There is a story that came out around, I don’t know, eight years ago. Of a young man who lived in Maine and he walked down the street of his small town where he had lived his entire life. And he walks with what we would call a swish, a kind of, his hips move back and forth in a feminine way. And as he grew older that swish, that walk, became more pronounced, and it was more dramatically feminine. He started to be harassed by the boys in the town, and soon two or three boys stopped his walk and they fought with him and they ended up throwing him over a bridge and they killed him. So then we have to ask: why would someone be killed for the way they walk? Why would that walk be so upsetting to those other boys that they would feel that they must negate this person, they must expunge the trace of this person. They must stop that walk no matter what. They must eradicate the possibility of that person ever walking again. It seems to me that we are talking about an extremely deep panic or fear or anxiety that pertains to gender norms. . . . Someone says: you must comply with the norm of masculinity otherwise you will die. Or I kill you now because you do not comply.
—Judith Butler, Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind (2006)
The spirit of the world is ourselves, as soon as we know how to move and look.
—Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”
A shock is something that happens that causes us to shift our interpretation and understanding of an event in our world. Such an event seems actually to change the nature of the world around us, breaking our modes of understanding, our habits of seeing, our ways of hearing. Fred Moten describes the ways in which a shock, a break, is an alteration of representation itself, a disturbance that reconfigures the visual and aural registers. His book In the Break describes how shocks and breaks shape and break and shape meaning, how collusion and disarticulation between sound and image break and fracture in the face of racist violence. Moten recalls the example of a child whose death represents just such a break, the representation of whose death offers the “the shock of the shock” in Moten’s words.1 This is another black child, also accused of being precocious. Of wanting to be the center of attention. Of bringing trouble on himself. He was accused of going too far. Moten’s invocation is of Emmett Till, who was alleged to have whistled at a white woman and uttered the phrase “Bye, baby” as he was leaving a store, an offence for which he was lynched.2 Till’s death and its aftermath enacted a fracture between sound and image. We can see a similar fracture in the King case. One can think of the spectacle that was made of Latisha’s embodiment in the school, the ways in which the visual aspect of Latisha’s embodiment blotted out the aural one. Latisha’s name was almost never uttered, not at the school, not during the trial. The privileging of the visual over the auditory rendered the nearly constant stream of slurs, of hostile commentary, of “fag,” of denigration directed at Latisha by the other students inaudible. It was not part of the official story, did not register as significant. The consequence of this privileging meant that unlike all of the visual provocation that was ostensibly so central to the case—the ways in which Latisha’s dress, hair, and mannerisms, whether recalled or imagined, were described in such minute detail—the words constituting the “trigger incident” also did not land in the register, either of the trial or of collective memory. It was a single word—“baby”—with other words proximate to it, which was considered to be the provocation. The other words surrounding that one word refused to contribute any sense to the sentence, acting as blank containment rather than offering meaning. In the end, the words themselves vanished, as we saw in the last chapter.
We can also turn to phenomenology for an articulation of shock and the ways in which it breaks the representational frame. One definition is Alfred Schütz’s, who describes shock as “a radical modification in the tension of our consciousness.”3 In his monograph on Schütz, Maurice Natanson describes a shock as “the condition which occasions a shift from one finite province [of meaning] to another.”4 This feeling of a jarring and unexpected shift, of a bump on the road that throws us, that veers us from our path, is the beginning of the constitution and reconstitution of meaning. That shift is also a way of describing what phenomenology is. Richard Zaner describes phenomenology in just this way, also borrowing from Schütz to characterize it: when going along with our daily lives something will happen, a small mundane something that will “shock you into an awareness of what you had been taking for granted all along.”5 It is shock that makes us assess the situation before us, makes us begin thinking where previously we had merely been moving along, motoring forward, inattentively. We suddenly are thrown by the shock into thought and thus are tasked with rethinking. The shock initiates the re-arrival of the self to consciousness. Shock condemns the self to reflection on its circumstances and world, a reflection that can be described as either the method or practice of phenomenology.
What we often feel as we shift from one interpretation of an event to another is a vertiginous unsettling. It is the feeling of having our habitual and familiar experience of the world suddenly snapped. This is how many of the teachers at E. O. Green Junior High School describe their experiences with Latisha. In her appearance, her mannerisms, her comportment, she was a radical affront to their assessment of how a boy should look and behave, and also of what constituted a girl. The sound of her walk occasioned a break in the familiar everydayness of the school, even as it became familiar enough to identify her through sound alone. Larry was not a typical boy, and Latisha was not a typical girl; her failure to conform to the expected norms and rules of gendered behavior had an ambiguous and pervasive effect within the school. Her walk, in particular, was a break with, and in, typicality itself. To those who saw Latisha as a willful agent and her gender as an expression of that will, she refused to adopt the mantle of typicality. Those who understand gender norms to be something other than the chosen or refused attributes of a willing subject might phrase it otherwise, saying that Latisha did not embody “boyhood” in a way that they thought a boy ought to, yet they could not quite conceive of her embodiment as a girlhood. It was illegible as such to those around her. When dealing with Latisha, her teachers seem to have experienced this breaking with typical behavior as a breaking of the typicality of the world itself.
In his essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the ways in which perception is always a stylization of what is perceived. Perception opens the object up to us, often through a flicker of an image, a single sound, or a gesture. Merleau-Ponty is talking about painting in this essay, but gives several examples of perceptions opening up the perceived object in which that disclosure happens in the auditory rather than the visual realm. In explaining how perception opens something up for us, in an instant, he writes this: “A woman passing by is not first and foremost a corporeal contour for me, a colored mannequin, or a spectacle; she is ‘an individual, sentimental, sexual expression.’ She is a certain manner of being flesh which is given entirely in her walk or even in the simple click of her heel on the ground, just as the tension of the bow is present in each fiber of wood—a most remarkable variant of the norm of walking, looking, touching, and speaking that I possess in my self-awareness because I am a body.”6 This is the body in its sexual being, this woman passing by, apprehended as such by Merleau-Ponty’s “I” who is also a body. She is not, he says, apprehended visually. She not a spectacle, not a mannequin. The visual fact of her materiality does not express her being. We might hear an echoed refutation of Descartes here and his skeptical distrust of both the body and the senses: How do we know who or what is under those hats and cloaks we see walking about in the street? Could be heads of pumpkin or glass, could be automatons. Nonsense, says Merleau-Ponty. The walk is disclosive of being itself. It is not that I see the woman walking, catch a glimpse of her, and then know some aspect of her. I know her entire being, which is “given entirely in her walk or even the simple click of her heel on the ground.” It is a grasping of the other that is instantaneous and total, in which the visual register is incidental. It is the sound itself, the sound of her walking, through which her being is entirely given.
And what, precisely, is that sound? It might be characterized first and foremost by its precision. It is the sound of gender as precision. Merleau-Ponty uses the word choc, which has been translated variously as “click”7 and “shock”: “the simple shock of her heel on the ground.”8 Both click and shock invoke a resonating, a reverberation, a way in which a singular moment—the noise of a heel striking the ground—becomes what it is through a repetition, gaining its meaning as one footfall follows another follows another, thus transforming a single noise into the rhythmic pattern of motion given through sound. That one singular sound also echoes, as well as non-singularly repeating, gathering evocation and meaning and significance in its wake. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” is an essay about painting and also about language, in which Merleau-Ponty makes the case that painting can be approached, interpreted, understood, and analyzed like a language.9 The voices of painting, he says, are the voices of silence.10 It is at the same time an essay about gesture; gesture is the key to every articulation of meaning that the essay wants to describe.
We will return to the question of gesture and silence and turn to those moments in the trial when the former comes to fill in the latter, becoming a way to convey what is otherwise unspeakable. But we might first consider: What is the nature of gesture? Is there some element that unifies gesture across the visual, auditory, and discursive realms? How does a gesture coalesce into a habit? Or become articulated as a style?
Brandon was seventeen in the summer of 2011, when the murder trial began. The trial offered many descriptions of the actions of Brandon McInerney before the morning of February 13. But it was equally invested, perhaps more so, in describing the actions of Latisha King. The proceedings were ab initio as much about establishing what kind of person Latisha King was as they were concerned with what kind of person Brandon McInerney was. And in this, it was a trial with a fundamental stake and interest in reading, decoding, parsing, and enacting the gestures of the human body.
Indeed, most of the contestation in the murder trial orbited around bodily gestures: how to read them, how to determine what they express, how to interpret what they mean. In this chapter, I examine how Latisha’s gestures were interpreted and will read several moments when gender fractured into separate auditory and visual registers, each with different modes of action and effects. This fracture happened in the school, as Latisha walked down the hallway, and it also happened in the courtroom, as the defense attorneys made their arguments. In the former, gender became an attribute of sound, as the testimony of many teachers made clear in their extreme reaction to the sound of that walk. In the latter, the meaning-making functions of the auditory register were supplemented and eventually replaced by the visual register as the attorneys attempted to portray Latisha’s gender and sexuality through gesture. Argumentation in a courtroom is necessarily an auditory affair, made through testimony, offered through examination and cross-examination, through the workings of spoken language. What I will explore here are the moments in which, during this trial, the defense attorneys made their arguments through gesture. That is: at moments in the trial when language failed, when the discourse circled around some formation of gender or sexuality that was unspeakable, that words failed to capture, the wordless language of bodily gesture took over, and meaning was made and transmitted through gesture.
Neither side disputed that Brandon fatally shot Latisha from a distance of about thirty inches away, as she was seated in front of her computer screen, typing her name at the top of the essay she was composing. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said District Attorney Maeve Fox in her opening statement, “the evidence will show that this was an execution.” She described Brandon’s actions before and during the shooting—the quietness with which he rose from his chair in order that Latisha not turn around and see him, how closely Brandon positioned his body to Latisha’s, the calm steady way he moved as his arms rose and he pointed the gun at the back of Latisha’s head, and his expressionless gaze after he fired two shots. These were the gestures that constituted evidence of Brandon’s cold-bloodedness, the “malice aforethought” required for a finding of murder. The defense read those same gestures and concluded that the killing was not murder but manslaughter, that the accused was acting out of panic and that the paradoxically calm and expressionless nature of his gestures were evidence of bodily dissociation and thus emotional distress.
Was it panic or was it an execution? The answer depends on how Brandon’s gestures are interpreted. But the gestures that were subject to the greatest scrutiny were not Brandon’s, but Latisha’s. It was Latisha’s walk in particular around which entire days of testimony were organized. One teacher at the school who testified about Latisha’s walk, Jill Eckman, said that she was never able to see what Latisha was wearing on her feet, or that she did not remember seeing what she wore. What she did remember was the sound that her boots made when walking down the hallway at school:
Fox: Outside of the makeup did you notice any other changes in his attire?
Jill Eckman: He started wearing high-heeled boots.
Fox: Do you remember what they looked like?
Eckman: Not really. I just know they were heels and clicked when he walked down the hall.
Eckman disapproved of his boots, of the sound they made. Other adults were also dismayed by his boots, or angered, or, in the words of other teachers, “shocked,” “appalled,” and “horrified.” In that instance, the sound of the heel striking the ground was shocking because that click, so instantly and recognizably feminine, came from the movement of a body that was not a woman’s body. That is, the movement of this body was recognizably feminine although its sex may not have been. And the shock of that discrepancy led to corporeal policing on the part of Latisha’s peers, Latisha’s teachers, and, especially, Brandon McInerney.
There was something that was readable and legible about Latisha’s walk, something that was read as announcing her sexuality through announcing her wayward relation to gender, and that something was conveyed through sound. A walk can convey any number of forms of iconic masculinity; the assertive masculinity of the walk of a soldier, or a cowboy, or a construction worker, is partially expressed in each case through a masculine style of walk that is accompanied by sound, or rather sound is part of what makes the style masculine. The masculinity of each figure is described by movement, and by the sound of movement; one can imagine the sound of soldiers marching in formation, scores of footfalls landing heavily as one, or the jangle of a cowboy’s spurs as they strike the planking of a floor.
A walk can also convey femininity through sound. The sound of Latisha’s footsteps is recounted throughout the testimony: one teacher described it as a clip-clop, recalling the sound of horses’ hooves or of a little girl playing dress-up in shoes too big. But more frequently it is described as a clicking. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the clicking sound that high-heeled shoes make on a hard-surfaced floor is an aural sign of an accomplished femininity. It means the body has trained itself into those shoes, the precision and crispness of the sound speaking to the skill that the wearer has in the wearing, their function as a bodily extension. That extension is not just the physical elongation of the leg accomplished by the height of the heel, but an extension that travels past the visual and into the auditory realm. The click of the heel extends the umbra of femininity out past the body itself, out of reach but within earshot. You could hear him coming, said another teacher, referring to the sound of Latisha’s boots.
A few of the teachers at E.O. Green implied that she had no skill in the boots. One opined that she was likely to twist her ankle or break her neck in them. This fantasized ankle-twisting and neck-breaking were offered as a reason to get Latisha to stop wearing the boots; several of the teachers got together and pondered changing the dress code, wondering if they might amend it to prohibit “unsafe” clothing. In insisting that the boots were “a safety issue,” the teachers implied a desire to protect Latisha from physical injury resulting from what they understood to be her own ill-chosen game of dress-up carried too far. These teachers, however, were in the minority in their characterization of Latisha’s walk in her boots. More of the teachers, and all of the students, described Latisha as being quite skilled in her boots, of walking without wobbling or falling down, of being able to run quickly over bumpy terrain in them, even chasing boys across the playground in them. It is of course possible that both are true—that Latisha began by clip-clopping in those boots, and ended flying across the playground blacktop, that her gendered walk started as ungainly and ended as accomplished, in a fairly brief timespan.
Shirley Brown, a teacher who was “appalled” by Latisha’s shoes, was asked why she was appalled. She replied:
Brown: Well because. Most women have to adjust to the three- or four-inch heel, and here is this child running in them through the grass, potholes and all of that, and it’s like what the heck are you doing? And it was like that. Because it’s always safety first.
Q: And why did you comment?
Brown: I always comment to a kid who is sticking himself out in any way, making themselves a target.
Q: Was he sticking out?
Brown: How could he not?
Brown takes umbrage at the shoes because of how Latisha wears them, “running in them” through all manner of terrain. Her outrage is grounded in the fact that “most women have to adjust to the three- or four-inch heel,” and here is this “child” who has apparently adjusted well enough to run through “the grass, potholes, all of that.” Latisha, whom she characterizes as a child, is apparently at ease enough in the shoes to wear them confidently, whereas a full grown woman would have had to “adjust” to them. Indeed, her assertion that her concern was “safety first” is belied by her account of how Latisha wore the boots, not just clipping along in them timidly, but running. That question—what the heck are you doing?—seems then to address Latisha’s gender violation rather than any breach of safety, since the literal answer to the outraged question would be: I am running quickly across the playground in heels without stumbling or falling down. One might even read a certain measure of gender envy in Brown’s response—an affective cloud around the fact that Latisha’s motility in the boots seemed to evince more ease and comfort than most grown women would be able to manage, by her own report. It may or may not be relevant to observe that Shirley Brown delivered this testimony as she sat in the witness box wearing a pair of shoes that had at most perhaps an inch of lift.
Another sensible-shoe wearing teacher, Anne Sinclair, also remarked on those boots, though her recollection of how Latisha wore them was quite different. Sinclair understood Latisha to have been making noise in her boots on purpose, in order to draw attention to herself. This was significant for the defense’s attempts throughout the trial to document what they called Latisha’s “negative attention-seeking” behaviors. In response to a defense attorney’s question as to whether she witnessed Latisha engaged in “negative attention seeking behavior,” Sinclair described Latisha in her boots: a spectacle that was auditory rather than visual.
Sinclair: Um, he started—well, he started wearing boots, high-heeled boots. Very first time I saw the boots, though, that I remember I believe it was after winter break, we came back to school. I was going across the quad. It was before school started, and I could hear this click click click click click click click of heels, and he started yelling, “Mrs. Sinclair, Mrs. Sinclair,” and I turned around and he said, “Look at my boots.” And he had on knee-high brown suede boots.11
Mrs. Sinclair hears her before she sees her. Indeed, to her the sound of the boots signifies an escalation in Latisha’s self-presentation, a gestural style of comportment that demands attention in a way that her other, merely visual modes of self-presentation—her nail polish and her hair gel—do not.
Defense Attorney Bramson: The manner in which he was dressing and his appearance, did that continue?
Anne Sinclair: Yes.
Q: Did it escalate in any way, or did it stay about the same?
A: I—I—it—he seemed—he seemed bolder about it.
Q: What do you mean?
A: I—when he first started wearing nail polish, he actually kind of covered it up. He pulled his sleeves down of his sweatshirt, and after a while he was just, um, drawing attention, but with the heels you could hear the heels—I mean, you can hear four-inch heels when they’re clicking, and he would make sure that they would—that you could hear them clicking as he was walking.
Q: Is there something that you noticed specifically about the way he walked in the heels that led you to believe that he was trying to make the sound of the clicking?
A: Um, well, I believe you can either make noise when you’re walking with your shoes or you cannot make noise when you’re walking with your shoes, and you could definitely hear the shoes.12
The fact that the shoes are audible becomes the fact of Latisha’s intention to make that noise, to disturb the teachers and the other students. Sinclair’s attribution of intention to Latisha was challenged by the district attorney in her cross examination:
On cross, Ms. Fox: Now, I was a little confused. On direct exam, you made a couple of statements. One statement was that you believed that Larry had trouble walking in those boots based on your observations, correct?
A: Yes, uh-huh.
Q: But then a minute or two before that you said that it was your opinion that he was walking in a way to make the—the shoes sound loud on purpose?
A: Well—
Q: I don’t understand how those two things can co-exist. Can you explain that?
A: Well, I think if you have four-inch heels on and even if you’re having trouble walking in them you can still make a lot of noise with them on concrete which is—
Q: That’s my point. If you’re having trouble walking in them, isn’t that inconsistent with purposefully trying to make noise in them? You see what I mean?
A: I think he could have not been as loud as he was, no.
Q: Well, I guess I’m going to ask you to choose then which it is.
A: Okay. Which do I think it is? I do not think he was walking in them like someone who had been walking in them for several—who had practiced a long time. I think they were new to him.
Q: Difficult, correct?
A: Yes. But I also think that you can walk in an exaggerated way which might have also made it difficult for him to be walking without them bothering him, and you can make noise with—you know, certain shoes make more noise than others. I could certainly hear him coming up—I heard him before I saw him. I heard the boots before I saw them.13
Fox then switched gears, making a bid for a moment of feminine identification that was surely enhanced by the five-inch heels on her own feet, though they made no sound as she walked back and forth in front of the witness stand in the carpeted cloister of the courtroom.
Fox: Do you have shoes that when you walk they make a lot of noise?
Sinclair: Well, I don’t wear heels.
Q: That was my very next question.
A: But I have worn heels. At this point in my life, I do—I take comfort over style, okay.
Q: And is it not true, based on your experience back in the day, that when you wear heels, sometimes they are loud regardless of what you do?
A: They can be loud, yes.
Q: It depends on how they fit, correct?
A: Yes.
Q: And you don’t know how those shoes fit him, do you?
A: No.
Q: So the opinion that you gave that you think he was purposefully trying to make the shoes sound louder, is that based on anything other than what you have already told us?
A: It’s an opinion.
Q: Exactly. And we’re here—
A: Okay.
Q: And an opinion is only as good as the information on which it is based. And that is what I’m trying to get at is, do you have any other information than what you have given us that supports that opinion?
A: Okay. They were boots. They weren’t strappy little shoes that tend to make more noise. He was wearing boots that were—seemed to fit him or at least being adhering to his—you know, he wasn’t sliding around in them. He was wearing boots. They were making noise.
Q: If they fit him and he wasn’t sliding around in them, then why did you perceive that they were a safety issue?
A: Well, for one thing, the concrete around our school has really wide cracks, and if you wear those kind of shoes, you can catch your heel in them and you could trip.14
When the defense attorneys raise this question of safety, the nature of the danger that Latisha’s boots pose is characterized quite differently. Given Sinclair’s statement that the boots are dangerous because of the cracks in the concrete around the school, one might wonder why the dress code, and not the cracked concrete, becomes the focus of the anxious huddle of teachers, hand-wringing about “safety.” Yet in her answer to Defense Attorney Bramson, Sinclair opines that the boots are dangerous because of the particular kinds of boys around the school—a claim that the defense attorney shuts down as soon as it is uttered, as quickly as she can.
Q. by Ms. Bramson: Do you feel that the way Larry was dressing and behaving was a safety issue?
Sinclair: Yes.
Q. by Ms. Bramson: Okay. Could you explain that, please?
A: I thought it was a safety issue because I—I felt the boots were unsafe for him any—regardless of whether they were going to allow them or not, that it wasn’t safe to be walking around in spike heels at our school. That there’s a safety issue there. I also thought it was a safety issue because I—it opens him up to ridicule from other students and that he could get hurt.
Q: By hurt you—
A: Beat up. I assumed he would be beaten up.
Ms. Bramson: Are we going to break?
The Court: How much longer are you going to go?
Ms. Bramson: I have several minutes. I need to regroup. My back is killing me. I’m asking to break for lunch.
The Court: You can sit down and ask questions, but we’ll take a break until 1:30.15
One of the women who staffed the front office at E. O. Green offers a moment of origin for the boots, relating a story about Latisha first bringing the boots to school. Latisha announced rather proudly that she bought them with her own money, along with two other pairs of shoes. The staffer chastised Latisha for this fact, not on the grounds of gender impropriety, but on the grounds of practicality. It is wasteful, she said, to buy too many shoes at one time. Because who needs that many shoes? And impractical, she said, because children’s feet grow quickly. She said, “You won’t be able to wear them for very long,” which was true, but not because Latisha’s feet would ever grow any larger.
In her book Refiguring the Ordinary, Gail Weiss uses phenomenology to examine our social interactions with difference and our embodied relations with otherness, and reminds us that perspectives and perceptions are necessarily social phenomena. Weiss emphasizes the importance of gesture to communication and meaning, constructed in what George Herbert Mead calls a “conversation of gestures.” She writes:
By following his argument that perspectives are socially constituted, one can in turn see how the social constitution of perspective depends upon shared horizons and shared social contexts. For Mead, it is in and through everyday participation with others in what he calls a “conversation of gestures” that perspectives as well as selves are constructed. These conversations allow for a variety of meanings to emerge precisely because of the differences in gesture, horizons, context, and perspective that the various interlocutors contribute to the conversation, thereby revealing multiple sources for the ambiguity that both Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir identify as an essential feature of human experience.16
A “conversation of gestures” describes a bodily means of communication that is not fundamentally material, though it engages the materiality of the body and is animated through it. As we saw in chapter 1, in the case of the sailor, his girl, and his ambiguously tilted cap, the conversation can happen face to face. But it need not always.
To understand language, Merleau-Ponty says, we must engage ourselves with its gestures. It is not a matter of moving language aside to tend to the purity of the thoughts there, as if language were a neutral vehicle of meaning. Meaning and its expression are indivisible. As he writes in The Visible and the Invisible, “the meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread.”17 It is, rather, a matter of our submitting ourselves to language. “We have only to lend ourselves to its life,” he writes, “or its movement, or differentiation and articulation, and to its eloquent gestures.”18 We lend ourselves to the life of language in order to understand it; we give ourselves over to its movement, which is the location of its meaning. Its meaning is not propositional but gestural, expressed in “eloquent gestures.” Language “does not stop”; it cannot be itself without motion; it is motion. When we give ourselves over to language, however, what we learn, paradoxically is that we cannot learn precisely all we want about it from itself. Its meaning is distributed through different words, still more language. It does not confer its own meaning; it points us always elsewhere, to things other than itself. Language gives us its meaning by giving us its opacity.
Merleau-Ponty writes: “There is thus an opaqueness of language. Nowhere does it stop and leave a place for pure meaning, it is always limited only by more language, and meaning appears within it only set in a context of words. Like a charade.”19 When we are dealing with language, we are dealing with opacity. Nowhere, he says, does language stop. Opacity, then, is connected to movement, suggesting transparency as a property of stillness. This interplay of movement, meaning, and silence is captured in the simile that follows: like a charade, one individual movement does not mean anything, it is when the whole is taken together that one can arrive at meaning. The metaphors for language, particularly the characterization of its opacity, are visual, and its materialization spatial, in contrast to the auditory metaphors and examples that come later in the essay, including the click of the woman’s heel. The example of the charade effectively divorces the realms of the visual and the auditory. In a charade, any auditory information accompanying the gesture means that a charade ceases to be a charade, ceases to be itself. A charade, however, is never really or only itself even when it is itself. It is defined as such only through its embodied mimetic relation to some other action or person, the reenactment of that other action or person thorough embodied gesture. Gesture expresses meaning through expressing style. As Galen Johnson describes it in his essay on Merleau-Ponty’s “Indirect Language” titled “Structures and Painting”: “Style begins as soon as any person perceives the world, and all perception stylizes because embodiment is a style of the world. Our own living body is a special way of accenting the variants the world offers.”20 The body has a style, expresses a style through movement and gesture, and style can be understood as something other than, and even resistant to, the choice or will of an individual artist, or person, even as it is her or his uniquely embodied expression.
Merleau-Ponty offers walking as a metaphor by which we might understand the relation between meaning and language, the footprint as the fixed trace of a movement that has passed on: “Language ends up imposing the most precise identification upon us in a flash. . . . Language bears the meaning of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body.”21 He is interested in the ways in which meaning is transmitted in a flash, suddenly, wholly and entirely. We do not arrive at meaning in a synthetic way, by adding together individual elements. It is given in language suddenly, “in a flash,” and also given through gesture with that same suddenness. It is not always possible to see precisely how gesture expresses style, not possible to freeze-frame movements, to stop time and try to locate the essence of gesture there. Although sometimes, like the painter who filmed himself painting in order to better learn his own gestures, we need to try.
In the epigraph to this chapter, Judith Butler relates of the story of a young man in Maine who is murdered for his queer walk by boys who “feel that they must negate this person, they must expunge the trace of this person. They must stop that walk no matter what.” In that walk, there was clearly a conversation of gestures taking place, though perhaps it was a one way conversation, or one in which the participants were only indirectly engaging one another. It seems that this young man’s walk changed over time; as he grew up, its swish became more pronounced, more “dramatically feminine.” The gender and sexual significations of his walk became more emphatic and distinct as he got older, and it may have been the intensification of his swish, and not simply the swish itself, that infuriated the other boys and drove them to murderous violence.
In the King case, the click of Latisha’s heels down the hallway is understood by the teachers to represent a danger. We can notice the ways in which concern for Latisha’s safety are articulated, the shift in focus in how that danger is characterized. The danger is at first named as Latisha herself—she will fall down, she will twist her own ankle, she will break her own neck. This soon morphs into a different concern, related but with a different agent of danger: she will make herself a target. Someone else will break her neck. “Larry” was “sticking himself out,” Shirley Brown states, as she assures the court with egalitarian equanimity that she was not singling anyone out, that she would have taken any boy aside who was “sticking himself out,” who was making himself a target. In the next chapter, we will explore the function of sticking out and passing, of anonymity and individuation, in the way Latisha was perceived at school.
***
One day Latisha wore eye shadow to school, and a teacher, though not one of hers, told her to wash it off. The teacher, Jill Eckman, said that Latisha did so, compliantly, but returned the next day with eye shadow on again, defiantly. “He said he had rights” she said, contemptuously. Latisha’s “defiance” was often described in terms of gesture. Indeed, in her opening argument, Maeve Fox speaks of Latisha’s increasing confidence, and her changing gender presentation, this way: “Some say that his confidence level increased. Larry King started to decide he wasn’t going to take it anymore. He started reacting to the teasing and the shoving. He started giving it back, some attitude.” At this moment, the district attorney pauses, hesitates, looking for a proper description for this change in Latisha. When linguistic description was not sufficient to the task of characterizing Latisha in the last weeks of her life, the district attorney resorts to enacting Latisha’s gestures through her own body. Or, more precisely, she enacts a gesture that she does not attribute to Latisha, but that she understands to in some way encapsulate the style of Latisha’s gestural life. Fox bends an arm at the elbow, places her hand under her chin, palm down, then slides it quickly outward, in a kind of inverted salute: the chin flick. She makes this gesture with her hand and arm, and then describes it this way: “He was giving the proverbial chin, or the proverbial f-you.” Latisha, as she is described by Fox in this moment (embodying the “fuck you” familiar from the proverbs?), is through some remarkable alchemy able to transform the transphobic scorn directed her way into something powerful and profound, a sense of confidence and security held at a bodily level.
In Fox’s account, Latisha is able to mobilize gesture in order to refuse the belittlement of her peers. Or, to be more accurate, Latisha is articulating her life through her comportment, her dress, her movements, and her relations with others in such a way that her very style of embodiment comes to resemble this gesture. Merleau-Ponty says of the power of gesture that it can enable the body to exceed itself and its circumstances in the world. He writes: “The body’s gesture toward the world introduces it into an order of relations of which pure physiology and biology do not have the least idea. Despite the diversity of its parts, which makes it fragile and vulnerable, the body is capable of gathering itself into a gesture which for a time dominates its dispersion and puts its stamp upon everything it does.”22 Gesture, then, gives us a way of seeing how the body and its meaning are not primarily biological, but rather that they engage and exceed the biological. And it seems a particularly apt way of describing Latisha, both the effect that her gendered style of embodiment had on others, her gestures that seemed to resonate so strongly throughout the school, and the way in which her gestures organized and made coherent her body and her person. The gestures of her gender presentation and her confidence and even defiance in the face of condemnation were how she transcended her fragility and a means by which her diversity of parts—scarred body, slight frame, challenged organs, medicated brain—could coalesce into a unity of proud, fierce, outsized expression.
This fierce expression found its apex in Latisha’s walk, brashly gendered, but according to her teachers too misplaced in her male body to qualify as feminine. The fact that her walk was so gendered, or so wrongly gendered, actually removed it from the category of walking. During the testimony of one teacher, Arthur Saenz, Defense Attorney Robyn Bramson and he struggle to find the language to describe Latisha’s walk: it was not a walk so much as it was a parading, a parading back and forth, a cocking like a bird. A man sitting behind me in the gallery chimes in during their back-and-forth, volunteering in a stage whisper: sashaying. As lawyer and witness continue casting about for language, and finding each word unsatisfactory, the blizzard of gerunds begins to slow, and they start to use their bodies to demonstrate the gender performance for which no words are deemed sufficient. “Was it, was it, what kind of walk was it? Was it like—?” And the defense attorney puts her hand on her hip, thrusts her chin high up in the air, and starts walking back and forth, swinging her hips. Well it was more like: the witness wiggles in his seat, lifts an arm up into the air, then lets his wrist go limp. He performs the gay walk in his chair, she adjusts her walk to match his, and they act out the gay-ness of Latisha’s “parading,” as they have decided to name it, back and forth across the courtroom, in a duet of mockery. When a style of walking is too queer, it stops being a walk and becomes a prancing or a mincing or a cocking or a sashay. It is no longer a walk at all. And the gestural meaning of the exchange between lawyer and witness was perfectly clear, even though that meaning evaded capture by the official court transcript. 23
The contention in this case was that when Latisha walks down the hallway in her boots, she was making an issue of her gender. She was “throwing it at people,” in the words of Dawn Boldrin. That the teachers who police Latisha’s gender also have a gender is seemingly invisible to them. But when a teacher herself clicks down the hall, or squishes down it in practical shoes with crepe soles, she, too, is offering her gender to the world, even if it recedes from her attention in its conformation with the norms of gender. Even if her shoes—perfectly appropriate, nearly invisible in their dullness—escape attention. Even if they do not make her a target.
A click is a sound that resonates with gendered significance. It is also a sound that can echo with racial significance. Consider this statement: “There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.” An African-American man is walking down the street and hears a “click,” the sound of white fear, of a racist social imaginary. President Obama, who was speaking after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, continued: “That happens to me, at least before I was a senator.”24 Philosopher George Yancy describes a similar moment, a “deafening” hail of clicks, in which he is racialized, marked, entrapped, in a passage that echoes Fanon. In the scene Yancy narrates, the clicks emerge from a white femininity consolidating itself against a blackness that it is consolidating in turn:
The sounds of car doors locking are deafening: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick. The clicking sounds are always accompanied by nervous gestures and eyes that want to look but are hesitant to do so. The click ensures their safety, effectively re-signifying their white bodies as in need of protection from blackness, that site of danger, death, and doom. In fact, the clicks begin to return me to myself—even as I continue to disrupt the constituting effects of the clicks that overdetermine me—as a dangerous beast. The clicks attempt to seal my identity as a dark savage. The clicking sounds mark me; they inscribe me, materializing my presence, as it were, in ways that I know to be untrue.25
***
In writing about the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Yancy has noted: “To be a black man is to be marked for death.” We have seen this repeatedly in recent months and years in the United States, with the shooting of black man after black man after black man by police. Black bodies are caricatured as dangerous and feared, a characterization that is then used to justify the violence against them. We can see, too, the critical significance of gesture in these cases, in which the hands of a black man holding a bag of skittles or a book or nothing at all are fantasized as and thus transformed into hands that threaten by the racist imaginary of the one who actually holds the weapon. In this imaginary, even the universal gesture of hands up, don’t shoot is enough to get a person of color shot.
Yancy has noted the ways in which, during George Zimmerman’s trial for the killing of Martin, “Racial profiling could not be invoked by the prosecution, which meant that the truth about Black bodies and anti-Black racism as expressed through racial technologies could not be told, which meant that the trial, in my view, was a site of obfuscation; a sham. Having the discourse of racial profiling barred by the state implicates the state in denying the use of the necessary narrative that implicates Zimmerman in acts of anti-Black racism and the devaluation of Trayvon Martin’s life.” Yancy describes the ways in which devaluation and marginalization makes some lives matter more than others, marks the bodies of black men vulnerable as the state targets them with impunity. And then there is the “obfuscation” and “sham” of a legal process that is unwilling to recognize racism, in either its structural or its particular predations.
The fantasy of aggression in the King case is most startling for the ways in which it gains coherence by taking the form of paranoid projection.26 It is important to attend to the conditions under which a narrative of homophobic or transphobic violence becomes or fails to become coherent, and what different guises aggression can take in such narratives. I would like in this context to think a bit about another King incident, the beating of black motorist Rodney King by the Los Angeles police in 1991. We see in both instances that the actions of violence directed at the vulnerable are made possible through a fantasy structure in which the perpetrators of that violence attribute an aggressivity to those vulnerable subjects. Indeed, such a structure of projected aggressivity is perhaps the only way of explaining how strapping Brandon McInerney could cast the slender and undersized Latisha King as an aggressive threat, or how a gang of heavily armed police officers acting in concert could argue that an inert Rodney King constituted a lethally dangerous threat, even as the mass of them were clubbing his body as it lay motionless on the ground. The fact that the argument was legally successful in the 1991 case, exonerating the police officers, suggests that this fantasy structure is somehow sensical to the law and aligned with cultural expectation, even if it conjures a situation entirely contrary to the manifest physical reality of the scene. I am arguing that the most pernicious forms of violence are able to work, are perhaps only able to work, through these fantasies of aggression projected onto a victim. Such projections become the justification for homophobic and racist violence, refiguring the socially enjoined violence visited on vulnerable bodies as a defensive act on the part of the more powerful. There is of course all manner of difference between the operations of racism, homophobia, and transphobia. But the structures that give rise to such socially enjoined violence share features in common. The commonality between Latisha King and Rodney King was even noted by Rodney King himself in his 2012 autobiography The Riot Within, in which he compares himself to the other King, the one who did not survive. “The thing I find so frustrating about these front-page stories,” Rodney King writes, “is that we’re not moving forward as a race of people, towards a more peaceful path of tolerance and understanding. We’re just as close-minded and violent as we were twenty years ago when I was brutally beaten and tasered by police. We’re just as prejudiced and poisoned by hate as we were when my gay teacher friend Mr. Jones was shot and killed by a vengeful student from John Muir High School. What have we learned? How have we changed? What have we improved?”27
In looking at the two King cases together, we see that the aggression attributed to queer or trans subjects and the aggression attributed to black subjects share three temporal attributes. First, the supposed aggression is retroactively installed as temporally prior, a “threat” that can be marked only after the body in question has already been the object of violence. Second, the attribution of aggression then gives the violence leveled at vulnerable subjects the cover story of preemption; that violence is “self-defense” against an aggression that would presumably have taken place sometime in the future. And third is the question of the ontology of that aggression, which, since it is both conjectural and futural, is not materially visible. Conjuring such violence and attributing it to vulnerable subjects and bodies thus relies on strategies of fixing, freezing, or altogether breaking the representational frame in order that the violence that supposedly inheres in the violated body might appear in the fractured reflection that results. In the Latisha King case, that freezing of the representational frame occurred through the invocation, over and over, of Larry King, in school, dressed in feminine clothing. In the Rodney King case, that freezing happened in the trial, when the videotape of the beating was disassembled by the defense into a series of still images, which had the effect of simultaneously mitigating the brutality of the beating he was receiving and rendering him as noncompliant. To be a black man is to be marked with death. What is it, then, to be a black transwoman? How is one’s life as a black transwoman marked, as a member of a population still more marked by such fatality?
As a way of thinking these two cases alongside each other, I would like to consider the phenomenological concept of the horizon. This idea, which originated with Husserl and was elaborated by Merleau-Ponty, holds that the world, when considered phenomenologically, is centered in my own perspective but also always shared. I am not the singular author of my meaning or my life, but rather my life and its meaning are best understood as a collaborative project of bodies whose contextual horizons are necessarily shared. The result is a lifeworld that is social, in which the engendering and interpretation of meaning is a relational activity. Horizons are shared because they coexist in enmeshment with one another. This does not mean, however, that they are equal; one of the most helpful things about the concept of a horizon is its ability to describe a world characterized by asymmetrical power relations and the differential distribution of bodily vulnerability that is a consequence of that power asymmetry. As we will see in the last chapter, one might describe the project of ethics as attention to what should happen when horizons are shared, in contradistinction with what often does happen when they are. One of the most significant workings of power in the creation of the social world is precisely that power can delegitimize other horizons, can render them as untrue, invisible, or unthinkable. One of power’s effects can be to break or dissolve the horizon that makes the other’s body, and life, legible, substituting its own horizon in the place of the other’s.
An example of just such an unhappy enmeshment of conflicting horizons can be found in the Rodney King beating. The capture and dissection of that beating on videotape, and particularly the subsequent exoneration of the police officers who beat him, offer an example of different horizons, discrepancies that interrupt the presumption or, indeed, the experience of a shared horizon as a unified horizon. In her article on Rodney King, “Endangered/Endangering,” Judith Butler points to the dangers of misrecognizing a reading as a seeing, the kind of misrecognition that in this case facilitated the white Simi Valley jury’s acceptance of the police interpretation of the videotape of King’s beating. That jury believed the police assertions that King was aggressively threatening the police officers, even as the evidence they were offered showed police beating him aggressively as he offered little resistance.
Gail Weiss takes up Butler’s reading to ask if an attempt to counter the racially saturated horizon in which the videotape was viewed with an aggressive antiracist reading, or an “antiracist hegemony,” in Butler’s terms, does not risk achieving only a further saturation of the horizon with aggression. She writes: “Although Butler’s strategy of countering a racist hegemony with an antiracist hegemony may be rhetorically and politically effective, I think it is also extremely problematic. . . . Is aggressivity either necessary or sufficient to promote the viability of alternative readings to the Rodney King incident, and to other equally disturbing events in recent and past U.S history? And if it is, then is there a way of distinguishing the violence and aggressivity deployed in the antiracist reading from the violence and aggressivity that inheres in the racist one?”28 Weiss asks what grounds might be used to determine the legitimacy of the antiracist reading over the racist one, given that Butler has asserted that seeing is always already interpreting and that therefore there can be no Truth of events that is not already mediated and thus no way to use the event itself, outside of interpretation, for its evidentiary value to support either reading.
I would offer that one way of distinguishing the violence and aggression in the racist reading and the antiracist one is to attend to the target of the aggression. That is to say, Butler advocates an aggressive reading of the video and suggests that such a reading should be “repeated and publicized.” The aggressive readings that Butler advocates hinges on a different understanding of black men, white police, and the general populace than the interpretation that eventually prevailed in court. The “antiracist hegemony” that Butler hopes to further would appear, in the light of the King verdict (and, indeed, subsequent events in the racial life of Los Angeles), to be a utopic counterpoint to actual conditions, politically necessary to reach toward, but on a quite different ontological plane than, the hegemony that it is seeking to counter.
In comparing these two horizons, the relations of power that currently exist render any attempt to represent them as equivalent a purely formal exercise, not responsive to their actual appearance in the world. Discerning the scope and depth of these horizons is not, then, a matter of squaring them with any kind of pre-representational or pre-interpretive truth, but rather a matter of determining which interpretation seems more attuned to the phenomena it seeks to describe and attending to the effects of each. The effects of an antiracist hegemony might be to expand or resuscitate a collective political imaginary that finds itself injured or splintered by that other horizon, the racist hegemony, whose effects can be seen in the broken body of Rodney King, as well as in the verdict that exonerated the officers who beat him.
Robert Gooding-Williams suggests that it is precisely the everyday violence of systematic racism that was the context for the all-too common instance of police brutality and the vehicle through which the extraordinary verdict was possible.29 We see in this moment the political necessity of maintaining some conceptual distinction between the body of a text, the body of a reading, and the human body, and note that the task of finding adequate ways to describe the phenomena that one encounters brings political work and phenomenological method into deep accord. Aggression as a reading strategy may work to counter the logics of aggression that determine the visible field and counter the routes of power through which anti-racist and anti-queer violence justifies itself. That such power constitutes the horizons we occupy is also one of the reasons that altering or expanding them is often more difficult than we would like.
That expansion of the horizon is sometimes called a school. The school as institution was once described in the following way, as a place that succeeds to the extent that it widens the horizon of its students:
A secondary school should achieve more than not driving its pupils to suicide. It should give them a desire to live and should offer them support and backing at a time of life at which the conditions of their development compel them to relax their ties with their parental home and their family. It seems to me indisputable that schools fail in this, and in many respects fall short of their duty of providing a substitute for the family and of arousing interest in life in the world outside.30
This is from Freud’s “Contributions to a Discussion on Suicide,” written about a hundred years ago. It is a sober assessment of the failure of schools to address suicidal despair in students, and provides an account of the purpose of schools and of education that is almost exactly contrary to the common understanding of the educational imperative as one of cloister and shelter. Freud suggests that protection should not be the model of a school, and shelter from the world is not the aim of an education. In the moment that a young person is beginning to find modes of relation outside the family, Freud says, the school must provide a substitute. But the substitute for the family is not structured like a family. Arguably the greatest value of a school is its ability to become an elsewhere, to give us models that are precisely not the family model, ones that offer us a different structure through which to feel and disseminate affection, intimacy, and aggression. The most important task of a school, Freud says, is to awaken desire. Protection, in such a context, would function only as an increasing fortification, an ever-narrowing constriction of sociality collapsing in on itself. He proposes, then, a pedagogical erotics that encourages the student to take the outside world, and the life found there, as an object of desire, even at the expense of his or her attachment to the school itself. For it is not any life, or even proximate life, that the student needs to desire, but the life found in the world outside: “The school must not take on itself the inexorable character of life: it must not seek to be more than a game of life.”31
For a number of years, I have had Eve Sedgwick’s essay “Queer and Now” as the first item on my Queer Theory syllabus, a text that we consider collectively, as a class, on the first day of our meeting. It begins as follows: “I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents. To us, the hard statistics come easily: that queer teenagers are two to three times likelier to attempt suicide, and to accomplish it, than others; that up to 30 percent of teen suicides are likely to be gay.”32 Sedgwick wrote these lines in 1993, and it is hard to know which is more startling: that these observations about youth suicide still have the immediacy that they do, or that queer suicides have only now become news. Sedgwick’s introduction can easily stand as a contemporary assessment of our current moment, perhaps adding only trans energies and lives alongside the queer, acknowledging that their bodies and selves are still more vulnerable than gay youth. In the next sentence, Sedgwick’s describes the kind of knowledge that we have about these suicides and confirms something about their epistemological ambiguity: “The knowledge is indelible, but not astonishing, to anyone with a reason to be attuned to the profligate way this culture has of denying and despoiling queer energies and lives. I look at my adult friends and colleagues doing lesbian and gay work, and I feel that the survival of each one is a miracle. Everyone who survived has stories about how it was done.” If this knowledge is indelible, its ineradicable traces are inscribed on a surface or in a location that is itself perpetually at risk of being lost.
A pessimistic reading of the fresh surprise at each decade’s wave of queer suicides might understand it as a confirmation that the conditions under which such suicides occur are both intractable and occluded, perhaps systemically so. How best to address the despair behind such suicides? As Sedgwick poses the question: “How to tell kids who are supposed never to learn this that, farther along, the road widens and the air brightens; that in the big world there are worlds where it’s plausible, our demand to get used to it.”33 That phrase get used to it cannot ring in the ears of contemporary youth with the same resonance that it did in 1993, where it was a demand that straight culture acknowledge the presence of queer lives. Yet Sedgwick’s question about how to communicate that more open horizon to dispirited and imperiled queer youth describes the same sentiment that impels Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” YouTube campaign addressing queer youth at risk of suicide: the road widens, the air brightens, it gets better.
In 2010, in between the time of the murder and the murder trial, Dan Savage launched the “It Gets Better” campaign in an attempt to reach out to despairing and suicidal LGBT youth to try and convince them that despite the direness of their current circumstances, life does indeed get better for LGBT people. The campaign was justly criticized on a number of fronts: for being too simplistic, for universalizing the perspective of the white gay male with class privilege, for suggesting the inevitability of upward mobility.34 It is surely true that life does not get better for all of us. It is true that we do not all survive. I am most interested in the critique that the campaign is relentlessly future-focused instead of being concerned with the present, anticipating a later time when conditions will surely improve and advocating a strategy of waiting out the present day rather than changing things now. That last critique, along with a critique of the portrayal of queer youth as martyrs or victims, is a rather uncanny replication of Lee Edelman’s position in No Future, a book that has been a widely criticized and an immensely generative counterpoint in recent queer theory. Indeed, one of the things that José Esteban Muñoz invited us to take seriously in his critique of Edelman in Cruising Utopia is the proposition that the future matters, that leaning toward a utopian future that can be imagined even if it cannot yet be materially realized can be an engagement with politics and not simply a flight from politics. Hope is sometimes necessarily predicated on an incipient future that exceeds the grasp of the pragmatic, and queer practices of art-making and world-making are sometimes the best ways to lean toward that future.
Part of what has been criticized in this campaign is its passivity. Some suggest that it ought to emphasize the power of the individual to change his or her own circumstances: thus make it better instead of it gets better. The slogan of “make it better” affirms will as the proper rubric for understanding both the triumphs and failures of queer life. The thing that might give us pause about that last criticism is its invocation of an agentic individual who is able to effectively mobilize power to make his or her circumstances better, as a corrective to the more collectivist and contextual horizon of the more nebulous “it” that either gets better, or doesn’t, aside from the purposefully instrumentalized will of the youth suffering the fact that it is not better yet.
In short, what one might need in that moment is a shared horizon. Viewing the world in terms of shared horizons suggests that a change to the conditions of my life can result only from something other than my own causally efficacious actions. It seems to me that aspects of Sedgwick’s queer approach, or perhaps a queer approach in general, is that it teaches us to look at structures rather than individual actors when considering both the causes and the solutions to violence against queers and transpeople. How then, in this context, should we begin to reckon with these disturbing suicides, which are more chilling not because they represent a new development, but exactly because they are the norm, exactly because they are perfectly in line with what we have known about LGBT suicide for decades. What might unite violence against LGBT youth that comes in the form of murder and violence that comes in the form of suicide? What might Freud’s comments on suicide, and his characterization of suicide as a murder of the self, contribute to these issues? I was initially hesitant to use Freud’s comments to read these instances of LGBT suicide. Understanding suicide as self-murder seemed to me to risk replicating the individualist analytic of above, to replace an analysis of the social contexts that push the vulnerable toward suicide by locating the aggression within the suicidal person, in a projection of aggressive violence that is all too common where queer folks are concerned, as we have seen. This same individualist analytic would have it that Brandon McInerney was merely a bad seed, that the killing was a result of an individual evil person, thus obscuring the role played by the school, the parents, the teachers—and shrinking the field of responsibility down to one fourteen-year-old boy.
The terrible economy of suicide lies in the simultaneity of its inward and outward action, that this kind of punishment is a routing of aggression that cannot find a direction outward and so turns back in on the self, while still retaining its function as an aggression toward the other. Jacqueline Rose has described this same dual movement of suicide less in terms of inner topography and more in terms of the social conditions under which it occurs:
All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also always an act of cruelty. . . . Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, psychoanalyst Karl Menninger wrote, unless they experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed’. You can die, but you can’t commit suicide, on your own.35
Despite the isolation, both perceived and real, of those queer youth who violently end their own lives, their deaths extend outward: “You can die, but you can’t commit suicide on your own.” The responses to these deaths, the addresses to anonymous others and the insistence that it gets better is not merely a well-meaning platitude spouted by anxious adults who have safely steered their lives into a harbor of privilege, but an invitation into a different future that is unknown. A shared horizon, in this instance, cannot indicate spatial or temporal proximity or even community. That is, in the invocation of “it gets better,” I wonder if there is not something in the vagueness of that “it”—the passive voice, nonagentic, nonindexical—that might be thought of as precisely the location of that hope? If I am a trans or queer youth who feels at the end of my rope, with no resources and nowhere to turn, the very thing that might sustain me in that moment is that there is an it that can get better exactly when I have reached the limit of my own capacity to make anything at all improve, even without specifying its contours of features. In that way the abstractness of the world invoked, its distance from what I can know or imagine in this moment and also from my own will, allows my own horizon to widen and to offer a way to an outside, to the as-yet unknown, to a differently valenced life.
But sometimes, it does not get better. Sometimes pointing toward some sunnier future horizon is not enough. Sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes it ends. The last time I taught Queer Theory, I began the first day of the semester as I always do, with a collective consideration of “Queer and Now.” We sat with Sedgwick’s haunted contemplation of the suicides of queer adolescents. We were a small seminar that year, just a handful of students. Most of them queer. Half students of color. One of them did not survive to the end of the term. Suicide.
***
One of the most remarkable things about Latisha King’s short life was her resilience, the way that she persevered in her self-expression in the face of normative regulation and prohibition. She emerged, and persisted, in defiance of all the different forms of violence directed at her, with the aim of extinguishing her very being. She was not crushed into submission by the insistence, by family and teachers and peers, that she was impossible, that she did not exist—though all these forms of violence did exact their price. On the morning that she was shot, she had dressed herself in compliance with the school’s dress code. On that day, she wore her boy drag. That day, she was passing as Larry. And yet, dressed in boy’s clothes, sitting in her classroom, she typed her name: Latisha King. These were the first words on the computer screen, the first two words of her essay, the essay that according to her teacher’s recollection consisted at that point of nothing other than those first two words: her name. She had given herself a name, and she wrote it out, so that everyone huddled around her computer screen, some laughing, some pointing, some with hands covering their mouths, could see. Latisha King. I am here.