– AI generated image based on the content of the post below –
This summer has been full for our family! We have been traveling a lot, including to Alaska, and next week we’re heading to New York to catch Broadway shows like Six, Death Becomes Her, Hamilton, and Maybe Happy Ending. So, the time to read, write, and cast has been compressed!
But here is what I am working on:
For Gay Thoughts, I am working on an essay bringing together Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Adam Phillips on the purposes of theory. I will call it When (Not) To Play Around.
Speaking of Butler, I was enjoying a dry cappuccino at Cup of Joe in Raleigh yesterday–rereading Gender Trouble–and the only reality that perplexed me at all was the young woman dressed like a cat, acting like a cat, and talking (in that voice we sometimes speak to cats) to her cat stuffies that she had laid out on her table as she … studied? (Sometimes she would scold them, making me laugh— but I physically jumped when she unexpectedly lunged into my space!).
As for Butler’s writing, it was not only thrilling but entirely comprehensible. I loved rereading it as much as when I first read it (although the pleasures associated with reading Gender Trouble now are informed by decades more study, whereby I earned my views about gender, identification, and many of the primary sources Butler reads).
For New Thoughts, I am working on two new episodes. The first, Sex Changes: On Trans* Desire(s)–will feature Butler, specifically their recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Kara Fisher has a great interview with Butler on her podcast. Listen in here.
– AI generated image based on the content of the post below –
Recently, Joe Rogan has become part of my daily podcast routine, helping me pass the time while taking the kid to and from theater camp, nearly an hour away from home. I was surprised to find that The Joe Rogan Experience is very entertaining and engaging. I was especially amused by pieces of what I take to be Rogan’s christology, shared in two recent episodes of his cast: #2356 with Mike Vecchione and #2357 with Sarko Gergerian.
Does Rogan believe Jesus Christ is an alien mushroom born of God’s semen?
In #2356 with Mike Vecchione, a comedian and actor, Rogan brings up the discovery of a large object that seems to be on an unusual trajectory toward earth. Discovered on July 1, 2025, 3I/ATLAS has been the subject of ongoing observations by astronomers, who are monitoring its movement through space. Rogan notes that Harvard scientist Avi Loeb believes it could be an alien spacecraft.
They go on to discuss the idea of extraterrestrial life, including the possibility that Mars may have supported life. Here it is (2:49:00):
R: It’s weird.
M: Well, just because we [can’t] exist there doesn’t mean other life forms [can’t] exist there.
R: Or other life forms used to exist there.
M: Right.
R: [I]f Mars at one point in time had a sustainable atmosphere, like millions and millions of years ago, what if there was life on Mars? What if we are the offspring of the life on Mars? What if those fucking guys just realized like, hey, this place is falling apart, let’s shoot over to earth and reestablish?
M: Yeah.
R: I mean, that might be why we’re so different than every other primate that’s here.
M: I never thought about it like that. That might be true. I just think it’s so vast, and we know so little about everything, it’s possible. . . . [I]t’s all possible, the universe is infinite, and we know very little about it.
If Rogan is correct, we humans (thus, Jesus) are descendants of an alien race from Mars.
Add to our alien origins Rogan’s observations, shared with Gergerian, a police lieutenant–and therapist trained to use psychedelics–serving in Winthrop, Massachusetts, about God, Jesus, and mushrooms (1:32:30):
R: It’s a book that he wrote after he was one of the people that was, he was contracted to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was like a 14 year job where they were deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he was the only one on the committee that was agnostic.
He was an ordained minister, but through his studying of theology, he started becoming agnostic because he recognized that there’s just too many religions and too many parallels and like, what’s the real religion and root of this all? Or origin rather, and root of this all. So he wrote this book after 14 years where he, I’m gonna sort of paraphrase, but he thought that the entire Christian religion was based on the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. . . .
And it’s a fascinating book. It’s a fascinating book because he translates or he breaks down the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian word, which was a mushroom covered in God’s semen. And this is what he’s saying is that they thought that when it rained that this was God, his semen on the earth, which has caused all life to rise from.
We all need water. And then plants, of course, need water. And then after rainfall, they would find these mushrooms.
Because mushrooms grow incredibly quickly. And they would consume these mushrooms and have these religious experiences. And this was a hugely controversial book, of course.
And to really be able to know if he’s right or wrong, you would have to have a deep understanding of ancient languages and the Bible and so many different things.
There you have it: The Joe Rogan Experience of Jesus Christ: a descendant of an alien race from Mars, the offspring of God’s semen, who grants us access to the realm transcendental.
As Elder Cunningham from the musical The Book of Mormon exclaims, “I’m interested!”
I am especially interested in how Joe Rogan talks. Why is his podcast so popular? My theory, or one part of it, is that he talks how most of us talk: there is a thread of intelligibility that allows for improvisation, insight, transgression, creativity, honesty, and so on.
Democratic politicians should do more than go on Rogan’s podcast. They should also study how he talks to people and why people find him so compelling to listen to–even when he is talking about alien beings and God’s semen (and maybe even especially so).
God is thought. What constitutes thought is the interpretation of (authoritative) text (e.g., the Bible). AI (e.g., ChatGPT) is transitioning us into a “post-literate” (and so “post-legal”) society. Thus, AI will kill the God of monotheisms: the God of letters, of text and law. The moral of the story is that only a proper hermeneutics can save God from the murderous rage of AI.
What authoritative text and what proper method of textual interpretation will compete with AI and heroically save God from it? The Bible is one obvious answer, but we are told that the Bible contains content even worse than what AI produces. And the proper method is? Unquestionably, it is what the cleric claims it to be.
Long before AI (or Trump) threatened God, the cleric killed the Truth of God by successfully reducing theology to hermeneutics.
Briefly: The most revolutionary characteristic of the Reformation was an insistence on translating the Bible (and liturgy) into the vernacular of the people. Reformation = the democratization of authoritative text, an event made possible by the invention of a radically new technology, the printing press.
The underlying value of the drive to translate was that the Truth of God belongs to everyone. Hence, the importance of learning to read. The literate person could know God apart from authority or the authorities, namely, the literate cleric.
Yet, the vast majority of Christians became (and remain) entirely dependent on translations of the Bible. They are mesmerized by what the learned cleric projects on the page for them to read and buy into or believe.
Consider the witness of Fastrada from the musical Pippin:
I know the parables told in the holy book I keep close [or closed?] on my shelf God’s wisdom teaches me when I help others, I’m Really helping myself And if we all could spread a little sunshine All could lend a helping hand We all would be a little closer To the promised land. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo (emphasis added).
Nearly all of the history of Christianity can be summed up as a battle for control over the interpretation of letters. It is only through a proper hermeneutics/methodology that we can know God and thus be saved by God. An obsession with method/hermeneutics long ago killed the Truth of God.
In my view, the quasi-theological critiques of AI are nothing more than outbursts of jealous rage. The learned human cleric does not want to give up their prestige to a rival, digital cleric, namely, AI. Is there nothing new under the sun?
What makes any cleric attractive is our drive for satisfaction, meaning, coherence, and a sense of authority. It is the cleric who attempts to tempt us to look away from the Truth of God and find salvation in method itself.
The cleric desires to be our ágalma.
“In Greek,” Lacan scholar Bruce Fink reminds us, “[ágalma means] shine and brilliancy: ágalma is something admirable or charming . . . it is a trap for gods – it draws their eyes . . . it is an uncanny object or charm – the Trojan horse, for example, is referred to as ágalma” (191).
The cleric’s charm is literally all too alluring. I take that to be the point of David Hammons’s Old Testament. Open it up, and you find The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, by Arturo Schwartz. The question is: What appears when we look beyond the wisdom of the cleric?
The lure of the cleric remains all too alluring because theology has lost its way. Theology has become the shitty version of any number of other disciplines, especially hermeneutics.
Theology has forgotten itself. It has lost sight of its singular task: to seize the Truth of God, the Truth that is truths—and so cannot be method: permanently located, situated, placed. God is Truth that is always revealed in truths, in the act of Truth’s dis-appearance from reality or what is entirely realizable in this world, here and now.
Following Badiou, whose thinking, especially in Conditions, makes this writing possible, I define Truth as the void or the hole in (common) sense. Theology, as the discipline of seizing of the Truth of God, makes holes in the sense of God.
The radical claim of what goes by the name of Christian theology is that the Truth of God became flesh in Jesus the Messiah, not in the cleric. The theologian’s task is “to draw from this observation the most joyous consequences” (Badiou, 48; Badiou is thinking about poetry). Theology does not interpret or circumscribe the Truth of God. That is the cleric’s task.
In its loyalty to the Truth that is not One or Whole, theology makes it possible for us to recognize the impossible, surprise, or the miracle in this world. The Truth of God as the truths of Jesus the Messiah does not require interpretation but rather conceptualization. Or, as Paul of Tarsus would affirm, it does not require any clerical authority.
Christian theology conspires with the Truth of God as the truths of Jesus Messiah, trapping our attention and thereby disrupting the reproduction of meaning, of (common) sense, and to the end of seeing what is new in the world. Thus, theology can only oppose the normal and established norms. Theology is necessarily the critique of religion (i.e., norms) and so of politics (i.e., the incarnation of norms).
Nonetheless, there is no theology without the cleric. If the cleric is the enemy of theology, theology must love them with all its heart, mind, and soul. Otherwise, the Truth of God will literally die.
And that’s why I’m just not too literal. I just can’t be too literal.
AI generated imaged based on the essay below. Notice the young Andrew Sullivan in the foreground?
Girl: “Are you sure you are not really a girl?
Boy Sullivan: “Of course not.”
Parent: My child knows who they are.
Adult Sullivan: “But do they? . . . I sure didn’t.”
I.
In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan contends that the gay rights movement has “radicalized, and lost its way.” Sullivan asserts that the gay movement has abandoned traditional, virtually normal politics (i.e., the defense of marriage equality and the expansion of non-discrimination protections in the workplace and housing for gays, lesbians and trans adults) and adopted a fascistic queer gender ideology—a transgender ideology that disregards the naturalness of the “sex binary” and seeks to impose itself, like a “theology,” on society—and especially on children and teens.
The irony is that Sullivan’s argument perfectly aligns with conservative theological reasoning. Sullivan follows the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, naturalizing a conservative theology of sex while masquerading it as liberal neutrality.
II.
Taking sex as a synonym for gender and vice versa is a hallmark of conservative theological thought. For example, Associate Justice Thomas Alito, writing for the majority inMahmoud v. Taylor, observes that “[m]any Americans, like the parents in this case, believe that biological sex reflects divine creation, that sex and gender are inseparable, and that children should be encouraged to accept their sex and to live accordingly” (24).
In queer and gender studies, the term gender ≠biological sex. As David M. Halperin reminds us, “Sex has no history. It is a natural fact, grounded in the functioning of the body and, as such, it lies outside of history and culture” (“Is There a History of Sexuality?,” in the The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 416 [416-431], emphasis mine).
In contrast to sex, gender (like sexuality) does have a history (although a much longer one than sexuality). It refers to the cultural habits and practices that a society determines make, for example, a male (= sex) a man/masculine (= gender).
Sullivan’s conservative theological sex ideology comes through in his definition of homosexuality. “My sexual orientation,” Sullivan shares, “is based on a biological distinction [= sex] between men and women: I am attracted to the former and not to the latter” (emphasis mine). What this implies is that (homo)sexuality is, for Sullivan, like sex: an entirely biological, neutral fact of the human condition.
Sullivan complains that “[d]issenters from gender ideology are routinely unfriended, shunned and shamed. . . . That’s the extremely intolerant and illiberal atmosphere that now exists in the gay, lesbian, and transgender space” (emphasis mine). If that’s true, it’s unfortunate because Sullivan’s conservative theological sex ideology does have an upshot: it implies that homosexuality “reflects divine creation.”
Like many proto-gay boys, I learned in middle school that having a penis does not necessarily make one a legitimate boy. According to my peers, the way I walked, talked, dressed, and styled my hair all cast doubt on the legitimacy of my penis. Thus, I was a queer, fag, and so on.
My middle school experience amply illustrates an essential point: sex has a gender. Sullivan may insist that sex/sexuality is “a neutral fact of the human condition,” but sex/sexuality is not merely a natural/neutral fact. Sex/sexuality is also an object of human interpretation.
Sullivan and his fellow conservative Catholic/religious friends are all too aware that politics will ultimately determine what sex/sexuality means. Sullivan and company want to end the hermeneutics of sex. They want the last word, and they know the deciding battlefield is the public school system.
III.
Sullivan worries that queer gender ideology is akin to an insurrection, a “societywide revolution” against traditional sex/sexuality norms. He is especially concerned about queer ideology being taught in our public elementary schools.
To Sullivan’s mind, helping children recognize that the relationship of sex to gender and vice versa is wiggly, by allowing them to play with pronouns and their gender comportment in public schools, is to play God. It has the power to resurrect Anita Bryant!
She is risen! She is risen, indeed!
The Supreme Court recently ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents can opt their children out of public school lessons that include books with queer themes, including same-sex marriage, on religious grounds. Consider the mercifully brief sample of Associate Justice Alito’s “legal” reasoning for the majority below (for a complete analysis of the Court’s overreading and misreading of the relevant children’s books, listen to the recent episode of the podcast Strict Scrutiny):
In light of the record before us, we hold that the Board’s introduction of the “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks—combined with its decision to withhold notice to parents and to forbid opt outs—substantially interferes with the religious development of their children and imposes the kind of burden on religious exercise that Yoder found unacceptable.
To understand why, start with the storybooks themselves. Like many books targeted at young children, the books are unmistakably normative. They are clearly designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected. . . .
Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the only book that the dissent is willing to discuss in any detail, conveys the same message more subtly. The atmosphere is jubilant after Uncle Bobby and his boyfriend announce their engagement. Id., at 286a (“Everyone was smiling and talking and crying and laughing” (emphasis added)). The book’s main character, Chloe, does not share this excitement. “‘I don’t understand!’” she exclaims, “‘Why is Uncle Bobby getting married?’” Id., at 288a. The book is coy about the precise reason for Chloe’s question, but the question is used to tee up a direct message to young readers: “‘Bobby and Jamie love each other,’ said Mummy. ‘When grown-up people love each other that much, sometimes they get married.’” Ibid. The book therefore presents a specific, if subtle, message about marriage. It asserts that two people can get married, regardless of whether they are of the same or the opposite sex, so long as they “‘love each other.’” Ibid. That view is now accepted by a great many Americans, but it is directly contrary to the religious principles that the parents in this case wish to instill in their children. It is significant that this book does not simply refer to same-sex marriage as an existing practice. Instead, it presents acceptance of same-sex marriage as a perspective that should be celebrated. The book’s narrative arc reaches its peak with the actual event of Uncle Bobby’s wedding, which is presented as a joyous event that is met with universal approval. See id., at 300a–305a. And again, there are many Americans who would view the event that way, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. But other Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.
Next, consider the messages sent by the storybooks on the subject of sex and gender. Many Americans, like the parents in this case, believe that biological sex reflects divine creation, that sex and gender are inseparable, and that children should be encouraged to accept their sex and to live accordingly. Id., at 530a–531a, 538a–540a, 543a, 625a. But the challenged storybooks encourage children to adopt a contrary viewpoint. Intersection Allies presents a transgender child in a sex-ambiguous bathroom and proclaims that “[a] bathroom, like all rooms, should be a safe space.” Id., at 323a. The book also includes a discussion guide that asserts that “at any point in our lives, we can choose to identify with one gender, multiple genders, or neither gender” and asks children “What pronouns fit you best?” Id., at 350a (boldface in original). The book and the accompanying discussion guidance present as a settled matter a hotly contested view of sex and gender that sharply conflicts with the religious beliefs that the parents wish to instill in their children (23-24, unattributed italics mine).
The Court rightly observes that “there are many Americans who would view [the marriage of two men as a joyous occasion], and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so.” What the Court does not recognize is that such a view is not only that of “many Americans,” it is also the nonmetaphysical position of their Government.
If the Court’s majority were at all inclined to affirm the appropriateness of the Government teaching a nonreligious, nonpartisan view of sex in our public schools, it would have concluded the following: There are many Americans who would view the marriage of two males as contrary to their religious beliefs, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. However, the Government has no role to play in teaching theological metaphysics. Religious instruction is the obligation of parents of faith and their respective religious institutions.
We are right to worry that the majority opinion in Taylor takes religion from the football field (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District) into the classroom by implicitly questioning the legitimacy of the Government’s nonreligious view of sex. In my opinion, Taylorgoes far beyond protecting religious liberty. It protects the status quo by incentivizing the teaching of traditional, religiously inflected sex ideology in our public schools.
But Sullivan is worried about Big Trans “overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria, but of every other kid as well.”
Sullivan does not mention Mahmoud v. Taylor in his opinion piece for The New York Times. Besides the shared insistence on the naturalness of a conservative theological understanding of sex, one other thread links Sullivan’s essay to the majority opinion in Taylor.
Sullivan, like the majority in Taylor, is expressly concerned about (gay and lesbian) youth being coerced by authority figures, such as teachers and doctors, into believing what he considers to be an unnatural gender ideology.
“As a child, uninterested in playing team sports . . . ,” Sullivan writes, “I was once asked by a girl when I was just 10 years old, ‘Are you sure you are not really a girl?’ Of course not, I replied” (emphasis mine). Nonetheless, Sullivan wants us to believe that he may not have given the same answer to the same question if the questioner had been “someone in authority—a parent or a teacher or a doctor [or a priest?].”
Alito expresses a similar concern in Taylor,
“The books therefore present the same kind of ‘objective danger to the free exercise of religion’ that we identified in Yoder. Id., at 218. That ‘objective danger’ is only exacerbated by the fact that the books will be presented to young children by authority figures in elementary school classrooms. As representatives of the Board have admitted, ‘there is an expectation that teachers use the LGBTQ-Inclusive Books as part of instruction,’ and ‘there will be discussion that ensues.’ App. to Pet. for Cert. 605a, 642a.” (25, emphasis mine).
Among the things Alito thinks coercion means is teachers communicating to young students a nonmetaphysical interpretation of sex, namely that it is not a synonym for gender and vice versa. Alito writes, “The upshot [of how Alito [over]reads Born Ready, written by Jodie Patterson and illustrated by Charnelle Barlow] is that it is hurtful, perhaps even hateful, to hold the view that gender is inextricably bound with biological sex” (25, emphasis mine).
The Court affirms the right of conservative religious parents to direct the public education of their children in Mahmoud v. Taylor. InU.S. v. Skrmetti,a case in which the Court’s majority allows states to ban gender-affirming care (while permitting the same treatments for minors not seeking gender-affirming care), the majority declines to resolve the legal question about the right of parents to direct the healthcare of their (trans) children. In this case, the Court neutralizes the authority of parents who are not (religiously) conservative or religious to care for their children, trusting the (conservative) Government to “parent” them.
IV.
Sullivan goes a step further than the Court’s majority in Skrmetti. Sullivan wants us to believe that no one is looking out for trans kids (except him and his fellow compassionate conservatives, of course). Even the supportive parents of trans children cannot be trusted to direct their healthcare.
Sullivan provides three reasons to remove the power to provide healthcare to children from the hands of their parents:
First, supportive parents trust their children’s testimony. Though young Sullivan was very clear with his female classmate about his sex, he questions whether or not trans children “know who they are.” He even contradicts himself, asserting that during the period between the ages of 9 and 13, he was unsure whether he was a boy or not.
Next, Sullivan argues supportive parents are the cucks of a fascistic queer ideology (i.e., of Big Trans). Specifically, they are illiberal cucks. They do as Big Trans tells them to do (i.e., force our kids to transition) for fear of being canceled—and they cancel others, like Sullivan, who refuse to obey the will of Big Trans.
Finally, Sullivan also believes supportive parents are reactionary cucks of a fascistic queer ideology. Sullivan asserts that if Trump (i.e., an election denier, encourager of insurrection against the U.S. government, Project 2025 supporter, and, according to one judge, a rapist) is for, say, the biological truth of gender,the cucks of a fascistic queer ideology are necessarily, unthinkingly against it.
What critics of the majority’s decision in Skrmetti (e.g., the 5-4 podcast) miss is that Trump’s conservative theological assertion of the “biological truth of gender” is underlying their reasoning.
State laws denying gender-affirming care to a teen male who desires to become a female is not, to the majority, discrimination based on sex. Healthcare providers may not deny gender-affirming treatment to a male because he is male. In many states, they must deny said treatment because he is a male who desires to become a female.
Recall that in Taylor, the Court’s majority similarly empowers parents to affirm a conservative theology, namely that sex and gender are inseparable. The rest of us must live with it—or else.
V.
Sullivan’s opinion piece for the New York Times is gross—and not principally because it is a conservative theological argument. It is also problematic because it is an example of the homophobic literary genre (e.g., queers are victims of queers; conservatives = persecuted; healthcare may be denied to women/queers; states should be allowed to decide the legality of queer life, etc.).
There is one aspect of Sullivan’s anti-trans/queer rhetoric that I find especially problematic: his deployment of the heuristics of fear. Echoing the logic of the late Cardinal Ratzinger (see, e.g., §10), Sullivan wants us to believe that we have only ourselves to blame for violence perpetrated against us as a consequence of our insistence on our difference from the (virtually) normal.
In The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks At Our Political Crisis(2018), a book inspired by Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Martha C. Nussbaum draws on psychological research to describe two “heuristics” of fear. The first is the “availability heuristic,” and the second is the “cascade heuristic,” which has two aspects: reputational and informational (47-51). These heuristics can function to overwhelm our ability to carefully consider whether or not fear is warranted in a given situation, instead activating our instinctual impulses.
In his opinion piece, Sullivan employs the availability heuristic, creating an immediately recognizable image of imminent, life-threatening danger. He argues that the radicalization of the gay movement by trans/queer ideology is collapsing public support for gay and lesbian civil rights.
Sullivan combines the availability heuristic with thecascade heuristic, motivating people to come together to overcome an imminent, life-threatening danger: trans/queer ideology. If we don’t act, gay and lesbian civil rights, our rights, will be erased—and we will be subject to violent acts (the reputational aspect of the cascade heuristic).
Sullivan also offers us new information. He contends that advocates of trans/queer ideology are essentially raping children, forcing them to transition. Moreover, by forcing trans kids to transition, trans/queer advocates are ending the lives of gay and lesbian kids, as Sullivan believes a lot of trans kids are just confused gay and lesbian kids (the informational aspect of the cascade heuristic)
The heuristics of fear are highly motivating. They compel us to act together to avoid immediate danger.
The problem arises when the fear they amplify is not based on a sober assessment of evidence, facts, data, or our experiences. For example, there are good reasons to avoid the path of a tornado. However, when our fear is unwarranted, as it is in the public’s assessment of trans lives and experiences, it can destabilize democracy.
Unwarranted fear, especially combined with disgust, can destabilize democracy by motivating violence. Trans/queer ideology, Sullivan imagines, inspires “a sane backlash” against trans/queer people—and not only them, but virtually normal gay and lesbian people, too. As many trans people and queer gay men and lesbians already know: the threat of violence for being misaligned with (virtually) normative straight (male) society is not an idle one.
VI.
Queer gay men and lesbians stand in solidarity with their trans comrades (a word I use intentionally to enflame conservative passions) for many reasons, not least of which is our shared experience of the violence of (virtually) normative gendered politics. David M. Halperin observes,
If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuals than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them into keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing queer it may be that one of the functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to the gender style deemed appropriate to their respective sexes (How To Be Gay [2012], 307, emphasis mine).
Yet, Sullivan believes that the radicalized gay movement is the real threat to a liberal or reasonably pluralistic society (see John Rawls). He asserts that the ever-expanding alphabet of queer welcome (e.g., L.G.B.T.Q.I.A+), and the new colors added to the pride flag to incarnate it, nowadays “demarcates a place not simply friendly to all types of people . . . but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.”
Youth are the worst offenders of Sullivan’s law of welcome. The “young queer generation” are contemptuous, according to Sullivan, of “those who came before them.”
Dear Andrew,
It’s true. Trans/queer youth and adults don’t want to hang with you.
It’s not us. It’s your habit of villainizing, demeaning, and disparaging our lives and loves.
I don’t doubt that you believe you care about trans/queer youth and adults. However, if you take a moment to listen, you’ll likely gain a better understanding of why hanging out with us just isn’t currently working out for you.
As they say in Chicago, “He only had himself to blame.”
Straight allies mean well when they support gay marriage. “It’s not gay marriage,” they assert; “it’s just marriage.” Likewise, they mean well when they envision a time when gay pride is no longer necessary. “Gay people will be so integrated,” they argue, “that parades and all that will no longer be necessary.”
Love is love.
I don’t blame straight allies for making those cringey statements. They are, after all, taking their lead from gay folks whose singular purpose in life is to fit in, to walk the straight and normal path laid out for them.
Gay parents are often leading the efforts of gay normalcy. “There is no gay way,” these parents contend, “to brush a kid’s teeth.”
If parenting were only that simple, right? Maybe it is, and perhaps that is why we have so many assholish kids running around nowadays. Just a thought.
Who is afraid of gayness? A lot of people apparently.
Here is my obligatory gay statement this June:
I am proud of my gayness. It is the best thing about me.
I am deeply grateful for my gayness. Devoted to it. It delights me.
Gayness animates my personhood, my intimate/married life, my fatherhood, my faith, my scholarly artistry, my style, my hopes and dreams.
I recently received The Book of Delights by Ross Gay from a dear friend. I started reading it (delight!) while waiting for my car to get serviced–and it inspired the recognition of this delight:
I am delighted by a spot in the middle of a major intersection near my home where various items gather. Auto parts, rocks, shards of glass, and the like find their way to the exact center of this intersection. The stuff there is so perfectly centered that cars turning or passing through don’t run them over or otherwise disturb them.
It’s all the rage in sophisticated circles to go on about de-centering this or that. Well, I am delighted by these weird, radically centered things of the world that few people notice and cannot (easily/safely) be reached.
I am further delighted by the thought of walking out into the middle of the intersection–not so much to investigate the items gathered there but rather to become one of them.
Will I be so perfectly centered in the road that people will ignore and not disturb me? Perhaps such radical centering requires a lot of practice or luck or . . . ?
The dramatic conclusion of Byung-Chul Han’s gloriously terse The Burnout Society (2015) calls forth–for me–an image of a sow in a gestation crate.
The sow may be genetically engineered to produce upwards of 20 piglets a year. According to Big Pork, the gestation crate is necessary for the sow’s health. In her crate, she lives a healthy life, but a life without what Han describes as “livingness.” The sow lives a life–but not “the good life” (50, emphasis original)
The life of the industrial sow is a vestige of an earlier form of human society. Her health is required–and it is enforced/policed by the Master, by Big Pork. When age or disease makes health impossible–the sow is killed. She becomes what she can no longer (re)produce: pork.
Unlike the industrial sow, living as she does in a disciplinary society, Han argues that we live in an achievement society. In our case, we have returned to the wild, and the internalized imperative of absolute survival is our Master.
The distinguishing feature of the achievement society is self-regulation. Gone are the days of an external Master ruling over their sows. Nowadays, we enter the crate of (re)production of our own “free” will.
Our eagerness to (re)produce breeds burnout because closure or an end to (re)production is not forthcoming in our survival society. Ultimately, our inability to live up to our ideal–to endlessly live/produce–stuns us.
II. Humans in a Crate
The achievement society is a “capitalist economy [that] absolutizes survival” (50). The survival society is, according to Han, an active, multi-tasking society:
Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness. An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. . . In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. . . . The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing because it must also process background events. Not just multitasking but also activities such as video games produces a broad but flat mode of attention, which is similar to the vigilance of a wild animal . . . . Concern for the good life, which includes life as a member of the community, is yielding more and more to the simple concern for survival (12-13).
As driven animals, we do not require external motivation to (re)produce. “That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow” (46).
According to Han, I am “predator and prey at once.” I “exploit” myself (10, 19). I am unable to be unproductive.
Yet, we are not aware that we have walked into and are living entirely within the gestation crate. The achievement-subject “thinks itself free of all foreign constraint” but is “entangled in destructive self-constraints” (47).
III. Stunned
What our entanglement in the crate of our freedom achieves is burnout and depression. “Burnout . . . often precedes depression” (44).
Burnout is the fatigue experienced by the “entrepreneur of the self” (Agony of Eros, 9). It is the result of “voluntary self-exploitation,” of being a “flexible person,” of constantly changing to meet the current demands of the market (Burnout, 44, emphasis original).
The real ego strives to keep up with the demand, the ever-new market, now projected as the ego ideal. The problem is that closure/gratification is not forthcoming—one never arrives at their desired destination.
Thus, I turn on myself. “In view of the ego ideal, the real ego appears as a loser buried in self-reproach” (47).
Depression is the deepening of fatigue/burnout. “The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down . . . it locks its jaws on itself . . . this leads the self to hallow and empty out” (42).
The depressive subject is characterless, formless, chaotic. The depressive lacks the strength to rebrand. It is stuned.
IV. Blood Bath
Han offers a promising antidote to the (re)production of the achievement society: the tired society. We may appreciate his constructive proposal more if we address an aspect of his analysis that I think is incorrect, in addition to some reservations I have with it.
My reservations are as follows:
First reservation: Is the split between an older disciplinary society and the contemporary achievement society (even more regressive than the previous disciplinary society) as clear and radical as Han seems to think it is?
The success of Donald Trump in the U.S. indicates that the distinction between the two societies is not so clear. Trump masterfully deployed the immunological imaginary of the disciplinary society, casting the Other as a contagion–a dire threat to the pure blood of the social body. Trump’s strategy would not have worked if the idea of otherness had been weak or powerless, as it is in Han’s achievement society.
It does seem like the old disciplinary logic is lurking in the background. Perhaps repressed, it erupts into view every so often.
Second reservation: It is also hard not to notice in Han’s writing what I call a mystical flair. In Agony of Eros, Han asserts that “[e]ros conquers depression” (4). The Other is salvation from what Han calls absolute positivity or “the inferno of the same.”
But at what cost? The self.
In his Forward to The Agony of Eros, Alain Badiou reminds us that the “vanishing of the self in the Other–has a long and glorious history: the mystical love of God . . . ” (xi). While Badiou cites Saint John of the Cross as an example, there are others, like Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite Porete.
From them we learn that self-evacuation/immobilization tends to lead in one of two directions: either to 1) the reification of the self–i.e., to auto-eroticism–(e.g., Mechthild); or to 2) the evacuation of the self (e.g., Angela, Porete). The outcome is not guaranteed.
Moreover, the difference between them is not clear. The inferno of the same melts identity down, leaving it to suffocate in its blood, while the freeze(?) of the Other immobilizes the self, incapacitating it.
The idea seems to be that immanence/same without transcendence/Other is a kind of hell (or a deadly illusion) and transcendence/Other without immanence/same is a kind of heaven (i.e., the real). Ok, but if the same/self/Own is irrelevant in either case, why are the respective “destinations” evaluated differently?
Third reservation: Han does not consider animal development in his philosophy. Animal development is not a novel philosophical topic. For example, Rousseau observes that the infant begins in monarchy (i.e., the same).
Her Majesty then enters into a relationship with the maternal parent(s) (i.e., Other[s]). Only then, if she is lucky, does she begin to leave the family sphere and enter society–hopefully as a citizen committed to love and reciprocity.
For example, Nussbaum consistently points out the ongoing threat of monarchy, or what Han describes as “the inferno of the same.” However, what Han considers a return to animality, Nussbaum recognizes as an aspect of human animal development.
So much for my reservations. What do I think Han gets wrong? I think he is wrong about the status of psychoanalysis in the supposed era of the absolute achievement society.
V. In the Beginning: the Unconscious
In Burnout, Han asserts that “Freudian psychoanalysis is only possible in repressive societies that found their organization on the negativity of prohibitions and commandments.” Han claims that the “late-modern achievement subject possesses an entirely different psyche than the obedience-subject for whom Freud conceived psychoanalysis” (36, emphasis original).
“The Freudian unconscious,” Han recognizes, “is not a formation that exists outside of time.” The unconscious is also not, pace Han, “a product of a disciplinary society . . . that we have long left behind” (36). The formation of the unconscious does not depend on society.
Jean Laplanche, for example, argues that the unconscious is formed by “enigmatic signifiers,” messages from adults (what I am calling the maternal caregiver[s]/Other[s]) that are untranslatable by the infant/child. Consequently, these messages are repressed–forming “a certain type of reality, called the unconscious” (“A Short Treatise on the Unconscious”, 92).
Han may respond that Freud ultimately rejected the seduction theory that Leplanche revives, giving primacy to the Other in the formation of the unconscious. Yes, Freud argues that the unconscious is formed in response to the instincts. In so doing, Freud makes otherness an intractable, internal feature of the human being (i.e., the biological organism, the human body, or the same).
Society, of whatever kind, need not play a (primary) role in the formation of the unconscious. The unconscious originates as a result of trauma, specifically the shock of human existence, starting at birth.
VI. Entangling/Entangled Desire
The formation of the unconscious does not depend on social organization–and this detail is significant because without the unconscious, there can be neither an achievement society nor a viable source of resistance to it.
The unconscious is the source of desire, and Han’s achievement society, it seems to me, is driven–not by instinct–but bydesire. Desire is inherently unentangled. As such, it drags the subject of desire in various directions. In this way, meaning is (re)produced.
Desire flits from this to that, like a hummingbird, (re)producing meaning out of originally disentangled, unconscious materials. Desire perpetually entangles–that is, it (re)forms the unentangled chaos of the unconscious.
The unconscious is also an occasion, at least within a Lacanian framework, for the entanglement of desire. This is an important observation because Han’s achievement society is, it seems to me, both frenetically active and frozen in place.
In the achievement society, the hummingbird flits about in a cage. The cage is the death drive.
The drive captures desire, entangling it in a cycle of repetition. Now, the hummingbird returns to the same flower again and again. In this way, the drive tires desire.
Tiring desire, the drive, the cage in which desire is captured, potentially frees it from the confines of the crate in which it is unknowingly circulating. Slowed, desire is potentially forced to see the crate/the thing in which it has unknowingly constrained itself.
Han’s achievement society is entirely diagnosable, if you will, from within a psychoanalytic framework–and in a sense that is entirely consistent with Han’s argument. The unconscious is a powerful resource for rethinking–and even for refocusing–political desire.
VII. The Entangled Society
In my view, the Other is the figure of the death drive in Han’s Burnout Society. The Other entangles or tires (as opposed to exhausts) the same–potentially opening it up to a new relationship with the world, women, and men.
Han, commenting on Peter Handke’s work, “Essay on Tiredness,” locates a form of tiredness that opens up “a space of friendliness-as-indifference, where ‘no one and nothing dominates or commands'” (31). Han observes that “[s]uch ‘fundamental tiredness’ brings together all the forms of existence and coexistence that vanish in the course of absolutized activity” (32).
Handke’s “we-tiredness”–a tired with you, as opposed to “I-tiredness,” a tired of you–opens up a potentially playful space between Others (33, 34). Han defines the space between as the Sabbath.
Han notes that Sabbath “originally meant stopping” (33, emphasis original). It is a day to stop commanding and being commanded. Duty and/or desire rest. This is the single day God calls holy. “It is a day of tiredness,” Han writes, “a time of, and for, play” (34).
The religion of the entangled society is “an immanent religion of [fundamental] tiredness” (34, emphasis original). It is a society in the grip of a playful drive, one inspiring new connections, curiosity, and openness without yielding to the pressure to achieve anything.
The entangled society is not the society of no! or yes we can!–it is the society of see what happens when you (are) stop(ped)and you play.
In my view, Han comes very close to theorizing a society that recombines duty and desire, reality and pleasure principles. Isn’t that what play enables, relationships with Others that are also pleasing–and even potentially new? But at the last moment, Han dances away, escaping “the achievement-principle entirely” (24).
I recently visited a friend who is in hospice care.
I listened as she shared memories of her ministry. She recalled being tasked with presiding over communion after her Association had declined to accept an Open and Affirming church into its communion.
That’s all history now. That church was eventually welcomed and is now thriving in that Association.
But the image of her presiding in this moment of sadness for many LGBTQ Christians and their allies (and she is one) worked on my unconscious:
Remembrances of Communions Past:
In college, I read Henry Nouwen’s Can You Drink The Cup? I preached a sermon inspired by it, “Sharing Our Lives,” to my rural hometown church. After hearing it, a friend observed, “I don’t think you know it, but you just came out to your church.” Looking at the text of my sermon now, I get it. I described lifting the cup as coming out and sharing (i.e., intimate connection) as a lifestyle. I even read a story from the book, Holy Homosexuals. I don’t have Nouwen’s book in my library today. As a college senior, I was invited to speak at a gay youth support group. I remember giving the book to a high school student. I wonder what the book did for him?
One of the first things I did when I moved to Chicago (and mostly out . . . though I had not yet explicitly told my family!) was force myself to begin exploring the city. I jumped on a bus, and I headed downtown. I made it to Michigan Avenue (on the south side of the river) and chickened out. I ducked into Subway(!) and sat down to read Leonardo Boff’s Sacraments of Life, Life of the Sacraments. Boff describes the old aluminum mug he and his ten siblings drank from: “It has shared everything. It has always been there. It is the ongoing mystery of life and mortal existence. The mug endures, old but still shiny . . . . We must drink in other people before we can love them. Eyes that drink in people speak the language of the heart.”
Several times, as others spoke to her, our eyes connected. I felt her love, and I smiled lovingly–and we looked, I am sure, lovingly sad.
On the last day of a challenging ecclesial assignment, I received my friend’s ordination gift in the mail: a beautiful communion chalice (pictured). Before leaving my friend’s bedside, I told her I would use her chalice whenever I preside over communion.
I’ll lift the cup up and share, through Messiah, communion with her.
The first episode, Change Happens, is ready for your ears. Lizzo is our guide as we think about our vulnerability to change and what to do when change–good or bad, fair or unfair–happens to us. We can change our stories when change happens to us.
The Introduction to New Thoughts is posted below for your convenience.
In the next episode, Small Changes, we will think with Legally Blonde (the 2001 movie). We will learn about the big difference small changes make from the inimitable Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon).
We will also consider what happens when we are pessimistic about the possibility of change. In that spirit, I’ll review Mel Robbins’ latest book, The Let Them Theory. I’ll argue that the first thing to go when we are pessimistic about change is the we, the us, the relationship between I and other.
Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett of Pod Save America recently interviewed the inimitable Representative Sarah McBride (D-Delaware). Among McBride’s interesting insights and arguments is the idea that the two major U.S. political parties are gendered. Republicans are gendered masculine (or identified in terms of fatherhood). Democrats are gendered feminine (or identified in terms of motherhood).
Here’s their conversation (if you prefer to watch, jump in at 12:44):
Rep. McBride: I’ve been thinking about how do you fight back against Trump in a smart way . . . because we are so susceptible to sort of this Trump derangement syndrome dynamic. We’ve been screaming about democracy. . . rights and the rule of law for so long—and clearly, this country voted for someone who incited an insurrection. . . .
The Democratic party is the woman of politics and the Republican party is the man of politics. It’s why Donald Trump can scream and yell and people see him as strong—and why when [Democrats] scream and yell we’re seen as hysterical and shrill. It’s why Donald Trump can hate and insult more than half of this country—because we tolerate deadbeat dads, but Democrats can’t say anything about any voters that [impugn] their motives and their good faith—because a mom has to love every single one of her children. So, I’ve been thinking about how do you grapple with that reality that is a real double standard. . . .
Lovett: Let’s test this new way of talking . . . . You’re trying to make people understand how dangerous it is that Donald Trump is coming after basic academic freedom, but you’re worried it’s not going to resonate with people. How do you talk about it?
Rep. McBride: With all of these actions that we’re seeing against immigrants, against institutions, [the Trump Administration is] picking on the most unpopular, the most vulnerable. They’re picking on people who are easy targets. I do think . . . you have to go back to what we were talking about before, which is that if they can do it [to them], they can do it to you . . . . They can do it to my constituents . . . . I think we can do a better job by making the main character [of our story] our constituents.
Changing our political situation requires, McBride claims, recognizing how political party affiliation is gendered. For example, Republicans can get away with being angry, but Democrats must always be empathetic. “[A] mom,” McBride says, “has to love every single one of her children.”
Motherhood is often the object of politics because the public sphere, the sphere of politics, is gendered masculine. The traditional story is that politics is for men; the management of the home is for women. For McBride, motherhood is the subject of political action.
But what is maternal politics, exactly? In her response to Lovett’s question about how to discuss maternal politics in the context of education, McBride attempts to clarify the character of partisan gendered politics. Her answer, namely that the mother protects “easy targets” of public abuse, isn’t specific enough–so it can’t inspire serious Democratic political action.
In what follows, I ask a revised version of Lovett’s question to McBride: How do you talk about maternal politics in the context of early childhood public education? To answer the question well, we need a definition of maternal politics that is specific enough to avoid confusion (e.g., terrorist organizations like Moms for Liberty claim to love all children) and to provoke serious liberal and/or progressive public action. I propose the following definition:
Maternal politics = public action(s) to secure and defend a boy’s rightto become a man who desires like a woman/mother.
Why a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother? Consider recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States regarding an opt-out option for religious conservatives who do not want their children exposed to readings that mention/feature same-sex desire in the public school classroom. It was a book about male same-sex marriage that caught the attention of conservative Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
Conservatives are manifestly not as passionate or concerned about a girl’s public education. What they care about is the reproduction of traditional or normative masculinity. Hence their focus on male same-sex desire. Conservatives think that male homosexuality is especially threatening to the future of straight maleness.
I think my definition of maternal politics helps explain the recurring outbursts of straight anxiety about male homosexuality and the “indoctrination” of boys in our public elementary school. Furthermore, the specificity of my definition of maternal politics (one of many possible proposals) allows us to form a more direct and beneficially partisan answer to (the revised version of) Lovett’s question about gender politics and academic freedom in Trump’s U.S.
Here is the take I will explain and defend below: Conservatives have used the public school system to indoctrinate boys, and we have generally failed to resist it because we (unconsciously) agree with the “obvious” meaning of the conservative premise: boys should be boys. Instead, we should reform early childhood public education by securing and defending a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother.
A traditional public school education entails learning skills, especially (though it is never explicitly acknowledged) the skill (and appreciation) of straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity). Between the ages of 5 and 6, boys are forced by law to leave the sphere of maternal power (i.e., the home/family) and enter the public school system. It is in the public school classroom that they begin to learn, formally (i.e., curriculum) and informally (i.e., socially), to desire “proper” manhood or straight maleness.
The irony is that the reproduction of “proper” manhood necessarily requires/inspires homoerotic desire. Boys must be motivated to undertake an education in normative masculinity. Thus, they are taught to want men/manhood.
You may argue that what boys are taught is the protocols of normative masculinity rather than to desire adult males–but the foundation of straight logic is that sex, gender, and sexuality are inextricably linked. Male/penis > masculine > heterosexual. In other words, a boy can’t want masculinity without also wanting men.
A second irony: the propagation of masculinity requires a boy to desire like a woman/mother. The transmission of normative masculinity from one generation to the next requires, at least initially, the misalignment of sex, gender, and desire (i.e., male/penis desiring man/masculine). It is at this early stage that normative masculinist logic shows its ass (= its vulnerability).
The vulnerability of normative masculinity is its unnaturalness. In other words, “proper” maleness does not inevitably proceed from being born with a penis. “Proper” maleness must be taught.
The fact that straight maleness is taught is not exactly the problem. The way normative masculinity is taught is the source of its tyranny.“Normal” masculinity is presented uncritically, and it requires uncritical acceptance to be mistaken for normal (i.e., natural) or, as the Trump Administration prefers, for “biological truth.”
Traditionally, this is why the acknowledgment of (male) homosexuality in public schools has been a source of straight panic. It exposes the hole of straight maleness: straight masculinity is not natural. It is optional.
Nowadays, homosexuality is not as often considered inherently opposed to straight masculinity. It’s an interesting development. Today, dudes sucking dick (homie head, brojob, etc.) is just another way for boys to be boys.
Straight ideology is flexible, and gay identity politics is clever. It’s a win-win situation: straight masculinity remains (if not natural) inherently desirable, and male homosexuals are welcome to enjoy its privileges–well, at least if they are good students, willing to learn/embody the protocols of “proper” masculinity.
So, recent arguments before the Supreme Court about readings in public schools that mention same-sex desire may be read as a form of social progress. Before books that acknowledge the reality of happy adult male homosexual relationships (happiness being what I think Justice Alito means by the “subtle” moral message of the book that offends religious conservatives) defiled God’s male children, the biggest threat to the “proper” education of our male children was the gay male English teacher. And before the English teacher became sus, the “gay” male philosopher was considered the corrupter of male youth.
“In a famous passage in The Divine Comedy,” writes David M. Halperin in “Deviant Teaching” (2007, 146-167), Dante represents himself as encountering, in the course of his journey through Hell, the soul of [philosopher] Brunetto Latini . . .” (146). Why did Dante put poor Brunetto in Hell? “His sin is tellingly not named in Canto 15, but other passages in Inferno remove any doubts about its identity. Brunetto is damned for sodomy” (146).
When Dante asks him about his companions in Hell, Brunetto answers that “all were clerks and great men of letters, in the world defined by one [and the] same sin” (148). “Sodomy,” Halperin declares, “is evidently a sin to which literary scholars, critics, and writers (such as Dante himself) are particularly prone” (148).
Halperin, a public university English professor trained as a classicist–and no stranger to controversy–reminds us of “how ancient is the association between teaching and sodomy, between paedagogy and paederasty” (149). “[T]he abolition of any clear or firm distinction between the relation of teacher and student and the relation of lover and beloved is,” Halperin writes, “one of the most notorious consequences of Plato’s metaphysical theory of erotic desire” (149). Teaching “has an extended history of association with deviance and has long figured as a deviant practice” (151).
If gender were a “biological truth,” as the Trump Administration claims it is, then straight anxiety inspired by the fantasy of homosexual indoctrination in public schools would be a genuine absurdity. The reality of old school straight anxiety exposes a glitch in the code of masculinist transmission: gender is a social–not a biological–reality. It must be taught and learned.
For a boy to become a man, he must leave the maternal sphere, the home. He must also leave his father’s side. A boy’s father “is too closely tied to the boy by blood and domesticity . . . so they cannot fully . . . incarnate the cultural ideal of male identity . . . ” (151).
“Every proper boy,” Halperin writes, “has to have at least two daddies” (151, emphasis original). Boys learn to become traditional or “proper” men in the public sphere (e.g., schools, sports teams, etc.).
The glitch in the heteronormative educational regime is further exposed by how it represents the social transmission of masculinity (154-155). Consider how the Sambia of Papua New Guinea ritualize the reproduction of strong warrior men.
Elder males take boys ages 8-9 off into the forest where they are forced to perform oral sex on adolescent males. Halperin observes that the young boys are taught to think of “cock-sucking as a kind of breast-feeding” (155).
Ingesting semen, the boys receive the nourishment they require to grow “into real men who will be strong warriors” (155). They continue to ingest semen until they turn 15, at which point they become “the breast” for younger boys.
Listening to social and religious conservatives today, one would never know that third and fourth grade boys in the U.S. are not being taught to suck cock in public schools. What they are being taught, and in ways not entirely different from how the Sambia “represent to themselves symbolically the means by which they reproduce themselves socially,” is how to become proper Western men (156, emphasis original).
Halperin considers the 1953 Western movie Shane an example of a Western form of masculine transmission. The movie’s focus on the mechanics of masculine reproduction makes it a standout Western (157).
Shane is about how a 9-year-old boy, Joey, is made into a man (i.e., taught how to shoot a gun and fight) by a mysterious stranger, “a gunfighter and a killer” (i.e., a social deviant), a cowboy named Shane (158). Joey’s father cannot teach Joey how to become a man because he is too busy managing and defending the family farm. For obvious reasons, Joey’s mother can’t possibly teach him how to become a man.
Halperin compares Shane to the Holy Ghost. “It is only when Shane’s potent shadow falls across the holy American family that the family succeeds in . . . reproducing masculinity . . . and ensuring its own futurity” (159–for my reading of the Holy Ghost, go here). And “[g]unfighting in Shane is,” Halperin observes, “like cock-sucking among the Sambia: both are cultural practices connected with initiation into the symbolic order of masculinity and heavily laden with phallic meaning” (160).
The relationship between Shane and Joey mirrors the relationship between Shane and Joey’s mother, Marian. It is not sexual, but it is erotic. Marian wants to play with Shane’s pistol, too.
Like his mother, Joey feels some kind of way about Shane. In desiring him, Joey gives Shane the “charismatic power necessary to enable those enamored of him (Joey and male viewers) to accede to manhood by means of identification, emulation, and endless, unfulfilled desire for him” (160).
Moreover, Joey’s desire for Shane is no accident. Like Socrates, Shane has a way with his young male students (160-161). Shane makes his manhood hot to both Marian and Joey (= it’s object a). He inspires Joey (and male viewers) to observe his gunobsessively. Masculinity is transmitted “ocularly” in Shane (162).
In seeing/receiving Shane’s manhood, the male viewers “make the supposedly identity-affirming, gender-consolidating experience of masculine identification coincide, as if nothing could be more normal, with the urgent and inescapable solicitation of homoerotic desire” (162).
Question: Did Shane indoctrinate Joey? Did Shane require Joey to accept his warrior manhood uncritically to begin becoming a “real” man? No. Joey wanted the manhood Shane offered him.
Masculine indoctrination requires boys to accept Shane’s manhood as “biological truth.” In that way, Shane becomes the “proper” man, the kind of man boys must become to be considered real men, the type of man women must desire and whose prerogatives they must support to be identified as pious/conservative/real women.
Shane’s “Republican manhood,” if you will, undoubtedly continues to appeal to women/mothers and their boys. I accept that, and I am prepared to secure and defend a boy’s right to want Shane and to become a man who either desires women/mothers or other men who desire men like Shane.
There is nothing inherently wrong with conservative masculinity. That is, I think, a liberal (if not progressive) position to hold–and it is consistent with McBride’s–and my own–definition of maternal politics. “[A] mom has love every single one of her children.”
Apparently, dads have a choice in the matter.
What I reject is the fascist spirit that often animates a traditional education in straight maleness. Republican manhood is manifestly not appealing to every boy. It is not even appealing to every boy’s parents, and there is no reason to believe it will appeal to all who will enter a boy’s life as an adult male.
Moreover, it is an offense to common sense and reason (and I, as a biblical Christian theologian, think it is an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ) to enforce, as a matter of (unacknowledged) policy or law, Republican manhood. If “biological truth” requires the enforcement of norms and/or the sword of law, just how biological–or true–is it?
The assertion of the biological truth of gender reveals that social and religious conservatives have, like a God, forgotten themselves:
For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago–and verily they had a good and joyful Gods’ end! Theirs was no mere “twilight” death–that is a lie!
Rather: one day they–laughed themselves to death!
This happened when the most godless words issued from a God himself–the words: “There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!” . . . a God, most jealous, forgot himself thus:
And thereupon all the Gods laughed and rocked their chairs and shouted: “Is just this not Godliness, that there are Gods but no God?”
In a gloss on this passage, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “God, in Nietzsche’s fabulation, forgot Himself, and even His own name; He thought he was God, THE God, when He was simply one among many others (inner superiority means we are on the wrong track, it means we are too intimidated) (Unforbidden Pleasures [2015], 42).
In another text–but in a similar context–Halperin describes how the “inner superiority” of straight maleness may work out in the context of sexuality and gender, nowadays:
If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuals than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them into keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing queer [remember: declaring “no homo” after receiving, e.g., homie head will protect you from appearing (too) queer] it may be that one of the functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to the gender style deemed appropriate to their respective sexes (How To Be Gay [2012], 307, italics mine).
As we discovered earlier, the propagation of straight maleness can accommodate a disconnect between sex and sexuality. Nowadays, being a homosexual doesn’t necessarily make you a sus male (i.e., gaaaaaay).
The chronic misalignment of sex/penis (male) and normative gender style (straight maleness) does, however, remain socially problematic. At some point, one must put childish ways behind them.
At this point, straightness has shown a lot of ass. It concedes that heterosexuality is not natural. No one (bi, lesbian, gay, straight, none) knows what determines one’s sexuality (or lack thereof). It also concedes that straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity) is not natural: it does not proceed naturally from having a penis. It must be taught (and even enforced).
And given that gender does not proceed naturally from sex or depend on one’s sexuality, it follows that anyone, of whatever sex or sexuality, can, if they so desire, learn a specific gender style. Women can, at least in principle, learn to embody normative masculinity.
What all this means is that the claim of straightness to have no other Gods before it is laughable. But the Gods before it need not laugh themselves to death! Instead, they can get on with baptizing newly persuaded converts.
The epigraph of How To Be Gay, a description of gay male masculinity, or masculinity that is gendered feminine because it is resistant to straight maleness, reads: “Let the pagans beget and the Christians baptize” (see also How To Be Gay, 532-533).
The epigraph of How To Be Gay echoes the central argument of Halperin’s essay, “Deviant Teaching”: The “introduction . . . to [non-sexual methods of instruction in maleness,] to non-standard ways of seeing, to distinctive ethical and aesthetic modes of relating to the surrounding culture, to a unique set of sensibilities, and to dissident ways of reading cultural objects (movies, opera, Broadway musicals, emblems of fashion and styles, embodiments of masculinity) [is] what I have been calling deviant teaching,” and what, in How To be Gay, is called gay male subculture (“Deviant Teaching,” 165).
Gay male subculture, as a deviant form of masculine propagation (i.e., it resists the allure of straight maleness), is similar to straight maleness in that it does not depend on either one’s sex or sexuality. It is a style that anyone who finds persuasive may learn to embody.
Gay maleness is among the gods a boy may reasonably desire. Accordingly, maternal politics entails defending and securing a boy’s right to become a man who desires women/mothers or other men who desire gayness.
As a non-normative gender style, a lifestyle misaligned with one’s sex, gayness is a form of Trans*ness (I use the * to indicate gender nonconformity in addition to sex nonconformity). However, Trans*ness moves us well beyond gender misalignment to sexual misalignment.
In her interview on Pod Save America, McBride addresses one of the challenges of Trans* politics (42 minutes in):
I think one of the challenges that we have in conversations around Trans identities that’s different than conversations around gay rights is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust –and so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience. People who aren’t Trans don’t know what it feels like to be Trans–and for me the closest thing that I can compare it to is a constant feeling of homesickness, just this unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed and live as myself . . . .
I imagine one reality that Rep. McBride is expressing here is that her body initially provoked a conversation: Is this you? She answered either “No” or “Not exactly.” I am guessing (because I am unfamiliar with the details of her experience) that McBride desired a new alignment of sex and gender–and one made possible by a radically new understanding of sex: sex, like gender, is not a natural fact. Sex is an opportunity for conversation rather than indoctrination.
Although Evangelical men really want women to have penises, male to female Trans* experience constitutes an upheaval of normative thought. It inspires intense—and, unfortunately, intensely irrational—emotions.
The animus directed toward Trans* women is a fruit of the fascist spirit that often underlies the commitment to the reproduction of Republican manhood–and one that more than a few fruits enjoy. We have only to think of Andrew Sullivan.
Sullivan is usually an interesting and nuanced public intellectual, but his screeds against “big trans” are becoming increasingly overdetermined (i.e., inspired by irrational forces). On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Sullivan comments:
I love the idea that Democrats should get back into building things, into making things happen, into deregulating, into supercharging the economy. I just think that until the Democrats address some of the core issues, they seem not to want to control immigration. They have extremist views about race. They think that boys should compete with girls in sports, and that children should be… have their sex reassigned. Until they grapple with that. . . .
We have not taught civics in this country. They’re too busy learning that America is white supremacist without learning that there are three branches of government. They’re all separate. They’re kept apart so that we can be freer than other countries. Why are we teaching that? We should be teaching that (italics mine).
The claim that Democrats “think . . . that children should be . . . have their sex reassigned” is blatantly false. I am curious, though, about the Levitical themes of Sullivan’s commentary: separation and purity.
Sullivan seems to think biological males should not be separated from their penises–even when they desire to be so separated. In his view, effeminate gay boys are being misled by “big trans” into thinking they are Trans* women rather than gay males. “Big trans,” again in Sullivan’s view, is “transing away the gay.”
The second of Sullivan’s falsehoods, related, I think, to the first, is: “We have not taught civics in this country.” Sullivan seems to believe that “we” have not learned anything about the separation of powers–and too much about the separation of racial groups enforced by those same powers for several centuries.
Is his argument that “we” would become less preoccupied with white supremacy if “we” were taught the philosophy of “separate but equal”? If I am not mistaken, “we” were taught in school that Sullivan’s approach is not unique in history. Hence the focus on white supremacy.
I don’t think it’s uncharitable to read the argument of the unruly forces underlying Sullivan’s Leviticus-like political theology this way: In a good society, penises should remain attached to their original bodies; races, like the branches of the U.S. government (like the sexes?), should be separate but equal.
Maternal politics, at least as I understand it, entirely rejects Sullivan’s (unconscious) definition of a “good” society. Instead, it defends and secures a biological male’s right to discern who they are, really–including a woman/mother who desires women and/or men who desire a new alignment of sex and gender.
Maternal politics, as I understand it, is a form of deviant politics. Securing and defending the right of boys to become (wo)men who desire like women/mothers takes us into scandalous and fraught territory.
How do we talk about maternal politics across a range of issues that are important to our fellow citizens? In other words, how do we make it an electorally desirable politics? If we allow ourselves to have a real conversation about the political body, what is our answer to the question, Is this us?
If maternal politics appeals to us, it could be defined more broadly as taking public action(s) to secure and defend everyone’s right to have complicated conversations about the political body, especially now. Among the lessons Trump has (unknowingly) taught us is that we require a genuine upheaval of political thought.
