Queer Objects

Guy Davidson, Monique Rooney, Guy Davidson, Monique Rooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429536304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Salud sexual y sexualidad

Pursuing the discursive or material effects of relational queerness, this book reflects on how objects can illuminate, affect, and animate queer modes of being.

In the early 1990s the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as "multiply transitive... relational and strange, " rather than a fixed identity. In spite of this, much of the queer theoretical scholarship of the last three decades has used queer as a synonym for anti-normative sexual identities. The contributions to this volume return to the idea of transitivity, exploring what happens when queer is thought of as a turning toward or turning away from a diverse range of objects, including bodily waste; frozen cats; archival ephemera; the writing of Virginia Woolf; the Pop art of Ray Johnson; the podcast S-Town; and Maggie Nelson's memoir The Argonauts.

Relevant to those studying queer theory, this book will also be of wider interest to those researching identity and the way in which it is represented in a variety of artistic disciplines.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

EVE SEDGWICK’S “OTHER MATERIALS”

for jonathan goldberg and michael moon, in appreciation

scott herring

“Eve Sedgwick’s ‘Other Materials’” refers to a seminar that Sedgwick offered several times at the CUNY Graduate Center entitled “How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials.” According to its digitally archived syllabus, the seminar’s graduate students participated in an “experimental seminar/studio workshop” with “each exploring different aspects of the complex relations among language, materiality, and visuality” via literary and non-literary objects, including those of their own creation (“How to Do Things”).¹ With their “unconventional use of the materiality of both the written word and its support,” these classes were a pedagogical riff on J.L. Austin’s 1955 lectures (“How to Do Things”). But Sedgwick’s title not only gestures to this British philosopher or to her own revisions of his speech act theory that she put forth in works such as her co-edited collection Performativity and Performance (1995) or Touching Feeling (2003). It also nods to her established interest in creating material things – what her memoir A Dialogue on Love (1999) refers to as “THE BUDDHIST STUFF, MANIA FOR MAKING UNSPEAKING OBJECTS” which assist “EMOTIONAL REGISTERS THAT WEREN’T AVAILABLE WHILE GENERATING FIRST PERSON” (Dialogue 207).² These course offerings coincided with her art pieces as well as their exhibition at Stony Brook University, Dartmouth College, and elsewhere before her death in 2009.

Eve Sedgwick’s “other materials” also refers to her fecal matter. The two titles are inextricable, as Sedgwick herself acknowledges. This should come as no surprise given her avowed interest in anality. Think of her close reading of Henry James’s “Golden Bowel” and his “anal poetics” in “Is the Rectum Straight?” (Tendencies 102, 98); her shared glee in filmmaker John Water’s “toilet bowl mentality” featured in her collaborative essay with Michael Moon (“Divinity” 236); and her commitment to “female anal eroticism” in “A Poem Is Being Written” (Tendencies 178). All this constituted what Sedgwick, quoting James, calls “accumulated good stuff,” and it is fitting, then, that the CUNY Graduate Center held a two-day symposium in 2010 juxtaposing public discussion of Sedgwick’s course materials with academic talks organized under the theme of “Spanking & Poetry” (Touching 60; Fig. 1). Anality and erotics as well as the rear and its material output regularly went hand-in-hand for this theorist. “SOMEHOW,” Sedgwick writes in a line from A Dialogue on Love that Touching Feeling repeats, “THE SILK AND SHIT GO TOGETHER” (Dialogue 206; Touching 22).

Fig. 1 Promotional poster for CUNY Graduate Center conference and exhibition on “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” 25–26 February 2010.

She was, as usual, on to something. This essay teases out Sedgwick’s not-so-tenuous link between material cultures such as cloth and socially abject matter such as feces by thinking more about the relationship between queer object relations and queer material cultures. As I have argued in previous writings on unorthodox collecting and material deviance, queer theorists and queer studies scholars would do well to appreciate how our organizing keywords – perversion, normativity, normalization – impact persons, subjectivities, and their possessions far beyond any identifiable sex/gender system (Herring). Regimes of normalization do not fade away like old soldiers after homonormativity’s successful march across the West for many LGBTQ individuals and populations. They take on new life in material perverts such as hoarders, or in relationships with what Sedgwick and Moon call the “chemical, cultural, and material garbage – our own waste – in whose company we are destined to live and die” (“Divinity” 235).

These observations have had good company. In his recent book-length evaluation of Sedgwick, art historian Jason Edwards cites my last quoted line above and notes that “Sedgwick’s writing pays particular attention to matters anal” (74). Finding that “she places in centre stage her own rear end,” Edwards zeroes in on how Sedgwick negotiated “a theoretical context in which ideas of ‘fecalisation’ as necessarily negative were commonplace among Kleinians” (75, 74). Picking up on the queerness of this Sedgwickian “SHIT,” my essay’s aim is not to desexualize anality even as Sedgwick noted that the last book she published “includes so little sex” (Touching 13). It is instead to consider how her writings on gendered anal erotics from the late 1980s met up with her crafty interest from the mid-1990s onward in what Melanie Klein terms “the anal object relation” (123). She – and I – are interested not just in the bottom or the bowels but also in what comes out of our digestive tracts. While I acknowledge and discuss her reliance on Kleinian thought below, I nevertheless show that Sedgwick offered her own queer theory of anal affairs, or, to be more precise, of fecal object relations. Following scholars such as Edwards, Renu Bora, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Robert Reid-Pharr, and others, I consider the critical issue of Sedgwickian bowels as they materialized into an idiosyncratically queer theory of objects and stuff, one that was never not a matter of life and death in this critic’s thought.³ My basic argument is that, while we have extensively detailed Sedgwick’s contributions to literary studies, sexuality, gender, affect, and performativity, we should also see her writings as theorizing queer material relations given how her rearticulating of psychodynamic object relations theory overlapped with the organic and inorganic matter that the workshops of our bodies daily produce. Indeed, Sedgwick listed her intersecting professional fields on her CUNY Graduate Center faculty website page as “the Victorian novel; queer studies; performativity and performance; experimental critical writing; material culture, especially textiles and texture; early modernism and Proust; Romantic fiction; artists’ books; non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; Buddhism in the West” (Bklynbiblio). I detail how part of her lasting investment in material culture studies was waste matter, including that of her own doing as she made things and, as a practicing Buddhist, also tried to empty herself out.

This piece consequently makes good on Sedgwick’s dedication to material culture and “material garbage” of all sorts, including feces, which is and is not part of personhood given that human waste matter consists of a body’s unprocessed, partially undigested food, drink, and bacteria. But shit, as Freud taught us and as the word’s various usages imply, can also be an emotional thing released into the world, a queer social bond, and, for an infant, a “first ‘gift’” to family members (Three Essays 52).⁴ Sedgwick felt similarly. “In an essay that has influenced me a lot,” she writes in Touching Feeling, “Renu Bora uses James’s intense fecal interest as his point of departure for a remarkably productive discussion of the whole issue of texture” (13). My point of departure for this argument will thus be her own.

Some quick words of caution before this close reading begins: I do not intend to dishonor Sedgwick by attending to her own thinking on her own ordure. She took this subject matter seriously throughout her academic essays, her poetry, and her creative non-fiction. I follow her example and do so as well. Her writings have been formative to my own writing on queer entities as well as my development as a white gay male academic who came to US queer theory with Sedgwick’s works in my pocket. With this debt in mind, my piece is not a paranoid reading of her excrement. Neither, however, is it an unabashedly reparative one. I have come to think that Sedgwick’s other materials – unlike those of Klein and many of our queer theories today – suggest one way of “envision[ing] a further space beyond the depressive position” even as she tried “to get a little distance from beyond” (Weather 136; Touching 8). How waste matter facilitates this task is one of my essay’s subsidiary concerns.

Let’s start, then, with her poem “Bathroom Song,” first published in the afterword to a special 2006 issue of Women and Performance on the topic of reparations. Reprinting the piece in the posthumously released The Weather in Proust, her editor Jonathan Goldberg informs us that “Bathroom Song” was earlier included in a 1997 essay entitled “Come as You Are” – the same year that Duke University Press’s Series Q released one version of “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You” in Sedgwick’s edited collection Novel Gazing. I present the four stanzas of this free verse poem in full:

I was only one year old;

I could tinkle in the loo,

such was my precocity.

Letting go of Number Two

in my potty, not pyjama,

was a wee bit more forbidding

– and I feared the ravening flush.

So my clever folks appealed

to my generosity:

“What a masterpiece, Evita!

Look! We’ll send it off to Grandma!”

Under the river, under the woods,

off to Brooklyn and the breathing

cavern of Mnemosyne

from the fleshpotties of Dayton –

what could be more kind or lucky?

From the issue of my bowels

straight to God’s ear – or to Frieda’s,

to the presence of my Grandma,

to the anxious chuckling

of her flushed and handsome face

that was so much like my daddy’s,

to her agitated jowls,

Off! Away! To Grandma’s place!

As, in Sanskrit, who should say

of the clinging scenes of karma,

“Gaté, gaté, paragaté”

(gone, gone, forever gone),

“parasamgaté; bodhi; svaha!”

(utterly gone – enlightenment –

svaha! Whatever svaha means),

Send the sucker off to Grandma.

Gaté, gaté, paragaté;

parasamgaté; bodhi; svaha!

(Weather xv; reproduced by kind permission of Hal Sedgwick and Duke University Press)

Riffing on nineteenth-century American writer Lydia Maria Child’s 1844 hymn “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day” (“over the river, and through the wood / To Grandfather’s house we go”), this poem concentrates numerous facets of Sedgwickian thought (91). First, the toss-off translation of “Whatever svaha means” evidences her non-expert interest in “BUDDHIST STUFF” as the fourth stanza quotes the Heart Sutra, a meditation that she elsewhere defines as “a key text of East Asian Buddhism” (Weather 105). By the initial publication date of “Bathroom Song,” Sedgwick had written extensively about her own relationship to Buddhism – as well as American translations of Buddhist thinking – in her personal memoir, in the closing chapter of Touching Feeling titled “Pedagogy of Buddhism,” in an essay titled “Reality and Realization,” and elsewhere. The primacy of this subject reveals itself in “Bathroom Song” as w...