"Cruising Utopia" with the radio on ???: Jose Munoz’s utopian queerness and !!!

Approaching Acid

Jose Munoz’s Crusing Utopia focuses mainly on visual, performance, and literary artworks. However, there are a few musical references in the text; for example, the last chapter is titled “Take Ecstasy With Me,” after the Magnetic Fields’ song of the same name. Similarly, the book has an extended discussion of “ecstasy.” Ecstasy, in Munoz’s view, is an excess (somewhat like Heideggerian “ek-stasis”) of affect or feeling, and is found in/produced by queer gestures, especially dancing.

What I find interesting about Munoz’s discussion of dancing and ecstasy is that it focuses entirely on gesture and totally ignores dance music.* Munoz extensively considers dancing and ecstasy without ever considering what seems to me quite obvious: acid house, the genre of dance music (mainly associated with 1990s British youth culture) composed and intended to be experienced under the influence of ecstasy. Simon Reyonlds has several books (Blissed Out, Generation Ecstasy, etc.) that clearly lay out the relationship between ecstasy and acid house. Munoz’s exclusive focus on the visual/textual dimensions of “ecstasy” is also somewhat puzzling, given the fact that ecstasy generally does not affect visual perception to the extent that it impacts other senses (this is why there were so many light/video effects at raves: ecstasy itself did not enhance participants’ visual experience, so visual interest had to be created in more material, non-pharmacological ways).

So, I think there are a lot of ways that Crusing Utopia approaches acid (house), but never commits to it. What, then, about acid? What happens if we take some E with Munoz’s queer utopianism?

Given Munoz’s reference to the Magnetic Fields, and his extended consideration and condemnation of Giuliani’s renewed enforcement of the cabaret laws,** I think the band !!! may be a helpful intermediary between Munoz’s dancing around acid and acid house proper. [I’m working on a piece that considers the relationship between Munoz’s queer utopianism and the musical and performative work of Genesis P-Orridge, who some consider to have invented acid house…but more on that in later posts] !!! is a Brooklyn-based band that is heavily influenced by Hacienda/90s British rave darlings The Happy Mondays.

When dealing with music, Munoz locates queerness mainly in lyrics; I want to look at the formal and stylistic dimension of the pieces, and locate the queer structures/strategies/devices Munoz identifies in queer viz and performance art in !!!’s music. Such strategies include: (a) the deployment of the past in order to reimagine the present/future (what I will call “critical memory,” and most importantly (b) an aesthetic of failure.

The most evident point of commonality between !!! and Munoz is the band’s cover of “Take Ecstasy With me”. Have a listen:



While the Fields’ version looks to the past lyrically (“I used to slide down the carpeted stairs”), !!!’s cover orients itself to the past musically—i.e., it appropriates a ‘90s musical style. In general !!!’s style seems to combine the catchiness (and oftentimes goofiness) of acid house and the languid dreaminess of shoegaze—both genres originating and reaching their peak of popularity in 1990s Manchester (UK). “Take Ecastasy With Me” applies this acid/shoegaze feel to the Fields’ very twee original. In so doing, it looks both to a no-longer-present (the 1990s were literally in a previous century), and to a not-here (Manchester UK, not Brooklyn, NY). According to Munoz, this no-longer-present and not-here is a form of ek-stasis, of standing outside of one’s present. Put differently, taking and
knowing ecstasy is having a sense of timeliness’s motion, comprehending a temporal unity, which includes the past (having-been), the future (the not-yet), and the present (the making-present) (CU, 186).

I’m not certain about !!!’s orientation to the future, but their cover of “Take Ecstasy With Me” clearly critiques the spatio-temporal present (US indie rock, which in the early 2000s was very rock-focused and which, as “Me and Guiliani” makes explicit, !!!’s dance orientation was specifically critiquing) by turning to another time and another place. In other words, !!! looks to the era of ecstasy in ordero to deploy an ek-static aesthetic, an aesthetic grounded in critical memory. In this way, both versions of “‘Take Ecstasy with Me,’ [are] request[s] to step out of the here and now of straight time” (CU, 186).***

Their cover (again, like most of their work) also evinces an aesthetic of failure. In the early 2000s, !!! was among the leaders (along with The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Le Tigre, to name just a few) of a resurgence of indie dance music rooted in punk, no wave, mutant disco, and other indie genres. Punk, no wave, and mutant disco all make use of strategic failure: think about Johnny Rotten’s failure to remember the lyrics of both “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roadrunner,” about James Chance’s herky-jerky demand not to dance but to “Contort Yourself!”, and the Slits’ failure to sing in tune on their cover of “Heard it Through the Grapevine” (which actually shares a lot, aesthetically, with !!!’s style). So, !!! was taking inspiration from styles rooted in failure, and we can hear it in the piece in the following ways: (a) most blatantly, at the 5:30 mark, the vocalists’ attack on “Take” is really sloppy, more like “T-T-T-Take”, (b) Nick Offer’s vocals always verge on being out of tune, and always sound like the result of very minimal effort, (c) it gets very noisy around 4:40, and threatens to fall apart, and (d) the production values and instrumentation sound effectively rustic when compared to ueber-slick mainstream dance music (e.g., Giorgio Moroder’s “Utopia,” off his 1978 From Here to Eternity; clearly, the difference between Moroder’s Utopia and !!!’s is that the latter adopts an aesthetic of failure, while the former’s precision (and use of choirs) sounds sorta fascist). Munoz defines the aesthetic of failure as follows:

a punk ethos that celebrates a certain kind of nonmastery that is failure…deliberate failure to achieve melodic or choreographic conformity. Instead, on the level of movement and sound, we see a brilliant offness. This is a modality of being off script, off page, which his not so much a failure to succeed as it is a failure to participate in a system of valuation that is predicated on exploitation and conformity. The queer failure…is a failure that is more nearly a refusal or an escape (CU, 174).

!!! refuses the imperatives of mainstream dance music: they refuse to be on pitch, on time, to be quantized, to be slick and smooth. In so doing, they refuse to offer us a soundtrack that will encourage us to feel mastery of our dancing bodies. They are funky AND awkward, so when dancing along with their music, our bodies never move seamlessly or smoothly. It encourages the “kinesthetic stuttering…movement that not only stutters but also twitches…that represents a problem within modernity’s compulsory dance steps” (CU, 147). Like Frank Herko’s dancing, !!!’s dance music rejects normative hetero embodiment (e.g., the norms that say that dudes can only approvingly nod or headbang along to music) for a funky and awkward queer one, a la Arthur Russell. According to Munoz, this twitchy awkwardness comes from standing outside oneslf, from ecstasy: the ecstatic “surplus is not simply an additive; it distorts—a stuttering particularlity that shoves one off course, out of straight time” (155). So, to dance to the aesthetic of failure is to awkwardly stand outside/beside oneself—it is to take ecstasy.

So, !!!’s music shows us that Munoz’s queer strategies are evident/at work in music actually made by/for people on ecstasy. Or rather, that his definition of queerness applies not only to pre-Stonewall visual and performance artists, but also to acid house (and other dance genres that come, at least in part, out of/through punk). But what about actual ecstasy, MDMA?


MDMA

What about ecstasy itself? Is ecstasy really the best metaphor for Munoz’s queer utopianism? Munoz’s utopianism is offered as a collectivist response to Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani’s anti-relational theories of queerness. Munoz privileges dancing because the thinks it is a uniquely collective practice. He

considers the dance floor as space where relations between memory and content, self and other, become inextricably intertwined…It may do so because it demands, in the openness and closeness of relations to others, an exchange and alteration of kinesthetic experience through which we become, in a sense, less like ourselves and more like each other (CU, 66).

MDMA was/is the drug of choice for ravers because it lowers inhibitions, thus making users more eager to dance, and to express affection (this latter effect is very well known and often parodied, e.g., in the film Human Traffic). These ravers took E in order to escape the Thatcherism that rendered them superfluous; in keeping them perpetually un/underemployed, it robbed them, as it did their West London punk forebearers, of any sense that they could have a meaningful future. By taking E, these 24-hour-party-people created a space that was actually fun, not dreary and soul crushing.

The difference between Munoz’s metaphorical use of “ecstasy” and ravers’ actual use of ecstasy is that the latter were not interested in imagining alternative futures,**** but in creating a pleasurable—and, importantly, communal and affectionate—present. MDMA is a stimulant that heightens attention and focus, allowing one to pay attention to details one would otherwise ignore or find uninteresting….how else could you keep up with Jungle’s dense, rapid-fire polyrhythms? It’s not dissociative or psychadelic, it’s about being hyper attentive to the here and now.


So, what does this tell us about Munoz’s theory of queer critical utopianism? First, it tells us that he may be drawing a false dichotomy between his position (futurity!) and Edelman’s position (no future!). If we “take ecstasy” the acid house way, the we see that the modalities of queerness Munoz otherwise privileges (critical memory, the aesthetics of failure) do not necessarily lend themselves to critical utopian futurity. They can lead us to different ways of attending to the present. They can also lead us to different ways of critiquing the present—through failure, through deployments of the past—that do not require us to predicate this critique upon or ground it in some vision of a future. Even if Giuliani enforces the cabaret laws, we’re still dancing over here in Brooklyn. Even if Thatcherism robs me of the possibility of a meaningful future, “the weekend has arrived,” and I sure am finding some meaningful escape from my meaningless life. Take ecstasy with me, baby.

__
* “I look at the dance floor as a stage for queer performativity that is integral to everyday life…considers the dance floor as space where relations between memory and content, self and other, become inextricably intertwined…the dance floor increases our tolerance for embodied practices. It may do so because it demands, in the openness and closeness of relations to others, an exchange and alteration of kinesthetic experience through which we become, in a sense, less like ourselves and more like each other. In my analysis that does not mean that queers become one nation under a groove once we hit the dance floor. I am in fact interested in the persistent variables of difference and inequity that follow us from queer communities to the dance floor, but I am nonetheless interested in the ways in which a certain queer communal logic overwhelms practices of individual identity. I am also interested in the way in which the state responds to the communal becoming” (CU, 66)

** “Recent developments in New York City, such as the Giuliani administration’s reanimation of archaic cabaret-license laws that have been used as a tool to shut down and harass various queer and racial-minority bars in New York City” (CU, 66). !!!’s biggest hit is their single “Me and Guiliani Down By the Schoolyard,” which is a scathing critique of the cabaret laws.

***There’s not much else that these two versions share other than this use of critical memory. Well, there’s the use of the gurio (the scraped percussion instrument), and the string melody…but the lyrics are markedly different in the cover, as is the cover’s use of rhythm, it’s general compositional form (a 7-min dance track, not a 3-min pop song), and overall feel.

****“What we need to know is that queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality. And we must give in to its propulsion, its status as a destination. Willingly we let ourselves feel queerness’s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel. We must take ecstasy” (185).

Plastic Bag: Xray Spex as critique of Katy Perry's liberal individualism

I was listening to Katy Perry's most recent single "Firework," and I noticed that this song used a "plastic bag" metaphor to connote the supposedly alienated, mass-produced subject of post-industrial consumer society. This then reminded me of one of my favorite punk songs, Xray Spex's "Plastic Bag." Here, Poly Styrene also plays on the image of a plastic bag: rather than being full of her own "original" ideas, her mind is full of the detritus of consumer culture. Let's take a listen:

Katy Perry, Firework:



Xray Spex, Plastic Bag:




The crucial difference between the two is that where Perry's song is ultimately about how special and unique each one of us is (thus affirming the mythology of liberal individualism), Styrene's song lacks any such affirmation of wholeness, authenticity, or inherent value. "Plastic Bag" can be read as concurring with or following from the other songs on Germfree Adolescents that affirm "I'm a Cliche" or "I'm a Poseur and I Don't Care." As Poly Styrene's stage name evinces, there is no true, unique individual self in Xray Spex--just mass-produced junk.

Perry's lyrics tell the story of a true, unique, inner, special Self that just needs to "shine through" for everyone else to see how great, extraordinary, and worthy of value you are. Here's a condensed transcript of relevant lines:

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind...?"; "Do you know that there's still a chance for you, 'cause there's a spark in you you just gotta ignite the light and let it shine. You just gotta own the night like the Fourth of July, cause baby you're a firework, show them what you're worth...Baby you're a firework, come on let your colors burst...You don't have to feel like a wasted space, you're original, cannot be replaced. If you only knew what the future holds, after a hurricane comes a rainbow...Even brighter than the moon, it's always been inside of you and now it's time to let it through

So, even if you feel as mundane and irrelevant as a plastic bag, you're really "good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you." What's particularly interesting here is the connection of the liberal individual self with US nationhood (i.e., the 4th of July). The exceptionalism of the individual Self is a microcosm of US exceptionalism.

For Styrene, there is no exceptionalism, just clichés. "Plastic Bag" describes an irredeemably alienated, postmodern self. Again, here's a condensed sample of relevant lyrics:

My mind is like a plastic bag! 1977 and we are going mad! 1977 and we've seen too many ads!...My mind is like a plastic bag that corresponds to all those ads. It soaks up all the rubbish that is fed in through my ear...My mind is like a switchboard with crossed and tangled lines...I don't know what's going on anymore; that's the operator’s job, not mine, I said...

Viewed through Xray Spex, the world lacks redeption; these lenses don’t allow us to be duped by the mythology of liberal individualism. There’s nothing “inside of you” to “let shine”---just rubbish. We can see that even though capital mass-produces us in the same way it mass-produces commodities, we’re still capable of critical, creative agency—Styrene’s song is evidence enough of that. She may be a cliché, but she knows it. She’s not guilty of the bad faith that Perry’s song promotes; she doesn’t attempt to claim a false sense of uniqueness. Styrene knows she’s not original, and that she can be replaced. Interestingly, she complements the plastic bag metaphor with an image of a neural network of sorts: there’s no transcendental ego here, just a bunch of connections.

Styrene’s “Plastic Bag” is an example of what Judith Halberstam calls “political negativity.”* Political negativity is a rejection of liberalism and its imperatives to “life, liberty, and [most of all] the pursuit of happiness.”** Halberstam explains,

In a liberal realm where the ‘pursuit of happness,’ as Jamaica Kincaid might say, is both desirable and mandatory and where certain formulations of self (as active, voluntaristic, choosing, propulsive) dominate the political sphere, radical passivity may signal another kind of refusal, the refusal quite simply to be (150).

Styrene’s clichéd self is not active (“that’s the operator’s job, not mine, I said”), not voluntaristic, and not propulsive. Styrene isn’t trying to pull herself up by her bootstraps, and she certainly isn’t trying to be “happy.” Her “rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania…incivility, brutal honesty, and so on” (Halberstam, 152) imply a rejection of liberalism and its mandates. For Halberstam, liberalism’s main mandate is that the authentic, whole, active, bootstraps-loving Self pursue happiness. Political negativity, as critique/rejection of the liberal Self and its imperatives, does not valorize the autonomous individual triumphantly conquering obstacles and realizing dreams. Instead, political negativity is at once collective (political rather than individual) and contrite. This contrariness can come in the form of refusal (passivity, e.g., Xray Spex’s “I Can’t Do Anything” or the Sex Pistols’ “Lazy Sod”), violent rejection (perhaps best expressed in Xray Spex’s most famous track, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!”), anger and spite (how bout The Clash’s “I’m So Bored with the USA”?), and many other forms of not being “nice” and not valorizing happiness above all else (e.g., “Hate and war are the only things we have today. If I close my eyes, it will not go away. We have to deal with it. It is our currency,” from The Clash’s “Hate and War” – I’m going to post more on that song at a later date.) Political negativity is the inverse of the (Kantian) Kingdom of Ends (more on this later, too).

So, while Perry gives us the liberal Kindgom of Ends, where we’re all unique, special ends-in-ourselves, Styrene gives us…the blank generation, less than zero, hate and war, lost in the supermarket, working for the clampdown, I wanna destroy passerby, I kill children, chemical warfare, genetic engineering, boredom, final solution, she’s lost control, albatross…all sorts of punk expressions for the dregs of post-industrial society. Styrene gives us political negativity.

I’ll leave you with Xray Spex’s “I’m a Cliché”:



* Halberstam, Judith. “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies” in Graduate Journal of Social Science, 2—8, Vol. 5 Issue 2, 140-156.

** Halberstam intends political negativity to be a critique and/or middle ground between Edelmanian anti-relational negativity and Munoz’s relational utopianism. Importantly, Halberstam notes that political negativity, as strategy and as affect, is a key component in much feminist theory, art, and activism. I think political negativity is also strongly resonant with Beauvoiran ethics (again, more on this in a later post). As you can see, I think political negativity is a really important concept, and hope to develop my case as to why in subsequent posts.

The Slits -- Peel Sessions

Does anyone else hear Sonic Youth avant la lettre in this Slits performance of "Love and Romance"? Listen to the timbre, the general noisiness of the guitars, the pitchiness and otherwise generally unmasterful vocals, etc.

3AM Eternal: the role of music in the queer futurity/anti-futurity debates

I’m currently working on some projects that focus on the role of music in the recent and ongoing futurity/anti-futurity or relationality/anti-relationality debates in queer theory. While these debates are wide-ranging, I’m focusing mainly on the work of Lee Edelman, Jose Esteban Munoz, and Judith Halberstam. To help me think through and get some feedback on this work, I’m going to be doing several series of posts that are “seeds” or “sketches” of ideas for these projects. I have only begun planning out the series, but, you can expect some posts on:

• London’s Burning: on punk music in Edelman and Munoz
• Cage and Edelman (and Munoz, maybe)
• !!! and Munoz
• If we’re interested in the aesthetic strategies of queers of color, why are we not talking about disco, house, and techno?
• Afrofuturist music
• No Wave and queer negativity
• The “queerness” of Edelman and Munoz vs. Genesis P-Orridge’s “pandrogyny” or why we should be taking Acid House more seriously
• And more, when I think of them…

My aim is not only to understand the role of music in these texts, but to use these discussions of music and music aesthetics to help advance our understanding of the broader theoretical issues themselves. For example, I think that attention to Munoz’s use and discussion of specific songs (e.g., The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” and The Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me”) highlight some theoretical commitments that are otherwise not so obvious or overt….commitments that I ultimately want to question.

As of this writing, I’m tending to see the futurity/anti-futurity debates as, well, a false dichotomy that existentialist ethics shows us how to resolve. Often portrayed as a contest between anti-futurist anti-relationality, on the one hand, and utopian relationality, on the other, the debate tends to overlook the possibility of an anti-futurist relationality. Existentialist ethics is an anti-futurist relationality. As Beauvoir argues, there is no meaning or justification (i.e., no future) other than the ones we make together, because I can make the world (i.e., engage in projects of transcendence) only with the help of others (or, my transcendence requires others’ transcendence). I’ll post more on my attempt to read the futurity/anti-futurity debates through existentialist ethics AFTER I’m done with the posts on music. Ultimately, I want to show that attention to the musical dimensions of these debates clarifies the underlying issues and stakes, and in so doing points us to existentialist ethics.

The Cyborg Emancipates Us from Liberal Humanism

Over at The Atlantic, Tim Malay does a quick genealogy of the term "cyborg." It's quite interesting:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/the-emancipated-cyborg/63995/

He focuses on the "emancipatory" potential of the cyborg. However, I do think he misses the critical function of the term--that is to say, he misses how the figure of the cyborg is actually emancipatory. That is to say, he doesn't seem to quite get how people like Haraway use the idea of the cyborg to critique hegemonic notions of "the human". For example, Maly argues:

So now our guest list needs to include everyone who's ever been alive. A definition this expansive is troubling. The worry is that the conceptions of thinkers like Haraway, Battles, Kelly, and Sloan run the risk of defining the term to the point of meaninglessness. After all, if we've been cyborgs all along doesn't the word just mean 'human'? If we've all always been cyborgs, why aren't we already emancipated? This isn't an 'everyone' party, it's a cyborg party.

We have been cyborgs all along, and this means that the category "human" is an invalid one. To be a cyborg means that we've never been "human," that "human" is just as thoroughly a constructed (and politicized) category as "cyborg." As critical political thinkers (e.g., feminists, postcolonial and critical race theorists, queer theorists, etc.) have argued, the category "human" has always been used to dole out access to privilege. Those who are members of "normative" or dominant identity categories are read as fully "human," and thus granted access to things like rights, protection from the state, and relatively unimpeded social and economic activity. Those who belong to subaltern identity categories are not read as "human," and for this reason are denied access to things like rights, protection from the state, and relatively unimpeded social and economic activity. So, for example, the U.S. Constitution classifies blacks as 3/5 of a full human, and denies full enfranchisement (and full humanity) to women. To say that we've never been human--i.e., to say that we're all always already cyborgs--is emancipatory because it undercuts one of the main ways kyriarchy (i.e., white straight capitalist patriarchy) creates and maintains relations of privilege and domination. Zizek's reading of Blade Runner (in Tarrying with the Negative) makes more or less the same argument. To say that we're all cyborgs is to claim that no one person or group can be more or less authentically "human" than another, and demonstrates that all such claims are really attempts to privilege some groups at the expense of others.

Put simply, Malay seems to assume a classically liberal notion of "emancipation": cyborgs emancipate us because they allow us to do more stuff. However, as I and other critical political theorists assert, cyborgs liberate us from the humanist (read: racist, sexist, heteronormative, bourgeois, Eurocentric) politics of classical liberalism. If you want to know more on the sexist, racist, and otherwise exclusionary politics of classical liberalism, may I suggest Pateman and Mills Contract and Domination, or Sheth's Towards a Political Philosophy of Race?

Trash/Pop Culture as more subversive than "art"

From io9:

http://io9.com/5662383/richard-kadrey-trash-culture-is-more-subversive-than-art-could-ever-be

I am a very big believer in the power of trash: trash pop culture, trash literature. I really have a lot of affection and belief in that stuff, because art scares people. Trash, pop culture doesn't. You can put in all the subversive crazy stuff you want in trash culture that will change people's perceptions of the world, and they will read it and they will take it in. Whereas in art they are going to run from it. So subvert the world through trash." — Kill The Dead author Richard Kadrey, on Minnesota Public Radio

This echoes some of the arguments I've made (e.g., in my Hypatia article on Peaches) that critical/radical political movements need pop culture. If you want people to hear your message, you need to make it accessible, and, even better, pleasurable (hell, pleasure in itself can be radical and critical--cf. on this one to Breyer-P-Orridge). What's interesting in Kadrey's remark is his emphasis on the fact that "art" gets heavily policed (e.g., by the post-Mapplethorpe NEA), whereas trash culture, b/c of its supposed insignificance, is policed much less.

Race as technology, or, on the racialization of non-human bodies

Ever since I adopted a pit bull, I have had suspicions and half-grounded intuitions that there was some sort of connection between the vilification of pit bulls and anti-black racism. I just lacked a coherent way of making that connection in a rigorous, academically solid sort of way.

Falguni Sheth’s Toward a Political Philosophy of Race gave me just the conceptual device that I needed to make that connection between pit bull dogs and anti-black racism. In this text, Sheth argues that race is not an identity (i.e., not a physiological or psychological property of one’s person) but a technology (i.e., a set of strategies and tactics for establishing and maintaining specific relations of power). Basically, to argue that race is a technology is to claim that race is mainly a tool for organizing society. In a sense, it’s a sort of algorithm for determining who lives where, who gets/has access to what, how one person ought to act toward another, what life options are available to one, etc. etc.

Among the many strengths of Sheth’s conception of race is that it allows us to analyze the way race governs things that aren’t human bodies. In gender studies, the sex/gender distinction made it possible to discuss the gendering of animals, plants, consumer goods, language, compositional choices in a piece of music…pretty much anything in the universe (indeed, as some non-Western feminists have argued, Western feminists have wrongly assumed the universality of “gender” as a category). Separating out “behavior” from biology, the sex/gender distinction helps show/explain that gender is not something that comes from sexed bodies, but that gendered systems of power are something done to bodies that make them appear to be dimorphously “sexed.” So, for example, we can say that salads are feminized and meat is associated with masculinity, just as boy bands are associated with femininity and hardcore is masculinized. Separating out race as technology from race as identity allows us to make similar moves: if race is not something that comes from phenotypically and/or habitually different bodies, but is the very thing that produces bodies as racially different, then this same technology can also be applied to things that aren’t human bodies…things like language, geography, or dogs. To understand race as (solely) an identity limits the ways in which we can talk about the pertinence of race to non-human objects. So, while the notion of commodity fetishism would allow us to understand how the relations among commodities, as ersatz social relations, trade in racial identities, it does not let us talk directly about the racialization of commodities as such; there still has to be this mediation through social identity. If race is (only) a social identity, then objects themselves are not “racialized”; rather, “race” is a property of the maker and/or consumer, which is then indirectly associated with the made and/or consumed object. To understand race as technology is to allow for the possibility that objects themselves are the objects of racialization.

Take, for example, the case of pit bull terriers. This (very loosely-defined) breed of dog is thought to possess the same sort of “unruliness” (to use Sheth’s term) or “menace to society” as urban black masculinity: they are loaded weapons only waiting to be fired, and even the apparently “good” ones are not to be trusted; they are inherently and irreparably criminal; they are voracious predators on innocent dogs and families. I have a paper on this topic where I analyze this in much greater detail; it’s currently under review at a journal, so I’ll wait to post a link to the article once it’s out (hopefully). Anyway, the point is that pit bulls aren’t merely associated with urban black masculinity b/c of their association with urban black men; rather, both groups are constituted as such in the hegemonic imagination by being situated as the same sort of “threat” or “abnormality.” Pit bulls and urban black masculinity are targets for a specific sort of racialized anxiety about violence and social breakdown, which in turn makes them targets for surveillance, policing, and incarceration. Pit bulls aren’t guilty by their association with urban black men (e.g., the use of pit bulls in hip hop culture); rather, they are guilty in and of themselves for the same transgressions posed by stereotypical urban black masculinity. As a technology, race governs not only human bodies, but also dogs (who, while certainly have bodies, are legally classified not as beings but as property).

My hope is that this conception of race as technology not identity changes the landscape and horizon of critical race studies. I would like to see it generate some nuanced analyses of how racial politics affect a range of phenomena, not just human bodies and “politics” as such.

Queering Taylor Swift

So, Taylor Swift is generally pretty uninteresting to me because her music, her image, and her lyrics all shore up normative white heteropatriarchal gender roles. And, her songs may be OK, musically, they're more meh than not. Although I would love to hear her write some amazingly catchy hook, I have yet to hear one from her. I mean, the part of me that's invested in re-valuing the feminized popular wants TS to do something interesting. So, I guess what I want from TS is either/both (1) some really pleasurable music (i.e., catchy hooks) and/or (2) something worth thinking about in a careful and nuanced way.

There is one thing worthy of a little consideration: In her hit "You Belong with Me," Swift basically argues that the "other girl" is too femme, and the reason why d00d belongs with the narrator is b/c she's properly butch, or, just butch enough for a straight d00d. So, for example: (1) "She wears short skirts, I wear Tshirts"; (2) "I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like"; (3) "She wears high heels, I wear sneakers"; etc. Interestingly, in the video, d00d doesn't notice her until she appears as paragon of white femininity (I'm reminded of Richard Dyer's reading of Mary Pickford...). Maybe she's all the masculinity that straight d00d desires, but is afraid to desire in another male body. Ultimately, though, it shows how even women will devalue other women by associating some women with a de-valued femininity while at the same time appropriating for themselves a socially valued masculinity, thus asserting their (relatively) privileged position within patriarchy. Ultimately, the message in this video is "Girls Suck." Instead of men bonding via misogyny, we have men and women bonding--and desiring one another--via the rejection of femininity.

Here's the video: