speak of a novel or the digital landscape, which has been described as a new frontier or a Wild West, and which, like the frontiers of settler colonialism and conquest of the past, is increasingly dominated by a logic of conquest and accumulation. How vast it is and can become, however, is literally beyond the scope of our contemplation. Instead we use the partial knowledge of the map to take us into the wilderness with our ethics intact. I run the risk ­here of appearing to turn to the individual rather than the social, which is the very ­thing that makes the individual pos­ si­ble and the ­thing that destroys multitudes and souls. But to the extent R emapping   the  L andscape  197

that the conditions create entrepreneurial man and entrepreneurial ­woman, and to the extent that we live with the ravages of the personhood doctrine that shapes the ways that e­ very reader thinks, I believe that transformation of both the interior self and the relations we have with ­others are necessary to practice a politics of liberation. Ultimately, all of ­these goals point t­ oward the question of how we do the world with ­others, even when they raise questions that are about the nature of the self. ­These remappings are calls for certain forms of marking, keeping track of what and who we decide ­matters: the enslaved, the excluded, the disabled, the debased; the rumblings for emancipation from domination. Entering the wilderness, not for conquest but to seek liberation, requires that we also prepare ourselves to encounter the landscape anew—to hold open the possibility of a dif­fer­ent set of relations in the territory and to greet the world like witches.

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chapter 7

THE UTTERANCE OF M Y NA ME Invitation and the Disorder of Desire ... You have to go the way your blood beats. If you d­ on’t live the only life you have, you ­won’t live some other life, you ­won’t live any life at all. James Baldwin, in Richard Goldstein, “Go the Way Your Blood Beats”

Being haunted draws us affectively sometimes against our ­will and always a bit magically into the structure of feeling of a real­ity that we come to experience, not as cold knowledge but as transformative recognition. Avery Gordon, Ghostly ­Matters

We remap b ­ ecause, in order to go another way, the landmarks and roads described must be dif­fer­ent. The “way” in the two epigraphs above, is something we are pulled to, by emotions. For James Baldwin, life is a ­matter of substance rather than mere fact. It consists of a vitality, one born of reckoning with both the inchoate and explicit yearnings, hauntings, and callings, a reckoning that brings us to fruition. ­There are many sorts of callings, yearnings, and hauntings. Some are terrifying; some are traumatizing. Some are mesmerizing. Avery Gordon describes a sort that make us move ­toward some­thing but also t­ oward a dif­fer­ent way of being. Among the hauntings lie the quests for meaning, intimacy, and joy, the fundamental desires that undergird so much of our curiosity and imagination. This may sound like a utopian fantasy of what we want our lives to be. But it need not be. What I am speaking of

is, in fact, far too speculative to be utopic. Seeking good relations with the world around us by answering the desire for intimacy, joy, and meaning is indeed a pathway ­toward transformative relations with ourselves and ­others. But that path is an opening, a praxis and ethos, not a telos. The state of the world is too dire, and we are too easily sucked into the morass of consumption, competition, and destruction that characterizes our globe to pretend other­wise. We cannot waste our time believing we can achieve an ideal self or community. All we can do is attempt to live well, in right relation. (­Here I am borrowing from the Quaker princi­ple of believing ­there is that of God in every­one and pursing a social order that preserves and protects the integrity, resilience, and beauty of every­one. To adopt this ethical belief does not require a specific theology, or any theology at all, but rather a commitment to generosity and mutuality.) From a belief in right relation we can make choices and decisions about how to proceed, as individuals and as communities. Out of that comes praxis. That is our best chance at the good. Ada Limón’s poem “Field Bling” teases with the promise of such seeking in the midst of a riotous and haunting landscape: FIELD BLING

Nights when it’s warm and no one is watching, I walk to the edge of the road and stare at all the fireflies. I squint and pretend ­they’re hallucinations, bright made-up waves of the brain. I call them, field bling. I call them, fancy creepies. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to die, it makes me feel like taking off my skin suit and seeing how my light flies all on its own, neon 200 chapter  seven

and bouncy like a wannabe star.1 Limón pulls us out of spectacle and into the wilderness with a bit of irony. “Bling,” that twenty-­first-­century term for excess and consumption, is depicted in the poem through hallucinatory refractions of nature: shiny stuff made of lightning bugs and imagination. So much of bling, in the colloquial consumerist sense to which we usually put it in the real world, is imagination, too. It is the appearance of sparkle, imaginings that are allure-­rich with artifacts. Like h ­ uman beings seeking bling, t­hese lightning bugs, “fancy creepies,” are real beings on which the imagination layers luxury. The desire to disrobe in the final lines of the poem then could be read doubly: as the plea­sure of taking off and putting on a new sparkling costume, or perhaps a desire to escape from the surface of bling, or maybe both. It is ambiguous. What I have no doubt about, however, is that the feeling of wanting to live—or, at least, not wanting to die—in ­these lines is attached to that inclination to remove the “skin suit,” the packaging of the self, in order to witness one’s own light bouncing about, nakedly. The “wannabe” star she ends the poem with ­doesn’t feel like the yearning to be a starlet or for the simulacra-­generated attention through which the starlet/Instagram model/celebrity/blinged-­out is marketed. Instead, it feels like a ­simple dancing vitality. I write as though ­those are wholly separate ­things. But Limón reminds us that they a­ ren’t. We like the “bling” of celebrity culture partly ­because of our desire for vitality. But it comes with so much more—so much cost and so much diminishment. We might, however, seek the vitality disrobed in many places: in the fields, in nature, in the flesh, in the dark, for example. That bouncing light, is an enticement to ourselves and to o ­ thers that could be dif­fer­ent from what we are accustomed to consuming, it could be a passion for the other­wise. Per­for­mance has been a vast topic in gender theory for several de­ cades. It includes quotidian per­for­mance and the per­for­mance of stages and professional performers, intimate per­for­mances and public ones. The root for much of this work is found in the scholarship of a phi­los­o­ pher of language, J. L. Austin. His concept of “performative utterances” was a term coined for phrases that did not describe or report, nor did they assert something that might be determined to be true or false in fact, but rather they are phrases in which the utterance itself is an action. In law, this is easy to understand. To consent to an oral contract, for example, is not simply binding, but the consent itself becomes an action: “I ­will pay The U tterance of M y N ame  201

you $200 for this bike.” Or in a marriage, when one party says, “With this ring I do wed,” it is not simply a promise; it is an action, a performative utterance. A performative utterance is not a description of the t­ hing, although it might describe a ­future set of relations. What makes it a performative utterance is that it is a consequential action unto itself. For the performative utterance to be definable as such, however, requires that the circumstances are “felicitous,” to use Austin’s word, meaning that the circumstances must be such that the per­for­mance is effective. In this discussion of language, Austin articulates the structural relation between the social contract and the minutiae of individual contracts that become binding in a given society. By that, I mean they become analogous to the objective theory of contract, which dictates that, rather than looking to the intent of parties who contract, the best way to interpret the contract is to determine what the external evidence (notes, money exchanged, paperwork) says the terms of the contract w ­ ere, the context. Austin’s felicitous circumstances are the set of conditions that make the performative utterance an action that has effect. Austin described speech acts that operate as contracts ­because they fit into a grammar of interaction. This is a root of the per­for­mance theory branch of gender theory, which has explored the grammars of social relations through which gender is made. Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler all brilliantly engaged the question of the performative utterance. Sedgwick suggested a broader read of performative utterance than the one presented by Austin. She encouraged an attention to the multiplicity of transformations and revocations pos­si­ble within performatives, their complexities.2 Derrida focused on the distinctiveness of each performative and the social situation in which a given existed that meant that a par­tic­u­lar performative could be distinct based on circumstance and therefore was iterable.3 Both contemplated the conditional and variable landscape on which performatives existed and implicitly challenged what­ever claims to a closed system, or a science of language, could be apprehended through the social realm of performative utterances. Butler, relying most heavi­ly on the ideas of Foucault, has had the farthest-­ reaching and most influential reading of performative utterances. She argued, germinally, that the predetermined scope of performative utterances actually produces us as gendered subjects and as sexed creatures.4 Our grammars, our codes of speech and their significations, and therefore the very terms of our communication, are bound up by a logic and history of gendering that entail a binary conceptualization of sex and embodiment. This not only constrains us; it is our map and perhaps even 202 chapter  seven

our entire linguistic territory, given that language can only be a map (while the territory includes the unutterable). Yet as all of ­these scholars did, Butler recognizes the potential for transformation and transgression, the breaks that exist ­because the bound­aries of per­for­mance and speech must constantly be remade. But the larger point is very well taken. Our performative be­hav­ior is “naturalized” by learned grammars. We assume and we have entire bodies of knowledge and cultural products devoted to attempting to prove that gender per­for­mance is “natu­ral” and that sex classification is essential. Therefore, even as transgression is pos­si­ble, it is incredibly difficult. But the difficulty of this moment, as described in the first section of this book, comes with some possibility. Austin’s conception of the performative utterance depended on a system of sovereignty that is destabilized by neoliberalism and that is fragmented by globalization. Of course, power and influence continue to be distributed unequally, and dominant gender ideologies are at work both locally and globally. But as the market has become hegemonic, it is also thrillingly and terrifyingly amoral on all m ­ atters other than the market. Ruptures occur, and weirdness flows in. But ­because of the voraciousness of the market, subversion of the old rules often becomes a marketing device or an individualistic practice that is the product of self-­promotion, simulacra, and celebrity. So, for example, we witness the coexistence of the queer celebrity and the per­ sis­tence of anti-­queer vio­lence. Feminism goes viral through popu­lar videos and public figures while gonzo porn proliferates. It is not as though transgression does not exist in our imaginations, then. The challenging question is how do we make space for ruptures in the rules of patriarchy that are not circumscribed to market winners or the individualized commodity and instead open up new forms of relation for more of us and in our analog existences? This is where I find Stanley Cavell’s concept of the passionate utterance to be a compelling turn. Cavell describes the passionate utterance as a necessary addendum to Austin’s concept of the performative utterance. In contrasting the passionate and performative utterance, Cavell says, “A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.”5 It is a statement that is not assured on the basis of convention. Rather, it is based in the hope that it is “inviting an exchange” rather than “invoking a procedure.” The passionate utterance is a disrobing. It is an attempt to chart new territory or to enter into the wilderness with another person. While a performative utterance ­either has a felicitous or infelicitous conclusion, according to Austin, depending The U tterance of M y N ame  203

on ­whether the speaker has followed the conventions and procedures required, passionate utterances have no such certainty. As Cavell argues that Austin gave short shrift to the passions in his understanding of the grammar of speech acts, I am suggesting that the trajectory of gender theory that has followed from Austin’s concept of the performative utterance should likewise be supplemented by a sense of the passionate utterance as offered by Cavell. Cavell’s idea about the passionate utterance is useful ­because it invites one to think about ­human engagement apart from competition, marketization, and reaction and deliberately open to connection outside that to which we are conditioned. When Chaka Khan sings “I feel for you, I think I love you,” she moves from “feel” to “think” to “love” without hesitation but with the tension of uncertainty (aided by the response to her call, a pleading, “Let me rock you, that’s all I wanna do”). It is an invitation for engagement, not resolution; she crosses the bound­aries of sentience, sapience, and emotions. This is a passionate utterance. The possibility for ­ doing gender differently, notwithstanding the grammars of gender per­for­mance that we live within, as described by both Butler and Derrida, is also usefully understood in terms of the passionate utterance. The possibility exists in the invitation that might have transformation in intimate associations and relations. This need not be confined to decidedly po­liti­cal utterance. The jubilant longings of Sylvester as a queer musician of the 1970s who sang, “You make me feel, mighty real,” and the opaque ones of Jamaica Kincaid’s protagonist as a girl who wants to marry a red brown w ­ oman, are not explic­itly po­liti­cal but, of course, become implicitly so b ­ ecause of the exclusions of queer relations from recognized intimate associations for so much of our history. In the social failure to recognize queer intimacies as part of the logic of good and beautiful h ­ uman love, and in the failure to legally recognize queer relationships, their yearnings and ­those like them historically have been thrown into the gaps of life and love. To mine the gaps with the hope of finding beautiful ethical ­human possibilities t­ here thus entails listening to and hearing passionate utterances. And mining such gaps can and should be much more than a question for incorporation. As stated earlier, incorporation has its merits, w ­ hether registered in our history as same-­sex marriage, interracial marriage, or integrated schools, b ­ ecause it corrects the logic of personhood as one that is exclusive along the lines of identity. But ­these merits are insufficient for the larger purpose of seeking gender liberation ­because they ultimately sustain the logic of personhood as an exclusionary structure period predicated on patriarchy.

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The passionate utterance is essential for outsiders to conventional forms of recognition b ­ ecause it is a form of invitation for which ­there is no existing conventional procedure to produce a par­tic­u­lar effect. The speaker is using emotion to assert standing before the one who is being spoken to, and ­doing so vulnerably. The invitation comes from an interior expression made public or simply externalized in traveling from one interior to the next. Yet it is also an assertion, a self-­naming in community. Renaming has been a fundamental part of liberation efforts: from Negro to Black, from prostitute to sex worker, from slut to sex-­positive. From lady to ­woman. Reclaiming names, subverting their pejorative, has done so, as well, with terms such as “queer” and “Black.” ­Here I am less interested in the fact of the name than I am in the way the renaming is always a remapping of relations, a contestation of existing relations. Hence, debates over the “right words” ­aren’t r­ eally about the words themselves. They are about negotiations of the terms of social relations, and as such, they are always ­going to be contested not simply between smaller groups and majorities, but across the board. They are propositions of an alternative architecture. This idea is po­liti­cally consistent with Enrique Dussel’s argument on behalf of critical discursive reason in which all of t­ hose affected, not simply ­those who are formally recognized members of a community, are participants in the “discourse.” He argues that “the ethics of liberation . . . ​ locates itself precisely in the ‘exceptional situation of the excluded,’ that is to say, in the very moment when discourse ethics discovers its limitations.”6 Discourse, which I read h ­ ere in terms of the logics of membership and exclusion, l­ egal rules that attend to po­liti­cal membership, words that have coercive meaning, as it exists must be disrupted. Dussel refers to “reason,” and I am speaking of “passion.” But my use of this term is not predicated on accounts of passion as somehow separate from reason, I am convinced by Martha Nussbaum’s assertion that emotions entail critical cognitive pro­cesses, so if we understand reason as the critical faculty, emotions and even passion entail reason. In this argument for the passions, I am drawing on both the Spinozan and the American pragmatist tradition, in the sense of seeking a conceptual reunion of mind and body, but also of thought and feeling and, ultimately, seeing feeling as occupying much the same field as the spiritual realm. This is also the Black feminist tradition of vexed flowers and ­mothers’ gardens, of hauntings and community. The emotional i­sn’t displaced on a higher power. Rather, it resides in the interactive and collective commitments to some ethical relations vis-­à-­vis ­people and nature. The passionate connection that flows from the passionate utterance is an undoing that relies in part on intuition.

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“Intuition” ­here refers to knowing that lies in excess of reason. It is the product of interior contemplation rather than “truth procedures” or codes of conduct. It is knowledge that we may not have the language to justify our feeling at our disposal. The unavailability of language for accounting is where we place witchcraft and magic. But before assuming that this puts it in a place that it too otherworldly to be of intellectual use, keep in mind the wail in m ­ usic that resists notation, or the growl in a singer’s voice for which ­there is no easy transcription. Th ­ ere are plenty of t­ hings that we cannot capture precisely that are unquestionably both real and moving. They exceed grammar, but they exist and they m ­ atter. Ross Gay uses beauty to gesture ­toward that inexplicability, saying, I love the moment when the poet says I am trying to do this or I am trying to do that. Sometimes it’s a h ­ orse­shit trick. But sometimes it’s a way the poet says / I wish I could tell you, truly of the l­ittle factory in my head: the smokestacks / chuffing, the dandelions / and purslane and willows of sweet clover / prying through the blacktop. / I wish I could tell you / how inside is the steady m ­ umble and clank of machines. / But mostly I wish I could tell you of the footsteps I hear, more than I can ever count, / all of whose gaits I can discern by listening closely. / Which promptly dis­appear / a­ fter being lodged again, / h ­ ere, where we started, in the factory / where loss makes all ­things beautiful grow.7 Death is throughout this poem. ­There is a w ­ oman in its lines who told him he had pretty feet, notwithstanding the crookedness of the left one, and that sweetness allows him to unfurl his toes in the sand. She is now dead. But the loss he names is both that and something less specific than that event. The sense of “loss” is that stuff, some of which may never have been felt but was unquestionably desired, that the factory of yearning produces, the t­ hings our hearts and imaginations fill up in response to the industries of deprivation. Gay delights in the reach, in the invitation, both ready to dance with the invited and to be the invited. By the same token, much of what we term “reasonable” is contingent on passionate commitments: po­liti­cal, identitarian, nationalist. Dussel’s account of discourse ethics is a passionate m ­ atter, pointing ­toward justice. Given that I am writing against the conventional formulation that passion and reason are opposing forces, or that they must be gendered forces, dwelling in passion is a critical tool. Passion charges emotion. It makes it plain. And the passionate utterance refuses to confirm the status quo, instead inviting us to think and do in alternative ways and to recognize the landscape differently, of the body, of the heart, of the territory. 206 chapter  seven

More explic­itly, I am concerned not simply with the ­things we “love” or relations we desire, but explic­itly with the act of gesturing ­toward the pos­si­ble that does not fit into logics of liberalism vis-­à-­vis a personhood status that comes with forms of ready-­made social and l­ egal recognition. I am interested in how considering passionate utterances might lead us ­toward the development of a practice of resourcefulness and creative praxis vis-­à-­vis being (collectively) that lies in contradistinction to the terms of market logic and both the neoliberal and the liberal subject. In a bit of a twist (for this text), some further inspiration is found in Edmund Burke’s essay “How Words Influence the Passions,” in which he argued that expression might move ­others more than nature itself, in part ­because of the way the imagination extends beyond “real­ity” saying “. . . ­there are many t­ hings of a very affecting nature, which can seldom occur in the real­ity, but the words that represent them often do; and thus they have an opportunity of making a deep impression and taking root in the mind, whilst the idea of the real­ity was transient; and to some perhaps never ­really occurred in any shape, to whom it is notwithstanding very affecting.”8 The liveliness of language gives meaning beyond clear or precise description, according to Burke, and he goes on to describe how language is a vehicle for passionate expression that can “catch a fire” in ­others. The irony, of course, is that Burke was a conservative and an opponent of Jacobinism, the liberation philosophy undergirding the French Revolution. Burke was a thoroughgoing adherent to patriarchy, failing to adequately account for the fullness of humanity that created the words and ideas he so cherished. But if we are open to rupture and reconfiguration and remapping, and certainly the con­temporary eruptions of the digital age aid us in so ­doing, we can find resources in the unlikeliest places, and ideas can be reworked. But in Burke t­ here is also a cautionary tale. We can be deceived by our passions, believing that domination is right and good ­because we are moved t­ oward its ac­cep­tance. Passions are essential, but they demand care and analy­sis to be read for their virtues. They ­aren’t neutral. The moment of passionate appeal leads us to reconsider the abstract concepts (fairness, justice, equality) and to unfreeze them from blank proceduralism. It allows us instead to swim in the substantive w ­ aters of how we are to be with one another. Now, this does not require a w ­ holesale rejection of proceduralism, or abstraction—­that is to say, we do not have to immediately undo all legally recognized relations and disavow all property and citizenship to make ourselves open to listening to passionate utterances. Instead, this listening is part of the pursuit of the iterative dimension of committing to a just society, such that we must repeatedly The U tterance of M y N ame  207

unfreeze and swim. For example, we ­ought not be able to debate the deportation of undocumented immigrants without being called to witness the rupture of families, the loss of ties and relations that is entailed in the practice, the passionate attachments, wounds, and vio­lence that are part of this question. The re­sis­tance to such contemplations with charges of overemotionalism or claims that such feelings w ­ ill lead to procedural failure or lawlessness o ­ ught to be met with deep skepticism. Witnessing ­ought not to be described as threatening. Listening carefully ­ought to be valued. Our avoidance is encouraged in such moments (by the dispositions, attentions, and priorities of the public sphere, cultural habits themselves) b ­ ecause of a fear that our attachments might shift. We might find ourselves emotionally bound not to fellow citizens, but to fellow parents, lovers, or mourners, differently situated ­people who are not supposed to be part of our “we,” who lie in the terrain of nonpersonhood. We might accept the invitation. ­There is an echo, a resonance, between what Cavell describes as the passionate utterance and what Audre Lorde describes as the erotic. Lorde’s erotic is not, as we often speak colloquially of the erotic, simply sexual energy. Rather, it is the life force, the sensual self that is inclusive of, but not reducible to, sexuality. The erotic energy defies efforts to limit the valued self to the parts that are rational or that fit the widely accepted conventions of social interaction. She writes, “The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, w ­ hether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”9 The intimacy that feeds the spirit, and also that which motivates the desire for intimacy, is the desire that moves us to set forth passionate utterances, notwithstanding how they might violate conventions and lead to our censure. Passion is what sent Harriet Tubman, Black, disabled, and hunted, back to ­free o ­ thers at the risk of her life. For Lorde, both her queerness and her unapologetic Blackness, according to the conventions and logics of the dominant social order, structurally excluded her from many legally and po­liti­cally recognized forms of joy. Hence, her passionate utterances, her invitation to her intimates and her readers, who become intimates, ­were not simply self-­affirming and capacity building; they ­were po­liti­cal actions. For Lorde, to imagine beyond the grammars gives space for the fullness of the “erotic” and for herself. She writes, “That self-­connection shared is a mea­sure of the joy which I know myself 208 chapter  seven

to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is pos­si­ble, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”10 According to Lorde, the erotic has been suppressed in large mea­sure ­because in its bewitching it resists the rules of patriarchy, of reasonable personhood, of property and expectations of the dominated and the dominating. It moves based on another sort of power that is generative instead of destructive. She writes: ­ ere are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or Th other­wise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, ­every oppression must corrupt or distort ­those vari­ous sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For w ­ omen, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, ­women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence. . . . ​As ­women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep w ­ omen around to exercise it in the ser­vice of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So ­women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-­giving substance for their masters.11 I want to extend Lorde’s argument. ­Women and men who are failed patriarchs have been marked as inferior to patriarchs by virtue of being associated with nonrational knowledge, and the register of nonrational knowledge has been feminized and deemed inferior. Moreover, the interests of elites have been rendered as always “rational” and therefore legitimate, regardless of w ­ hether they are indeed appropriately described as such, and the capacity to reason is always questioned for ­those residing outside the category of patriarchs. The erotic, the passions, as I want to invoke them h ­ ere, are therefore reintroduced on dif­fer­ent terms that The U tterance of M y N ame  209

are marked not by inferiority or by subsuming them to what is deemed reasonable or appropriate. They are marked instead by the pos­si­ble. This is about seeking something more intimate than recognition. It is the assertion that makes us think in terms of that other person’s fullness of being rather than the spectrum of rights or the rules of markets. We must be cautious of becoming too romantic about this. Not all passions are good. Moreover, we should not fetishize the passions. Butler reminds us, for example, that passionate attachments can be what confines us and even destroys us. Passions are exercised in vio­lence as well as care. While some such vio­lence is rewarded and some is penalized, violent expressions of passion ­ought to be confronted as tragedy and crisis, even ­under the noblest of circumstances.12 As both Robert Cover and Toni Morrison have noted, ­there are performative utterances that, rooted in the passions, become a death sentence without potential remedy. So passion may be necessary, but it is insufficient to ensure liberation. To speak of an openness to passionate utterances is not to remove the responsibility of right relation and the contemplation and analy­sis of what the implications are in each interaction proposed. Rather, it is to expand the terrain on which they might be engaged. This expansion is necessary precisely ­because we exist in a grammar whereby that which is normalized and relations that are recognized are so often so brutal. Just think of war, of prisons, of hunger, of intimate vio­lence. We must expand the terrain of concern b ­ ecause our skepticism ­toward the passions often amounts to a refusal to acknowledge the claims of the vestibular or nonpersons. In a capitulation to the “theory-­ laden material,” we have domesticated and denied the passions necessary for our ethical liberation. This is a call to open ­things up. Critics as vari­ous as Philip Fisher, Carol Gilligan, June Jordan, and Robin West have contemplated how to recuperate passions as a key part of civic life, as they are impor­tant to our sense of connectedness. It is not “new,” as it ­were, to acknowledge the importance of the passions or to assert that the way they have been diminished is a prob­lem. This point, however, is about the substance of our encounter with them, the standing at the threshold with them, openly as a necessary response to the vexations of our moment and as a necessary practice for reading the worlds around us as liberation feminists. William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” written in the after­­ math of World War I, is an emotional confrontation with the devastation and destruction of war that captures this sense of a passionate utterance as attendant to the exigencies of a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal moment. He writes:

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; ­Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-­dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are ­those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Trou­bles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep ­Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches ­towards Bethlehem to be born?13 Yeats starts out with the image of a falcon wheeling about in the sky, departing farther and further from the falconer who released it. The captive has been unleashed. Order is in disarray. The poem is a reflection on how Yeats’s generation was transformed by war and haunted by death in its aftermath. He writes, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The best are t­ hose dispassionate and reasonable figures who lead nations into war; the least of t­ hese, “the worst,” in contrast, are filled with “passionate intensity.” They are the ones with whom the emotional center of the poem lies. What we accept as “good” is called into question, as Yeats is moved and invites us to be moved. Although the language of the “Second Coming” is suggestive of Christ, Yeats points elsewhere, t­ oward the end of the pres­ent world and the revelation of something radically new. It is reckless to a certain extent. We are “vexed to nightmare” by the rocking cradle and reborn, monstrously. Again, it is a call to embrace the monstrosity. We are moved by witness and become something dif­fer­ent, something unrecognizable and even ugly according to the way ­things ­were or ­were “supposed to be.”

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In arguing that we heed passionate utterances, it is necessary consistently to reassert how emotion, including strong emotions such as passion, must be understood as central to the justification for our laws and po­liti­cal recognition. Emotions are always part of analy­sis and reason, but they are not often recognized as such b ­ ecause they are submerged according to the grammars we have been taught that treat reason as belonging on a masculine register, along with order, and set in opposition to emotion. This binary is dishonest and damaging. The call to war, for example, while in our po­liti­cal language has o ­ rders and treaties and justifications that are all about reason and interests, always has passion and passionate discourses undergirding it. Often the passion is fear driven by the ideology that one (or a ­people) ­either dominates or is dominated. Talk of reason is often an obfuscation of how much passions shape and s­ haped our rules. Hence, the bifurcations of gender ideology have not simply diminished the emotions; they have caused us to misrecognize them, to distort them, and, as Sara Ahmed describes it, to fail to account for the ways our affect is discriminatory.14 Our emotional responses are not distributed to all kinds of p ­ eople. “Feeling” that leads to action that is po­liti­cal, ­legal, or punitive reaffirms the structures of domination in our society. We choose—as a society, as juries, as voters—to avenge the deaths of some while disregarding ­others. A primary barrier to understanding and being honest about this practice is the epistemological influence of gendering. If all of ­these ­things—­equality, justice, due pro­cess, privacy—­are in fact basically emotional terrain, rules regarding our sense of righ­teousness with re­spect to ­those who have the full rights of personhood, or discretion exercised in ways that reflect our beliefs in ­those who fulfill the requirements of personhood, then we must understand the rejection and failure to recognize some h ­ umans (who occupy nonpersonhood or partial personhood status) as a ­matter of deep dishonesty, particularly when we base that rejection on a claim of dispassionate proceduralism. When we claim faith in the pro­cess, for example, that almost never punishes or prevents police officers killing unarmed civilians, or the deaths of innocents in the collateral effects of war, we are pretending that dispassion is at work, when ­really it is an unethical distribution of care. We should forever dispose of the dependence on legitimizing arguments against social in­equality by resorting to dispassionate analy­sis. Reason has its place as part of the pro­cess of assessment as to ­whether a princi­ple, based in emotion and ethics, has been upheld or how it might be upheld. But recognition does not dictate values.

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Moreover, in this restoration of emotion, we then understand better the fraught terrain on which arguments for inclusion take place. ­Those arguing for recognition depend upon emotion but are also rejected for it. (They are seen as “emotional” precisely b ­ ecause of the association of ­others, such as w ­ omen, Blacks, Latinos, lesbians, and gays, with emotions.) We simply cannot neatly separate reason and feeling, no ­matter how much we have pretended to do so as a sorting device for the social order. The act of resigning the female, the queer, the black, the other subject to the terrain of the emotional, nonrational, served not only to delimit their sphere, but also to diminish the function of emotion in our ideals of how social ordering can and should occur. As Angela Davis wrote de­cades ago, “If, as Marx has said, liberation is to ultimately also mean ‘the complete emancipation of all the ­human qualities and senses’ which include ‘not only the 5 senses, but the so-­called spiritual sense, the practice senses (desiring, loving),’ then the positive qualities of femininity must be released from their sexual exclusiveness, from their distorted and distorting forms.”15 Gender liberation must occur at the level of pro­ cess and analy­sis as well as ­human relations. As previously stated, the emotional register, where passion exists, is not distinct from thought. Martha Nussbaum usefully describes emotions as intelligent appraisals of a world that we do not control in the light of our own most significant goals and plans.16 She asserts the role of compassion in private and public reasoning and reveals the po­liti­cal intellectual’s historical attempts to purify or deny emotion in decision making. Nussbaum pursues this line of thought in par­tic­u­lar with re­spect to how we ­ought to structure the liberal demo­cratic state. I want to hold off on such explorations of an idealized and abstracted po­liti­cal order about which my feelings range from ambivalence to antipathy. (That is to say, I am as yet unconvinced that cap­i­tal­ist statecraft can ever be reconciled with a belief in democracy and justice.) Rather, what I find particularly useful about her insights for my purposes ­here is that part of my argument necessitates that we see passionate utterances, or “invitations into the disorder of the desire,” as something more than unthinking outbursts. They can be holistic appeals. As the artist and critic Adrian ­Piper says, “You are one in spirit, in makeup and every­thing, and ­there’s no inner war g­ oing on between your animal passions and your pure transcendent intellect. ­You’re all one t­ hing, and you do what you have to do and what you can do, and that’s it.”17 Or stated in the terms of an old pop standard: “All of me / Why not take all of me?”18 Further, for ­Piper, as an artist, the manner in which she avoids repre­sen­ta­tion of ­people or objects in her work speaks

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to the desire for liberation from the grammars of the social order. It is beauty that entices differently: “Abstraction is freedom from the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; freedom to violate in imagination the constraints of public practice, to play with conventions, or to indulge them. Abstraction is a solitary journey through the conceptual universe, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to.”19 Yet the viewer is sought for connection. Abstraction ultimately is not solitary; it is seeking to be seen. Out of that abstraction comes a form of witnessing that cannot be easily named. Nussbaum argues not simply that emotions are part of cognition but also that emotions are forms of cognition. They can include the nonthinking (heart fluttering, palms sweating) but do not have to. She works with an idea of cognition and emotion as dynamic. Urgency and heat can be part of them. To say that they are thought-­laden does not necessarily imply elaborate calculation, or even self-­awareness. Thought ­here is supple. Part of this includes what John Berger called “ways of seeing,” and at the heart is the idea that valuative judgments are part of emotions. They do not require language to exist. ­Music is an example of this. “Feeling,” “perception,” and “judgment” are terminological variants of the same ­thing: thought. When it seems like reason and emotion are in conflict, Nussbaum argues, t­ hose are conflicts within thought itself. Emotional conflict is “a story of reason’s urgent strug­gles with itself concerning nothing less than how to imagine life.”20 So h ­ ere I am speaking of a disruption to social logics at the emotional register, a disruption that allows us to imagine differently. The passionate utterance is in part an invitation to consider anew. To listen and to imagine, affected by that listening. Cavell states, “Perlocutionary acts [of which passionate utterances are a subcategory] make room for, and reward, imagination and virtuosity. . . . ​Passionate expression makes demands on the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if all goes well) forgoes.”21 To elaborate, it is in the power­ful disruption of convention that transformation is pos­si­ble. Virtuosity, importantly, has both meanings in ­these sentences: in both the moral sense and the sense of mastery. The doubleness of “good” is what draws us in. Cavell’s scaffolding of the performative utterance with the passionate utterance is a language for working the artistic impulse (and remapping) and the joy it brings into sociality. ­There may be a better way. The phrase “I am ­free” may or may not have a felicitous conclusion, depending on ­whether one is locked in detention or prison, whereas the passionate utterance is acting on one’s humanity and testifying to it like the caged bird that sings. That song, traveling past the prison walls, may move us, may cause ­those walls to crumble like Jericho’s. 214 chapter  seven

Returning to Dussel for a moment to extend this point, he argues that the necessary development beyond “ethical consciousness” is one in which an awareness (­here, a listening) to the oppressed and excluded “initiates the pro­cess of re-­cognition and the first solidarity . . . ​that emerges out of the originary re-­sponsibility of the victims themselves as subjects of a new history”—­that is, to “know” again in ways that follow from “answer to” distinctly. The passionate utterance is both a distinct proposition and dif­fer­ent answer to the conditions of patriarchy, of domination, of the architecture of relation. As Dussel says, “Creative critical dissent is the origin of a new rationality, a new discourse.”22 June Jordan’s poem “What ­Great Grief Has Made the Empress Mute,” which recounts the travails of Japan’s Empress Michiko, reminds us that ­there are prison walls to high status, too. Visions of liberation must travel up and down. Certainly, we have Oscar Wilde’s history to see how the breach of status led to literal imprisonment. Jordan mediates on how the empress lost her voice, literally, ­because of its theft by the rules of high status: ­ ecause the jewels of her life did not belong to her B ­Because the glow of gold and silk disguised her soul ­Because nothing she could say could change the melted ­music of her space ­Because the privilege of her misery was something she could not disgrace ­Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief ­Because her grief required no imagination ­Because it was raining outside the palace ­Because ­there was no rain in her vicinity.23 The power of the poem is that it uses the quiet of the empress to make a passionate utterance for the reader to contemplate what her emancipation would sound like, in word and deed. Its result is not simply illocutionary or perlocutionary; it is an appeal, an engagement and a reengagement on the questions of the social and emotional ­orders around us. Passionate utterances are also always efforts to seduce the viewer and listener, ­whether that person is ­family, friend, or stranger. ­There is, in the passionate utterance, seduction as well as argument, like Lorde saying, “I am who I am, d ­ oing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel or remind you of your me-­ness as I discover you in myself.”24 That word has its own vexations. Seduction is fraught by the constructions of both gender and race, associated with the sins and stains and embodiments of femininity. But it is simply a more emotionally and The U tterance of M y N ame  215

corporeally sapient sense of appeal. The lushness of Kincaid’s language, the naked spiritual humanity in Sylvester’s voice, the longing in Chaka Khan are seductive and passionate ways to insist on being seen and understood. As you read, you likely ­will have considered that ­these passionate utterances are still performatives. Cavell describes this conundrum by saying, I am perhaps prepared to recognize, in regarding cries of pain, or prolonged silences, or sobs, as “preverbal” calls for help, or as traces of rage, perhaps at oneself, or as reminders of comfort—­this is b ­ ecause the view is meant in ser­vice of something I want from moral theory, namely a systematic recognition of speech as confrontation, as demanding, as owed (not only, but perhaps especially, when it is molded in the form of moral reasons, and even when it proceeds out of sincere cooperation. . . . ​So my idea of passionate utterance turns out to be a concern with per­for­mance ­after all.25 But the per­for­mance of the passionate utterance is not a performative, it is not coercive, nor is it a commodity or a site of exchange. It is a site of connection and, potentially, intimacy. ­There are vari­ous words we could use for what “might be” a felicitous response to the passionate utterance. One is resonance. Both technically and meta­phor­ically, resonance is how reverberation moves something or someone ­else; it is how guitar strings on one guitar respond to the plucking on another as the air between them moves, and ­trembles, too. Resonance is not the same as the acquisition of knowledge or the repetition and recounting of a shared subjective experience. It is the testimony that makes another ­tremble, as well; that moves you and therefore shapes both feeling and thought. We have a prob­lem in how our socialization cuts down our capacity to experience resonance with the testimony of another ­human being. We might, and even ­ought to, rail about what happened to create that destruction, but we must also be about the work of creating the openness to rebuild it. To do so means being willing to disrobe ourselves of our gender suits, citizen suits, religion suits, and even our most closely loved identity suits. As Baldwin described it, identity ­ought to be treated as a loosely worn garment that can be easily removed when it is time to be intimate with another ­human being. Passionate utterances may also be described as vulnerable but “worth it” expressions—­not ­because of the end that the passion elicits, but ­because of the opening the utterance makes, ­because it enables witnessing. The movement of that passionate utterance is dependent on the kinds of 216 chapter  seven

­ eople the rest of us who hear it choose to be. Although some form of p deeper inclusion in community may be the result, this is not the strategic work of formally convincing one to “see” me as worthy. It is something much more raw and intimate. To witness me is to feel as well as to see me, to allow yourself to be moved by me ­toward a dif­f er­ent self and a dif­f er­ent relation to me, and potentially the world. If you think this is a juvenile romanticism, ask yourself when it was that you developed the capacity to walk past someone starving on the street without pausing.26 Something has been undone inside us that must be reconnected deliberately. The passionate utterance can be an intimate gesture, reaching for a way of being with other ­humans that is dif­fer­ent, less proscribed, and as big as it is close. It can make us leave ­behind beliefs and attachments and forge new ones. It can put us on a path never ­imagined. It can emerge with intensity in moments of crisis and despair and even be communal. Judith Butler captures this potential in two very distinct ways. In the act of reading, she says, “We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves transformed and part of a more expansive world.”27 Reading is an intimately transformative affair, a relation between the writer and reader that is virtual even as it is close, but she also describes being moved in terms of sociality, saying: ­ ere is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain Th life, and ­those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interde­pen­dency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-­human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-­approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-­war politics. The question is not w ­ hether a given being is living or not, nor ­whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, w ­ hether the social conditions of per­sis­tence and flourishing are or are not pos­si­ble. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.28 She describes a move beyond the question of the ­legal category of recognition, to what we do with the relation once we are moved to care about it. In Mia Alvar’s short story “The Virgin of Monte Ramon,” the protagonist, Manny, is a young Filipino boy who has “only the beginnings of legs; below that, a semblance of ankles; and fi­nally two misshapen knobs, The U tterance of M y N ame  217

smooth as stones worked over by w ­ ater.”29 He travels in a wheelchair inherited from his American grand­father, a badge of honor in a life that his peers deem worthy of shame. Manny is moved around by an artifact of patriarchal personhood. The technology offsets his failed masculine body and that he descends from a “failed w ­ oman.” His ­mother is a sex worker; therefore, both have bodies that are deemed “unworthy.” His ­father is absent. The patriarch simply haunts them with his artifact but leaves their ­house­hold adrift. At school Manny is teased ruthlessly for his disability and ­because of his ­mother’s occupation, most unrelentingly by Ruben Delacruz (“of the cross”), who is the doctor’s l­egal son. In the story, the doctor is the figure of patriarchal authority, as is his son, who taunts ­those on the margins. Through the f­ ather and the son, Manny is diminished and wounded. Manny is captivated by another child, a girl named Annelise. She is also subjected to taunts based on a belief that her body is marked for inferiority. Her skin is dark, and her hair is curly; she is very poor. She is called “Negrita” (black girl). She and Manny become friends across the borders of their differences, or perhaps in part ­because of them. But their growing friendship is interrupted ­because Annelise’s menstrual periods make her too sick to go to school. In a twist of fate, the doctor, who is a client of Manny’s ­mother, is soon bringing Annelise to their home to tend to her and give her the baths that are impossible in the conditions in which she lives. Manny’s ­mother looks down on the poorer, darker Annelise. She plays the lady to the girl and claims to be able to “smell” her. She resents that the girl crosses her threshold and rejects the doctor’s charity in part b ­ ecause it is pos­si­ble only in her home, not in his marital home, which cannot be transgressed by any of ­these three low-­status ­people with whom the doctor is connected. As the story unfolds, the doctor’s charity seems to be inextricably bound to his culpability. It is revealed that Manny’s disabilities ­were caused by untested medi­cations being given to pregnant ­women in the Philippines. Annelise, just a child, is given a hysterectomy and is pushed thereafter even further into the gaps. We are left to won­der: Did Annelise ­really require a hysterectomy, or was she, like so many Brown and Black ­women of the world, a victim of zealous efforts to control reproduction? Was Manny a victim of the father/doctor? Alvar paints for us the layers of coloniality, of gendered status, of gendered classism, and of color—­how they create hierarches of value rendered by space and the accessibility of the body. But she also depicts the possibility of the passions. Manny and Annelise do not reject each other’s marks of inferiority. They do not jockey for greater access to civil society or barricade 218 chapter  seven

against each other’s shame. Instead, they forge a bond across difference and witness each other, in their respective pains and beauty. In Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, the protagonist, Hattie, is no Jacob.30 She is not blessed for having striven with God and prevailed. She is not even religious, as we learn at the novel’s power­ful conclusion. She is a w ­ oman whose life is tragedy. The novel begins with the story of Hattie’s two infants, named Jubilee and Philadelphia. ­These designations are obviously religious and constitutional references. But also, ­because this is a novel about the g­ reat migration of a Black American f­ amily from the Deep South to the urban North, the names reference freedom seeking in that tradition. Mathis writes, “Philadelphia and Jubilee ­were already among ­those luminous souls, already the beginning of a new nation.”31 One reads breathlessly, word by word, wheezing along with the ­children, as Hattie does every­thing she can to keep them alive ­after they are stricken by respiratory infections. This is the embodied cruelty of the false hope, the dream deferred of the ­Great Migration north: from Georgia to Philadelphia, from viciousness to coldness and alienation. Hattie is the heroic ­mother, but no ­matter. Tragedy ensues: “Hattie’s ­children died in the order in which they w ­ ere born: First Philadelphia, then Jubilee.” This is the beginning of the book. What follow are the stories of all of the surviving ­children and their offspring. The violation of the conventions of Black transcendent narratives throughout the novel is a power­ful rupture, unrelenting in its refusal of any hopes for justice or remediation or redemption. And while she is indebted to Morrison and Baldwin, Mathis is ambivalent about the prospect of healing as a possibility. This is endurance rather than resilience, and certainly not transcendence. In Mathis’s second section, we encounter one of Hattie’s sons, Floyd, a musician who has sexual intimacy with men u ­ nder the cover of night but is a rather average, straight-­identified philanderer in public. Then he encounters Lafayette: “The man could not have been more than eigh­teen. But he was not a boy, that is to say his lips w ­ ere red and voluptuous and he held them slightly apart. It was a mouth as ripe as a strawberry; the young man was not unaware of this.”32 Floyd is drawn in by Lafayette’s beauty and the possibility that exists in their mutual desire. They rendezvous. Floyd invites Lafayette to hear him play, but when Lafayette arrives, he is kicked out of the club and beaten for being read as gay. Floyd does not intervene. He hopes that he can still find Lafayette afterward, but he does not, so he simply leaves town, ignoring two ­people—­one a ­woman who is his lover and another a friendly man—­who are explic­itly homophobic yet also question Floyd’s moral failure in the moment that The U tterance of M y N ame  219

he refuses to protect Lafayette. They see through their disdain to the ethical responsibility between lovers. This vignette is rife with strangeness, and I use the term “strangeness” not pejoratively but in the sense of being outside convention, which is part of what makes each expression of desire of one for the other a passionate utterance. Lafayette and Floyd do not have a comedic ending or any kind of resolution. The door is ajar. Fi­nally, at the conclusion of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, when the church might redeem and restore in a neat conclusion the trauma of Hattie’s grand­child, Hattie disrupts the fiction of such a cleanup job. Again, redemptive suffering and its logic is rejected along with the American narrative of the ever more perfect u ­ nion moving ­toward an ideal liberal society. Migration fails. Black movement through the twentieth c­ entury is pain. The ambivalence about the po­liti­cal and constitutional proj­ect that I think this suggests should not be read as a Marxist or nationalist gesture in the way that, say, Martin Delany or Richard Wright have put forth in the African American literary tradition. ­These are not po­ liti­cal theoretical arguments for a revolution. This ambivalence, I think, is instead an invitation to the disorders of desire, a form of passionate utterance proffered before the reader. It is a question: What if? It is also a challenge to God, to refuse compliance with the church while still sitting in the flock. This is what Cavell describes when he writes, “In acknowledging a mode of speech in or through which, by acknowledging my desire in confronting you, I declare my standing with you and single you out, demanding a response in kind from you, and a response now, so making myself vulnerable to your rebuke, thus staking our ­future.”33 This is done doubly, both in the characters’ encounters in the text, often where they confront ­actual rebuke, and in the intimate confrontation with the reader. The utterance is made not solely in the form of appeal but also in the form of a speculation about other possibilities of being h ­ uman. In that way it does what Sylvia Wynter proclaimed we must do: displace the overrepresented man as if that w ­ ere the only mode of full humanness, with ­human possibility beyond approximating “him.” In addition to necessarily displacing logics of gender and race, it reminds us that our expression of what are naturalized h ­ uman per­for­mances of right and wrong are in fact not natu­ral at all but created and ­matters of faith. The single rupture, moreover, is episodically unique but has some extrinsic pattern, some other terrain of ­human intimacy insofar as it resonates with us. It allows us to “decide upon the undecidable” and to name the nominally indiscernible. The event recasts ontology, giving it new contours. It is a refiguration. It challenges doctrine and toggles the h ­ andle on our ethical 220 chapter  seven

imagination. We are called to ask: So what if we w ­ ere to start h ­ ere and build out on the alternative grammars and reordering that emerges from embodied truths? In the novels of the Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh, we consistently encounter men and boys whose disposition is not masculinist and whose passionate yearnings are unmet, leaving them wounded and bereft. Their patriarchal failures create anxiety from within their communities, born of a fear that they are not prepared to be men who can fight against the Israeli occupation. ­These sensitive characters have encounters with vio­ lence that force them into the role of men—­embattled and wounded men. Khalifeh’s critique is directed to the gender constraint, but also to the Israeli state’s forms of patriarchal vio­lence that trigger hypermasculinity as a response. The devastation is found most acutely in the latter, but it is a lesson for us not to read populations in ­simple binaries of dominators and oppressed but instead to oppose domination and the ideologies of patriarchy within, as well as from outside. The invitation into the disorders of desire is posed by Khalifeh to us, her readers. Her novel The End of Spring chronicles the life of a Palestinian ­family in a village outside the city of Nablus, in the midst of the second Intifada.34 It follows three young men: Majid, a former singer turned re­ sis­tance fighter; his ­brother Ahmad; and their cousin Issa. Majid almost involuntarily transitions from an aspiring singer to a re­sis­tance fighter. The shift for Majid comes very quickly when his patron, the head of the Al-­Washmi ­family and a known collaborator with the Israeli government, is found dead. Having gotten into an unpleasant confrontation with him, Majid believes that he ­will be the prime suspect in Al-­Washmi’s death, so he chooses to flee and is taken into the custody of re­sis­tance fighters. Khalifeh writes, “Just like that a new page was opened in the life of the young musician. He put down his guitar and picked up a machine gun.”35 Ahmad has a deep affection for two ­things: his camera, through which his imagination soars, and his cat, whom he loves with sensitivity and softness. His cat is stolen by an Israeli girl, whose gaze he has frequently met through the barbed fence and whose photo­graph he has taken with tenderness. The potential for friendship is lost, however, with the theft of his companion. Issa, who is tickled by Ahmad’s softness yet ­eager to avenge the theft, joins Ahmad to break into the neighboring Israeli settlement to retrieve the cat. Ahmad thereafter spends an extended period in Israeli prison suffering beatings and torture. When Majid and Ahmad reencounter each other a­ fter their suffering, their intimacy and their creativity have been destroyed: “Neither one showed the least bit of interest in the other. They ­didn’t hug, they d ­ idn’t shake hands; they ­didn’t offer a The U tterance of M y N ame  221

word of endearment. Ahmad ­didn’t shy away and he ­didn’t blink. He was staring off in some direction with his ears pricked up, not showing any expression. The boy had changed; indeed, he was more a young man. He had become serious and spoke with brevity and unsettling calmness. And Majid was dif­fer­ent, too. His hair was short and dull, his shirt was dirty, and his face had been darkened by the sun.”36 Ahmad becomes a medic, and an efficient one. He is motivated in his work, but his spirit has been crushed by the devastation of the world in which he lives: “He stitched wounds, cleansed burns, bound and set broken bones, administered shots. He became numb. He walked around hearing ­people scream in pain without showing the slightest bit of emotion. His main goal became to give something to ­these ­people, give them something from his heart or his blood. If it ­were pos­si­ble, he would give them his soul, or more, ­because t­ hese p ­ eople ­were like orphans with no refuge, no good, no God to watch over them.”37 The failures of passionate utterances, as depicted, might themselves become passionate utterances, eliciting both grief and contemplation. They work on the reader as both art and ethical proposition. In another novel, Wild Thorns, Khalifeh depicts the sense of capture that defines occupation, a capture that is compounded by the prob­lems of a patriarchal nationalist vision. This novel has two protagonists, the cousins Usama and Adil, from an upper-­class Palestinian ­family. Usama is a young idealist, recently returned from working in the Gulf region, who believes in an in­de­pen­dent state and vows to resist ­until that is achieved. Adil carries the burden of making sure the f­ amily survives now that it has encountered financial vulnerability. He endures the occupation and navigates within its limitations, including accepting work within Israel. Usama views p ­ eople who have deci­ded to make a life for themselves in Israel as individuals who have simply abandoned the cause of their p ­ eople and their nation. He and Adil engage in a verbal conflict about revolution but also about Pan-­Arab politics. Usama verbally attacks Adil, yelling, “I just ­don’t believe that ­you’ve forgotten your own country and the occupation!” Adil immediately places himself in solidarity with Palestinians “inside” and opposed to t­ hose “outside” when he says, “The proof that I ­haven’t forgotten my country is that I ­haven’t left it.”38 Adil criticizes the ­people of Arab states where Usama has found work who claim solidarity but leave the stateless Palestinians vulnerable: “The Palestinians in Kuwait, Dhahran, and the Gulf? Let them help build industries in the West Bank and Gaza and we’d stop working ‘inside’ straight away. But they ­won’t do that. You know why? ­Because they ­don’t want to risk their money; yet they want us to bear all the burdens of 222 chapter  seven

risk and sacrifice on our own.”39 Adil is effectively venting his frustration about the historical tendency of the other Arab states to offer vocal support for the Palestinian cause while failing to offer concrete economic and po­liti­cal support. He explains the frustrations of statelessness that Usama’s relative privilege allows him to avoid. Usama’s inattentiveness to class further emerges in a conflict with a bread seller, whom Usama assails for selling bread made in Israel. The bread seller responds, “Look friend, ­we’re not the first to work with them. While we w ­ ere still wandering the streets of Nablus looking for bread to eat, your kind w ­ ere ­running around Tel Aviv looking for companies to award you franchises so you could sell their products.”40 Of the two protagonists, Adil is the one who is able to read the layers of domination. He realizes that even the Jewish workers at the factory where he works are being exploited. When Usama kills an Israeli officer, Adil comforts the officer’s wife. But he also tears epaulets off the dead officer’s uniform. The fallen status of his ­family, from elites to occupied, and his day-­to-­day interactions has left him emotionally open, with a greater capacity for witnessing. This is not sentimentalism. Adil rejects the layers of domination, and he falls victim to them, all the while maintaining his capacity to be moved by the emotions of ­others. At the conclusion, the home he has strug­gled to maintain is destroyed by Israeli forces. The last vestiges of patriarchy have been removed, and what he is left with is merely his humanity. Khalifeh’s work leaves the reader with the sense that the ideological abstraction of nationalism or statecraft must always be secondary to the stuff of intimate reckoning. Politics must emerge from ­those moments rather than be applied to them. The “civilizing mission”—­and by that I mean the creations of sovereignty and personhood—is thwarted in ­these moments by ways of being and witnessing that challenge this status quo. Monstrosity is preferable to civilization. We might heed Alice Walker’s advice in this regard: “Be nobody’s darling, be an outcast, qualified to live among your dead.”41 This is not something we can use readymade language, such as “revolutionary” or “counter-­hegemonic”—to adequately describe, partly b ­ ecause it is pre-­theoretical. But it is also a precondition for the ends of liberatory feminism, the creation of community that undoes domination and sustains right relation. It is the opening to a way of being that can imagine dif­fer­ent politics or economics, not necessarily as a fixed m ­ atter, but as an experimental and pos­si­ble pathway to ethical relations. The events and personalities and relations in ­these texts disrupt grammars and propose phrases through which to develop values. They are indexical, pointing to referents (men, ­women, places, races) in rich The U tterance of M y N ame  223

contexts that alter proscribed meanings. This thematic alone provokes a challenge to the oft-­presumed ideal of our given (and abstract) po­liti­cal and ­legal order in the United States and the West generally. The indexical rupture points t­ oward the existence of alternative grammars—or, at least, to the possibility of ­those grammars—­that move us ­toward deeper reckoning with one another. My aunt Barbara once said that if you do not believe or know about conjure it has no power over you. Conjure is something that works only in the case of mutual witnessing. I do not know w ­ hether what she said is true, but it is wisdom regardless. Being open to passionate utterances is about the possibility of being moved. The recalcitrance and re­sis­tance that meets transformations in sexual politics and gender roles has the sense of a child covering her or his eyes or ears, a refusal to be moved by the possibilities opened up. This is fear, but of what exactly? Temptations to do something cruel or hurtful o ­ ught to be resisted. But to be open to mutually respectful caring relation is altogether dif­fer­ent. In fact, it is very nearly the direct opposite. So often the panicked response to passionate utterances is to embrace the rules of domination, to exploit the power to make ­others “less than.” This real­ity makes the fact that ­people still attempt to make passionate utterances breathtaking and reveals how essential they are, even when they can be offered only in the shadows and gaps of our lives. ­There is h ­ uman possibility beyond efforts to approximate the patriarch and the lady. Reckoning with them reminds us that our expressions of what are naturalized h ­ uman per­for­mances of right and wrong are in fact not natu­ral at all but created and m ­ atters of faith. Baldwin recalled one such moment of reckoning with his friend the painter Beauford Delaney, saying, I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, “Look.” I looked and all I saw was ­water. And he said, “Look again,” which I did, and I saw oil on the ­water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a ­great revelation to me. I cannot explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Paint­ers have often taught writers how to see. And once ­you’ve had that experience, you see differently.42 Ultimately this is the point: to recognize that which is pres­ent but outside the descriptions at our disposals. ­Water is not simply ­water; it has worlds of oil and light and images in it. To heed the passionate utterance

224 chapter  seven

is to witness in ways that are far more fundamental than agreeing to believe in a set of doctrines of feminism or social justice. It is to allow for a resonance beyond the familiar that ­will shape our ways of being and seeing. This is requisite for the liberatory po­liti­cal imagination to blossom, for us to begin our revolutions.

The U tterance of M y N ame  225

chapter 8

THE VICAR OF LIBERATION ... “Every­body wants a black man’s life.” Calvin held the forefeet open and up while Omar pierced the curling hair at the point where the sternum lay. Then he sliced all the way down to the genitals. His knife pointed upward for a cleaner, neater incision. “Not his dead life; I mean his living life.” When he reached the genitals he cut them off, but left the scrotum in­ tact. “It’s the condition our condition is in.” Omar cut around the legs and the neck. Then he pulled the hide off. “What good is a man’s life if he ­can’t even choose what to die for?” The transparent underskin tore like gossamer ­under his fin­gers. “Every­body wants the life of a black man.” Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

It was, for a time, a loud twittering flight of psychedelic-­colored canaries: a cloud of startle and get-­out in the ornamental irons of the rib cage. Nights when the moon was wide like the ­great eye of a universal beast coming close for a kill, it was a cave of bitten bones and snake skins, eggshell dust, and charred scraps of a frozen-­over flame.

All the ­things it has been: kitchen knife and the ancient carp’s frown, cavern of rust and worms in the airless tire swing, cactus barb, cut-­down tree, dead cat in the plastic crate. Still, how the ­great ­middle ticker marched on, and from all its four chambers to all its forgiveness, unlocked the sternum’s door, reversed and reshaped ­until it was a new bright carnal species, more accustomed to grief, and ecstatic at the sight of you. Ada Limón, “Adaptation”

In Song of Solomon, a group of Black men kill a bobcat as if they are performing a lynching. Their refrain is a lynching song about cut-­down manhood. They bond in hunting instead of being hunted. This is a bittersweet episode in Milkman’s life, b ­ ecause soon he and his aunt ­will also be hunted by men seeking a restored manhood in which valor is found in vengeance. Ada Limón also writes about a dead cat and a nighttime kill. But the events are opaque, the remnants of the destruction vari­ous. Yet “still the ­great ­middle ticker,” the heart, marches on. In Song of Solomon, ­after the bobcat kill, Milkman digs out the animal’s heart as he is commanded by his fellow hunter: “Milkman plunged both hands into the rib cage. ‘­Don’t get the lungs, now. Get the heart.’ ‘What e­ lse?’ He found it and pulled. The heart fell away from the chest as easily as yolk slips out of its shell. . . . ​‘What are you ­going to do with it?’ asked Milkman. ‘Eat him!’ ”1 Limón’s heart is not consumed; it lives and pumps itself into “a new bright carnal species, more accustomed to grief and “ecstatic at the sight of you.” ­There is a lesson in each vignette. The harrowing repetitions of the hunt in one precipitate Milkman’s conversion to the gospel of Pilate soon thereafter. The motley life and death scene in the poem vignette also provides grounds for rebirth. Poets are curators and curates. “Curate” is both a noun and a verb. The commonplace usage is the verb: to collect, select, or­ga­nize and tend to a set of objects or in the case of poetry, words and images and referents. T he V icar of L iberation  227

Placing them together might tell a story, produce an effect, or facilitate an understanding. The poet does that witchcraft. In that sense the poet is a curate, as well, charged with the tending and cure of souls without dogma. Limón, the poet, is a vicar like Pilate, the poet and pi­lot of Song of Solomon. Her words are neither scientific nor doctrinal; their map is an ethical one. As another poet, Jericho Brown, writes of his own pro­cess: I prob­ably turned to poetry b ­ ecause it allowed for a complexity of idea and feeling that I thought religion asked me to avoid. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot says, “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him ­will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly ­will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” This is what we mean when we talk about loving the writing pro­cess. It is offensive to say and impossible to explain, but somehow in the act of writing, the tree, the shoestring, the molestation, the m ­ other, the beating, the burial, and the ­music all become the same. Each item of one’s life—­from experience or from imagination—­merges u ­ ntil anything becomes material we can use to make the gorgeous and enduring ­thing.2 The gorgeous and enduring t­ hing is ­there for us to witness, even the most searing events, and to make space for ourselves and for o ­ thers. What and how we collect, acknowledge, arrange, and create is linked to the state of our souls. We are inundated with superfluous stuff. Th ­ ere is the twenty-­ four-­hour news cycle. Th ­ ere is the information superhighway. ­There are the plethora of e-­mails and tweets and texts and message boards and posts, and gifs and videos and images and platforms. Our world is so much heteroglossic access and excess, and at the same time ­there is so much rendering of so many ­people among us as ­little more than detritus and debris. It is easy to be passively active within it; to participate unthinkingly as it piles up around us, as p ­ eople fall “­under” us. Popu­lar tele­vi­sion shows about hoarding and hoarders pres­ent the disordered collection of stuff and so much suffocation under­neath piles in the analogue world. Hoarding is clearly dangerous. Viewers watch it with voy­eur­is­tic horror. But indeed, we are watching ourselves. Even if most of us d ­ on’t have physical mountains of garbage and accumulated t­ hings surrounding us, we live with overwhelming accumulations of other sorts, and we are habituated to them. Often they are both mindless and mind-­preoccupying and occupying. To be deliberate about the practice of curating in this world is to step back from the excess to deliberately care for our souls and do so with discernment. To curate in our lives is to practice deliberateness about what kinds of work we allow to come into view, not as blinders on the world, 228 chapter  eight

but as a means of cultivating the just imagination, as a means of developing an active relationship to the world around us with purpose (and not simply for plea­sure). At the same time, we must critically reflect upon our desires (knowing how our yearnings are ­shaped by the ideology of the society, knowing that they very well may be ­doing damage to ourselves and ­others), with deliberate cognizance of the repeated fact that, notwithstanding the amazing range of repre­sen­ta­tions that we find in the simulacra, the status of nonpersonhood is common and mundane both locally and globally. Therefore, curation of this sort must include the ugliness as well as the beauty, suffering as well as joy, and allowing—­even requiring—of ourselves that we be moved by them all. Resisting the logic that creates nonpersonhood status requires something much more than ­people watching. Part of the work of curating has to be recognizing that markets can so often seduce us into mere watching instead of witnessing. Neoliberalism moves fast; it integrates the appearance of counter-­ hegemony at lightning speed. Evidence of something more or dif­fer­ent happening than mere consumption can be found only in our deeds and our relations. The question we are confronted with is this: How can we be something other than neoliberal subjects? How can we aspire to something other than becoming patriarchs or ladies, or lady patriarchs? Liberation feminism is a call to pursue becoming dif­fer­ent kinds of subjects from that demanded by the po­liti­cal economy: critical and caring and attendant to the passionate utterances, the gaps and the peripheries as fundamental sites of knowledge and existence, the new maps they suggest, the ethics on which they insist, with the hope of liberation. This is prefatory work. It does not displace the many meaningful forms of activist, organ­izing, and intellectual work. It attaches to it. So h ­ ere I am invoking both the spiritual function of the vicar and the etymological connection ­there to the vicarious, the way our imaginative journey into the lives and thoughts of ­others might transform our ways to do what we do in the world. Hence, this is not the doctrine of what we o ­ ught to do as “feminists.” It is a proposition of the (what is the right word? ­There are many: interrogation, exercise, hygiene, reflection, practice) that the liberation feminist must pursue to strengthen our critical capacities and sharpen our discretion as actors in the world for whom justice m ­ atters. We curate so that we can be transformed, by the passionate utterances, so that we can encounter other maps of h ­ uman relations and the possibilities therein. Gil Batle is a Filipino artist who was born in San Francisco. By the time he was a young adult, he was incarcerated and would go on to serve twenty years in vari­ous prisons. While ­there, he navigated prison life as an artist. He describes his time as follows: T he V icar of L iberation  229

The prison “artist” was a commodity . . . ​He was like a magician . . . ​ Even the toughest convicts w ­ ere in awe at the artists’ skills . . . ​I was that commodity . . . ​The ability to draw, my age and the fact that I was good at faking it (toughness) to make it . . . ​Call it per­for­mance art . . . ​is how I was able to survive b ­ ehind ­those walls . . . ​Nothing Im proud of . . . ​but funny when I think of it now . . . ​I did tattoos in the joint . . . ​Not daily . . . ​and I have to say that my skin art d ­ oesn’t compare to my drawing patterns that I could sell in the joint . . . ​I drew daily . . Mostly tattoo patterns and portraits of ­family members on the outside. I would have the inmate pose for a sketch and include them in a ­family photo they had in possession . . . . ​as if the inmate ­were t­ here with them in the final drawing . . . ​I was pretty good at it too.3 ­ oday Batle lives on a small island in the Philippines. He makes art of T ostrich eggs. He hollows them out, then, with a dentist’s drill, he carves scenes into them of prison life that are so minute that they often require a magnifying glass to take in fully. The images are open—­often one can see the hollowness of the egg inside—­yet difficult. Batle’s is classical, symmetrical art. The scenes are true. He says: From the inmates/convict point of view, the scenes on the eggs are fairly common to t­ hese guys. . Stabbings are heard of all the time, I’ve seen at least 5 . . . . ​some reported to authorities and some not . . . ​ Ive seen 2 riots . . . ​each lasting no more the 40 seconds with horrible results . . . ​both at Jamestown . . . ​I’ve seen a Skin Head get thrown off the 4th  floor tier in San Quentin once . . . ​what a mess . . . ​they never caught the guys who did it . . Most rapes are consensual . . . ​ while some a­ ren’t . . . ​From the gang structures, the fear, the politics, how they coordinate checkings (disciplines),  hidden weapons e­ tc ­etc. , , that I have in the egg is part of prison living . . . ​you get used to it . . . ​Just gotta keep your head up, re­spect ­others and stay with your ­people . . The outside world is blown away by all this . . . ​I have a few stories that are so complex that it would impossible to express on an egg . . . ​No movie. book, painting or even eggs can express what it was r­ eally like in ­there.4 What he expresses is not visual vérité. It is curatorial. He chooses a feminine symbol, the egg, but the figures are all men. Their scenes are at once tragic in the classical sense and terribly vulnerable and intimate. The barbed wire is lacy. The guards in riot gear are armies, weapons held aloft. The chain gangs that circle so many of the eggs are made of men, each with a distinctive face and body, but expressions are kept blank. The artifacts 230 chapter  eight

of prison life are lonely. On one egg titled “Reception: Fresh Fish,” a toiletry kit is at the center: soap, toilet paper, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a razor. It is framed by a border of eyes that surround the image. At the top is a collection of security cameras, pointing ­every which way. Surveillance, loneliness, and deprivation are the sentiments of this testimony to the first day of prison admission. Another egg depicts an inmate clutching his pillow. As a witness the viewer cannot see his eyes, but the emotion reverberates. The monochromatic milky whiteness of the eggs in soft relief does not diminish the careful treatment of humanity on t­hese maps, and they include references to race and gender. We see the Aryan Nation tattoos on the arm of one subject; the cornrows of a Black inmate on another. As an artist, Batle has found a means of recounting life in prison that marks life inside as worthy of careful contemplation. It is a subversion of a beautiful sort. The care of the pro­cess is apparent, but his genius is placed in ser­vice of the stories. The invocation of classic relief sculptures, which are generally “nameless” but stand instead as trea­sured artifacts of history and culture in this work, is significant. The work draws us in, ­behind the walls, like a museum and a folktale at once. It questions the ethics of treating the incarcerated as legitimately and uncritically exploited and excluded. Similarly, the invocation of Fabergé eggs is meaningful. Whereas the ornate Fabergé egg drips with wealth, Batle’s eggs are populated with stories rather than jewels. They are an extended meditation on the world of the incarcerated. Batle says, “I actually have to go back (mentally) to prison to capture that feel of being inside that place. Its a relief of gratitude when I look up from the egg and Im reminded that . . . ​Im not in ­there anymore.”5 But he chooses to return, and he habitually brings something back for us to see. This call to curate is to cultivate rather than adhere to convention. It is itself a form of passionate utterance. Conventions are predetermined grammars for ­doing ­things. Curatorial practices are deliberate ways to be in relation to o ­ thers in our midst—­other ­people, but also other life forms, artifacts, and knowledge—­with the understanding that we are being made as well as being in that pro­cess. ­Here is another example: The jazz singer Cecile McLorin Salvant’s voice carries an archive within it. It traces a genealogy of sound. We hear Jim Crow and its transgression. We hear the claim of inheritances beyond borderlands. This is not mimicry. Salvant is not “the next” so and so, in some form of facile pastiche; the next new ­thing. She is descendant. The ­daughter of a French m ­ other and Haitian f­ ather who was raised in Miami, Florida, she describes “falling in love” with the voice of Sarah Vaughan T he V icar of L iberation  231

while training as a classical vocalist as a young teen. Vaughan satisfied a yearning in Salvant’s own vocalization. “I never wanted to sound clean and pretty,” she says. “In jazz, I felt I could sing t­ hese deep, husky lows if I want, and then ­these ­really tiny, l­ aser highs if I want, as well.”6 One can hear Sarah Vaughan–­like precision and elision, Abbey Lincoln–­like vibratos, and that sustained back-­of-­the-­throat dance of Billie Holiday’s in Salvant’s archive as a deliberate vocal ancestry. She has an extraordinary collection of ancestral voices she channels out of which to produce both art and feeling. This is a model for us all. Liberation is not departure from every­thing. It is found in the conditions of existence, some of which we create, and o ­ thers of which we inherit. From t­ here we step out on faith. The archive differs from pastiche in that archives point to genealogies and histories. They work with and through them, partially and contingently, whereas pastiche often remains a s­ imple form of authorization rather than a deep engagement. To curate is not to become the “next” Abbey Lincoln, James Baldwin, or Susan Sontag, but it very well may find in each of ­these artists a font for imaginative possibility. Remember, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon begins with a suicide. Robert Smith jumps off a roof thinking that he can fly and plunges to his death. His is a step that fails. It invokes the story of Ibo Landing, a classic part of the African American archive. With their backs ­toward slavery, it says, the Ibo walked or flew back to Africa. Perhaps like Robert Smith, they simply died. Maybe it was magic. ­Either way, it was a dream of the other­wise. Adrian P ­ iper describes a similar dream of an ability to confront fear and traverse landscapes, eluding capture. She writes: Sometimes I take off from a perch that is so very high that it knots my stomach and takes my breath away to look down and see how far away the ground is. It’s the view from an airplane on a cloudless day, but without win­dows, cabin or seatbelt, and with even greater detail in what I see below me: sometimes mountain ranges, or plains or city buildings; sometimes turbulent sea shores, or oceans with g­ iant cresting waves and no land in sight. I feel dizzy with fear of being up so high and doubt my ability to navigate over t­ hese dangerous, distant, alien landscapes. But if I do not spring off my perch and into the air, ­they’ll catch up with me, capture me, and drag me down. So I take a deep breath, jump, flap my arms vigorously—­and catch a wind current! I’m still a bit dizzy b ­ ecause of the height, but I’m firmly sailing, soaring aloft, confidently navigating a dangerous and solitary journey, which I come to love and crave. I can do it. I’ve escaped. 232 chapter  eight

Sometimes I c­ an’t escape, b ­ ecause I’m flying around the ceiling of a room in an apartment on a high floor and c­ an’t get out the win­dow ­because its only open at the bottom, and if I dip down to fly out the bottom half of the win­dow ­they’ll catch me, and the win­dow is stuck at the top. So I kick at the top pane of glass with my shoe and shatter it and dart out through the jagged hole into the open. I land among the tenements and skyscrapers.7 Something must be shattered for P ­ iper to break ­free. In the dream world, she curates the shards of glass as well as the mountain ranges. Such a curatorial imagination is distinct from a utopic one b ­ ecause it i­ sn’t idealized. It is filled with the vexations as well as the beauty to tend to the soul. The dreams of flight as represented in the higher registers of Savant’s voice, the ring of birds on so many of Batle’s sculptures, and the jumping out into the air of ­Piper and Robert Smith are placed alongside chain links, deep husky tones, shattered glass, and death. To curate like this we must ask: What news? What books? Which ­people? Which tragedy? Which joys? Which love and which devastation? With whom do we converse? To whom do we listen? E ­ very day we are making dozens or even hundreds of decisions in this regard anyway. To curate is to make them deliberately. When we curate in the simulacra—­which, if we are honest, is an essential means by which we encounter so much of the world that exists beyond our immediate lives, particularly if our resources are limited—we must ask: What is our relationship to this art, to t­ hese po­liti­cal images, to t­ hese stories of lives and places? Who made this computer? Who made this chair? Who buckled ­under so that I might sit and write in comfort? What is my obligation to ­these p ­ eople I cannot name? Art answers ­these questions when fact cannot. Its function is to incite our imaginations, to add to the collage of our thoughts, to know and become part of the shaping of our worlds and therefore o ­ ught not be treated as passive commitments, adulation, or artifacts for fandom. This means we grapple, we think, we love, and we critique. We set ideas and experiences and deeds alongside one another. We do not enter the world simply carried along by the waves of rapid-­fire attention fueled by the corporations that are deeply embedded in all of our lives. Rather, we seek nourishment to learn, to expand, to refuse, to open up space for our fullness rather than replicating the habits of enclosure. My flesh crosses where other flesh crossed, but our relations are not equivalent. Across the door closing off my domestic space, across shipping routes, before the packing and assembling, t­ here is a person or ­people to whom I am ethically bound, even T he V icar of L iberation  233

though they are unknown to me. The question, and h ­ ere I am following Dussell’s lead again, is to operate with an ethics of liberation so that this unidentified person is not outside my po­liti­cal community but, rather, squarely within it. This is not noblesse oblige. This is a ­matter of my own existence, too. My insecure status as a neoliberal market winner does not expunge the echoes of Anarcha, Lydia, and the unnamed girl strung from the mast on a slave ship in my body and commitments. It should not. We must recollect, not as a personal possession or egotistical drift, but as a call to ethics. The bad old days are ­today, even if you and I are not scullery maids or slaves. And we are all fallible; thus, humility is necessary in our efforts. A ­ fter all, the point ­isn’t to be “correct” (as if we could be). It is to ­labor critically, experientially, in the ser­vice of liberation. I was reminded of this a­ fter a lecture. When I spoke from this book at Smith College, two students asked me to consider how impor­tant it is for virtual communities to exist for ­people who are often completely isolated in their analogue worlds—in par­tic­u­lar, for trans and genderqueer and queer kids living in the Bible ­Belt and “­Middle Amer­i­ca.” I ­hadn’t yet thought of that in the midst of my critique of the simulacra. I ­hadn’t recognized the benefit of the digital landscape they described. In discussion with them, the importance of the virtual as an arena of community formation in which real connection might be had took shape for me. I could see how it was so impor­tant, despite the ravages of repre­sen­ta­tion in the simulacra. Then we discussed ways to make the virtual in and of the flesh for ­these young ­people, and for many other p ­ eople seeking liberation. This aspiration we ­imagined together was at once diachronic and synchronic, a moving t­ oward one another a mutual and collective desire to be able to forge relations of care, at pres­ ent and for the ­future. I believe such hopes ­ought to guide decisions we make. A critical intervention in which I was challenged to admit the limitation of what I was arguing pushed me in a useful way. That said, we make all of our decisions in the midst of constraint that coexists with excess. We are not fallible just ­because we are ­human; we face limitations ­because of the social order in which we reside. This constraint is financial. Th ­ ere are obligations and danger. Th ­ ere are physical obstacles and institutional barriers. Even language and literacies inhibit. In the face of this constraint I find motivation in the old southern expression that we must “make do.” It once suggested the opposite of excess: to do what we could with the l­ ittle material at our hands. But now we are in the midst of both excess and industries of deprivation. We are inundated and overwhelmed, as well as excluded and limited. We must make do with the difficulties of both. We must make do with the forces of com234 chapter  eight

petition, even as we try to remake ourselves. We must make do with the stresses of an unhealthy environment and inequitable distributions, as well as precariousness. To not have t­ hings, to experience lack and to be seen as lacking, to be the resident of industries of domination should not be collapsed into being less fully h ­ uman or being essentially lacking. We must not capitulate to domination in this way, although it can be a power­ful temptation to make the argument against domination—­that is, to say: “Look at what ­little I have and how that deprivation made ­little of me!” ­Human beings always seem to resist, and they keep creating from the scraps in the gaps. Fixating solely on “loss” or “lack” as an essential brokenness comes at the expense of imaginative possibility and creativity, the very ­things that we need to escape domination. The dominated do and imagine all over the place, distinctly and yet often with liberation as a shared philosophical underpinning to the creativity. Toril Moi wrote, “A w ­ oman defines herself through the way she lives her embodied situation in the world, or in other words, through the way in which she makes something of what the world makes of her.”8 This resonates with Cameo’s pop m ­ usic verse about the creative work of making do—­“In room 123, she elusive you see, like the invisible man in drag, / and when you come to meet her, you’ll never greet her, ­she’ll be waving her skirt as a flag”—in which invisibility, gender masquerades, and gender artifacts are all reworked to make a seductive strangeness. The refrain of the song goes, “She’s strange, and I like it.” Something beautiful and liberatory has been created. This clearly is not a conventional sense of beauty I’m referring to. It is more. In Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry describes beauty in terms of conventions of balance and equity.9 Her book is an effort to recuperate the relationship between beauty and justice. She writes against the move to discount beauty partly by expanding that which is understood as beautiful in the pro­cess. This expansion, Scarry suggests, is a form of incorporation and has its merits as such. But the beauty reached for in this text is dif­f er­ent from that. It is that of Pilate’s asymmetry or the enslaved ­woman’s monstrosity. It is polyphonic and rhythmic and both tonal and atonal rather than visibly “balanced” as though on a scale or possessed of regular features. It transgresses order. Making do, beautifully, of this sort happens in the vernacular art born of found objects in the “African Village” yards of Joe Minter and Lonnie Holley of my native Alabama. It is in the quilts of Alabama’s Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, which in the early twenty-­first c­entury ­were celebrated with traveling museum exhibitions. I went to see the work of my foremothers. I learned that during the Civil Rights Movement, the Gee’s T he V icar of L iberation  235

Bend Quiltmakers had been enlisted to raise funds for movement organ­ izing. For the movement, they made uniformly neat and pretty quilts to sell. But the older tradition from which they sprang was less uniform. My late grand­mother, also an Alabaman ­woman, told me about her aunties and grand­mother in the 1920s quilting together in a large circle. It was one of many acts of simultaneous preservation and renewal that sprang from necessity and the creative impulse. She witnessed quilters who ­were unrecognized by the larger society; I witnessed them recognized by the fine arts establishment. Both mattered. For generations, Gee’s Bend’s quilters and ­others you ­will never know crafted quilts that ­weren’t orderly and uniformly suited for sale. They ­were and are unique and brilliant compositions; imaginative and disparate artifacts that have decorated Black b ­ elt homes from the scraps. The quilters made do as an aesthetic, practical, and philosophical practice. Making do is also found in fine art forms. Take the work of young Nigerian Alabaman visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola. In many of her pieces, she works with ink pens, arranging myriad fine black lines on her canvases in texturally layered images. The images are textually layered, too—­stories of embodiment in which Blackness is both vast and overwhelming. The Blackness on Ojih Odutola’s canvases is repre­sen­ta­tional of Black life and ­people, but she also has used it to create non-­Black subjects. Her Black pen makes men and ­women, and t­ hose who are gender ambiguous, weighted heavi­ly or floating and rippling through white space that feels like air. This one place, a state that so often is depicted as ­behind and backwards, is in fact thick with possibility for the curating of liberation. To riff on the formulation of one of my elders, Frances Moore, we can blossom where we are planted. Wangechi Mutu describes making do in the context of postcolonial ­Kenya, saying, “We had a humongous history pre-­British, and when we ­were colonized and violently reshuffled, we had to decide who we ­were again. . . . ​We have this cobbled-­togetherness that comes out of a poor country aesthetic, and this attitude of, ‘Alright, we just have to make it work, just put that machine together, duct-­tape it, nail something in ­there, make it move ­because we have to keep ­going.”10 This makes its way into her art, which, as I described earlier, relies on print advertising. “I’m making a sketch, but I’m using the existing images that have been put out in the world” she says. “I love magazines b ­ ecause ­they’re so dispensable, and ­they’re so quickly consumed. In that way ­they’re quite honest. ­They’re unashamed about how small an amount of time t­ hey’re trying to keep our attention. ­They’re the fecal ­matter of culture. If you want to find out what’s ­really . . . ​­going on in the digestive system, you look at what’s 236 chapter  eight

coming out of it. ­They’re this cross-­section of our gut. And t­ here’s a lot of shit in ­there!” ­These examples are meant to suggest that making do when it comes to our curatorial proj­ect is nondoctrinal; it is vari­ous and dependent on the particulars of our constraint. Moreover, it requires that we sit with our vexations. In Wislawa Syzmborska’s poem “Autotomy,” the holothurian, or sea cucumber, is a figure of such vexation. It can cut off part of itself when it finds itself in danger, metaphorically—­a questionable sacrifice: In danger the holothurian splits itself in two: it offers one self to be devoured by the world and in its second self escapes. Violently it divides itself into a doom and a salvation, into a penalty and a recompense, into what was and what ­will be. In the ­middle of the holothurian’s body a chasm opens and its edges immediately become alien to each other. On the one edge, death, on the other, life. ­Here despair, ­there, hope. If ­there is a balance, the scales do not move. If ­there is justice, h ­ ere it is. To die as much as necessary, without overstepping the bounds. To grow again from a sal­vaged remnant. But we are not holothurians. Although we break, we cannot escape the endangered self: We, too, know how to split ourselves but only into the flesh and a broken whisper. Into the flesh and poetry. On one side the throat, on the other, laughter, slight, quickly calming down. ­ ere a heavy heart, ­there non omnis moriar, H three ­little words only, like three ­little plumes ascending. The chasm ­doesn’t split us. A chasm surrounds us.11 Our essential nature is neither that of the sea cucumber nor that of the rules of patriarchy, which creates binaries and cuts off neatly with categories, laws, and designations. Instead, we creatively live with the T he V icar of L iberation  237

wounds and the art, with the broken whispers and the poetry. The words “I ­shall not wholly die” ascend above the abyss. The meta­phor of flight is also, however, not the ultimate or sole symbol for our curatorial proj­ect. The territory can provide the means, as well, as in Toni Morrison’s poem “Eve Remembering,” in which she personifies Eve’s taste of the apple: I tore from a limb fruit that had lost its green. My hands ­were warmed by the heat of an apple fire red and humming insight I devoured sweet power to the core. How can I say what it was like? The taste! The taste undid my eyes And led me from gardens planted for a child To wildernesses deeper than any master’s call. Now ­these cool hands guide what they once caressed; Lips savor what they have kissed. My eyes now pool their light Better the summit to see; Better the summit to see. I would do it all over again: Be the harbor and set the sail, Loose the breeze and harness the gale, Cherish the harvest of what I have been, Better the summit to scale. Better the summit to be.12 Morrison’s poem was inspired by “The Thunder Perfect Mind,” a monological poem found in the Gnostic manuscripts. The voice is that of the divine feminine who self-­defines in paradox and opposition. It includes the following lines: For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the ­mother and the ­daughter. I am the members of my ­mother. I am the barren one and many are her sons.13 In the Bible, Eve’s sin means she can no longer be honored; she can be only scorned. This is patriarchy. Following from this idea of Eve’s original 238 chapter  eight

sin, conventional gendering creates a kind of stasis with certain events—­ attach them to the body forever (sex acts) as though they never begin or end but eternally define or haunt us. When does sexuality become ontological, placing one within hierarchies of desire and d ­ oing? (Slut, whore, gold digger—we are forced to ask: Can this ontological labeling ever be undone?) We have been drawn to theories, doctrines, and politics that promise to ­free us from ­these ontological prisons (the idea in Chris­tian­ ity of being renewed; the campaigns against slut shaming in feminism), and while they have personal meaning, we must push against the nature of the concept of why sexual acts echo, but social constraints do not. We must also question our habit of responding with other noun-­labels, with defining ourselves against ­these terms. The ambition of gender liberation, as stated earlier, ­doesn’t require the complete erasure of our gender categories. But it does require making t­ hose categories more elastic and more accommodating and treating them as never being all-­inclusive. Gender liberation may not require the evacuation of all categories, but it does require us to imagine that each ­human being might be afforded access to embodying and experiencing and representing all of the beautiful traits we have ascribed according to gender, irrespective of the accidents of birth of body, the ascriptions of our cultures, or the decisions of identity. It pains me to admit this, but h ­ uman beings appear to require some kind of organ­ization of who and what we are; it is just as impor­tant, however, that that h ­ uman organ­ization be broad, improvisational, and appropriately contingent and open to change. The organ­ization should help us make sense of our lives, be a map that is essentially affirming of all of our humanity. But instead, much of our social organ­ization is devoted to crushing ­people, ­either their entire identities or aspects of the self that ­ought to be affirmed and that bring good to the world. We must build into our way of ­doing gender a confrontation with the ethical questions posed by gender that exist at the level of gender ideology (which may be dif­f er­ent from one’s a­ ctual gendered experience), as well as market-­based and other social, familial, and intimate interactions that occur both between groups and within them. Morrison’s alternative genealogy of Eve allows for Eve the purported sinner and Eve the saint—­the w ­ hole of Eve—to be claimed and reclaimed. The singular biblical figure of her poem is repeated in the community of her novel Paradise, in which an old convent is occupied not by nuns disciplined by religious convention, but by a habitus, a motley inclusion of the range of w ­ omen: witches. The townspeople, striving for success and inclusion in the American body politic are scandalized by the curates in their midst and destroy their paradise. The novel at once T he V icar of L iberation  239

recognizes the beauty of the convent and how endangered we are when we make such spaces, both in our communities and in our interior lives. They breach the status quo. Utopia f­ aces almost certain destruction once it is materialized institutionally, but its tenets, if not its ends, can be practiced and practiced again as a praxis of ethical relation. We know that utopic gestures w ­ ill likely die b ­ ecause co-­optation is an integral part of late cap­i­tal­ist markets. This does not mean one s­ houldn’t try to sustain organ­izations—of course one should try. But the par­tic­u­lar structure, effort, or institution must not be fetishized. It is the relation that must be the mea­sure. I say that, but my real hope, of course, is that the eruptions we find in the passionate utterances move us t­ oward deeply loving sociality and become sustained social forms. My hope is that some truth lies therein that ­counters the current constructs that dominate and diminish. But hope must be tempered by the stuff of living. Ends cannot sustain a feminist life. Praxis holds more promise. Curates are destroyed and must be made again, repeatedly. Each loss becomes like “two tears in a bucket.” The particulars of the injury are a few molecules in an ocean of accumulation. But the bucket provides a way to hold the tears. Our buckets, our vessels, then allow us to curate again. The genealogy of tears facilitates our curatorial effort to create new purpose and renewed ethics out of history. In the Japa­nese ceramic art form of kintsugi, when a jar or vase shatters, the pieces are not disposed of but, instead, mended together with gold or silver lacquer. The vessel is restored, and the restoration does not seek to be seamless. Rather the line of brokenness is highlighted. Like scar tissue it is the mark of being put back together and back to use. ­There are archives of injury. They pile up and topple over and seep inside and outside. They are chemical spills. They wound; they create disability out of difference; they create weakness out of variation. Flesh regenerates to create scar tissue, and so do love and imagination. The stuff we use to fill the cracks at the sites of our wounds is of the utmost importance. Our woundedness does not end our purpose or our ser­vice; nor does it end our capacity to hold a life of value. Filling the wounds is something more than simply “healing.” It is a becoming. Tod Marshall’s poem “Scars” reworks the industry of deprivation and the vio­lence of failed patriarchy. It is a portrait of wounds and memory: Some trailers lost their skirting in the last storm, baring an underworld of cinder blocks and flat tires, old hoses in leaky coils, busted bikes, millipedes and spiders gathering beneath the creaking of feet 240 chapter  eight

and beds, the occasional crash of a thrown beer ­bottle, shattered mirrors, or worse. My ­father nearly killed my ­mother in our kitchen, the Formica countertop broken at the corner where he brought down her head.14 ­ ere is no resolution, but it is meaningful testimony, a story from inTh side the ­house that is not quite a ­house in this society. Trailer homes and trailer parks in our popu­lar culture are most often the butt of jokes regarding failed efforts at whiteness (read as property and stability) and decency. But this is not a joke. This is a testimonial that reveals and unmasks the joke of failed whiteness and patriarchy. Its threads of connection—to kintsugi, to shreds of fabric—­are worthy of attention. The Nigerian artist El Anatsui’s broken pots do not return to vessel form. Instead, they become landscapes, a creative composition of the shards of past and pres­ent. His work is an assemblage, with resonances of Nok sculpture and traditional narratives regarding the Earth. This is resurrection creativity, new worlds out of old vessels.15 In other words, chopped up Africa cannot be made untouched. Pillaged and v­ iolated and disabled flesh cannot be made smooth and unscarred. But it can “be,” and in that being it can exist as something w ­ hole. This creation out of the shards is conceptually much easier—at least, it seems to be—as an interior proj­ect. But even the work of self-­creation depends on a relationship with o ­ thers. And if we are trying to be liberated from relations of domination, it necessitates vulnerable work with ­others. To curate requires paying attention to this or that, to particulars, but it does not mean the wounds of patriarchy can be neatly sutured making us each ­whole and distinct. The attentiveness it demands is about cultivating the habits that enable connection, including (meta­ phor­ically and sometimes literally) bleeding together. And while we are often reminded that we simply cannot pay attention to ­every tragedy or ­every injustice in the world, we can be attentive to the compossibility of a practiced awareness to the interlocking nature of all dominations in such a way that we remain open to reading them each as we encounter them and allow ourselves to be transformed in that pro­cess. Hence, our close deliberate attention is not exclusionary; rather, it is a discipline as readers of the world. If the information age pushes us t­ oward dilettantish surface information, we instead ­ought to practice careful reading as a practice of holding close rather than holding apart or aloft. We arrange the stuff of our curation; we make of it a set to understand more deeply. But ­these sets must not delimit or permanently define who we are or the possibilities for connection. T he V icar of L iberation  241

For example, we o ­ ught to be skeptical of giving par­tic­u­lar meanings and static positions to ­either national identities or the facts of the body at the same time as we are intensively attentive to the experience of being in the body as it is situated in the conditions of a par­tic­ul­ar time and place. From the subject position, embodiment entails a constantly shifting set of realities, including pain, plea­sure, mobility, hormonal shifts, and physical encounters with objects, artifacts, and other bodies. All of this is gendered. Moreover, the perception of one’s embodiment, how it is read and therefore responded to and where it is seen as belonging, introduces another set of gender encounters. To repeat an earlier formulation: Once we understand bodies as not static but ever changing, the binary conception of embodiment is even more unsatisfying. Over the course of one’s life, one may not have breasts, have breasts, then no longer have breasts. This can be the product of hormonal shifts or surgical intervention (mastectomy, implant surgery). But it is also the case that the body is altered not simply by choice but also by circumstance. Race and wealth affect the loss of limb. Some p ­ eople, often the desperately poor, sell their organs and rent out their wombs. The scars of physical abuse, disease, and exertion adorn our flesh. Th ­ ese are “real” bodies. Our reproductive functions change in the longer terms of a lifespan but also in the shorter cycles of menstruation. Temperature, sexual excitement, illness, dietary habits, and aging change bodies. A person may begin her or his life classified as able-­bodied and may ­later be blind, paraplegic, or an amputee. In addition, the social meaning of life in a par­tic­u­lar body may change over the course of a lifetime. A person may at some points be a “bread­ winner” and a “provider” in patriarchal terms; at other points, a homemaker; and at even another point, an invalid. The primary signifiers of the categories of ­woman and man do some disciplining work that can provide effective shorthand at times, but they also can be terribly obfuscating. Hence, it is simply not enough to rail against photoshopping and racial and size diversity in media repre­sen­ta­tions of “­women” to have a feminist reading of the body. We must radically transform the way we talk about bodies and gender, the organic bodies with which we live. We must read bodies, not in terms of deficiency or affirmation, but as part of the ­human story and as a major part of the gender story. With bodies, narrative and detail must trump symbolism if we are to be careful readers. For ­women and nonpatriarchal ­others to be defined and valued through their bodies within the constraint of a binary construction of gender is a central feature of Western thought. We cannot evade discussions of bodies in our analyses of gender, nor can we pretend that binaristic thought 242 chapter  eight

i­sn’t at work in gendering. But I am calling for us to be suspicious of the coherence of terms of embodiment and the use of normative reference points for disadvantage and advantage in terms of “­woman” and “patriarch” in our thinking about gender. Hierarchies and unequal power relationships rooted in commerce collide daily with the facts and symbols of embodiment, yet ­because gender hinges on intimate association and love so integrally, it proves more difficult to confront than other terms of in­ equality. Its attachments are everywhere. This is another way of saying that we must disrupt the repetitive unconscious everyday life as readers. We want our faculties to commingle reason and emotional in an ethical way. That requires a curation of study and thought regarding the complexities of our bodies and embodiment. In “The Politics of Listening,” Wendy Chun describes a praxis of attentiveness to the bodies and lives of ­others that resists egotistical drift.16 Our duty as listeners is “to feel the victim’s victories, defeats, and silences, know them from within, while at the same time acknowledging that one is not the victim, so that the victim can testify, so that the truth can be reached together. In this model, distance must be maintained between listener and speaker.”17 Thus, for example, to learn with survivors of traumatic vio­lence is to negotiate the possibility of a common proj­ect without negating the uniqueness of one another’s trajectories. To become a listening community by learning with survivors therefore constitutes a departure from a relationship that is self-­obsessed, as well as a departure from individualistic responses of pity or even compassion. Instead it involves responding to the victim’s standing and engaging in the dynamic relationship of query and response of testimony and witnessing. Analogously, nonrepre­sen­ta­tional theory in geography is dynamic. It sets aside the artifact of repre­sen­ta­tion and collects practices, pre­sen­ta­tions, “manifestations,” and entanglements of life. It breaks through what has been termed the “embalming obsession” of ordered accounting and looks t­ oward an ecosophic analy­sis of interconnections. In this way and ­others—­some yet to be ­imagined—­the artifactual and embalming pro­cesses of product in the neoliberal age need to be disrupted. As cyborgs we run the risk of the products’ becoming us, standing in for us, as we circulate them and make them altars to our self-­ representation. Curating how we do and might act, how we survive, how we sustain in response to domination, and how we create, subordination notwithstanding, is ecological work. Our signifiers, including categories and even (and, at times, especially) identity categories, must not stand in the way of thinking through the ecol­ogy. Precolonial belief systems around gender and sexuality have become one mode of curating a gender-­liberatory imagination. The Native American T he V icar of L iberation  243

concept of two-­spirit ­people or detailed accounts of a complex array of sexual and gender identities in pre-­colonial continental Africa,18 for example, are reintroduced by vari­ous social and po­liti­cal communities to imagine gender possibilities that are not beholden to Western patriarchy. ­Whether or not we as individuals or communities take up t­ hese forms and integrate them into our social and cultural practice, they offer the stuff of history to allow us to re-­form and refigure. They are set against a backdrop of gender binaries and normative ideals that wound and offer other terms of ­doing and being. ­Those examples suggest that understanding the industries of deprivation and reading depletion are perhaps a more useful metric than a primary focus on the par­tic­u­lar Western figuration of the body. That is to say, if one claims to believe in gender liberation, then ­those claims cannot, must not, be limited to assertions of how “­women” (rendered amorphously and without a consideration of the layers of domination) are disadvantaged. We must ask: How is this or that one taxed? Whose is taxed? How is one wounded and brutalized? Is one invaded? Is one debased? How might one be cared for instead? How might we commit to naming for care? We must pursue a heightened sensitivity to the fleshly realities of the ­human body and to how taking the body seriously introduces phenomenological registers that exceed repre­sen­ta­tion. If we insist on seeing enfleshment as vulnerability filled and with the potential for intimacy, we are also insisting on a release of the patriarchal imagination and ambition. It means a confrontation with fear. This kind of “witnessing” seeks being “in tune to the vitality of the world as it unfolds,” to quote John David Dewsbury.19 THE CREATIVE AS A WAY B­ ecause each had discovered years before that they w ­ ere neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had to set about creating something e­ lse. Their meeting was fortunate for it let them use each other to grow on.—­Toni Morrison, Sula

I have never believed in theories of social death.20 Nonpersonhood and nonrecognition are features of modernity. They range in brutality from Colin Dayan’s account of the nonpersonhood of detainees at Guantánamo Bay in The Law Is a White Dog to the deep alienation of theoretically demo­ cratic but effectively plutocratic socie­ties.21 Neoliberalism brings its own dimensions to nonpersonhood for t­ hose neither possessed of many possessions nor rendered sellable. That said, ­people live in the zone of non­ 244 chapter  eight

personhood. They may be treated as “dead” before the law. But their creations have always persisted, and they trou­ble and haunt the dominant order. Their life and love is defiant. The question has always been: How do we move that creative possibility ­toward a deliberate intellectual and po­liti­ cal praxis pursued in the ser­vice of gender liberation, and of all liberation? Art is both creative and artifactual, and it is artifice to the extent that we get taken up in its worlds. The imaginative space it provides gives us room to think about our d ­ oings while ­doing something that is potentially changing us in the pro­cess. It is meaningful. I look for art, including the art of living, to pull us beyond the obsession with self-­branding that marks neoliberalism—to take us out of the way that, right now, our salability is indeed a big part of the “real,” the way the imaginative can tell us something dif­fer­ent about who we are. It is not so much escape as spiritual hygiene in the cesspool of the pres­ent. That said, I do not believe that the art world is beyond the cesspool. Indeed, it is squarely in it, like all of us, but if art itself does its work well, it has a life beyond its markets. Part of the benefit of thinking in terms of a living curatorial proj­ect is that one is focused less on the immediacy of a reaction to a t­ hing (usually some form of product or commodified self) than on building up a series of artifacts and ideas and experiences to develop a sense of the world and self and we. It is anti-­fandom. It is creative existence. We build classrooms of experience. We can create critical encounters. Consciousness-­raising is active, not passive. We participate in the building of our knowledge. Our lives become works of art, as well. At one of the lectures I delivered while searching my way through this book, I was confronted by angry colleagues twice. One critic said (and I paraphrase), “You begin with law as the foundation of patriarchy, but you do not end with it. You look to lit­er­a­ture and art, but you have not ­imagined how law could be dif­f er­ent. Lit­er­a­ture c­ an’t save the world.” Another said, “You repeat the very t­ hing you decry. You focus on the United States, the empire, even though you claim to be writing against imperial domination.” In a sense, they w ­ ere both right, even if in the moment I felt as though they w ­ ere not charitable and w ­ ere even macho in their desire to “take me down.” Yet ­here I am, ­doing the ­thing they accused me of. Let me explain more, knowing that perhaps my explanation ­will still be unsatisfactory. I acknowledge my own limitations even as I strug­gle ­toward liberation. Art, as I take it, is a philosophical proj­ect. Curatorial living guides ethics. I do believe that, as po­liti­cal actors and thinkers, we can and should be s­ haped by art. It can disrupt. It can disrupt h ­ ere in the United States, the heart of empire (especially as it appears to crumbling). Two events illustrate this for me. T he V icar of L iberation  245

Two days before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-­gender marriage in one state must be recognized everywhere, an affirmation of marriage equality, President Barack Obama appeared at a reception celebrating lgbt Pride month. A Latina activist, Jennicet Gutiérrez, interrupted his remarks. She had been invited along with other lgbt activists. Gutiérrez is undocumented and trans and one of the found­ers of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, a queer immigrants’ rights organ­ization. She disrupted the cele­bration with a call for the president to release queer ­people from detention centers. She said, “I’m tired of the vio­lence ­we’re facing.”22 The audience attempted to shush her, then silence her. They booed and chanted the name of the president. The president said, “­You’re not ­going to get a response from me by interrupting.” He went on to say, “You ­shouldn’t be d ­ oing this. Can we escort this person out? Can we have this person removed, please?”23 And she was removed. The next day, Gutiérrez explained her motivation for disrupting the cele­bration, writing: Immigrant trans ­women are 12 times more likely to face discrimination ­because of our gender identity. If we add our immigration status to the equation, the discrimination increases. Transgender immigrants make up one out of ­every 500 ­people in detention, but we account for one out of five confirmed sexual abuse cases in [the] custody [of U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ice)]. The vio­lence my trans ­sisters face in detention centers is one of torture and abuse. The torture and abuse come from ice officials and other detainees in ­these detention centers. I have spoken with my trans immigrant ­sisters who w ­ ere recently released from detention centers. With a lot of emotional pain and heavy tears in their eyes, they opened up about the horrendous treatment they all experienced. Often seeking asylum to escape threats of vio­lence b ­ ecause of their gender identity and sexuality, this is how ­they’re greeted in this country. At times misgendered, exposed to assault, and put in detention centers with men. Last night I spoke out to demand re­spect and acknowledgement of our gender expression and the release of the estimated 75 transgender immigrants in detention right now. Th ­ ere is no pride in how lgbtq immigrants are treated in this country and ­there can be no cele­bration with an administration that has the ability to keep us detained and in danger or release us to freedom.24 Gutiérrez breached the codes of civility. But she did so to expose how a moment of incorporation would nevertheless leave so many in the 246 chapter  eight

gaps and so vulnerable. She did so to describe how she, undocumented and trans, would remain in the vestibule even as some ­others who ­were formerly excluded could become property holders and patriarchs and achieve full personhood. She did so to make a passionate utterance on behalf of ­those who are incarcerated, abused, and reviled both ­here and ­there. The charges made against her concerned a lack of appropriateness. She creatively broke the order. Her voice ripped into the room, changed the tapestry. Her invitation into the disorders of desire tested the maps of our affiliation as feminists. She begged the question: With whom do we cast our lots in that moment? With the one who is cast out or with the one who excludes? The answer to that question, I believe, is ­shaped by how we are attuned to witnessing, our developed politics of listening. In December 2015, Daniel Holtzclaw, a member of the Oklahoma City police force, was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault. Holtzclaw used the resources at his disposal to run background checks on his victims. He then used the information he found to coerce ­those victims into unwanted sexual contact. He faced thirty-­six charges at trial and was convicted on eigh­teen. One of the w ­ omen he raped, identified by the initials “S. H.,” shared her story ­after the trial. Three police officers, including Holtzclaw, encountered her as she was sitting in a truck, high on pcp. The officers called for an ambulance. Holtzclaw first raped her by forcing her to perform oral sex on him in her hospital room. She was handcuffed to the bed.25 ­Later, while Holtzclaw was still in the room, a nurse asked S. H. ­whether she had been sexually assaulted in the previous twenty-­four hours. She said “no” as her rapist, the one with the keys to her cuffs, stood by. He stalked her ­after the first assault, sending her a “friend” request on Facebook. While her charges ­were still looming, he coerced her into meeting him about her case and sexually assaulted her again. Her story was exposed ­because of the case against Holtzclaw. The exposure was a rare instance. S. H. said she ­hadn’t told anyone about what he did “­because I ­didn’t think that no one would believe me. I feel like all police w ­ ill work together and I was scared.” Her fear was warranted. As described earlier, reports of sexual assaults of sex workers and addicts by police are commonplace. Their authority and weaponry give them license to abuse without accountability. The position of t­hose whom they abuse—in the gray economy, in the zones of nonpersonhood—­means that they consistently lie outside of the protections of personhood. For some ­people, Holtzclaw’s conviction was a welcome remedy. But it hardly indicated that it would deter the next rapist police officer, or the next officer who tacitly consents to the rape performed by his colleague. T he V icar of L iberation  247

Half of the charges went without conviction. Rape convictions in general are rare. Rape charges are even rarer when the victims are vestibular: the poor, the stateless, t­hose who live and work in the gaps. They are almost non­ex­is­tent when the perpetrator is a cop. Any rape conviction, moreover, is an unusual instance in a structure that more often than not punishes based not on transgression or wrongdoing in any sort of objective analy­sis but on the intersection of low social status and participation in the aspirations for patriarchy that exist outside of “lawfulness” and affluence. So the meager remedy implicitly provided affirms the very structure of criminal law that made the ­women vulnerable to the police officer’s attack in the first place. Admittedly, this is a modest and temporary protection from one rapist—­one among so many—­but it is no remedy to sexual vio­lence as a hallmark of patriarchy. What would that look like? In the years leading up to the Holtzclaw case, public discussions about sexual assault ­were largely framed around their incidence on college campuses. If that is our discursive foundation, we think of sexual assault through the structure of a crime of men against ­women or other men, by and large. But the structure is more complex than that. Th ­ ere is the ideology of patriarchy, evident on college campuses by the willful avoidance of holding rapists responsible and the per­sis­tence of rape among peers. It is evident in the increased vulnerability to sexual vio­lence for t­ hose without access to the spoils of patriarchy: capital, homes, the protection of a benevolent patriarch, conventional forms of masculinity or femininity (genderqueer and queer ­people are more vulnerable). A crisis ­ought to be provoked by the vio­lence of “policing” of ­those who have the authority to kill and violate ­under the “order” of a system of protecting and serving ­those who benefit from personhood. All over the world this is a prob­lem; it is a product, not a mere distortion, of the structure of policing as legitimate patriarchal vio­lence. It is the product of the authoritative judgment of Holtzclaw’s having presumptive superiority over S.  H. and other vestibular ­people. S.  H.’s voice, and the voices of o ­ thers like her o ­ ught to elicit a rupture, a passionate intensity. It ­ought to be among the stories we curate to contemplate the prob­lem of sexual vio­lence, one that cannot be resolved by punishment or by protection (at least how protection traditionally has been constructed). Th ­ ere ­will never be enough punishment. It is far too pervasive. And protection has been a basis for constriction and confinement. The question is how do we transform ourselves from being p ­ eople who believe that some are suitable subjects of vio­lence or disregard? How do we disrupt our presumptions and our tacit consent? Our politics must be about that transformation of emotional investment and our 248 chapter  eight

analytics of what constitutes injustice. The map of Holtzclaw’s vio­lence is not one of consent. Technically, he had consent. But it occurred ­under unconscionable conditions. ­Those abound for the most vulnerable in our world. The hand is always forced in industries of deprivation or conditions of subsistence. Holtzclaw’s map is a landscape of dark alleyways and handcuffs, of brutal power. We can choose to mark this ­woman—­this ­woman out of view of personhood—as one who ­matters all the time, not just when she wins a case, along with the o ­ thers whose stories w ­ eren’t recognized as legally relevant. We can create a politics of listening, not as a repetition of the experiences of the privileged or an affirmation of judicial procedure, but as part of our curated set of priorities and our po­liti­cal community. A politics of listening is, to a certain extent, an answer to Gayatri Spivak’s famous question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”26 The answer is, “Of course, but on her terms.” The real question ­really is ­whether the ­legal person, or even the subalterns positioned slightly above her, ­will listen. Again, curation and cultivation are essential to answer, even prospectively, “Yes.” We can say, and it would be true, that the accumulation of gender domination falls more heavi­ly on some shoulders than on ­others. That can be an assertion. But we must also attend to how that happens. The deeper charge is to move beyond assertion and, through careful examination and shifting maps of attention and relations of care, ­toward a transformation in how we exist in relation to ­others so we might transform our analytical practices and, with growing fa­cil­i­ty, witness the unjust pro­cesses of accumulation, deprivation, and depletion so that we are able to disrupt domination. One day, I got on social media. The latest controversy was a flutter. Black men ­were berating feminists and asserting that failed Black ­women ­were the cause of failed Black communities. The Black men fetishized patriarchy and wanted to have “ladies” by their sides. Feminists responded, many with thoughtful critiques and some ­others with charges that the men ­were “fragile” or poor or somehow failed. It was just banter. But linguistically, at least, I observed that they w ­ ere fighting fire with fire; fighting patriarchy with patriarchy. What would it take, I wondered, to get all of us unbound ideologically, po­liti­cally, emotionally, and structurally, from the system that declares us (and by “us,” I mean all who have been colonized; all who have been the objects u ­ nder the thumb of the patriarch) inferior? The work of the artists Dread Scott and Glen Ligon poses this question. Both have created posters signifying on signs that read “I Am a Man” carried by 1,300 striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis and made famous in Ernest Withers’s photo­graphs from T he V icar of L iberation  249

1968.27 Prompted by the tragic deaths of two co-­workers from faulty equipment, the strikers marched to protest low wages and unsafe working conditions. They took up the slogan “I Am a Man” as a variant on the first line of the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “I am an invisible man.” By deleting the word “invisible,” the Memphis strikers asserted their presence, making themselves vis­i­ble in standing up for their rights. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis to address the striking workers; the next day, he was assassinated. Glen Ligon, a Black queer artist, makes signs that alter punctuation and capitalization—­“I am a man”; “Am I a man?”—to trou­ble the aspirations of patriarchy as aspiration to membership in this society.28 Does it include queer Black men? Is it something to aspire to? Dread Scott instead says, “I am not a man,” refusing that aspect of “the dream.”29 Scott’s fame as an artist began when he and two ­others burned flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building as a follow-up to his provocative installation posing the question, “What is the proper way to display the flag?” which elicited an excited backlash from po­liti­cal conservatives. In both pieces, Scott rejects rules of sovereignty, property, and patriarchy; he refuses owner­ship. No alternative doctrine is presented, but a door is opened. That is where, I hope, a feminist reading leads first. Opening. Nayyirah Waheed writes: what massacre happens to my son between him living within my skin drinking my cells my ­water my organs and his soft psyche turning cruel. does he not remember he is half ­woman.30 We might take this poem literally as a criticism of the patriarchal beliefs embraced by biological men who are the biological sons of biological ­women. It is certainly that. But we might also take it to be a larger critique about the manner in which we are all seduced by the logic of patriarchy, adopting it cruelly over and against the tenderness, the vulner250 chapter  eight

ability, the underside where the nonperson dwells that has been deemed feminine. What does it take for us to refuse the logic of differentiation that colonizes w ­ ater, that dominates by skin and organ and mind? Th ­ ese are questions for freedom seekers. Back in the 1970s, feminists created consciousness-­raising groups. Although circumstances have changed dramatically, and in some ways t­ hings are much better for some categories of ­women, perhaps consciousness-­ raising, with a specific eye t­ oward the po­liti­cal economy and the hegemony of the digital landscape, as well as entrepreneurial subject status and simulacra publics, is what we need again. Legions of p ­ eople are fighting ­today for gender liberation, with vari­ous politics. They are working against police vio­lence, heteronormativity, sexual assault, domestic vio­ lence, reproductive domination, and so many other dimensions of gendered domination. The work is happening. Consciousness-­raising is not a proposal, then, that suggests that feminist thinking and organ­izing i­ sn’t happening. It is instead a belief that the curating of our souls is necessary to prevent the simulacra and neoliberalism, with their overarching power and insidious forces, from unraveling ­these most noble efforts. It is a proposal about the development of listening politics and analytics that are broad as well as par­tic­ul­ar to the cause at hand. It is about how to contemplate the unintended consequences of affiliations and funding, of the invitations to dance with empire, of the way we are all captured by it even when we resist. It is a proposal about how to be in community in the midst of t­ hese difficulties—to work through them rather than allowing them simply to be the basis of rejection, ­battle, or attack. And it is a call to cultivate reading practices together. In the fall of 2015, national attention in the United States slowly turned to Flint, Michigan. Residents of Flint had been poisoned over the course of two years. The poisoning appeared to be deliberate, the consequence of a governor who chose not to spend money on necessary water-­filtration systems. The w ­ ater was rust-­colored; the residents’ bodies broke out in raised rashes. The cruel irony is the residents paid for this muddied ­water and ­were threatened when their payments ­were late. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietz­sche’s protagonist embarks on an epic journey of spiritual discovery for the Übermensch, the superior super­ human—or, perhaps conceived of another way, a utopian subject. The work is philosophy and poetry at once, though in it Nietz­sche is ungenerous with many other poets, proclaiming them unclean: “They all muddy their ­waters to make them appear deep.”31 He charges them with emotional manipulation and with making insincere efforts to appear profound rather than seriously pursuing transcendence. T he V icar of L iberation  251

The motif of unclean w ­ ater in Nietz­sche’s work is provocative. On the one hand, the manner in which he champions efforts to seek clarity through an integration of science and art is appealing. But, on the other, his rejection of swimming in unclean ­waters has some disturbing implications, harrowing ones even, for our moment. He asks in a letter to a friend, “Why then go down into ­those muddy w ­ aters where one has to swim and wade and get one’s wings dirty?—­No, it is too hard for us to live t­ here: is it our fault that we ­were born for the air, clean air, we rivals of the beams of light, and that we wish we could r­ ide on ethereal dust specks like t­ hese beams—­not away from the sun but t­ oward the sun! That, however, we cannot do:—­thus we want to do what we alone can do: bring light to the earth, be ‘the light of the earth.’ ”32 ­There are ­those, according to Nietz­sche, who are born for the clean air and ­those who are born for the muddy ­waters—­the old ones, the ones who cannot be Übermenschen ­because of their outdated beliefs and inadequate beings. But what about ­those who are left to the muddy ­waters; who live and grow in them? What of the insight therein? The encounter with the muddy ­waters, the poisoned ­water, happens in poetry, ­music, and art, b ­ ecause ­those artistic forms, although structured, have developed modes of resisting the excessive pruning, order, and stratification as it seeps under­neath the skin and into the bloodstream. It is no surprise, then, that one of the greatest bluesmen calls himself Muddy W ­ aters and sings, “They call me Muddy W ­ ater, I’m just as restless man as the deep blue sea.”33 This creative restlessness needs science, of course. Nietz­sche ­wasn’t completely wrong. Unfurling the disaster required knowing all of the vari­ous forms of neglect and refusal that turned the w ­ ater rusty. And all of the agencies charged with mea­sur­ing and evaluating that failed to intervene. It also needs for us to know that the charitable interventions of bottled ­water, an industry plagued with its own scandals of deception regarding cleanliness and the environmental havoc wreaked by their plastic, while generous and life-­sustaining for Flint residents, w ­ ere in another sense an accumulation of the damage. Th ­ ere ­were also reports that to get clean ­water in January 2016, Flint residents had to show identification, meaning that ­those who ­were undocumented residents immediately became vulnerable to arrest. Overdue notices for w ­ ater bills ­were sent. It was an excess of cruelty and absurdity. ­Water is routed, used, dirtied, cleaned, and absorbed. It is privatized, too, by elites who claim it is not a right, even if it is filthy, and certainly not if it is clean. We cannot take its paths for granted or concede them to the technocrats and bureaucrats. What maps might we demand or create ourselves on seeing the muddy ­waters and the raised flesh? The body 252 chapter  eight

responds to injury with scarring. The body makes maps. ­People, in turn, make maps. They may dam off the muddy w ­ aters and its drinkers, showing only t­ hose self-­described Übermenschen, citizens, countrymen, and ­people and their clear air lives and spaces, but they may instead reveal the ­whole as a call to action. Liberation feminism requires that we attend to the pro­cess of gendering and its devastating effects on people across the globe, even, and especially, at the level of who lives and dies as the Earth is exploited. It requires reading as a feminist but also deploying modes of knowledge to serve the liberation vision undergirding such readings, w ­ hether it is environmental science or musicology. This means paying attention to expressions that are revelatory, as well as to the complexities of ­human interactions in light of our current moment. It requires that we read, witness, analyze with humility; that we confront the ways in which we are implicated in domination, even as we seek to undo it, by our ideas and our roles in the society. It calls for us to treat “feminism” as a verb: to feel the resonances, answer the utterances, listen closely, and experience that as a d ­ oing, as a diachronic poesis of living in politics that is ever changing, uncertain, and vexed but that also, we hope, ­will bring us closer to freeing us all.

T he V icar of L iberation  253

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, in The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 5, ed. Montague Summers (1915; Proj­ect Gutenberg, 2009), http://­www​.­gutenberg​ .­org​/­files​/2­ 9854​/­29854​-­h​/­29854​-­h​.­htm, 136. 2 Behn, Oroonoko, 136. 3 Behn, Oroonoko, 137. 4 Behn, Oroonoko, 161. 5 Behn, Oroonoko, 172. 6 Behn, Oroonoko, 175. 7 Behn, Oroonoko, 197. 8 Behn, Oroonoko, 198. 9 Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Po­liti­cal Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 10 Kent Anderson Leslie, ­Woman of Color ­Daughter of Privilege: Amanda Amer­i­ca Dickson, 1849–1893 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). CHAPTER 1. SEAFARING, SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE SELF

Epigraphs: John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 9 of The Prose Works of John Milton: With an Introductory Review, (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1866), 66; John Donne, “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” in The Love Poems of John Donne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 71. 1 See Baptista Boazio, St. Augustine Map, 1589, World Digital Library, accessed May 30, 2017, https://­www​.­wdl​.­org​/­en​/­item​/­3936. 2 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 27. 3 John Locke, “The Second Treatise of Civil Government,” 1689; Constitution Society, 1998, chap. 9, sec. 124, http://­www​.­constitution​.­org​/­jl​/­2ndtr09​.­htm. 4 Locke, “The Second Treatise of Civil Government,” chap. 5, sec. 27. 5 Locke, “The Second Treatise of Civil Government,” chap. 5, sec. 27. 6 John Locke, “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” 1669; Avalon Proj­ ect, Yale University, 2008, sec. 110, http://­avalon​.­law​.­yale​.­edu​/­17th​_­century​ /­nc05​.­asp.

7 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: ­Towards the ­Human, ­after Man, Its Overrepresentation—­An Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3: 257–337. 8 Fortunio Liceti, De Monstris, ed. Gerard Blasii (Amstelodami [Amsterdam] 1665), Accessed November 1, 2017. https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­bub​_­gb​ _­Jh4zIGd5iEUC. 9 John Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, vol. 2 (1690; Proj­ect Gutenberg, 2004), bk. 3, chap. XI, sec. 27. http://­www​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­ebooks​ /­10616​.­ Accessed November 1, 2017. 10 Zillah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminism, Racism, and the West (London: Zed, 2004). 11 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of ­England, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1765; Avalon Proj­ect, Yale University, 2008), 442. http://­avalon​.­law​.­yale​ .­edu​/­subject​_­menus​/b ­ lackstone​.­asp#book1​.­ Accessed November 1, 2017. 12 For example, the ­legal doctrine of sovereign immunity as applied to states has its origins in the idea that the monarch, divinely ordained to lead, could do no wrong. 13 South Carolina Slave Code quoted in: Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: Jewett, 1854; Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of ­Virginia, 1998), chap. 12. http://­utc​.­iath​.­virginia​ .­edu​/­uncletom​/k­ ey​/­keyII12t​.­html. 14 David J. McCord, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnson, 1838), 397. 15 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). 16 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651, Proj­ect Gutenberg, 2009), https://­www​ .­gutenberg​.­org​/­files​/­3207​/­3207​-­h​/­3207​-­h​.­htm. 17 See Hobbes, Leviathan. 18 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Menthes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40; Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond,” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 207–44; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” 19 Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-­ Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies ­toward the ­Human Proj­ect,” in A Companion to African-­American Studies, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). 20 Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Transcriptions of the Court Rec­ords in Three Volumes, vol. 3 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977; Salem Witch ­Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Proj­ect, 2002), http://­salem​.­lib​.­virginia​.­edu​/­texts​/­tei​/­BoySal3R​?­div​_­id​=­n125, sec. 3–3.54. 21 Boyer and Nissenbaum, The Salem Witchcraft Papers, sec. 3–3.54. 22 Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale: ­Women in the International Division of ­Labour (London: Zed, 1986). 256  Notes to Chapter one

23 Consistent with a large body of postcolonial criticism, Federici’s Caliban is a figure of the colonized subject. 24 Simeon Mesaki, “Witchcraft and the Law in Tanzania,” International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 1, no. 8 (2009): 133. 25 SparkNotes Editors, SparkNotes 101: Philosophy (New York: Spark Educational Publishing, 2005), 186. 26 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and ­Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Volume II (London, 1778; New York Public Library, 2010), 290. http://­oll​ .­libertyfund​.o ­ rg​/­titles​/­smith​-­an​-­inquiry​-­into​-t­ he​-­nature​-­and​-c­ auses​-­of​-t­ he​ -­wealth​-­of​-­nations​-­cannan​-­ed​-­vol​-­1​.­Accessed November 1, 2017. 27 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1790; Library of Economics and Liberty, 2000), pt. 5, chap. 1, sec. 19. http://­www​.­econlib​.­org​ /­library​/­Smith​/­smMS4​.­html#n9. 28 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1790; Early Modern Texts, 2008), 109. http://­www​.­earlymoderntexts​.­com​/­assets​/­pdfs​/­smith1759​.­pdf. 29 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Early Modern Texts), 110. 30 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 204. 31 Celia Britton, Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Re­sis­tance (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 1999), 19. 32 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Library of Economics and Liberty), pt. 4, chap. 1, sec. 21. 33 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Library of Economics and Liberty), pt. 8, chap. 3, sec. 5. 34 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Library of Economics and Liberty), pt. 4, chap. 5, sec. 65. 35 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 3–31. 36 Of course, even ­these names—­designations given by Eu­ro­pean explorers—­ are a sign of the logic of global domination that I am describing. They w ­ ere mapped as such, not by the designation given by indigenous p ­ eoples of West Africa or the Ca­rib­bean, for the sake of Eu­ro­pean interests. 37 Saidiya Hartman provides an extended meditation on the lacuna of history and narratives of longing and the inadequacy of the archive to capture events ­under slavery: Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your ­Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). See also David Brion Davis, “Slavery, Sex and Dehumanizatio.” 38 John Kimber, The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the Murder of Two Female Negro Slaves, on Board the Recovery, African Slave Ship: Tried at the Admiralty Sessions, Held at the Old Baily, the 7th of June, 1792 (London, 1792; Boston Public Library). https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­trialofcaptainjo00kimb. 39 Gregson v. Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. kb 232. 40 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring ­Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 41 Somerset v. Stewart (1772) 98 er 499. Notes to C hapter one  257

42 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of ­England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; Found­ers’ Constitution, 1987), vol. 4, art. 4, sec. 2, clause 3, doc. 1. http://­press​-­pubs​ .­uchicago​.­edu​/­founders​/­print​_­documents​/­a4​_­2​_­3s1​.­html. 43 See Simon Fowler, The Work­house: The ­People, the Places, the Life ­behind Doors (South Yorkshire, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2014). CHAPTER 2. PRODUCING PERSONHOOD

Epigraphs: Advertisement, New-­York Gazette, November 27, 1732, http://­ nyshistoricnewspapers​.­org​/­lccn​/­sn84024358​/­1732–11–27​/­ed​-­1​/­seq​-­2. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 186. 1 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1869; Library of Economics and Liberty, 2003), chap. 5, para. 11. http://­www​.­econlib​.­org​/­library​/­Mill​/­mlLbty5​.­html. 2 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, Volume 3: The Pro­cess of Cap­i­tal­ist Production as a Whole, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago, 1909; Library of Economics and Liberty, 2004), pt. 6, chap. 47. http://­www​.­econlib​.­org​/­library​/­YPDBooks​/­Marx​/­mrxCpC47​.­html. 3 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976). 4 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Boston: Sever, Francis, 1869), 131. 5 State of North Carolina v. Mann, 13 N.C. 263 (1830). The case is cited as State v. Mann within North Carolina. 6 Sally Greene, “State v. Mann Exhumed,” North Carolina Law Review 87, no. 3 (2009). 7 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Vio­lence in ­Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), quoted in Carol A. Archbold, Policing: A Text/Reader (London: Sage, 2013), 22. 8 J. Marion Sims, Silver Sutures in Surgery: The Anniversary Discourse before the New York Acad­emy of Medicine (New York: Samuel S. and William Wood, 1858), 51. 9 Wendy Brinker, “James Marion Sims: ­Father Butcher.” http://­www​.­whale​.­to​ /­a​/­brinker​.­html. Accessed May 30, 2017. 10 Brinker, “James Marion Sims.” 11 This point is made in contradistinction to the concept of social death. Enslaved ­people had social ties and community outside ­legal recognition, and, in fact, ­those ties out of recognition are more impor­tant terrain for our imaginings of other sorts of ­human relations than dominant ­legal ones. 12 Wendy Brinker, “J. Marion Sims: One among Many Monumental ­Mistakes,” A Dr. J. Marion Sims Dossier, 2000. http://­www​.­english​.­illinois​.­edu​/­maps​ /­poets​/m ­ ​_­r​/­moss​/­sims​.­htm. 13 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 50 U.S. 393 (1857). 258  Notes to Chapter one

14 Carlynn Trout, “Harriet Robinson Scott,” Historic Missourians, State Historical Society of Missouri. http://­shsmo​.­org​/­historicmissourians​/­name​/­s​/­scotth. 15 Victoria Welby, A Young Traveller’s Journal of a Tour in North and South Amer­i­ca during the Year 1850 (London: T. Bosworth, 1852). 16 Victoria Welby, A Young Traveller’s Journal of a Tour in North and South Amer­i­ca during the Year 1850 (London: T. Bosworth, 1852), 126. 17 Victoria Welby, A Young Traveller’s Journal of a Tour in North and South Amer­i­ca during the Year 1850 (London: T. Bosworth, 1852), 127–28. 18 Welby, A Young Traveller’s Journal of a Tour in North and South Amer­i­ca during the Year 1850, 122. 19 Welby, A Young Traveller’s Journal of a Tour in North and South Amer­i­ca during the Year 1850, 146. 20 Victoria Welby, Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretative Resources, ed. H. Walter Schmitz. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985. 21 Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,” American Journal of Sociology 10, no. 1 (1904). 22 Edward W. Said, “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness,” in Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 19. 23 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories (New York: Words­worth Editions, 1995), 38. 24 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 88. 25 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 88–89. 26 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 80. 27 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 89. 28 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 38. 29 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 89. 30 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 95. 31 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 78. 32 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 102. 33 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 104. 34 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 104. 35 Lucy E. Parsons, “Speech of Lucy E. Parsons,” in Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: New York ­Labor News Co., 1906), 167. 36 Ida B. Wells-­Barnett, “Lynch Law in Amer­i­ca,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-­American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-­Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1995), 74. 37 Wells-­Barnett, “Lynch Law in Amer­i­ca,” 73. 38 Mercedes DeMasi, “Sex, Stigma and Scapegoating: Contagious Disease Acts of Victorian ­England,” Social Sciences Journal 7, no. 1 (2007). For a discussion of the application of ­these laws in the colonies, see Katria Hiersche, “Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts in Nineteenth-­Century British Colonies,” 2014, Student ­Theses, Papers and Proj­ects (History), paper 31. http://­ digitalcommons​.­wou​.­edu​/­his​/­31. Notes to C hapter two  259

39 Leon Henri Thoinot, Medicolegal Aspects of Moral Offenses, trans. Arthur Wisswald Weysse (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1920). 40 Thoinot, Medicolegal Aspects of Moral Offenses, 288. 41 Frank August Schubert, Introduction to Law and ­Legal Systems (Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2015), 69. 42 Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 26. 43 Frank Harris, ed., Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, vol. 1. Fairfield, IA: First World Library, 2003), 277. 44 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” in Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 61, 63, 65. 45 Richard S. Fogerty, “Between Subjects and Citizens: Algerians, Islam, and French Identity during the ­Great War,” in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2005), 179. 46 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), 60. 47 James Ciment and Kenneth Hill, eds., Encyclopedia of Conflict since World War II (New York: Routledge, 1999), 250–­51. 48 Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2004), 146. 49 Jonathan Fryer, Andre and Oscar: The Literary Friendship of Andre Gide and Oscar Wilde (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 112. 50 André Gide, If It Die: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 2001), 304. 51 Gide, If It Die, 310. 52 Gide, If It Die, 310. 53 Gide, If It Die, 310. 54 Gide, If It Die, 312. 55 James Baldwin, “The Male Prison,” in James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). 56 Baldwin, “The Male Prison,” 103. 57 Baldwin, “The Male Prison,” 104. 58 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1913; Proj­ect Gutenberg, 2007), par. 20. http://­ www​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­files​/­921​/­921​-­h​/­921​-­h​.­htm. 59 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 60 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (London: Methuen and Co., 1905), 110. 61 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 2014), 187. 62 Oscar Wilde, Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act (Boston: Branden, 1989), 2. 63 Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde in Amer­i­ca: The Interviews, ed. Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 156–57. 64 Colm Toibin, Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and ­Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Scribner, 2004), 55–56. 65 Wilde, Oscar Wilde in Amer­i­ca, 157. 66 Chinese Exclusion Act, Pub. L. No. 47–126, 22 Stat. 58 (1882). 260  Notes to Chapter two

67 Page Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 477 (1875). 68 Expatriation Act of 1907, 34 Stat. 1228 (1907). 69 Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage International, 1989). 70 Jean Genet, dir., Un Chant d’Amour, film, Connoisseur Video, Paris, 1950. 71 Edward Said, “On Jean Genet’s Late Works,” ­Grand Street 9, no. 4 (1990): 26–43. 72 Kamel Daoud, The Mersault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (New York: Other, 2015). 73 Daoud, The Mersault Investigation, 19. INTERLUDE 1. HOW DID WE GET H­ ERE?

Interlude subtitle: Montell Jordan and Anthony Crawford, “Nobody’s Supposed to Be ­Here,” on One Wish, compact disc, Arista Rec­ords, cl 40272553, released September 22, 1998. 1 Dennis Hevesi, “Crystal Lee Sutton, the Real-­Life ‘Norma Rae,’ Is Dead at 68,” New York Times, September 15, 2009, B17. 2 Maggie Jones, “Crystal Lee Sutton: The Or­ga­nizer,” New York Times Magazine, December 23, 2009, mm35. 3 Megan Rosenfeld, “Through the Mill with Crystal Lee and Norma Rae,” Washington Post, June 11, 1980, https://­www​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­archive​ /­lifestyle​/1­ 980​/­06​/­11​/­through​-­the​-­mill​-w ­ ith​-­crystal​-­lee​-­and​-­norma​-­rae​ /­c0b62170​-­e8c1–4550–95a5​-­c7ebe31f7c3c​/­​?­utm​_­term​=­​.­a319cf0aaba4. ­Accessed May 31, 2017. 4 The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian organ­ization that was active from 1974 to 1980. It is well known for the Combahee River Collective Statement, which presented a critical Marxist and multiracial coalition-­ based vision of liberation. The Boston ­Women’s Health Collective was an organ­ization that grew out of a ­women’s liberation conference at Emmanuel College. In 1970, it put together Our Bodies, Ourselves, the groundbreaking book on ­women’s health, sexuality, and reproductive freedom that has since been updated ­every four to six years. 5 This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical ­Women of Color is a feminist anthology edited by Latina feminists that was first published in 1981, with multiple subsequent reprintings: see Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical ­Women of Color, 4th ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). 6 Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 268. 7 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007) 3. 8 Ronald Reagan pop­u­lar­ized the term “welfare queen” during his first presidential run in 1976 to pejoratively describe Black ­women “cheating the system” Notes to I nterlude one  261

of needs-­based assistance. This discourse ultimately became a key to the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which drastically limited the access and scope of needs-­based assistance in the United States. 9 A re­nais­sance of Black ­women’s writing emerged in the 1980s, including the rise of authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker. 10 Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). For an argument for abortion rights based on equal protection rather than privacy see Kathryn Holmes Snedaker “Reconsidering Roe v. Wade: Equal Protection Analy­sis as an Alternative ­Approach,” New Mexico Law Review 17, no. 1 (1987): 115–37. 11 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “­Under Western Eyes,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 333–58. CHAPTER 3. IN THE ETHER

Epigraph: Martín Espada, “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper,” in Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Lit­er­a­ture, ed. John S. Christie and José B. ­Gonzalez (London: Pearson, 2006), 169. 1 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (New York: Verso, 2013), 89. 2 John Stuart Mill, Essays on Some Unfinished Questions of Po­liti­cal Economy (London: John Parker, 1844), 137. 3 Mill, Essays on Some Unfinished Questions of Po­liti­cal Economy, 137. 4 John Troyer, ed., The Classic Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 158. 5 Vaughn v. Menlove (1837) 3 bing nc 468, 132 er 490 (cp). 6 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (Boston: ­Little Brown, 1881), 108. 7 Holmes, The Common Law, 108. 8 Holmes, The Common Law, 108. 9 Wendy Brown, “Neo-­liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and Event 7, no. 1 (2003). https://­muse​.­jhu​.­edu​/­article​/­48659. Accessed on November 2, 2017. 10 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009), 37. 11 Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Lit­er­a­ture, Culture and Identity, ed. Héctor Calderón and Jose David Saldívar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 29. 12 Trinh Minh Ha, ­Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1989), 28. 13 Rajini Srikanth, Constructing the ­Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Lit­er­a­ture and Law (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2011). 14 Malini Johar Schueller, “Cross-­cultural Identification, Neoliberal Feminism, and Afghan ­Women,” Genders, April 1, 2011. http://­www​.­colorado​ 262  Notes to I nterlude one

15 16

17 18 19 20

21

22

.­edu​/­gendersarchive1998–2013​/2­ 011​/­04​/­01​/­cross​-­cultural​-­identification​ -­neoliberal​-­feminism​-­and​-­afghan​-­women. Accessed May 31, 2017. Linda Hirshman, Get Work and Get a Life before It’s Too Late (New York: Viking, 2006). Judith Butler, “Fiscal Crisis, or the Neo-­Liberal Assault on Democracy?” Irish Left Review, November 11, 2011. http://­www​.­irishleftreview​.­org​/­2011​/­11​/­14​ /­fiscal​-c­ risis​-­neoliberal​-­assault​-­democracy. Accessed May 31, 2017. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Johanna Oksala, “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Foucault Studies, no. 16 (September 2013): 50. Cardi B., “Bodak Yellow.” Atlantic Rec­ords, 2017 Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (New York: Penguin, 2008), excerpt reprinted in Harper’s Bazaar, January 2009. http://­www​ .­harpersbazaar​.­com​/­culture​/­features​/­a359​/­the​-­fight​-­against​-f­ akes​-­0109. Vice News, “The High Cost of Cheap Clothes,” December 14, 2014. https://­ www​.­vice​.­com​/­en​_­us​/­article​/­wd4kjb​/­the​-­high​-c­ ost​-­of​-c­ heap​-c­ lothes​-­198. Accessed on November 2, 2017. Vice News, “The High Cost of Cheap Clothes.”

CHAPTER 4. SIMULACRA CHILD

1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 2 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. 3 See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and ­Women (London: Routledge, 1991). 4 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel, 2005). 5 See Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and ­Women, 150. 6 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972), 46. 7 Megan Garber, “Pray for Paris: When Solidarity Becomes a Meme,” The Atlantic, November 16, 2015. https://­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­entertainment​/­archive​ /­2015​/­11​/p ­ ray​-­for​-­paris​-­empathy​-f­ acebook​/­416196. Accessed May 31, 2017. 8 Elaine Scarry, Resisting Repre­sen­ta­tion (London: Oxford University Press, 1994); bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Repre­sen­ta­tions (London: ­Routledge, 1994). 9 Susan Maslan, “Resisting Repre­sen­ta­tion: Theater and Democracy in Revolutionary France,” Repre­sen­ta­tions, no. 52 (Autumn 1995): 27–­51. 10 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 16. 11 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of ­Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 12 See Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964). N otes to C hapter four  263

13 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 24. 14 Johanna Oksala, “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Foucault Studies, no. 16 (September 2013): 51. CHAPTER 5. STICKS BROKEN AT THE RIVER

Chapter title is from Miriam Makeba et al., “The Retreat Song (Jikele Maweni)” on Miriam Makeba, compact disc, Collectables Rec­ords, Narberth, PA, 2002. Epigraph: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter—­Second Edition: A Romance, ed. John Stephen Martin (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 117. 1 Noam Chomsky, “Dominance and Its Dilemmas: The Bush Administration’s Imperial ­Grand Strategy,” Boston Review, October–­November, 2003. http://­ bostonreview​.­net​/­archives​/­BR28​.­5​/­chomsky​.­html. 2 Noam Chomsky, “­Towards a Second Cold War?” Counterpunch, September 11, 2008. http://­www​.­counterpunch​.­org​/­2008​/­09​/­11​/­towards​-­a​-­second​-­cold​-w ­ ar. 3 Lee Jarvis and Jack Holland, Security: A Critical Introduction (London: ­Palgrave, 2015), 99. 4 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Border Patrol History,” April 3, 2014. https://­www​.­cbp​.­gov​/­border​-­security​/­along​-­us​-­borders​/­history. 5 “St​.­ Charles Historic Buildings: Illinois School for Boys,” St. Charles Public Library. https://­sites​.­google​.­com​/­site​/­stcharleshistoricbuildings​/­main​_­page​ /­local​-­buildings—alphabetically​/­illinois​-­school​-f­ or​-­boys. 6 Aaron Gold, “The ­Battle to Close the Hellhole at Sheridan,” Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1974, sec. 2, 2. 7 Tom Brune and James Ylisela Jr., “The Making of Jeff Fort,” Chicago Magazine, November 1, 1988. http://­www​.­chicagomag​.­com​/­Chicago​-­Magazine​ /­November​-­1988​/­The​-­Making​-­of​-J­ eff​-­Fort. 8 Lajos Bíró and Miles Malleson, Thief of Baghdad, dir. Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan et al., film, United Artists, London, 1940. 9 Ronald Koziol and William Jones, “Police Probe Extortion by South Side Gang: Blackstone Rangers Racket Bared,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1968, 11. 10 Koziol and Jones, “Police Probe Extortion by South Side Gang. 11 Brune and Ylisela, “The Making of Jeff Fort.” 12 Arundhati Roy, “Peace and the New Corporate Liberation Theology,” lecture delivered at the University of Sydney, Australia, November 4, 2004. 13 Matt Schroeder and Guy Lamb, “The Illicit Arms Trade in Africa: A Global Enterprise,” African Analyst 1 (2006): 69. 14 A. P. V. Rogers, Law on the Battlefield (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 4. 15 Rogers, Law on the Battlefield, 4. 16 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, 1 (2003) 40. 17 Charles Thomas, “Gang Found­ers ‘Appalled’ by Tyshawn Lee Murder, Congressman Says,” abc7 Eyewitness News, November 10, 2015. 264  Notes to Chapter four

18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26

27 28

29

30 31

­http://­abc7chicago​.­com​/­news​/­gang​-­founders​-­appalled​-­by​-­tyshawn​-­lee​ -­murder​-­congressman​-­says​-­​/­1076589. Carol J. Williams, “Padilla Spared a Life Sentence: Harsh Treatment in Brig Prompts Judge to Cut Prison Time,” Chicago Tribune, January 23, 2008, 1. Williams, “Padilla Spared a Life Sentence,” 1. Benjamin Weiser, “U.S. Defends Decision to Move Suspect in ‘Dirty Bomb’ Case,” New York Times, July 19, 2002, A15. For an extended discussion of this phenomenon, see Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic, 2002). Robin Celikates and Yolanda Jansen, “Reclaiming Democracy: An Interview with Wendy Brown on Occupy, Sovereignty, and Secularism,” Critical ­Legal Thinking, January 30, 2013. http://­criticallegalthinking​.­com​/­2013​/­01​ /­30​/­reclaiming​-d ­ emocracy​-­an​-­interview​-­with​-w ­ endy​-­brown​-­on​-­occupy​ -­sovereignty​-­and​-s­ ecularism. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary, ed. Larry Siems (New York: ­Little, Brown, 2015). Spencer Ackerman, “The Dis­appeared: Chicago Police Detain Americans at Abuse-­Laden ‘Black Site,’ ” Guardian, February 24, 2015. https://­www​.­theguardian​ .­com​/u ­ s​-­news​/­2015​/­feb​/­24​/­chicago​-­police​-­detain​-­americans​-­black​-­site. Spencer Ackerman, “Homan Square Detainee: I was Sexually Abused by Police at Chicago ‘Black Site,’ ” Guardian, May 14, 2015. https://­www​.­theguardian​ .­com​/­us​-­news​/­2015​/­may​/­14​/­homan​-­square​-­detainee​-­police​-­abuse. Janet E. Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006); Jeannie Suk, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Vio­lence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Vio­lence against ­Women Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103–322, 108 Stat. 1796 (1994). For a discussion of this practice, see Scott Burris and Edwin Cameron, “The Case against Criminalization of hiv Transmission,” Journal of the American Medical Association 300, n. 5 (2008): 578–81. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veteran Homelessness: A Supplemental Report to the 2009 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2010). Lindsey Devers, Plea and Charge Bargaining: Research Summary (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2011), 1. Sabrina Rubin Erdely, “The Transgender Cubicle,” Rolling Stone, August 14, 2014.

INTERLUDE 2. RETURNING TO THE WITCHES

1 ­Virginia Woolf, “Shakespeare’s ­Sister,” in A Room of One’s Own reprinted in eds. Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt, in In Her Own Image: ­Women Working in the Arts (New York: Feminist Press at cuny, 1980), 90. N otes to I nterlude two  265

2 Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Re­nais­sance: A ­Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 3 Alice Walker, “In Search of Our ­Mothers’ Gardens,” in In Search of Our ­Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 232. 4 Walker, “In Search of Our ­Mothers’ Gardens,” 232. 5 Duncan Thomas, “The Politics of Art: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Verso, November 9, 2015. http://­www​.­versobooks​.­com​/­blogs​/­2320​-t­ he​ -­politics​-­of​-­art​-­an​-­interview​-­with​-­jacques​-­ranciere. 6 Erica Jong, Witches (New York: H. A. Abrams, 1981); Maha Marouan, Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora ­Women’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2013). 7 Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1983), 10–11. 8 Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River, 10–11. 9 Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” Signs 11, no. 3 (1986): 439–56. 10 Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 149. 11 See generally Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1925–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). CHAPTER 6. REMAPPING THE LANDSCAPE

Epigraph: Nayyirah Waheed, “Untitled.” https://­www​.­pinterest​.­co​.­uk​/­pin​ /­351984527104922658​/­visual​-­search​/­​?­x​=­12&y​=­12&w​=­395&h​=­500 last retrieved 11/4/171. 1 Robert M. Cover, “Vio­lence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601–29. 2 Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geo­graph­i­cal Pivot of History,” Geo­graph­i­cal Journal 23 (1904): 421–37. 3 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; and, Through the Looking Glass (London: Bibliolis, 2010), 117. 4 Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (New York: Macmillan, 1894; Proj­ect Gutenberg, 2015), 170. http://­www​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­files​/­48795​/­48795​-­h​/­48795​ -­h​.­htm. 5 Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998). 6 Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 325. 7 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759; Proj­ect Gutenberg, 2008). http://­www​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­files​/­1079​/­1079​-­h​/­1079​-­h​.­htm. 8 See Alfred Korzybski, “Supplement III: A Non Aristotelian System and Its ­Necessity for Rigour in Mathe­matics and Physics,” in Science and Sanity (1933). http://­esgs​.­free​.­fr​/­uk​/­art​/­sands​-­sup3​.­pdf. Accessed on November 4, 2017. 9 Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Plume, 1987). 266  Notes to I nterlude two

10 King James Bible, Revelations 10:1–2. 11 Morrison, Song of Solomon, 149. 12 Mia Mingus, “Moving ­Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability,” keynote speech at the Femmes of Color Symposium, Oakland, CA, August 21, 2011. 13 Morrison, Song of Solomon, 336. 14 Morrison, Song of Solomon, 336. 15 Morrison, Song of Solomon, 336. 16 Morrison, Song of Solomon, 336. 17 Morrison, Song of Solomon, 337. 18 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: ­University of Minnesota Press: 1999), 137. 19 Edward P. Jones, The Known World (New York: Amistad, 2003). 20 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 21 See Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp, eds., Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge, 1997). 22 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847; Proj­ect Gutenberg, 2007), chap. 36. http://­www​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­files​/­1260​/­1260​-­h​/­1260​-­h​.­htm. 23 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 2000). 24 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 25 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (New York: Penguin, 2003), 9. 26 See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics Volume 3, No. 17, 1987, 80. 27 Rosario Ferré, The House on the Lagoon (London: Abacus, 1995). 28 Ferré, The House on the Lagoon, 65. 29 Ferré, The House on the Lagoon, 65. 30 Ferré, The House on the Lagoon, 9. 31 Ferré, The House on the Lagoon, 106. 32 Ferré, The House on the Lagoon, 106. 33 Quoted in Laurie Firstenberg, “Painting Platform in New York,” Flash Art 227 (2002): 70. CHAPTER 7. THE UTTERANCE OF MY NAME

Epigraphs: Richard Goldstein, “Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Interview with James Baldwin,” in James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, James Baldwin, Quincy Troupe, et. al. (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House: 2014), 74; Avery Gordon, Ghostly ­Matters: Haunting and the So­cio­log­i­cal Imagination ­(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 8. 1 Ada Limón, “Field Bling,” in Bright Dead ­Things (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2015), 48. 2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). N otes to C hapter seven  267

3 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977). 4 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–31. 5 Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day ­after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 185. 6 Enrique Dussel, Ethics and Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Alejandro Vallejo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 295. 7 Ross Gay, “Feet,” in Cata­log of Unabashed Gratitude (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 22. 8 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, vol. 24 (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909–14), pt. 2. 9 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in ­Sister Outsider: ­Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press), 56. 10 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. 11 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. 12 This idea is explored compellingly in Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Vio­lence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986). 13 William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” (1919). https://­www​.­poets​.­org​ /­poetsorg​/p ­ oem​/­second​-­coming. 14 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015). 15 Angela Y. Davis, “­Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation,” in Marxism, Revolution, and Peace: From the Proceedings of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Dialectical Materialism, ed. Howard L. Parsons and John Somerville (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1977), 162. 16 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” in Thinking about Feeling: Con­temporary Phi­los­o­phers on Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17 Adrian ­Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-­Art, 1968–1992 (Cambridge: mit Press, 1999), 63–64. 18 Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons, “All of Me,” 1931. 19 ­Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 224. 20 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 86. 21 Cavell, Philosophy the Day ­after Tomorrow, 173. 22 Cavell, Philosophy the Day ­after Tomorrow, 346. 23 June Jordan, “What ­Great Grief Has Made the Empress Mute,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press), 506. 24 Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black ­Women, Hatred, and Anger,” in ­Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press), 147. 25 Cavell, Philosophy the Day ­after Tomorrow, 187.

268  Notes to Chapter seven

26 For a compelling exploration of this question, see Patricia Williams, “Spirit-­ Murdering the Messenger: The Discourse of Fingerpointing as the Law’s Response to Racism,” University of Miami Law Review 42 (1987), 127–55. 27 Judith Butler, “What Value Do the Humanities Have?” commencement ­address, McGill University, Montreal, May 30, 2013. 28 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 29 Mia Alvar, “The Virgin of Monte Ramon,” in In the Country (New York: ­Vintage, 2016). 30 Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). 31 Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, 11. 32 Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, 16. 33 Cavell, Philosophy the Day ­after Tomorrow, 185. 34 Saḥar Khalīfah, The End of Spring, trans. Paula Haydar (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2008). 35 Khalīfah, The End of Spring, 106. 36 Khalīfah, The End of Spring, 109. 37 Khalīfah, The End of Spring, 187. 38 Khalīfah, The End of Spring, 98. 39 Khalīfah, The End of Spring, 98. 40 Khalīfah, The End of Spring, 68. 41 Alice Walker, “Be Nobody’s Darling,” cited in Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 247. 42 Jordan Elgrably, “James, Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78,” Paris Review, Spring 1984. https://­www​.­theparisreview​.­org​/­interviews​/­2994​/­james​ -­baldwin​-t­ he​-­art​-­of​-­fiction​-­no​-­78​-j­ ames​-­baldwin. CHAPTER 8. THE VICAR OF LIBERATION

Epigraphs: Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Plume, 1987), 281; Ada Limón, “Adaptation,” in Bright Dead ­Things (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2015), 79. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam, 1980), 52. 1 Morrison, Song of Solomon, 299. 2 Jericho Brown, “The Long Distance between Poems,” Boston Review, April 28, 2016. https://­bostonreview​.­net​/­poetry​/­NPM​-­2016​-­jericho​-­brown​-­long​ -­distance​-­between​-­poems. Accessed May 16, 2016. 3 Gil Batle, “About Gil Batle’s Work,” accessed May 16, 2016, http://­www​ .­gilbatle​.­com​/­about. 4 Batle, “About Gil Batle’s Work.” 5 Batle, “About Gil Batle’s Work.” 6 Cécile McLorin Salvant, interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National ­Public Radio, November 4, 2015. 7 Adrian ­Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-­Art, 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1999), 224. Notes to C hapter eight  269

8 Toril Moi, What Is a ­Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 72. 9 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999). 10 Benjy Hansen-­Bundy, “A Fantastic Journey into the Mind of Collage Artist Wangechi Mutu,” October 12, 2013. http://­www​.­motherjones​.­com​/­media​ /­2013​/­10​/i­ nterview​-c­ ollage​-­artist​-­wangechi​-­mutu​-­fantastic​-j­ ourney. 11 Wislawa Szymborska, “Autonomy,” in Poems: New and Collected, 1957–1997 (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 134. 12 Toni Morrison and Kara Walker, Five Poems (Las Vegas: Rainmaker, 2002). 13 George W. MacCrae, trans., “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” Gnostic Society Library. http://­gnosis​.­org​/­naghamm​/­thunder​.­html. Accessed May 16, 2016. 14 Tod Marshall, “Scars,” Narrative. http://­www​.­narrativemagazine​.­com​/­issues​ /­poems​-w ­ eek​-­2014–2015​/­poem​-­week​/­scars​-t­ od​-­marshall. Accessed May 16, 2016. 15 Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 98–110. 16 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Unbearable Witness: ­Toward a Politics of Listening,” Differences 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 112–49. 17 Chun, “Unbearable Witness,” 139. 18 See, e.g., Qwo-­Li Driskill, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-­Spirit Memory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016); Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of aids (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). 19 John-­David Dewsbury, “Witnessing Space: ‘Knowledge without Contemplation,’ ” Environment and Planning A 11 (2003): 1923. 20 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), a text that has had a profound influence on the development of the subfield of African American studies referred to as “Afropessimism.” 21 Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How ­Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2013). 22 Paige Cooperstein, “Trans Latina Activist Who Interrupted Obama to Speak in Philly,” Philadelphia Gay News, November 5, 2015. http://­www​.­epgn​.­com​ /­news​/­local​/9­ 592​-t­ rans​-­latina​-­activist​-w ­ ho​-­interrupted​-­obama​-t­ o​-­speak​-­in​ -­philly. 23 Cooperstein, “Trans Latina Activist Who Interrupted Obama to Speak in Philly.” 24 Jennicet Gutiérrez, “Exclusive: I Interrupted Obama ­Because We Need to Be Heard,” Washington Blade, June 25, 2015. http://­www​.­washingtonblade​.­com​ /­2015​/­06​/2­ 5​/­exclusive​-­i​-­interrupted​-­obama​-­because​-w ­ e​-­need​-­to​-­be​-­heard​ /­#sthash​.e­ UsSl3CL​.­ww35EXOX​.­dpuf. 25 Matt Sedensky and Nomaan Merchant, “Betrayed by the Badge,” Associated Press, November 1, 2015, http://­interactives​.­ap​.­org​/­2015​/­betrayed​-­by​-t­ he​ -­badge​/­​?S­ ITEID​=­apmobile. 270  Notes to Chapter eight

26 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–314. 27 Alison J. Peterson, “Ernest Withers, Civil Rights Photographer, Dies at 85,” New York Times, October 17, 2007, C12. 28 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am a Man), 1988, oil and enamel on canvas, 101.6 cm × 63.5 cm (40 in × 25 in), National Gallery of Art. 29 Dread Scott, “I Am Not a Man,” n.d., color images, http://­www​.­dreadscott​ .­net​/­works​/­i​-­am​-­not​-­a​-­man​-­2. 30 Nayyirah Waheed, “From.” http://­fleurishes​.­tumblr​.­com​/­post​/­52954113150​ /­what​-­massacre​-­happens​-t­ o​-­my​-­son​-­between​-­him. Accessed May 16, 2016. 31 Friedrich Nietz­sche, Philosophical Writings: Friedrich Nietz­sche, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Caroline Molina y Vedia (New York: Continuum, 1997), 149. 32 Nietz­sche, Philosophical Writings, 149. 33 Muddy ­Waters’s per­for­mance of “They Call Me Muddy ­Waters,” on They Call Me Muddy ­Waters, Chess Rec­ords ch-­1553, 1977.

Notes to C hapter eight  271

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INDEX

ableism, 183 abortion rights, 92, 262n10 absolution, 121 abstraction, 214 Ackerman, Spencer, 164–65 “Adaptation,” 226–27 addictions, 148–49 adornment, 117–18, 128 Africans, 1–5, 18, 27; Chris­tian­ity, emancipation and, 19; as likened to animals, 79; as not feeling pain, 53; owner­ship of, 38; slave ship conditions for, 36; ­women as synecdoche for, 63 Afrophantism, 62, 64 Ahmed, Sara, 212 Alarcón, Norma, 108 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 178–79 Alvar, Mia, 217–18 American Revolution, 43 Anatsui, El, 241 anesthesia, 53–55 anthropomorphizing, 64 anticolonial imagination, 87 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 21, 89 Arab Spring, 130, 196 art, 12, 128, 173, 176, 190; as creative and artifactual, 245; impulse to make, 197; in prisons, 229–31; questions answered with, 233 attention, 116, 143, 144 Austin, J. L., 201–4 “Autonomy,” 237–38 Badiou, Alain, 190 Baldwin, James, 75, 199, 224, 232

Batle, Gil, 229–33 ­ attle of Algiers, The, 90 B Baudrillard, Jean, 90, 129 Beauty and Being Just (Scarry), 235 Beauvoir, Simone de, 45 Behn, Aphra, 1–5, 189 Berger, John, 133 Bhabha, Homi, 87 Black Lives ­Matter, 130 Blackness, 3, 80, 208, 236 Black Panther Party, 141 Blackstone, William, 23, 38–40 Blackstone Rangers, 154–55 blank parody, 140 bling, 201 Boazio, Baptista, 16–17, 179 bodies, 239; disabilities of, 182–83; as ever changing, 242; real­ity of natu­ral, 182; response of, 252–53; transformations of, 116–18; of ­women as distorted, 193; of ­women as engine of slave economy, 37–38 borderland theory, 21 Border Patrol, 152–53 Bordo, Susan, 174–75 Borges, Jorge Luis, 179 Boucaux, Jean, 38, 40 Boucaux v. Verdelin, 38 Brinker, Wendy, 53 Brontë, Charlotte, 191–92 Brontë, Emily, 171 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 154 Brown, Jericho, 228 Brown, Mike, 169–70 Brown, Wendy, 103–4, 105–6, 162–63

Burke, Edmund, 207 Burns, Robert, 171 Bush, George W., 159, 162 Butler, Judith, 94, 120, 202–3, 204, 217 Caliban and the Witch (Federici), 27 Camus, Albert, 81 capitalism, 62, 66–67, 83, 120; as competitive, 100; deconstructing of, 175; foundations of, 30–35; gender, mechanization and, 61; as industrial, 7, 40–41; leading to suffering, 162; militarism, globalization and, 95; wealth production depended on by, 34 capital punishment, 68 Carroll, Lewis, 178–79 Cartesian anxiety, 172–75 cartography, 177–80 Cavell, Stanley, 203–4, 208, 216, 220 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 152 Charles (King), 1 Cherokee Indians, 7 ­children: as display, 58; exploitation of, 161; medical experimentation conducted on, 53–55; sexual encounters with, 74–75 Chinese Exclusion Act, 80 choice feminism, 113–14, 126 Chris­tian­ity, 3, 19, 78, 105, 180 Chun, Wendy, 243 cia (Central Intelligence Agency), 152 citizenship, 43, 80, 87, 114, 175 civility, 4, 246–47 civilization, 68 civilizing mission, 223 Civil Rights Movement, 141, 235–36 civil society, 3; alienation from values of, 81–82; dividing line between, and other, 73 Civil War, 80 class: gender, race and, 67; mythologies of, 9; oppression of, 89 classicism, 77, 218 Clinton, Hillary, 111 clothing industry, 123–26 284  I N D E X

Cold War, 84, 92, 152, 155–56 collateral damage, 157 Collins, Patricia Hill, 94, 143 colonialism, 10, 18, 49, 61, 72, 75, 83, 90 colonial mimicry, 87 Commentaries on the Laws of ­England (Blackstone), 38–40 commitment: as collective, 205; passions and, 82; to patriarchy, 60, 186; recognition and, 60 community-­based organ­izations, 166 compassion, 213 competition, 91, 100, 105, 140, 143, 200 Comte, Auguste, 73 Congo ­Free State, 62–63, 179 Conrad, Joseph, 61–66, 179 consciousness-­raising, 251 consumption, 103, 160, 200; cycles of, 150; patterns of, 113–14; per­for­ mance and, 131–32; of pornography, 147 Contagious Diseases Act, 69 contract interpretation, 102 convict ­labor leasing system, 79 cotton trade, 43 Cover, Robert, 177, 210 creativity, 128, 174, 189–90, 197, 252; in art, 245; destruction of, 221–22; domination escaped by, 235 critical race theory, 91 crossroads space, 89 Crow, Jim, 81, 83, 85, 90, 231 curatorial living, 230–33, 237–38, 240, 245–46 cyber-­mobs, 132–33 Daley, Richard, 154–55 Daoud, Kamal, 83–84 Dardot, Pierre, 100 Davis, Angela, 94–95, 213 Davis, Thadious, 172 Dayan, Colin, 174 Debord, Guy, 131 Delaney, Beauford, 224 Delany, Martin, 220

deliberateness, 228–29 democracy, 43, 84, 120, 132, 156–57, 164 De Monstris (Liceti), 20 deportation, 158 deprivation, 231, 244 Derrida, Jacques, 90, 202, 204 despotic authority, 26 Dewsbury, John David, 244 Dickson, Amanda Amer­i­ca, 7–8, 12–13 Dickson, David, 7–8 digital age, 11, 99, 128, 136 digital media, 129–30, 133; gender ideologies disrupted by, 142; presence of law in, 140; as tool, 136–37 digital sociality, 130 disabilities, 182–83, 188, 218, 240 discipline: of be­hav­ior, 55; of desire, 70; discriminatory form of, 75; of language, 60; site of punishment and, 153–54; theories of, 35; for ­women, 57 displacement, 72, 105 domesticity, 5–6, 57, 67, 68, 86 domination, 40, 58, 72, 125; as absolute, 21; awareness of forms of, 142–43; colonialism facilitating, 75; control, exploitation and, 16; corrupt nature of, 28; depiction of, 190–91; as economic, 67–68; emancipation from, 198; erotics of, 77; escaped by creativity, 235; failure of, 85; freedom and, 79; of gender, 9–10, 249; gender as tool for, 6; gendering and, 112; as global, 61, 84; logics of, 150, 257n36; mechanisms of, 35–36, 156; nonperson experience of, 52, 165; observation of matrix of, 82; patriarchy as form of, 44; pre­ce­dence of, over investment, 50–51; protection and, 25–26, 166; relations of, 11, 25–26, 43–44, 189; responsibility to think about, 95; rules of, 224; structures of, 48–49, 89, 112, 128, 146; symbolism of, 15; tools used to maintain, 170; as violent, 62, 65; of Wilde, 76; winning through, 139

Douglas, Alfred, 70–71, 73–76 Douglas, John, 70–71 Drake, Francis, Sir, 14–17, 62, 179 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 56 drug trafficking, 155 Dussel, Enrique, 205–6, 215, 234 economic benefits, 61–62 economic liberalism, 21 education, 7–8; affirmative action in, 91; bud­get for, 73; of feminist ideologies, 93; reduction in spending for, 106; structure of, 161 egotism, 110 egotistical drift, 108 Eisenstein, Zillah, 23, 94 Elizabeth I (Queen), 14–16, 40 Ellison, Ralph, 250 emancipation, 3, 11–12, 113; appeals for, 189; assertion for, 38; Chris­ tian­ity, Africans and, 19; from domination, 198 End of Spring, The (Khalifeh), 221–23 Enlightenment, 16, 25, 32, 49 entrepreneurial ­woman, 10, 100–110, 119–28, 135, 198 Epistemology of the Closet, The (Sedgwick), 76–77 eroticism, 11, 77, 82, 208–9 Espada, Martín, 99 essentialism, 55, 115 ethical consciousness, 215 Eubanks, Charles, 7 “Eve Remembering,” 238 exotic, 37, 59, 67, 103 exploitation, 34, 84; as acceptable, 186; of c­ hildren, 161; control, domination and, 16; freedom of, 76; of ­labor, 124; of natu­ral resources, 72; of productive ­labor, 44–45; vulnerability to, 127 ­family, 4; individual as opposed to, 44; logic of culture and, 82–83; relations of, 51; slavery and, 39 fatherlessness, 25 IN D E X   285

­father sense, 60 fecund, 64 Federici, Silvia, 27–30 femininity, 115, 248; in appearance, 75; expressions of, 118; ideals of, 68–69; signifiers of, 193, 213, 230; transgressing of, 77–78 feminism, 5–10, 12, 59, 253; articulation of, 127–28; as corporate, 110; doctrines of, 225; education of, 93; elite notion of, 61; as essential, 96; as guise, 163–64; privatizing of, 110, 113; recommended forms of, 89; in socialist thought, 162; waves of, 112, 114. See also choice feminism; governance feminism; postfeminist movement feminist criticism, 12, 95, 100 feminist imagination, 92 feminists: concerns of, integrated into laws, 165–66; pornography opinions of, 145 femme coverture, 21, 23 femme-­sole, 23, 50 Ferré, Rosario, 194–96 Field, Sally, 87 “Field Bling,” 200–201 financial institutions, deregulation of, 100 Fisher, Philip, 210 Flaubert, Gustave, 78 Forc’d Marriage, The, 1, 5 Fort, Jeffrey, 151–63 Foucault, Michel, 35, 55, 68, 90, 202 Frankenstein (Shelley), 49, 194 freedom, 4, 34, 156–57; acts of, 117–18; aspiring to, 80; domination and, 79; of exploitation, 76; movements for, 93; princi­ple of, 46; as root, 114; of sexuality, 78 ­free market, 103–4 fundamentalism, 84 al-­Gaddafi, Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar, 155 286  I N D E X

Garber, Megan, 137 Gay, Ross, 206 gay rights movements, 10, 141 gender: beauty ideals and, 117; binary conception of, 182; bound­aries of, 10; breaching conventions of, 63; digital media disrupting ideologies of, 142; domination of, 9–10, 249; as domination tool, 6; expression of, 246; identity of, 166, 169; ideology of, 115, 203; imperial growth, urbanization and, 69–70; love association with, 243; mechanization, capitalism and, 61; naturalization of categories of, 21; performative demands of, 114, 204; practices regarding sexuality and, 66; race, class and, 67; race and, in maps, 231; racial repre­sen­ ta­tion and, 131–32; responsibility and, 60; sexuality, race and, 139, 173; social construction of, 16–17; treatment dependent on, 55 gender artifacts, 10, 113–15, 122–25, 142, 148 gender domination, 9–10, 249 gender identity, 166, 169 gendering, 6, 11, 37, 239, 242–43; devastating effect of, 253; domination and, 112; epistemological influence of, 212; history of, 202–3; structure of, 52 gender liberation, 110, 117–18, 137–38, 213, 239, 243–44, 251 gender roles, 69–70, 77–78, 224 gender rules, 37, 78, 86 gender theory, 202 generosity, 32–34, 66, 200 Genovese, Eugene, 17, 48 geopolitics, 85, 178 Gide, André, 73–76 Gilligan, Carol, 210 Glissant, Édouard, 32 globalization, 9–10, 91, 95, 99, 203 Goldman, Emma, 67–68 Gordon, Avery, 199

governance feminism, 110, 165–67 governmentality, 120, 163 Guantánamo Diary (Slahi), 164 guilt, 103, 184 Gutiérrez, Jennicet, 246–47 gynecol­ogy, 53–54 Hadden, Sally, 51 hair, 122–23 Hairston, Eugene, 153–54 Halley, Janet, 165–66 Haraway, Donna, 130 health industry, 119 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 61–66, 179 hibiscus flowers, 173–74 Higher Law, 105 Hobbes, Thomas, 22, 25, 29, 30–32 Holley, Lonnie, 235 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 101–2 Holtzclaw, Daniel, 247–49 Homan Square, 164 homesteading, 44 homo economicus, 101–2 homophobia, 219–20 homo­sexuality, 73–77 Hoover, Larry, 158 House on the Lagoon, The (Ferré), 194–96 humanism, 32–33 humiliation, 76, 136 humility, 234 hypermedia, 11–12, 116, 136 identity, 95–96; categories of, 243; experience and, 132; as form of currency, 110; of gender, 166, 169; intervals constructed between types of, 186–87; marketization of, 107–8, 122, 143; through marriage, 8; as self-­imposed, 82–83; vio­lence based on, 107–8; of ­women, 133 identity politics, 91, 105 image circulation, 140–41, 143–44 imperialism, 83–85, 112 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 71

income in­equality, 9, 123 industrialization, 44–45, 67 inheritance, 8, 131, 187, 194 insurance corporation, 36 International Monetary Fund, 103 intuition, 205–6 Invisible Man (Ellison), 250 ivory trade, 65 James (King), 16 James, William, 57 Jameson, Frederic, 140 Jane Eyre (Brontë, C.), 191–92 Jay, Martin, 176 John the Baptist, 77–78 Jones, Edward P., 11, 187–94 Jones, Elizabeth, 49–50 Jong, Erica, 173 Jordan, June, 210, 215 joy, 177, 199–200, 208–9, 214, 229 juvenile delinquency, 153 Khalifeh, Sahar, 221–23 Khan, Chaka, 204, 216 Khan, Majid, 164 Kimber, John, 36–41 Kincaid, Jamaica, 173–74, 204, 216 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 90, 154–55, 250 kintsugi, 240 knowledge: accepted forms of, 55; agents of, 145; as destructive, 56; law and, 69; production of, 16, 94, 245; pursuit of, 108; as spiritual, 192 Known World, The (Jones, Edward P.), 187–94 Korzybski, Alfred, 180 Kuhn, Thomas, 129 ­labor: division of, 45; exploitation of, 30, 44–45, 124; as gendered, 119–21, 125; globalization of, 91; as reproductive, 48; of slaves, 26; valuelessness of, 48; wealth through, 55 Laboring ­Women (Morgan), 37–38, 62 IN D E X   287

language, 174; discipline of, 60; as inhibiting, 234; liveliness of, 207; as map, 202–3; unavailability of, 206; values developed through, 223–24 Latin Kings, 158–59 Laval, Christian, 100 Law Is a White Dog, The (Dayan), 174, 244 Lawrence, T. E., 82 laws: authority of, 81; citizenship and, 175; feminist concerns integrated into, 165–66; of intimate association, 77; knowledge and, 69; as order established, 16; patriarchy, religion and, 19; presence of, in digital media, 140; for segregation, 167–68; slavery ­shaped by, 187–88 Leopold II (King), 64–65 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex and Asexual (lgbtqia), 163–64 Leviathan (Hobbes), 25 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 44 lgbtqia (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex and Asexual), 163–64 liberal demo­cratic theory, 94 liberal feminism, 8–9, 109 liberalism, 93, 207 liberation, 67, 85, 261n4; ethics of, 234; movements for, 90; as not departure, 232; politics of, 198; seeking of, 204; visions of, 215. See also gender liberation liberation feminism, 5–6, 12, 253 Liberation of Aunt Jemima, The, 149 libertarianism, 150 Liceti, Fortunio, 20 Ligon, Glen, 249–50 Limón, Ada, 200–201, 226–27 Lincoln, Abbey, 232 Locke, John, 17–21, 26, 55 loneliness, 231 Lorde, Audre, 11, 208–9 Louboutin, Christian, 123 288  I N D E X

Mackinder, Halford, 178 Mann, John, 49–50 mapping, 16, 188; accuracy and contingency in, 177–79; of civilization, 32; ethical relations and, 190; to go another way, 199; refiguration and, 193; repre­sen­ta­tions of, 195; technology of, 179; values and ethics in, 180; witnessing, transformation of relations and, 11 maps: as creative, 189–90; illustrating West Indian voyage of Drake, 17; language as, 202–3; race and gender in, 231; substantial gap between, 63–64; as tools, 180; transformations presented in, 196–97. See also Waldseemüller map Marital Clauses Act, 69 marketability, 102, 121, 160 market-­based precarity, 166–67 marketization, 107–8, 118, 122, 136, 143–46 Marouan, Maha, 173 marriage, 8, 24–25, 80, 202, 204, 246 marriage slavery, 67 Marshall, Tod, 240–41 Marvellous Sugar Baby, The, 148–50 Marx, Karl, 44–45, 47–48, 93, 175–76, 213 masculine realm. See public sphere masculinity, 248; expressions of, 118; as failed, 135; ideals of, 68–69; as prison, 75; vio­lence triggering, 221; of weapons, 170 Maslan, Susan, 139 materiality, 77, 95–96 Mathis, Ayana, 219–20 Mbembe, Achille, 26 McClintock, Anne, 145 McDonald, Cece, 168–69 mechanization, 44, 61 medical experimentation, conducted on slaves, 53–54 Mehretu, Julie, 196 memory, 141, 240–41

mercantilism, 22–23 Meursault Investigation, The (Daoud), 83–84 meta-­theories, 90 Mies, Maria, 28, 43 migration, 45, 220 militarism, 11, 90, 95, 151, 156, 163 military necessity, 157–58 Mills, John Stuart, 46, 100–101 Mingus, Mia, 183 Minh-ha, Trinh, 110 Minter, Joe, 235 modernity, 3, 9, 20, 29, 89–91 Mohanty, Chandra, 95 Moi, Toril, 235 monstrosity, embracing of, 28, 78, 93, 97, 175, 211 Moore, Frances, 236 moral norms, 73, 117 moral panic, 69, 170 Morgan, Jennifer, 37–38, 62 Morrison, Toni, 11, 173–74, 180–87, 210, 226–28, 232, 238–40 ­mother sense, 60 multiplicity, 108–9 Mutu, Wangechi, 193–94, 236 namelessness, 82, 231 nationalism, 223 National Security Act, 151–52 naturalization, 21 neo­co­lo­nial­ism, 195 neoconservatism, 105–6 neoliberalism, 91, 120; expansion entailed by, 122; for feminist thought, 10; nonpersonhood and, 244–45; as overarching order, 102–3; pace of, 229; sedimentation of, 109; work of, 95–96 neonatal tetanus (trismus nascentium), 53–54 neurasthenia, 12–13 new man, 68–69 Newton, Huey, 141 new w ­ oman, 67–69

Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 251–52 non-­normativity, 70 nonpersonhood, 28, 61, 146, 208; border between personhood and, 64; creation of, 23, 125, 229; deepening of, 87; determinants to status of, 168; neoliberalism and, 244–45; position of, as undisciplined, 32; poverty connected to, 52; theorizing of, 91 nonpersons, 74, 104; accounting of, 44; classification of, 41; domination experience of, 52, 165; position of, 21 Norma Rae, 87–88 Nussbaum, Martha, 213–14 Obama, Barack, 111, 246 Obama, Michelle, 123 objectification, 144–46 objective real­ity, 90 Odutola, Toyin Ojih, 236 Offense against a Person Act, 69 Ogden, C. K., 57 Oksala, Johanna, 121, 145–46 Ong, Aihwa, 120 opacity, 6, 32 oppression, 89, 111 Orientalism, 62, 73, 78, 84 Oroonoko (Behn), 1–5, 8, 12, 189 otherness, 30, 70, 77 Our Bodies, Ourselves, 88 Outlaw Culture: Resisting Repre­sen­ta­ tions, 138 outrage, 142 Padilla, Jose, 158–59 Page Act of 1875, 80 pain, disregard for ­others, 144–50 Palin, Sarah, 105 paper, 99 Paradise (Morrison), 173, 239–40 Parks, Rosa, 140–41 Parsons, Lucy, 67–68 passionate utterance, 203–25, 229, 247, 253 IN D E X   289

passions, 64; commitments and, 82; as distorted, 31–32; emotion charged by, 205–8; as marked by possibility, 209–10; rules ­shaped by, 212; vio­ lence as expression of, 210 patriarchal authority, 6, 157 patriarchal subordination, 111 patriarchy, 1, 12, 19–20, 47, 56; bluntest force of, 11; celebrating of, 139–40; commitment to, 60–61, 186; conventions of, 78–79; democ­ratization of, 44; distinctions from, 35; economic distribution of benefits of, 61; as elusive, 142; established ­under modernity, 20; as foundation for gender domination, 9–10; law, religion and, 19; legacy of, 6–7; liberation from commitments to, 11; logic of, 250–51; as made of personhood, 175; personhood, property and, 40, 197; recognition, wealth and, 184; rules of, 203, 209; sexual vio­lence as hallmark of, 248; threat to, 185; traditional form of, 134; wounds of, 241 Peirce, Charles, 57 Perez, Angel, 164–65 performative be­hav­ior, 202–3, 216 performative utterance, 11, 201–4, 214 Perry, Nathan, 7 personhood, 23, 44–48, 161–62; access to, 155; border between nonpersonhood and, 64; broadening of, 134; of Chris­tian­ity, 180; dominators outside, 81; as ­legal, 26, 38, 51; notions of, 22; patriarchy as made of, 175; property, patriarchy and, 40, 197; as recognized, 79; sovereignty, property and, 9–10, 21, 99, 138 photo­graphs, 143 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 71 Pilate, Pontius, 15 ­Piper, Adrian, 213–14, 232–33 piracy, 15, 42–43 “The Politics of Listening,” 243 290  I N D E X

pop psy­chol­ogy, 59 pornography, 70, 113, 138, 144–47 postfeminist movement, 99–100, 106–7 postmodernism, 96 poststructuralism, 88, 90–91, 96 poverty, 40, 52, 103–4, 160 prisons, 159–60, 229–31 private sphere, 9, 25–27; access to, 58; digital spaces in, 131; as domestic, 67 proceduralism, 207–8, 212 progressivism, 114 proletariat, 44, 62 property: accessed through homesteading, 44; definition of owner­ ship of, 50–51; as ­human, 24; ideas of, 178; intellect as, 137; personhood, patriarchy and, 40, 197; produced through birthing, 55; protection of, 18, 43; rights to, 124; rules of sovereignty and, 188; slaves as, 48–49; sovereignty, personhood and, 9–10, 21, 99, 138; theories of, 17–18 prostitution, 41, 70 protection, 9; domination and, 25–26, 166; of innocence, 65–66; as ­legal responsibility, 133; order of, 12; of patriarchy, 80; of private interests, 42; of property, 18, 43; in public sphere, 58 proto-­speculum, 53 public-­private partnership, 22–23 public sphere, 9, 26; humiliation in, 76; private corporations in, 131; protection in, 58; transformation of, 67; ­women in, 86 punishment, 40–43, 89, 153–54; critique of, 150; for deviation, 81; gender identity resulting in, 169; justification for, 122; power demonstrated by, 35; racism and, 166; for rape, 248; risk for, 126–27; for sex workers, 126; for Wilde, 76; for witches, 27–29; ­women subject to, 55 al-­Qaeda, 164

race, 9, 20, 242; gender, class and, 67; gender, sexuality and, 139, 173; gender and, in maps, 231; inferiority of, 179 racial justice, 60–61, 67–68 Rancière, Jacques, 173, 186 rape, 3–4, 7, 74, 165; charges for, 247–49; as eco­nom­ically orchestrated, 125; institutionalization of, 8, 169; productivity of, 48; punishment for, 248 rationality, 55, 100–101, 106, 121, 209–10 Reagan, Ronald, 261n8 Reasonable Man, 101 recognition, 258n11; of artists, 236; commitment and, 60; conventional forms of, 205; demand for, 76; domination, relation and, 11; patriarchy, wealth and, 184; of personhood, 79; as po­liti­cal, 103; of power, 64; values not dictated by, 212–13; for witches, 174–75; of ­women in society, 104 Reconstruction, 79 relativism, 195 Relief of the Poor Act of 1782, 40–41 renaming, 205 repre­sen­ta­tion, 127, 178–79, 229; gender and racial, 131–32; of ­women, 110–12, 242; writing on, 138–39 reproductive ­labor, 48 reproductive rights, 9, 113 republicanism, 73 Resisting Repre­sen­ta­tion (Scarry), 138 resonance, 216, 225 respectability, 77, 149–50 responsibility, 185–86; as ethical, 220; gender and, 60; protection as ­legal, 133; of sovereign authority, 30; to think about domination, 95 Rich, Adrienne, 108 rights-­based model, 166 Robinson, Cedric, 5 Roe v. Wade, 92

Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 171–72 Roy, Arundhati, 156 El Rukn, 155 Russell, Bertrand, 57 Saar, Bettye, 149 Saar, Lezley, 192–93 Said, Edward, 61–62, 78, 82–83 Salvant, Cecile McLorin, 231–32 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 20 savages, 20–21, 30–32, 49 Scarry, Elaine, 138, 235 “Scars,” 240–41 Schiller, F. C. S., 57 Schueller, Malini, 112 scientific method, 55–56 Scott, Dread, 249–50 “The Second Coming,” 210–11 security state, 155, 161–62 Sedgwick, Eve, 76–77, 202 seduction, 215–16 self-­defense, 163, 168–69 self-­denial, 101 self-­love, 116–18 self-­ownership, 30 self-­presentation, 114, 130–31 self-­promotion, 109–10 sentimentalism, 223 ser­vice industry, 119–21 sex, 2, 202–3 sexism, 6, 107, 117–18 sexology, 70 sex trafficking, 125–26 sexual conservatism, 61 sexuality: criminalization of, 71, 167; freedom of, 78; gender, race and, 139, 173; as heart of moral panic, 69; as logical, 239; marketization impact on, 145–46; pornography as healthy part of, 147; practices regarding gender and, 66; of Wilde, 74 sexually transmitted diseases (stds), 69, 80 sexual moralizing, 69–70 IN D E X   291

sexual politics, 114 sexual vio­lence, 7–8, 114, 164; as hallmark of patriarchy, 248; as productive, 48; rates of, 162; ­towards sex workers, 247; in universities, 112. See also prostitution; rape sex workers, 114–15, 125–26, 205, 247 Shelley, Mary, 49, 194 significs, 59 Simone, Nina, 193 Sims, J. Marion, 52–56 Slahi, Mahamedou Ould, 164 slave economy, 37–38, 48 slave literacy, 7 slave patrols, 51 slavery, 2–5, 8, 12, 18, 125, 185, 257n37; common law authority for, 38; end of, 10; expansion of, 43–44, 47; ­family and, 39; laws ­shaped by, 187–88; opposition to, 49; sense-­ making of, 57; as status, 56. See also marriage slavery; wage slavery slaves: definition of, 19; examination of, 25; ­labor of, 26; medical experimentation conducted on, 53–55; murder of, 37; as property, 48–49; rights of, 36; vio­lence t­ owards, 51. See also ­children; ­women slave ships, 36 slave trade, 10, 18–19, 94, 163 Smith, Adam, 30–34, 42, 55 socialism, 84 sociality, 6, 137, 217, 240 social media, 132–36, 142, 149, 249 social movements, 88, 91, 141 social organ­ization, 28–30, 60, 239 social ser­vices, structure of, 161 social transformation, 92–93 Somerset, James, 38, 40 Song of Solomon (Morrison), 173, 180–87, 226–28, 232 Sontag, Susan, 143, 232 sovereign authority, 19, 156–57, 194; establishment of, 44; justification by, 21; partnerships between merchants 292  I N D E X

and, 23; responsibility of, 30; tools for, 179 sovereignty, 18, 26; benefits of, 111; doctrines of, 197; militarism guarding, 156; property, personhood and, 9–10, 21, 99, 138; recuperative proj­ects and, 85; rules of property and, 188 Spanish Inquisition, 68 Spillers, Hortense, 21, 25, 37, 47, 55, 96–97 Spivak, Gayatri, 21, 28, 249 standpoint theory, 96 State v. Mann, 49–52 stds (sexually transmitted diseases), 69, 80 Stevens, Wallace, 140 strangeness, 220 Stranger, The (Camus), 81 subaltern imagination, 95 suffrage, rights for, 44, 61, 86 Sula (Morrison), 173 surveillance, 24, 158; loneliness, deprivation and, 231; organ­ization of, 35 Sutton, Crystal Lee, 87–88 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (Carroll), 179 sympathy, 30–31, 49 Syzmborska, Wislawa, 237–38 Taney, Roger B., 56 Tar Baby (Morrison), 174 technology, 44–45, 67; of destruction, 156; fa­cil­i­ty with, 130; of mapping, 179; stakes and structures of, 132; vio­lence, emotion and, 65; for war, 152 temptation, 78 terrorism, 158 Textile Workers Union of Amer­i­ca, 87 theater, as site for po­liti­cal theory, 139 Thief of Baghdad, The, 154 This Bridge Called My Back, 88–89 Thomas, Dana, 124 “The Thunder Perfect Mind,” 238–39

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietz­sche), 251 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 72 Toomer, Jean, 172 totalitarianism, 197 Treaty of Westphalia, 152 trismus nascentium (neonatal tetanus), 53–54 Truman, Harry, 151 Trump, Donald, 111 Tubman, Harriet, 208 The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Mathis), 219–20 unemployment, 91 ­unionization, 87–88 universalism, 90 urbanization, 29, 44, 66–70 utilitarianism, 55 values, 196; alienation from, of civil society, 81–82; destabilizing of, 105; ethics and, in mapping, 180; of feeling, 209; of integration, 90; language developing, 223–24; of listening, 208; recognition not dictating, 212–13 Vaughan, Sarah, 231–32 Vaughan v, Menlove, 101 vawa (Vio­lence against ­Women Act), 166–67 Vespucci, Amerigo, 178 vestibular, 37, 47 veterans, 168 Victoria (Queen), 56–57 Victorianism, 56–57, 114, 145 video games, 139–40 vio­lence, 9, 55; conditions for, 81; as domestic, 165, 166; of domination, 62, 65; ending of, 126; as expression of passion, 210; as identity-­based, 107–8; incarceration as alternative to, 159–60; as legitimized, 29, 169, 197; masculinity triggered by, 221; relations to, 192; ­towards slaves, 51; structure maintained through, 19; survivors of, 243; technology, emo-

tion and, 65; in video games, 139–40; ­towards w ­ omen, 36, 50. See also sexual vio­lence Vio­lence against ­Women Act (vawa), 166–67 “The Virgin of Monte Ramon,” 217–18 virtuosity, 214 visibility, 127, 175 vulnerability, 59, 161, 216–17, 244, 250–51; as economic, 88; to exploitation, 127; height of ­human, 143 wage slavery, 45, 67 Waheed, Nayyirah, 177, 250 Waldseemüller, Martin, 178 Waldseemüller map, 187–88 Walker, Alice, 172–73, 223 Walker, Kara, 148–50 war: aftermath of, 155–56; destruction from, 210–11; justification for, 39; technology for, 152; on ­women, 106. See also American Revolution; Civil War; Cold War; World War I; World War II ­water, 252–53 wealth, 53, 231, 242; through ­labor, 55; patriarchy, recognition and, 184; production of, 8, 31, 34, 47; from slave trade, 18–19 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 30, 34 weapons, 151, 156–57, 169–70 Welby, Victoria, 57–61 Welfare Reform Act, 261n8 Wells, Ida B., 67, 68 West, Robin, 210 whiteness, 8, 56, 78, 149, 241 White South, 7–8 Wilberforce, William, 36 Wilde, Oscar, 66, 195, 215; domination of, 76; Douglas, A., relationship with, 73–76; The Importance of Being Earnest by, 71; The Picture of Dorian Gray by, 71; punishment for, 76; self projection of, 78–80; as sexual deviant, 70–71, 75–81; sexuality of, 74 IN D E X   293

Wild Thorns (Khalifeh), 222–23 witches, 27–29, 34, 171–76, 198 Witches (Jong), 173 Withers, Ernest, 249–50 ­women: bodies of, as engine of slave economy, 37–38; capacity of, 30–33; disadvantages of, 244; discipline for, 57; distortion of bodies of, 193; ideals regarding, 57–58; identity of, 133; inferiority of, 209; as leaders, 18; medical experimentation on, 53–55; in public sphere, 86; repre­sen­ ta­tion of, 110–11, 242; role of, 59–60; societal recognition of, 104; as synecdoche for Africans, 63; vio­lence

294  I N D E X

­towards, 36, 50; war on, 106. See also ­mother sense; new ­woman Woolf, ­Virginia, 171–72, 265n1 World Bank, 103 World War I, 194 World War II, 86, 153 Wright, Richard, 220 Wynter, Sylvia, 19, 26, 220 Yeats, William Butler, 210–11 Young Travellers Journal of a Tour in North and South Amer­i­ca during the Year 1850, A, 57 Zong slave ship massacre, 36