Reading list (2020)

I.W.

2020-12-31

read

READ Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History

READ Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

READ Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation

READ Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory

READ If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past

INTRODUCTION: In the Interest of Time

  • trauma shit
  • time regime makes it productive
  • no more idleness! (sexual) idle figures merged into dandy, then homosexualized
  • nostalgia (untimeliness, rather) central to C19 emergence of modern homo identity
    • is this just the culture thing? if you can’t reproduce, be a carrier of art
  • cold war gays as corruption from within
  • post-cold war panics over predation in public, schools, internet: home vs world
    • gay “counterprogressive traits” (nostalgia, nonreproductive pleasure against future) cast as threats to human survival
  • took hold of gay community itself with forward-looking activism wanting inclusion in family, military
  • “memory” as way of summoning other ways of doing leisure//work (lol)
    • compulsory Benjamin homogeneous empty time citation
  • questionable differentiation of memory and history

1 BATTLES OVER THE GAY PAST: De-generation and the Queerness of Memory

  • >The years following the onset of the aids epidemic witnessed a discursive operation that in- stigated a cultural forgetting of the 1960s and 1970s, installing instead a cleaned- up memory that reconstitutes sanctioned identity out of historical violence. like national identities, the sexual consciousness that emerges from such narratives of forgetting and sanctioned memory serves state interests, not least by turning gays and lesbians into a “respectable” (fit for assimilation) constituency ready to receive state recognition in the form of “rights.”
  • nostalgic orgy activist gays vs forward-looking amnesic productive members of society
  • draw on past in present
  • let’s replace shame and guilt with desire and elation
    • John Demos: pedagogical structure of sex panics uses guilt over resurrected dirty past to instruct in contradictory proper values of individualist opportunity (do more!) and individual responsible self-control (do less!)
  • de-generational amnesia of neocon gays who want bathhouses etc. closed
    • “total break with past,” sexual conservatism to stop epidemic
  • Bersani is whatever-normative for saying getting fucked is a passive act

2 FOR TIME IMMORIAL: Marking Time in the Built Environment

  • “queer space” repeatedly portrayed as only existing in action, temporary appropriation, the present
  • yet there is a desire for locality memory, history of places associated with queer history
  • white figures that evoke little vs big pink triangle arrows
  • “this form of queerness was not about hiding or masking but about asserting queerness as a superior form of visual sensitivity.” [cf. p word superiority and childish aesthetics]
  • “lieux de mémoire — places of memory — play an important role in creating and sustaining the invested sense of history that is memory. As long as there has been homosexual identity, this desire for history has been expressed as a yearning for a lost sense of place”
  • Oz, midcentury Hollywood, art deco “fantasy homeland” of gays. whose homeland? not mine lol. doesn’t mean anything to me. is this a point in favor of the generically-open NAMG tendency
  • personally, i find nostalgia a noxious smog that makes thought and navigation impossible. how’s that for torauma. i need forgetting. that’s a point for Nadaud

3 THE REVOLUTION MIGHT BE TELEVISED: The Mass Mediation of Gay Memories

  • looks boring so not reading this lol

4 QUEER THEORY IS BURNING: Sexual Revolution and Traumatic Unremembering

  • muh trauma Caruths bitch
    • “we insist on the right to memory without necessitating the imposition of normative values, redemptive chronology, or prophylactic forgetting”

READ Fair Play

READ Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader

Introduction: Sex, Gender, Politics

  • “I realized I was in love with one of my feminist comrades and had two immediate goals: to seduce the object of my desire, and to read all about this exciting discovery. Since the girl was unavailable, I headed to the library.”

The Traffic in Women

  • Marx, Engels, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan
  • wish i had read this 2 years ago lol

The Trouble with Trafficking

  • “trafficking = sex trafficking = all commercial sex”
  • c. 1900 trafficking used interchangeably with white slavery
  • Victorian assumption prostitution could not be a rational vocational choice
  • element of geographical mobility
  • racism, antisemitism
  • “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”
  • London police supported antiprostitution groups in crusades but were privately skeptical about existence of white slave trade
  • same concept in America
  • McClure’s Magazine article by George Kibbe Turner kicks off hysteria, claiming organization “largely composed of Russian Jews” furnishing women for Chicago brothels
  • white slave tracts with uniform plot about American country girl going to city, being preyed on, tricked or drugged and installed in brothel as enslaved prostitute
  • concerned with 2 obvious facts of early C20 American life: migration of rural/small town young women to cities for jobs and opportunities, existence of red light districts
  • mobilizations against prostitution enmeshed with race/immigration debates
  • Mann Act 1910 regulating helping women move for supposed prostitution purposes. policing basically whatever non-marital sexuality
    • transformed FBI into major organization. more agents, spies, working with postal service, census of prostitutes
    • 1917–1920s “immoral purposes” construed broadly. “any man who has taken his girlfriend from New York City to New Jersey on a date, hoping for sexual romance that evening, has violated the Mann Act”
    • rapt stuff!: “Women as well as men were liable under the Act for transporting other women; they also could be, and often were, prosecuted for conspiracy to aid males (such as their boyfriends and lovers) with their own transportation.”
    • between 1927–1937, 23% of female prisoners in Alderson, WV federal prison were incarcerated for Mann Act violations, almost all not prostitutes
  • current UN Protocol detaches trafficking from exclusive focus on prostitution but rhetorical and institutional tendency to recombine still exists
  • some groups (Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women) get the exploitation focus right
  • others (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women) reduce it to commercial sex involving “women and children”
  • The Scope of the Problem: numbers for social problems need to be explicit and their sources clear (one thinks of shi pi…). pornography, missing children, homosexuals,
  • problem with counting prostitutes was broad definition of prostitution
    • prostitution could just mean nonmarital sex or marital sex the woman enjoyed too much
    • a prostitute is just a woman who enjoys sex too much lol
    • “five-year theory” that prostitutes died like flies
  • “In 1997, the organization to End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) claimed that there were 800,000 child prostitutes in Thailand (a figure that, to their credit, they now disown). Other NGOS and journalists were claiming that there were 4 million sex workers in Thailand. However, had this number been correct, it would have meant that 24 percent of the female population of Thailand between the ages of ten and thirty-nine was engaged in commercial sex work— an unlikely proposition at best.”
  • Emma Goldman’s “The Traffic in Women”
    • sympathized with prostitutes, called for gender wage equality, equal access to sex education and sexual freedom
    • puts prostitution on a continuum with marriage
      • Rubin’s reason for taking the title
  • then-current reemergence of feminist “anti-trafficking”
    • feminists involved last time around, but easily coopted by conservatives (just as was possible for second wave)

Introduction to A Woman Appeared to Me

  • blah blah blah lsbiaenas that invented being proudly so
  • i literalmente do not care

The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M

  • boylove and S/M used as ways to target gay community as a whole
  • police redefining e.g. “bawdy house” “pornography” to arrest S/M people without change in laws
  • custody law used to punish sex dissenters

Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality

  • “The term sex offender sometimes applied to rapists, sometimes to "child molesters," and eventually functioned as a code for homosexuals. In its bureaucratic, medical, and popular versions, the sex offender discourse tended to blur distinctions between violent sexual assault and illegal but consensual acts such as sodomy.”
  • sexual essentialism: idea of sex as a natural force prior to social life
    • “To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, my position on the relationship between biology and sexuality is a "Kantianism without a transcendental libido.”
    • repression can be recognized without falling back on idea of natural libido
  • sex negativity: sex presumed guilty till proven innocent
    • genitalia intrinsically inferior
    • erotic behavior considered bad without specific excuse
  • lack of idea of benign sexual variation
    • existence of a single acceptable standard repeatedly reconstituted in different rhetorical frameworks
  • sexual transformation
    • industrialization, urbanization gave rise to new sexual system
    • supposedly sodomite collective self-understanding did not exist (Sexual Hegemony would dispute this)
    • urban gay communities form, with sexual migration to them
    • similar change with prostitution. originally part of general working-class population but increasingly became isolated outcast group
    • groups moving towards identity/community formation
  • sexual stratification
    • sex law strongest (then) about obscenity, money, minors, homosexuality
  • sexual conflicts
    • definitional and legal wars over acceptability
    • info on how to get into a community is made hard to get
    • gay community becomes real estate matter. get rid of them to redevelop
    • moral panics about sex: 1880s white slave hysteria, 1950s anti-gay campaigns, 1970s shi pi panic
      • scapegoating
      • feminist antipornography ideology against S/M
      • right wing AIDS=gay stuff
      • feminist rhetoric reappears in reactionary contexts. Pope John Paul II talks like Julia Penelope
  • the limits of feminism
    • progressives turn to feminism for guidance about sex
    • sexual liberation feminist tendency vs antisexual, antipornography one
    • “Within this framework, monogamous lesbianism that occurs within long-term, intimate relationships and does not involve playing with polarized roles has replaced married, procreative heterosexuality at the top of the value hierarchy. Heterosexuality has been demoted to somewhere in the middle. Apart from this change, everything else looks more or less familiar.”
    • legal rules about sex mostly not based around consent, or deny that there can be consent to certain things (at that time)
    • feminism is not necessarily the theory of sexual oppression. it’s about gender oppression
      • have to distinguish the sexual from gender
      • development since The Traffic in Women, which combined the two too easily
      • necessity for theoretical pluralism
    • conclusion

Afterword to “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”

  • many things she feared have come to pass
  • the road to ruin
    • “Sex panics over pornography, children, homosexuality, AIDS, popular music, and sadomasochism have occurred with alarming frequency in the last decade.”
    • Reagan’s Meese Commission recommended obscenity be treated worse. 55 recommendations to control chi pi despite there being no commercial shi pi in the U.S.
    • feminist antiporn rhetoric thoroughly assimilated into conservative sexual discourse
    • feminists abandon cause of creating new category of “pornography” as illicit material, instead relying on existing legal categories of obscenity, shi pi
  • life in unimaginable times
    • 1989 Helms Amendment prohibits National Endowment for the Arts grants to “obscene materials”
    • 1990 raid on Jock Sturges, seizing all his shit
    • 1991 single mother Denise Perrigo lost custody of 2yo child for speaking of becoming aroused while breastfeeding on phone. child returned a year later
    • much censorship of gay and lesbian books
    • 1991 proposed 5-year survey of teen sexual behavior intended to explore risk of pregnancy, STDs cancelled due to conservative pressure
  • we fucking told you so

Postscript to “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”

  • more increase of obscenity pornography stuff
  • S/M erotica basically illegal in Canada
  • feminists leveraging homophobia against S/M

Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on “Thinking Sex”

  • 25 years later
  • “Thinking Sex” first given as workshop at 1982 Barnard Sex Conference
    • was protested by antiporn advocates
  • shifting paradigms of sex
    • social construction of sex is just what we do with every other phenomenon
    • early studies on queer stuff were systematically marginalized in academia, even not published academically. “career suicide”
  • speaking bitterness: the feminist sex wars
    • Barnard Sex Conference Diary of a Conference on Sexuality had all sorts of info, including on the speakers. huge variety of topics
    • small number of activists distributed leaflet against conference
    • Diary confiscated by panicked Barnard administration
    • contradictory claims that Barnard conference was a “blatant celebration of S/M” and that it was insidious because hidden
  • the west coast wars: WAVPM and Samois
    • Barnard conference (in NY btw) often thought to have initiated sex wars, but has a prehistory on west coast
    • Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (first feminist antiporn org) and Samois (first lesbian S/M org) both active in SF Bay Area in late seventies
    • pornography and sadomasochism construed, making antiporn and pro-S/M opposites
    • 1976 WAVPM founded, 1978 held first national feminist conf on porn which enspired NY antiporn activists to found WAP
    • Diana Russell, a WAVPM founder, “provided the early movement with most of its intellectual leadership, analytic language, and ideological coherence” but is usually sidelined in favor of Dowrkin, MacKinnon
    • there’s no way anyone could like this, so they must have been duped or coerced
    • Russell’s rhetoric incorporated into WAVPM literature
    • WAVPM public protests focused on S/M, porn, violence against women, female subordination mix
    • 1978 Samois founded. did not claim S/M particularly feminist, just compatible
    • Samois sent letters to WAVPM asking to meet and discuss but rebuffed
    • feminist antiporn movement intensified shift of locus of legal/social concern about sexual imagery from genital proximity toward kinkiness
    • “Opposition to S/M has always been a major subtext of the feminist antiporn movement: indispensable to its analytic coherence, the source of its most rhetorically potent examples, and a primary target of its prescriptions for social change.”
  • Barnard redux
    • Barnard pattern repeated
    • 1986 conference on “Feminism, Sexuality, and Power”
    • 1993 several American scholars dealing with sexuality, LGBT studies (including Rubin) invited to Humanities Research Center at Australian National University. letter to university vice chancellor sent by antiporn activists in protest, etc.
  • rethinking “Thinking Sex”
    • remarks abt transsexuality, sex work, sexuality of the young were too sketchy
    • sex work and transsexuality are “inconvenient facts” that show its limits
    • Susan Stryker took to task for going along with categorization of being trans as sexual. trans studies posed similar challenge to queer theory on sexuality that it did to feminism
    • underestimated dimensions of oncoming child sex panic
    • was still possible to have a thoughtful discussion about the sexuality of the young in 1980s
    • Kate Millett’s Barnard workshop was on sexuality of infancy and childhood [she has an interview in Paidika 8 too]1
    • gentrification of gay neighborhoods continues

The Catacombs: A Temple of the Butthole

  • not really interested in this either tbh
  • okay it is kinda cute tho
  • honestly i think this has made me significantly less anti-sex, more pro- pleasures of the body

Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries

  • butch is a category of lesbian gender constituted thru deployment, manipulation of masculine gender codes, symbols
  • ki-ki used to be intermediate between butch and femme
  • “indigenous lesbian category for gender dysphoric women,” trans men as strong dysphoria (nah the categories have been distinct a long time)
  • varieties of butch
    • stereotypical imagery of butch lesbian as working class masculinity originate in early fifties motorcycle, street gangs
    • what constitutes masculinity has a lot of variety for men, as much or more for women
  • butch sexualities
    • blah blah blah they don’t always top
    • historically (when?) expected to seduce and satisfy partners, like men
    • butch4butches draw on gay male roles etc
  • frontier fears: butches, transsexuals, and terror
    • see this is what “border wars” suggest to me
    • permeable boundaries. past figures claimed by both butches and trans men
    • lesbians treating trans men as traitors
    • lesbian discriminations against trans women
    • “Lesbians should instead relax” lol
  • let a thousand flowers bloom
    • reclaim butch/femme after its rejection

Misguided, Dangerous, and Wrong: An Analysis of Antipornography Politics

  • premises, presuppositions, and definitions
    • the conflation of pornography and violence
      • porn is characteristically violent/sexist in what it depicts
      • porn is more violent/sexist in content than other media
      • use of bad examples out of context for shock
    • definitions: what is pornography?
  • the “harm” of porn: allegations, assertions, and creative causality
    • the research
    • is porn a “documentary of abuse”?
    • costs and dangers of antiporn politics
    • feminism and sexual politics

Sexual Traffic: Interview with Gayle Rubin by Judith Butler

  • “By defining lesbianism entirely as something about supportive relations between women, rather than as something with sexual content, the woman-identified-woman approach essentially evacuated it—to use a popular term—of any sexual content.”
  • “Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's original 1975 essay deliberately blurred some of the distinctions between categories of lesbianism as a sexual status and other types of female intimacy, but she refrained from using romantic friendship as the standard by which lesbianism should be measured.”
  • focus on perverts exonerates powerful institutions like family
  • interesting stuff abt pre-Freud sexology, how Freud is overblown on per/in-version when that was less his deal than that of the people around him
  • “Instead of class, gender was often supposed to be the primary contradiction from which all social problems flowed. There was an attitude that feminism now had the answers to all the problems for which Marxism was found wanting.”
  • need to value data as much as theory
  • “I have this quaint, social-science attitude that statements about living populations should be based on some knowledge of such populations, not on speculative analysis, literary texts, cinematic representations, or preconceived assumptions. And I can hear the objection to what I'm saying already: "But Deleuze," someone is bound to say, "is Theory."”

Studying Sexual Subcultures: Excavating the Ethnography of Gay Communities in Urban North America

  • anthropology oddly uninterested in urban homosexual communities for a long time
    • pathology is not our issue etc
  • sociologists cared a bit more
    • University of Chicago. W.I. Thomas compiles Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex (1907)
  • Chicago Vice Commission gathered a lot of data on gay men (not out of love)
  • Thomas lost his career due to being caught in a hotel with a woman he was not married to in violation of the Mann Act (RIP)
  • urban ethnography of subcultures begin
  • dismantling deviance
    • "Chicago's Two Worlds of Deviance Research: Whose Side Are They On?"
    • Becker giving equal credence to opinions of disreputable deviants, respectable citizens, authoritative officials
    • John Gagnon and William Simon, Chicago-trained sociologists, undertook comprehensive rethinking of sexual deviance
  • from sexual deviance to social construction
    • “social construction of sex” goes from Kenneth Plummer and Mary McIntosh to Jeffrey Weeks, doesn’t start with Foucault
    • Plummer, Sexual Stigma: An Interactionist Account (1975)
    • Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role” 1968
      • “Thus a distinct, separate, specialized role of 'homosexual' emerged in England at the end of the seventeenth century, and the conception of homosexuality as a condition which characterized certain individuals and not others is now firmly established in our society.”
    • Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out
      • urbanism and accompanying anonymity enable subcultures to form
  • from sociology to anthropology
    • Sonenschein
  • Mother Camp
    • Esther Newton, Mother Camp 1972: professional female impersonators
      • studied under the very encouraging David Schneider, who directed her to sociological research on deviance
    • “It prefigures notions of gender as "performed"; provides an analysis of the political economies of homosexuality in the 1960s; and links types of performance to economic stratification, political orientation, and hierarchies of social status.”
    • professional impersonators vs street fairies: hierarchy of stigma
      • but line extremely iffy. everyone goes back and forth
    • Deborah Goleman Wolf, The Lesbian Community (1979)
    • then a few things in the eighties
    • but mostly not till the nineties was there a substantial literature
  • legacies and lessons
    • Rubin’s work indebted to such scholars
    • subtlety and originality of old texts often underestimated because of their outdated idioms
    • but they were responsible for appropriating study of sexuality from psychology for the social sciences

Geologies of Queer Studies: It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

  • we need archives and we need bureaucracy

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 5

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 6

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 7

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 8

READ Histories of the Transgender Child

Introduction: Toward a Trans of Color Critique of Medicine

  • separate media figures of “trans of color person” and “trans child”
  • trans child whitely innocent, empty of content
  • trans child wrongly shown as “new generation,” unprecedented C21 thing
  • C20 full of trans kid stuff
    • starting 1910s “ambiguous sex” kids medicalized, experimented on: material for altering human sex
    • 1930s, first trans people seeking U.S. doctors based requrests on reports of “sex changes” on children
    • 1940s, 1950s experiments on children led to invention of category gender, then transsexual medicine, postwar binary transition model
    • 1960s, 1970s, children took hormones, changed names, were recognized as gender in school, underwent gender confirmation surgeries
  • trans kids central to medicalization of sex/gender: racialized plasticity discourse
    • abstract biological force, living laboratories
  • “abnormal”/“mixed” sexual development read thru eugenic + evolutionist paradigms sorting sexual morphology thru racial typology
  • plasticity hardly revolutionary or subversive
  • trans medicine was around all century, not a midcentury innovation
  • ”led in the 1950s to the invention of gender, a signal event with deep consequences for all human life” lol

1. The Racial Plasticity of Gender and the Child

  • late C19/early C20, 2 transformations in sex
    • sex synonymous with biological “plasticity,” alterable morphology
    • eugenic scientists racialized sex phenotype
    • life’s bisexuality in the nineteenth century
      • biology mired in mechanism vs vitalism debate. organism metaphor to resolve opposition (per Donna Haraway)
      • study of sex in anatomy, physiology, embryology, endicronology refined focus to center on apparent natural bisexuality of life
      • sex = organisms’ differentiation, sex = sexual reproduction
      • 1848–9 Adolph Berthold in Germany hypothesizes internal secretions governing animal biological life
        • repeating established experiments on fowl gonads
          • famously done before by C18 physician John Hunter
          • “caponized” cocks by removing testes: “feminization” in morphology, behavior, both looking and acting like hens
          • transplanted testes back into birds but in stomachs and they re-masculinized
            • demonstrated that “no specific spermatic nerves exist”; signal function something different, goes by circulatory system
          • laid basis for endocrine body. sex as primary means of access
        • drew on centuries of informal animal husbandry knowledge
      • natural bisexuality, changeability jumped by analogy to humans
        • Darwin, The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, casual reference to human analogy
        • latency of bisexual characteristics: potential for “reversion,” hence “primitivist” implication
        • latent bisexual animality placed on phylogenetic, evolutionary scale, not yet ontogenetic
      • 1905 Ernest Starling coins “hormone.” works to introduce endocrinology to medicine
        • sex as both differentiation and reproduction: he stresses that endocrine system’s function is integrating the two
          • sex, governed by hormones, regulates metabolism + phenotypic form and its transmission. important bridge-point of phylogeny, ontogeny
          • phyogenetic “early bisexuality” recoded over course of C20 to ontogenetic “early bisexuality” i.e. plastic kids
        • William Bayliss and Ernest Starling (like Berthold) trying to disprove nervous theory of the organ
          • which said nervous reflex governed food digestion stages
          • they removed part of dogs’ small intestine during digestion, scraped surface, distilled chemicals
            • hypothesis: chemical agent in mucous membrane, activated by entry of stomach acid, turns on pancreas secretions
            • injection of distilled solution made pancreas secrete without stomach acid
            • 1902 named speculated chemical “secretin.” guessed there might be similar mechanisms for other secretions
        • 1905 Starling gives Croonian Lectures introducing endocrinology to peers, extrapolates secretin to “hormone”
          • ambitious proposal: hormonal body more evolutionarily fundamental than nervous
    • from bisexuality to plasticity
      • “protoplasm” like Burroughs’ un-D.T.. playing-out from Chaotic Blob to differentiation, losing vitality with change-capacity on the way
        • coined 1839 Czech anatomist J.E. Purkyne
        • 1846 German physiologist Hugo von Mohl argues it is material out of which nucleus of new cells is formed
      • 1891 Hans Driesch shakes apart 2-cell sea urchin embryos: where mechanist model said they would become deformed half-urchins, instead they became half-size normal ones
      • 1907 Ross Granville Harrison, Johns Hopkins University embryologist, publishes paper on success culturing live tissue (frog, neural) without body
        • “hanging drop” method plays massive role in C20 research
      • protoplasm/plasticity not seen, needs metaphor: plasticity as unobserved chemical reactions or metaphysical, vital force of life?
        • child as better metaphor, combining cell theory with bisexuality in “development” drama
          • child study movement
      • child study movement and G. Stanley Hall (cf.:)2
        • 1904 Hall writes Adolescence: psychobiological, evolutionist. adolescence as critical plastic period demanding cultivation (to specific and racist end)
        • psychological/spiritual child development directly analogyized to biological development; psychic and somatic in same process
        • “Hall grounded the psychological and spiritual development of children and young people in a direct analogy to biological development, so that the psychic and somatic unfolded as part of the same material process.”
        • have to make them normal (ideally white binary male)!
        • disease as pathology of precocity, arrest, belatedness
          • worry of “not only arrest, but perversion, at every stage, and hoodlumism, juvenile crime, and secret vice.” sexual differentiation a uniquely intense concern
        • staged model of plasticity. overal withering of it, but intervention points in infancy, childhood, adolescence
    • the racial cultivation of the developing endocrine body
      • Eugen Steinach in Vienna, where socialist eugenic endocrine research community was. early attempts at hormone administration, gland transplants, organotherapy there
        • Steinach famous for “rejuvenation” surgery reactivating dormant plasticity of gonads, i.e. vasectomy
        • 1920 coauthored with colleague, biologist Paul Kammerer, “Climate and Puberty”
          • Kammerer: neo-Lamarckian
          • demonstration with rats to say warm climate makes people hypersexualized, overdeveloped puberty glands and secondary sex characteristics vs cold neurotic Europeans
      • hypersexualized body of color homologous to species primitivism
      • 1907 The Training of the Human Plant by botanist Luther Burbank: U.S. suited to “race of the future” due to widespread “mingling.” dedicated to “16mil public school children of America”
        • romantic naturalism. good sunshine, clean air, good food for cultivating children
      • Oscar Riddle (discoverer of hormone prolactin and its function in pituitary gland)
        • 1913 joined Cold Spring Harbor eugenic research station in Long Island
        • said sex of numerous pigeons has been reversed in egg stage by application of semi-synthesized hormones
      • “The concept of a mutually exclusive, biologically grounded two-sex binary popular today was simply not an established concept in the early twentieth century.”
      • recent scholarship says eugenic ideas and practices find most pervasive reach post-war, not pre-WWII
        • modern endocrine body is one survival

2. Before Transsexuality: The Transgender Child from the 1900s to the 1930s

  • Europe (esp. Germany) gave medical transition as early as 1920s. but America did not have a good concept for it or want to let people transition
  • Alan Hart tried to transition ftm, was called “homosexual”
  • trans woman “Val” recounted childhood in 1948. resisted boy clothes from age 2, supported by parents and school until high school
  • sex reassignments performed on children diagnosed “hermaphrodites”
  • the transatlantic circulation of endocrinology, sexology, and eugenics
    • Hirchfeld’s “transvestism” did not catch on in the US. lengthy study not translated
    • Harry Benjamin: founding figure in ’50s/’60s ts medicine
      • began career specializing in endocrinology, anchored view in German “intersexuality”
      • “Freud was not a Freudian, . . . more of a biologist”:
      • practical bridge between German sexology, American endocrine medicine
      • overlappingly involved in eugenics
      • thru Benjamin, early C20 sex plasticity theory, its eugenic racialization, German “transvestism” all preserved into “transsexuality”
        • Benjamin continues to practice until 1979
        • midcentury emergence of transsexuality took up multiple competing concepts rather than coming from major paradigm shift or technical advance
  • sex reassignment without hormones
    • Brady Urological Institute (opened 1915) at Johns Hopkins Hospital established 4-decade protocol for turning intersex into binary
    • Hugh Hampton Young, surgeon in charge
      • started with detailed physical exam
      • cystoscopy, x-ray, exploratory laparotomy. cutting open abdomen to find truth of sex in gonadocentric theory
    • Hopkins with “charitable” mission to serve poor but expecting total access to bodies, esp. African-American East Baltimore population
      • research “as often coercive and nontherapeutic as it was curative”
      • rumors in Baltimore black community of doctors as kidnappers, grave robbers

Conclusion: How to Bring Your Kids Up Trans

my own conclusions are as follows.

this book is definitely v valuable for helping redraft trans history as something not initiated in the mid 20th century, showing continuity between the transsexual paradigm and previous U.S. medical thinking on gender, putting the medicalization of intersex kids at the origin of medicalization of (adult) trans people, and taking the proper line on the medical age of consent (i.e. abolish it!). still, there were some frustrating aspects of the book.

to say that developmental approaches to sex are tied up with developmental approaches to children (psychologically, the child study movement, etc.) and with eugenicist cultivatory developmental thinking about “human stock” is so sensible that once it’s said, it can’t really be denied. but while the book constantly tells you that sex biology is racialized, it broadly fails to show it. there is much made of the necessity of centering trans people of color in analysis of trans history, but the book admits that the archive it works from unavoidably skews white, middle-class, etc. the word “plasticity” is said enough that it stops sounding like a real word, but it’s not clear how exactly it relates to race, beyond a sketched-out but little-demonstrated notion that “non-whiteness is interpreted as physically hypersexualized/overdifferentiated, resistant to medical cultivation.” the book evidently has some animosity towards the experimentalism of Testo Junkie, but i would struggle to explain its reasons concretely in any way but “access to body modification through e.g. hormones is only easy when you’re better-off, so making a big deal about it is rude to those that aren’t,” and that sounds more like weird bitterness than a serious critique.

this is part of a general trend: it feels like there’s a disparity between the narration with the analytic tools it employs on one hand, and the historical material it’s working with on the other. theoretical concepts appear in the form of digressions that aren’t actually adequate to the material. tedious passages about Donna Haraway and “situatedness” or Kathryn Bond Stockton and her mediocre book on “growing sideways” are interspersed as if by compulsion; i can only assume the author felt obligated to prove familiarity by citing established names and simply didn’t have anything better on hand. the actual material is excellent, though; it’s fascinating reading pieces of letters written by trans kids passing tips around and trying to get hormones from doctors. i would have liked to have had more direct testimony and less analysis of “fatness and plasticity.”

READ The History of White People

READ The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

READ Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture

READ Trauma: A Genealogy

READ The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816

READ The Incest Diary

READ Tao Te Ching

READ Airless Spaces

READ A Critical History of Schizophrenia

READ A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe

READ War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

READ The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory

READ Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System

READ The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

READ Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

READ Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self

READ Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy

READ The Logic of Sense

READ The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

READ Ccru: Writings 1997-2003

READ The Heart in the Glass Jar: Love Letters, Bodies, and the Law in Mexico

READ A Balthus Notebook

READ A Short Course in Reading French

READ The Law of Kinship

READ Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism

READ Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

READ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

READ Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 1 (Land of the Lustrous, #1)

READ Land Of The Lustrous, Vol. 10

READ Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 2 (Land of the Lustrous, #2)

READ Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 3 (Land of the Lustrous, #3)

READ Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 4 (Land of the Lustrous, #4)

READ Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 5 (Land of the Lustrous, #5)

READ Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 6 (Land of the Lustrous, #6)

READ Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 7

READ Land Of The Lustrous, Vol. 8

READ Land Of The Lustrous, Vol. 9

READ Dark Spring

READ Nightwood

READ Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

READ This is Not a Program

READ Epistemology of the Closet

READ Bartleby the Scrivener

READ Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays

READ Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov

READ To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

READ Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman

READ The Fear of Child Sexuality: Young People, Sex, and Agency

READ Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History

READ The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

READ Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

READ Doing Ethnography Today: Theories, Methods, Exercises

READ The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

READ The Coming Community

READ Tiqqun 1: Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party/Exercises in Critical Metaphysics

READ This World We Must Leave: And Other Essays

READ Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

READ Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form

READ Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism

READ The Cybernetic Hypothesis

READ Endnotes 1: Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the Twentieth Century

READ Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

READ Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction

READ Mine-Haha

READ Love in Relief

READ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

READ The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction

READ Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

READ Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production

READ The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

READ The Turn of the Screw

READ Diary of an Innocent

READ The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine 1840-1900

READ The Guermantes Way (Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 3)

READ Cannibal Metaphysics

READ The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

READ Proust and Signs: The Complete Text

READ This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after Emerson after Wittgenstein

I. Declining Decline

  • i came here to find out about forms of life
  • are they cultural groups within the group of humans? biological groups?
  • Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a philosophy of culture

Everydayness as Home

  • distrust of language vs trust of ordinary speech
  • Umgangssprache not “colloquial speech” in any sense that implies devalue
  • Descartes’ wax: only one close to W in this trust of ordinary conception
  • words are somehow away from home in philosophy
  • lead words back—more than that, need to lead our lives back
  • W: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (§ 123)
  • philosophizing as a spiritual struggle
  • temptation to madness, temptation to skepticism
  • “THIS pain”—skepticisim of communication of experience—[compare Zhuangzi on the fish]

Life Forms

  • typical understanding of FoL: rebuke philosophy for concentrating on isolated individuals
    • agreement in language is agreement in FoL not opinions
    • misses the role of the natural in PI. there is a sense of FoL that contests the “contractual” (ethnological, horizontal) idea of agreement
  • biological, vertical sense [why is biology vertical??]
  • if we hypothetically can’t be skeptical about other minds thanks to cultural customs: what if people who marry and own property turn out to be automata or aliens? so they can have culture if not human
  • Cavell says criteria of pain only applies to what has a FoL. but not criteria for FoL
  • W called “conservative” for saying we have to “accept the given”
  • bio sense of FoL contests conservatism of ethno sense
  • “The precise range or scale is not knowable a priori, any more than the precise range or scale of a word is to be known a priori.”
  • “The rhetoric of humanity as a form of life, or a level of life, standing in need of something like transfiguration — some radical change, but as it were from inside, not by anything; some say in another birth, symbolizing a different order of natural reactions…”
  • Emerson’s “accept place found by providence” might mean not accepting your place among your fellows but going into exile
  • “philosophy leaves everything as it is” (§ 124): conservative? no, it’s like Heidegger’s letting-be
  • W wants transfiguration thru the ordinary
  • language is a (complicated) form of life? which hope pertains to (W)
    1. human as irreducibly social+natural
    2. universal determination of meaning
    3. everything humans do and suffer is as specific to them as hoping or promising or…
  • “To imagine a language means to imagine a modified form of talking life.”
  • an obscurity: is there an unmodified pre-cultural human? [heaven forfend!!]
    • those whose sensibilities demand an a priori basis of language, but cannot tolerate the costs of Kant (noumenal remainder and Aristotelian table of judgements), find this obscurity awful
  • to solve this? is why Heidegger implies recuperation of thing (in itself) will come only by shift in Western [sic] culture
  • W in line with this, apparently. W thinks our sense of linguistic arbitrariness attests to skepticism about existence of world, myself, others(?)
  • W and Heidegger similar because following similar reaction to Kant
  • criteria can’t refute skepticism

The Investigations as a Depiction of Our Times

  • W in PI as philosopher/critic of culture
  • like Spengler, W sees culture as a kind of nature. so skepticism is “natural” to language
  • “philosophy as battle against bewitchment of intelligence by means of language”—the battle is by means of language rather than simply the bewitchment
  • romanticism as another way of struggling against skepticism
  • PI has figure of child central, in inheriting culture
  • what is all this about inheritance? america as inheritor of europe, mis-inheritor of europe. who gives a fuck for europe and for america? this world produces people with no inheritance. the american settler has a poverty of culture, bland whiteness of lima bean mush. it mirrors the cultural loss inflicted on those kidnapped from africa, except that this loss is originally self-inflicted. people born today don’t even undergo loss: we are born into dispossession already. our attitude towards culture can only be one of looting. take what you can get, take it from wherever, and run. america and whatever europeanness it has brought with it are not an inheritance for me, but an alien idiom i find around me and appropriate only as long as i am forced to.
    • W agrees with me here, i guess(?) or he looks down on his culture
    • “all my words are someone else’s”

READ The Amphitheater of the Dead

READ Psychiatry and Its Discontents

READ Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971

READ Phenomenology of Spirit

READ Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 1

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 2

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 3

READ Fire Punch, Vol. 4

READ Ran and the Gray World, Vol. 1

READ Ran and the Gray World, Vol. 2

READ Ran and the Gray World, Vol. 3

READ Ran and the Gray World, Vol. 4

READ Ran and the Gray World, Vol. 5

READ Ran and the Gray World, Vol. 6

READ Ran and the Gray World, Vol. 7

READ African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity

READ The Sayings of Jesus: The Logia of Yeshua

READ The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings

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