4
Seething Theory
In 1966—the same year that Jacques Lacan published his Écrits and that Jacques Derrida first met Paul de Man at a conference in Baltimore—Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris as a student from her native Bulgaria. She was on hand to absorb the scenes of theory’s postwar French explosion, and three years later, in 1969, Kristeva published her own contribution under the intimidating Greek title Σημειωτιχή, with the French subtitle Recherches pour une sémanalyse. While the original French edition had the stark white cover that characterized so many Éditions du Seuil volumes, the English version, retitled Desire in Language and published by Columbia University Press, which I picked up at a used bookstore about a quarter century later, was black, with gold and white letters framing a cover-dominating black-and-white photo of a young Kristeva. Whereas French readers were invited to contemplate the erudition of the Greek letters, English readers were invited to contemplate the soft lines of the author’s face.
Back at the makeshift desk in my college bedroom, I readily complied. It was, I am sure, in some basic sense exciting just to see what a theorist looked like. Absent image searches, wikis, and similar repositories, I read theory books in the Nineties with only my mental pictures of their authors—and these were often stunningly disconfirmed later when I did come across photos. For this reason alone, the cover of Desire in Language made an impression. Beyond that basic fact, though, the Kristeva pictured on the cover looked to young me like an interesting person. With her face resting on her hand, her blouse tugging asymmetrically across her neck, her hair pulled back, but her bangs slightly windswept, the image conjured an intellectual at a picnic or a seaside who nonetheless allowed the leisurely conversation to turn toward some serious contemplation. Her body and gaze angled toward the out-of-frame but also to the near distance, and I imagined her talking to Someone Very Important about matters that I longed to understand. This author photo suggested at once gravity and grace. It was one of the only photographs of an intellectual that I, at twenty, had ever beheld, and tentatively, perhaps without knowing what I was doing or what it could mean, I projected something of myself onto it.
Of course, it’s not at all difficult to stand over this book cover and detect a whiff of the kind of sexism by which a woman theorist gets pictured—face, lips, hair, and blouse—while similarly indomitable men like Derrida or Foucault tended not, in the Eighties and Nineties, to likewise grace their own book covers. But sexist as the fact of this cover image might indeed be, it generated for me, at an impressionable moment in my own intellectual formation, some concrete possibility that a theorist could also be a woman. At stake in the twinning of those terms was something open-ended, something vague though still exciting about the authority behind theory not restricting itself by gender. But I should have begun that sentence, “At stake for me . . .” In the privacy of my college bedroom, contemplating book covers and intellectual futures, it was my privilege to value feminism as an idea, without feeling the deep identifications and angers that swirled around it.
Understanding feminist theory provided a singular episode in my education with theory, because it necessitated pitching a tent in an emotional landscape where I didn’t have to rest. The value of feminism seemed intuitive to me, and you may not be surprised to learn that I was one of those Nineties guys who declared myself a feminist at every opportunity. At the same time, such declarations didn’t cost me much. I valued a set of entirely important political and theoretical ideas that, nonetheless, have a way of staying mostly theoretical when you’re living in a body at which nobody is ever going to catcall or whistle as you make your way to class.
And so, despite the fact that I and anyone I knew in college would have regarded our attempts to study feminism as political acts, our education also had an ineluctably sentimental side. Undertaking to master feminist theory set into tension theoretical and political principles, on the one hand, and actual, irreducible felt experience, on the other. We were learning how to feel about gender and power and about their structures, inequities, and pleasures. Moreover, in learning how to feel about gender, we weren’t just learning how we as individuals happened to feel; rather, we were learning which kinds of affects the university, and maybe the broader culture, tied to which kinds of political positions. An education in feminist theory proceeded by trying on possible feelings and taking on existing conflicts. These gave us a means to refine our own senses of the ideas and politics we cared about. Accordingly, gender in the Nineties became as emotionally heated an academic topic as there was, and we contemplated it with raised fists and even more raised voices. We yelled. We fought. We seethed.
***
There’s a lot to be learned from spirited arguments, and the history of theory is full of them. Some are well-known exchanges, like Derrida’s disagreement with Foucault’s account of madness, followed by Foucault’s acid reply that appeared a famously petty nine years later; or Foucault’s thunderous silence in response to Jean Baudrillard’s call for an outright dismissal of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Other arguments seem to be functions of particular theorists’ dispositions, where the common denominator is their personality. Thus, in succession Freud’s collaborators quickly became his rivals, while Alain Badiou picked fights with everyone he met (even notably go-along-to-get-along types like Gilles Deleuze) but after their deaths named them publicly as dear friends; and meanwhile, Lacan made a career out of actions that are more or less the equivalent of the GIF of Mariah Carey saying “I don’t know her.” But unpleasant as such slights and fights and arguments may sometimes be, they can also be productive. Marx’s disputation with Feuerbach produced one of the most elegant and consequential listicles in modern history—including the phrase literally engraved on Marx’s tombstone in Highgate Cemetery, London: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
There may be a demonstrably productive quality to theoretical arguments, but you also may have noticed that none of the preceding examples, strictly speaking, is about gender. I hasten to add that arguments about gender can of course be highly productive and clarifying for thought. Gender, certainly, is something that has been and can be theorized with great sagacity and sometimes life-changing implications. But gender is not, and never entirely can be, a purely theoretical thing. We have gender and live gender and iterate gender through our actions—we invest in gender for ourselves and others, often in ways in which even very intelligent people can’t be fully conscious. We can argue about gender, but, by virtue of being people who live with gender in our lives, in our speech, and in our psyches, we are also always to some extent stuck using our gender to argue about gender. When that kind of recursive psychic and social terrain becomes the fodder for theoretical argument—when, in other words, we ourselves identify with the things we’re arguing about—it’s no wonder that people begin to seethe.
Age is a multiplier for these particular theoretical challenges. You can imagine, or you may remember, the acute investments the young feel in their genders. A majority of traditional-age college students are new to adulthood, and little at that age has encouraged them to pry the self-defining questions of how and whether life could make this or that opportunity available, this or that future possible, apart from the coming-of-age experiences that, unless you are uncommonly fortunate, are shaped by gender at every turn.
How to be, how to dress, how to talk, what to talk about, how to act, and whom to fuck: these are all young adult questions—questions, in other words, that young adults are not typically expected to have answered definitively—and all of them are also questions whose answers will be gendered. It makes a ton of sense that such students would be interested to study, discuss, debate, and otherwise theorize gender, but, on the surface, their willingness to do so is different in kind from a willingness to engage with, say, eighteenth-century European painting. As we theorize gender, we inevitably get tangled up in its knotty skeins. At moments we sense ourselves, or some parts of ourselves, to be at risk in the argument, and we argue harder, more forcefully, because the stakes feel higher than usual. It’s difficult to be tentative when we feel ourselves to be at stake in an argument, and the seething anger that often erupts in such moments expresses our strident commitment to positions that feel like more than mere intellectual positions. The truth about gender may indeed set you free, but first it will very likely piss you off.
***
Kristeva’s name circulated in discussions of Eighties feminism, but it was not associated with the biggest arguments of those years, the acerbic debates about women’s sex and sexuality that came to be known as the Feminist Sex Wars—that more dubious honor goes instead to Catharine MacKinnon. By the time I was in college in the Nineties, the prosex, proporn, pro-S/M positions in the debate were regularly shorthanded as the “anti-MacKinnon” position, though this shorthand, it turns out, was of recent coinage. In fact, MacKinnon was not active in the emerging antipornography foment of the Seventies. She did not become associated with the antipornography movement until around 1983, and her signal and much-cited theoretical essays from the then-leading feminist journal Signs in 1982 and 1983 mention pornography only in passing. Instead, MacKinnon emerged from the Seventies with a deservedly brilliant reputation as a feminist legal scholar whose work had consolidated jurisprudence around the newly theorized legal category of sexual harassment. On this basis in 1983 the city of Minneapolis hired her and the feminist writer and activist Andrea Dworkin to draft legislation outlawing pornography on civil rights grounds.
It’s worth pausing here to appreciate that as recently as 1983, pornography had not been established as protected speech, and one could still reasonably imagine outlawing or censoring such media in the name of civil rights. A Supreme Court case like Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), which upheld the First Amendment rights of pornographers, was still in the future. Pornography was only beginning to become available in the privacy of one’s own home, via consumer adaptations of technologies like the VCR and the polaroid, and otherwise its practically Victorian association with vice dens, back alleys, and dark movie theaters still held strong. MacKinnon and Dworkin’s understanding of pornography jived with commonsense conceptions and misconceptions about pornography coming out of the Seventies, though they added the argumentative twist that the production and consumption of pornography were discriminatory behaviors that necessarily harmed women.
It’s also worth pausing to appreciate that as virulently anti-MacKinnon as was I and everyone I knew in the Nineties, we owed more than we realized to the antiporn feminists. Take Back the Night marches, for example, were (and in many places still are) a staple of feminist organizing and empowerment on college campuses—staging candlelight processions and rallies where women assemble after dark to reclaim space that has historically and culturally been marked as unsafe. But it was only while researching this chapter—that is, basically yesterday—that I learned that the first Take Back the Night march occurred in 1978 in San Francisco, at a rally devoted to antipornography feminism. The zone of overlap in positions like MacKinnon’s and the ones we called anti-MacKinnon was not something that the often ferocious arguments between these positions left much room to acknowledge.
The anger that generated the polarizing clarity of positions like pro- or antiporn sacrificed nuance with remarkable efficiency. Accordingly, MacKinnon’s antipornography writings from the Eighties are a strange read now, as we all know she’s the antiporn enemy of women’s sexuality, and yet the astonishing clarity of her critique of structural sexism is nearly unparalleled. One would have to try hard to surpass the eloquent and synthetic account of the nature of gender-based inequality that MacKinnon outlines in the first eight or so pages of her 1987 essay “Francis Biddle’s Sister.” After those opening pages, however, as the essay pivots to pornography as the cause of all this inequality, the argument strains considerably. MacKinnon is, of course, a legal scholar trying to imagine legal solutions to inequality, and for such an argument, a singular cause is a welcome target. The fact that she set her sights on too singular a cause doesn’t exactly mean we should fault her for trying. It does, however, mean that we can (and did!) fault her for getting it wrong. And that, I think, the try-and-fail, is a big part of what made everyone so angry and, consequently, what made the sides of the argument feel so far apart.
MacKinnon became something of a straw woman in debates about women’s sex and sexuality, and, oddly, one of the only scholars to take her and Dworkin’s antipornography work seriously was a French professor and proto-queer theorist named Leo Bersani. Opening his scandalously titled essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) with the observation, “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it,” Bersani gave the final third of his argument over to an elaboration of the stakes of antipornography feminism. What he liked about what MacKinnon and Dworkin had to say was their implication that sex itself was a bad thing, that it was already a relation of domination (men over women) that pornography simply eroticized and reinforced as a genre of realism rather than of fantasy. Feminists, Bersani argued, taking MacKinnon and Dworkin’s argument to its logical extreme, should reject intercourse and criminalize sex until such time as it can be reinvented.
What Bersani liked in other words, was all the arguing, all the friction, and he implied that the sex wars would be well served by even more war and even less sex. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” argues on behalf of a thoroughgoing antipastoral, nonredemptive, account of sex, which has been generative for some subsequent strains of queer theory, and it says something about the politics of Bersani’s position in the late Eighties that his essay also includes not one but two backhanded objections to Gayle Rubin’s flashpoint essay on the legitimacy of lesbian S/M as a sexual orientation; the very idea of harmless fun between consenting adults is, Bersani implies, itself harmful. The fight is where we learn, he seemed to say, and his essay aligned with some unpopular positions in order to advance the conversation.
In this context, however, the truly odd thing about Bersani’s take was its cool commitment to logical argument. It’s unmistakable in the essay that things like homophobia and sexism made him angry, but his expression of that anger on the page was, at most, snide, catty, biting. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to characterize Bersani’s essay as one that seethes. Rather, it’s a cool and clever take on feminist anger, turning a felt position into more of a logical one. As a young reader who didn’t easily get angry, it appealed to me how he values emotions he does not bear. But rereading the essay years later, as a reader who’s a little more in touch with my own angers, it’s striking, and almost anticlimactic, how much Bersani’s writing lacks the emotional tonalities of MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s.
***
The differences between the Eighties and the Nineties matter a lot for the ways I encountered feminist theory. The book I owned by Kristeva, edited, translated, and published in 1980 as Desire in Language, was based on texts published in French between 1969 and 1977. Her more widely read Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection was from 1980, translated in 1982. Some other of Kristeva’s works had been available in English prior, but the Eighties were the moment that they really entered the Anglophone theory catalog. Given the slow movement from a book’s publication to its appearance on an undergraduate syllabus, the odds are relatively low of my having been assigned to read Kristeva as a college student had I been ten years older than I happened to be.
It probably also mattered that I was something of a haphazard scholar, reading hungrily for my own purposes and with little regard for chronology. By the time I encountered Desire in Language, I had already been reading a lot of queer theory that postdated it. This time-warped (and, frankly, misguided) prelude to reading Kristeva was framed by a youthful reading of other theoretical texts that erred so happily, so misguidedly, on the side of the affirmative: what queer theory opened up, what it made possible. That sense of possibility found amplification in queer theory’s open-ended account of how identification and fantasy might catalyze sex and gender (some version of what Sedgwick, as discussed in the previous chapter, designated “gender transitivity,” or perhaps what a male college friend once more poetically proposed as “If we were both girls, we’d probably be dating”). Unsystematic reader that I was, I relished the ways that queer theory seemed to validate how my identifications and desires spilled out in multiple directions at once. So I identified—unconsciously but also at moments willfully—with something that Kristeva, as a woman writing theory, seemed to represent: the blouse, the bangs, the big ideas. I imagined this identification was part of the point, and, I guess, it became so.
Was this sort of affirmative queer identification why I wasn’t especially angry reading feminist theory? Was it why Bersani wasn’t angry? Different kinds of anger, after all, are differently available to different people, and that’s true both structurally and personally (hence the cultural tropes of the angry feminist or the angry black woman). It would, at least, not really be possible to sort out which parts of my collegiate attraction to feminist theory had to do with me being a man or being queer or just having the personality I happened to have. Sure, I felt something when I rehearsed some feminist anger as an anti-MacKinnonite, but I also felt something when I admired Bersani’s cool take on her and Dworkin’s position—even though the anger and its absence pulled in obviously different emotional directions. If my education in feminist theory was allowing me to try on possible feelings and take on existing conflicts, maybe for whatever combination of reasons I also harbored some resistance to those possibilities. Feeling an emotion can be an opportunity, but it can also be a big ask.
It’s also possible that at a certain level some of these positions felt like they were important without exactly feeling like they were mine. By the time I was in college, the Feminist Sex Wars were mostly over. Figures like MacKinnon and Dworkin loomed large, but their best-selling books were behind them, and the movement for which they became spokespeople mutated and redirected toward new targets. Surely these circumstances have something to do with the fact that into the late Nineties we studied the Feminist Sex Wars, but we all took the same, prosex, proporn, pro-S/M positions. We argued fiercely with enemies whose views had been vanquished. Our argument, seemingly undiminished in its intensity, was nonetheless a leftover argument.
***
Feminism in the Eighties argued about gender and sexuality, but before long it was also embroiled in arguments about how to argue. In 1997, Judith Butler published Excitable Speech, a culmination of the essays she’d been circulating for several years on the language of injury. One part of the book directly refutes MacKinnon’s work, but the parts that attracted the most attention were those that theorized what had become the widespread practice of “resignification.” The theory went like this: racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination weaponize language and deploy its power against people, and the response to such significations were resignification—moments when people who had been harmed by the power of language took back that language and dismantled its weaponization. So, for example, the people who had been taunted by a homophobic slur like “queer” gradually reclaimed the word and called themselves queer, identified as and with queer, and called their intellectual work “queer theory.” They resignified the term.
Ultimately, resignification amounts to a kind of linguistic application for social construction. The latter is a classic social science insight—that behaviors, rituals, and their meanings are culturally specific and vary widely by time and place. From a social constructivist perspective, there is no necessary reason why a word like “queer” is a slur and not a compliment. But there are constructed reasons, and the fact that the word has been a slur is an effect of history and culture, both of which can and do yield, though only very slowly.
The theory is elegant, and it is empowering, but actually doing it often made you sound incredibly angry. In the act of resignifying, one walked around loudly using words that many other people recognized as hateful, offensive, or just inappropriate for polite situations. (Somehow there were many, many more polite situations in the Nineties than there are today.) The fact that by 1997 some people were calling themselves queers did not mean that, say, a politician or a community leader or a university president wanted to be on record using that same word, which some part of their audience might not recognize as a reclaimed term. And though “queer” is now pretty commonplace, in the past five years the Twitter-literate public has seen the same kinds of bottom-up resignifying claims and top-down public hesitations around words like “tranny” and “nasty.”
A friend told me a story about his days in a Nineties liberal arts college that captures the point. Someone he knew was giving prospective students—that is, high schoolers and their parents—a campus tour. As is the convention with such tours, the guide walked the guests through the tree-lined paths and the beautiful grounds, pointing out sights and landmarks, some of which one would never need to enter in four years (the admission office) and some of which someone eager for their life to begin might sheepishly want to know about (the frat house). As the tour group paused in front of a bulletin board advertising a meeting of the queer student organization, one of the parents took immediate objection. What was the meaning of this? Was such offensive language tolerated here? “No, no,” the guide patiently explained to the concerned parent, “‘queer’ is a word that has been reclaimed.” Seeing that the explanation had not registered, she helpfully added, “Like ‘cunt.’”
***
Though resignification challenges the power behind words, it acts little on the feelings they can carry. Resignifying words like “queer” or “cunt” in real time didn’t exactly cancel the force those words held; it just nudged the feelings toward a different register. Add to this circumstance the fact that some of the most spirited theoretical arguments of my youth were left over from the decade prior, and it’s not wholly surprising that, in my tutelage by feminist theory, I was a quick study with the theory part but slower, more reluctant, to engage the emotional side.
But then one day, my resistance broke apart all at once. About five years after college, I read a newspaper story one morning about a group composed of graduates and dropouts from UC Santa Cruz, about my age though unknown to me personally, who had founded a kink porn start-up in San Francisco. Asked in the course of the interview about college or other experiences that prepare one for such a career, one person spoke dismissively about feminist theory in particular. In his brief elaboration of the point, however, he conflated the MacKinnonite, antiporn position with Marxist feminism more generally—or, to put it in the terms discussed earlier, he lumped together MacKinnon’s pre- and post-1983 work. It made me livid.
By any rational account, I had little reason to be. Here was someone I didn’t know, bringing up undergraduate recollections toward which he harbored mere impressions, claiming that those impressions amounted to little more than something he wanted to dismiss. Despite some analytical sloppiness on his part, he nonetheless took an anti-antiporn position, which was approximately mine as well, except that by about 2004 these debates had mostly cooled, and if you’d asked me, I would have told you I didn’t really care anymore. These circumstances together would seem to provide wholly insufficient fodder to make me as angry as I nevertheless felt.
Temperamentally disinclined to anger, as I mentioned, I had usually demurred from grounding my feminist politics in that emotional register. But all of a sudden it seemed pretty undeniable that I had access to some feminist rage after all. Perhaps that anger was a delayed reaction from the decade prior. Perhaps what was being dissed had become a thing I used to care about and so, in that sentimental remove, actually seemed mine. It certainly felt like I was holding onto some something that this guy in the news story, by contrast, had so glibly let go. But my anger, whatever its cause, does go to show that emotional investments in ideas can run deeper than we expect them to or even feel they should. Arguments may resolve positions, but they also leave remainders.
***
Around the same point in graduate school when I was getting angry about a stranger confusing MacKinnon with Marxist feminism, I took a night off to hear Kristeva speak at a bookstore in New York. It was on the occasion of the English translation of the Colette volume in her trilogy on “female genius.” A friend and I arrived an anxious half hour early, anticipating a crowd that only arrived on academic time, which is to say, in a flood of noisy laughter and bespectacled bodies that poured in on the hour, so that the event might begin five minutes late. My early vantage, however, let me watch the choreography of the event in its planning moments, as the bookstore manager pointed out to the staff who would sit where on the makeshift stage, who would give introductions, who would speak, and in what order.
Kristeva appeared with the rest of the crowd, in a fitted turquoise suit (no asymmetrical blouse here!) and sporting what was unmistakably Chanel Shocking Pink lipstick. Under the bookstore’s fluorescent lights, the lipstick brought her features into a kind of severe relief. It perplexed me as it seemed at once perhaps the wrong color on her complexion but equally perhaps well beyond my feeble knowledge of lipstick. It was, in a word, an enigmatic signifier. It located her firmly on a trajectory of feminine beauty and also somehow astride it.
Kristeva’s manner that night struck a similar bargain. At first, she demurred to speak in what she claimed to be not-good-enough English, shaking off the event choreography that I had watched the store manager plan. A graduate student pulled from her entourage must, impromptu, speak in her place. Mere minutes later, when the graduate student’s description of the female genius project took a turn that was not apparently to Kristeva’s liking, she jumped in to correct her and proceeded in accented but in fact flawless English through a measured and perfectly paced account of her recent work. In the course of an hour, Kristeva’s language became indistinguishable from her lipstick: each did its signifying work, both as a formal artifice and as a means of communication, signifier and signified working together endlessly forward yet just as endlessly freighted by conventions of culture, of history.
Was she angry at the store manager or the event planners for putting her on the spot? Was she angry at the student for misrepresenting her intellectual project? Would Kristeva have been treated in the same ways had she been a man? Was gender a factor in how she handled uncomfortable circumstances? Or, as Virginia Woolf asked at an entirely different academic event whose social topography nonetheless traced gender’s contours, “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”
Though these are worthwhile questions, all that they ultimately have in common is that I have no idea how to answer them. I have no idea how I would ever have any idea. I cannot and would never deny that gender was in the room with us, but neither can I precisely point to aspects of the experience that isolated gender or made it visible in some determinate way. Gender is not an efficient cause. The only thing that feels concrete, as I comb my memories of the hour I spent in Kristeva’s presence, is the incongruous shade of her lipstick.
It’s true that if Kristeva had been a man, I might not have registered or recalled much about her appearance, and this structural sexism that colors my memories annoys me. Whether or not she was angry that night, it turns out that I am, a little bit, at myself. The upshot here is that her lipstick might well be read as a component of a larger intellectual argument. The terms of the argument are not those with which I am most familiar, as it has never, mercifully, been my task in an academic setting to have to negotiate a balance between my professional self and my femininity. But the evening I spent watching Kristeva lecture taught me something about the labor that goes into such a negotiation and also about the impossibility of getting it definitively right.
Kristeva reached an agreement in this negotiation by landing on the side of the feminine, making herself recognizable first as a woman, and tempering that position in the arbitrary symbolic of gender, as needed, with the deliberately secondary fact that she happens to have one of the greatest theoretical minds of any living intellectual. The memory of the event with which I’m left—where I cannot decide whether Kristeva’s was among the most brilliant, the most subtle, performances of gender and intellection I have ever witnessed or whether the bookstore’s lighting was unforgiving—certainly brings the arbitrariness of gendered signification into high relief.
Who wouldn’t be a little angry?