Queer, p.44
Queer, page 44
“Yes, Hida Patricia, I do,” she says.
And I can tell she means it.
LAST WORDS FROM MONTMARTRE
Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995)
Born in Changhua County in western Taiwan, Qiu studied at the National Taiwan University before moving to Paris where she studied with philosopher Hélène Cixous. Qiu’s first novel was published in 1994, when there was a media frenzy in Taiwan targeting lesbian communities resulting in a number of suicides. Her final novel, Last Words From Montmartre comprises 20 letters that can be read in any order, a homage to her fascination with non-linear structures of avant-garde cinema. Qiu took her own life at twenty-six.
LETTER FOURTEEN
May 31
(We have nothing to fear but insincerity.)
The mouth stands for sincerity. The nose stands for generosity. The eyebrows stand for integrity. The eyes stand for sexual prowess.…
I stroke her face lightly, every feature, murmuring to her how beautiful she is to me. Yes, it’s her. The image that flashes through my mind is of a bird flying past drifting clouds; the illusion is what floats to the surface of the water when you stare into it. Is that what I saw among the hovering clouds? Or is it what I’ve seen in my heart? An image I dreamed of her? Or is the flowing water itself an illusion?
Yes, she is a simple woman. I can’t describe Xu’s physical appearance, how her beauty is engraved in my heart.… I think a sculptor must carve the way his lover looks in his mind by imagining, that he must find a temporal focus as solid as marble in order to chisel out a permanent image in the shifting sands. This is how it is, right?
*
I met Xu in September 1992 and in December I boarded a plane to Paris; our chance meeting became a honeymoon. I first lived in a small village, and the following September I moved to Paris for graduate school. That June we took an oath and maintained a perfect relationship and Xu resolved to be the rock supporting my vague ideas about studying abroad, illuminating the path of my lonely self-pursuit with her radiance. More than three hundred letters kindled my love’s glowing resplendence. This love, this grace, how can I deceive myself that there is someone as beautiful waiting for me; how can I ignore my heart and tell myself that I could love someone else; how could I pretend not to have seen the outline of my life as she tailored it and say that I could belong to someone else and say that this isn’t how “love” is, it’s something other, it’s somewhere else.…
June 1994, Xu flew to Paris and we realized our idealistic dream of a loving union, until February 1995 when I accompanied her back to Taiwan and our union disintegrated with each passing day.… You could say that the one before my eyes was no longer a “her” I recognized, and when she returned to France to live, her final promise to me, she had already left her body and I had already lost a Xu who loved me 100 percent. I’ve often thought that she returned to Paris not to love me but to torture me. The more she tried to treat me well, the more she lashed out. Our relationship crumbled. After she started being unfaithful to me in August, I fell into a state of insanity, destroying myself bit by bit, tearing myself down, twice planned to die so I could escape from the gory narcoleptic nightmare that was my life.… And she grew colder and colder, more frightening, committing more serious acts of unfaithfulness.… I was unable to stop myself from hurting her.… The deepest feelings in me had been gutted, and it was as if I was confronting my most ferocious enemy.… She too seemed nearly destroyed, terrified that I’d crossed the point of no return.…
In March 1995 I returned to France to continue my studies. To persuade me to leave Taiwan, Xu promised we’d work together to revive our love and try to recover and that she would wait for me with hope.… I was too vulnerable and too fragile, and couldn’t imagine that she was no longer the “she” I had trusted and respected, though in fact that “she” with integrity had already been destroyed by my own hand.… (Yes, destroyed by me, a month before she came to France I had already destroyed the deepest part of her that she had opened to me, and when I realized she didn’t want to care for my heart and didn’t want to return to France—and that she herself couldn’t acknowledge this—I turned away and flung her love root and branch down to the ground, and I resolved to go live alone in France, to stop waiting for her, and in despair I locked myself in my little apartment, pulled out my phone cord, and blocked her out.… By then her heart was broken, and the spirit of her love had flown away.… Before a month had passed she rushed to Paris to get me back, to save our relationship. Oh, it was a she that wasn’t even recognizable to herself, for she really did not want to leave home!)
Until the day before I “died” for her, I still believed in her integrity, her sincerity, and I still trusted her.… On March 30, ten days after leaving Taiwan, she was sleeping in someone else’s bed.… In the telephone booth I died in the blink of an eye, experiencing in one moment the entire cumulative effect of the violence and murder of half a year of her unfaithfulness. Yes, I died… true death. Happening. Death. Death. Happening.
Crazy screaming uncontrollably, striking the glass and the metal frame of the phone booth uncontrollably, blood streaming from my numb head.… I howled at her through the receiver, “Tonight I’m going to die!”… A police car was parked nearby and four officers wanted to take me away, but I insisted on finishing my call.… In the midst of this turmoil I heard Xu crying that she would leave the other person’s place immediately and go home and call me right away, each lie she told putting my life even more in jeopardy.… Beyond the lies there were only more lies.… Two policemen pulled me from the telephone booth and I resisted them, trying to pick up the receiver again.… I was taken to the police station; my brain felt like it had exploded and I just sat there catatonic on the floor, feeling as if there were many pairs of feet treading on my body, which felt severe pain yet was numb.… I forget how I managed to stand up and march out of the police station, or how I walked home. I’ve forgotten everything except the deep spiritual scars. I felt my spirit pushing me to go home quietly, go home and sit near the phone to wait for Xu’s call.… I arrived home and my whole body felt swollen with a dislocating ache and my vital organs felt as if they’d been squeezed, and I vomited continuously.… In the darkness of early dawn as I sat next to the telephone in the living room a voice exploded into my ear: “You’re really going to die!”
I thought about the portrait of van Gogh, after he had cut off his ear, with the bandages wrapped on his head, and I thought about “Apollinaire’s head bandaged in white” that Osamu loved so much.
“Someone lives with an unfaithful ‘woman.’ He kills the ‘woman,’ or the ‘woman’ kills him. This is an inevitability.”
—Angelopoulos, Reconstruction
Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich
LETTER FROM A TRANS MAN TO THE SEXUAL ANCIEN RÉGIME
Paul B. Preciado
Paul B. Preciado (1970–) Preciado is a Spanish philosopher who studied with Jacques Derrida on a Fulbright scholarship. His interests include pornography, architecture and gender identity. He writes academic literature about the influence of architecture on sexual norms, while his more personal work reflects on his experiences with hormone therapy. Elsewhere, he has worked as a curator and a teacher.
Ladies, gentlemen, and others,
In the midst of the crossfire around the politics of sexual harassment, I would like to take the stand as smuggler between two worlds, the world ‘of men’ and the world ‘of women’ (these two worlds that could very well not exist but that some people try to keep separate by a kind of Berlin Wall of gender), I want to give you news from the position of ‘found object’ or rather ‘lost subject’ during the crossing.
I am not speaking here as a man who belongs to the dominant class, to whom the masculine gender was assigned at birth, and who was brought up as a member of the governing class, of those to whom the right is granted or rather from whom it is demanded (and this is an interesting analytical key) that they exercise masculine sovereignty. I am not speaking, either, as a woman, given the fact that I have voluntarily and intentionally abandoned this form of political and social embodiment. I am expressing myself here as a trans man. Thus I am not claiming, in any way, to represent any collective whatsoever. I am not speaking, nor can I speak, as heterosexual, or as homosexual, although I know and inhabit both positions, since when someone is trans, these categories become obsolete. I am speaking as a gender defector, a fugitive from sexuality, as a dissident (sometimes awkward, since I lack the pre-established codes) of the sex-gender binary regime. As a self-guinea pig of sexual politics who is carrying out the experiment – not yet thematized – of living on each side of the wall and who, by dint of crossing it daily, is beginning to be tired, ladies and gentlemen, of the recalcitrant rigidity of codes and desires that the heteropatriarchal regime imposes.
Let me tell you, from the other side of the wall, that the thing is much worse than my experience as a lesbian woman allowed me to imagine. Ever since I have been living as-if-I-were-a-man in the world of men (aware of embodying a political fiction), I have been able to verify that the dominant (masculine, heterosexual) class will not abandon its privileges just because we send out some tweets or let out a few cries. Ever since the upheavals of the sexual and anti-colonial revolution of the past century, heteropatriarchs have embarked on a project of counter-reform – to which now the ‘feminine’ voices who wish to continue to be ‘importuned/disturbed’ are joining. This will be the thousand-year war – the longest of wars, knowing it affects the politics of reproduction and the processes through which a human body is constituted as a sovereign subject. In fact, this will be the most important of wars, because what is at stake is neither territory nor city but the body itself, pleasure, and life.
What characterizes the position of men in our techno-patriarchal and hetero-centric societies is that masculine sovereignty is defined by the legitimate use of techniques of violence (against women, against children, against non-white men and women, against animals, against the planet as a whole). We could say, reading Weber with Butler, that masculinity is to society what the State is to the nation: the holder and legitimate user of violence. This violence is expressed socially in the form of domination, economically in the form of privilege, sexually in the form of aggression and rape. On the contrary, within this political epistemology, feminine sovereignty is linked to the capacity of women to give birth. Women are sexually and socially subjugated. Only mothers are sovereign. Within this regime, masculinity is defined necro-politically (by men’s right to put to death) while femininity is defined bio-politically (by women’s obligation to give life). One could say of necro-bio-political heterosexuality that it is something like the idealized eroticization of the mating of Robocop and Alien, thinking that with a little luck, one of the two will find his footing…
Heterosexuality is not just, as Wittig demonstrates, a technology of government: it is also a politics of desire. The specificity of this libidinal regime is that it is embodied as a process of seduction and romantic dependence between apparently ‘free’ sexual agents. The positions of Robocop and Alien are not chosen individually, and are not conscious. Necro-bio-political heterosexuality is a government practice that is not imposed by those who govern (men) on the governed (women) but rather an epistemology fixing the definitions and respective positions of men and women via internal regulation. This government practice does not take the form of a law, but of an unwritten norm, a transaction of gestures and codes that have the effect of establishing in the practice of sexuality a division between what can and cannot be done. This form of sexual servitude rests on an aesthetic of seduction, a stylization of desire and a historically constructed and codified domination eroticizing the difference of power and perpetuating it. This politics of desire is what keeps the ancien sex-gender régime alive, despite all the legal processes of democratization and empowerment of women. This necro-bio-political heterosexual regime is as degrading and destructive as bondage and slavery were in the time of the Enlightenment.
The process of denouncing violence and making it visible that we are currently experiencing is part of a sexual revolution, which is as unstoppable as it is slow and sinuous. Queer feminism made epistemological transformation the condition of possibility of social change. It called binary epistemology and the naturalization of genders into question by asserting that there is an irreducible multiplicity of sexes, genders and sexualities. We understand today that libidinal transformation is as important as epistemological transformation: we must modify desire. We must learn to desire sexual freedom.
For years, queer culture was a laboratory of invention for new aesthetics of dissident sexualities, confronting techniques of subjectivation and the desire of hegemonic necro-bio-political heterosexuality. Many of us long ago abandoned the aesthetic of Robocop-Alien sexuality. We learned from butch-femme cultures and BDSM, with Joan Nestle, Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin, with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, with Guillaume Dustan and Virginie Despentes, that sexuality is a political theatre in which desire, not anatomy, writes the script. It is possible, within the theatrical fiction of sexuality, to desire licking shoe soles, to want to be penetrated in every orifice, or to hunt your lover in a forest as if he were sexual prey. However, two differential elements separate queer aesthetics from that of the hetero-norm of the ancien régime: consent and the non-naturalization of sexual positions. The equivalence of bodies and the redistribution of power.
As a trans man, I disidentify with the dominant masculinity and its necro-bio-political definition. What is most urgent is not to defend what we are (men or women) but to reject it, to disidentify ourselves from the political coercion which forces us to desire the norm and reproduce it. Our political praxis is to disobey the norms of gender and sexuality. I was a lesbian for the majority of my life, then trans these last five years; I am as far from your aesthetic of heterosexuality as a Buddhist monk levitating in Lhasa is from a Carrefour supermarket. Your aesthetic of the sexual ancien régime does not make me come. It doesn’t excite me to ‘importune’ anyone. It doesn’t interest me to get out of my sexual misery by placing my hand on the ass of a woman on the metro. I feel no kind of desire for the erotic-sexual kitsch you propose: guys who take advantage of their position of power to get laid and touch asses. The grotesque, wounding aesthetic of necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach. An aesthetic that re-naturalizes sexual differences and situates men in the position of the aggressor and women in that of victim (painfully grateful or joyfully importuned).
If it is possible to assert that in queer and trans culture we fuck better and more, it’s on the one hand because we have extracted sexuality from the realm of reproduction, and on the other, more importantly, because we have tried to free ourselves from the domination of gender. I am not saying that queer and transfeminist culture escapes all forms of violence. There is no sexuality without a shadowy side. But it is not necessary for shadow (inequality and violence) to prevail and determine all sexuality.
*
Representatives of the sexual ancien régime, get to grips with your shadowy side and have fun with it, and let us bury our dead. Enjoy your aesthetic of domination, but don’t try to make your style a law. And let us fuck with our own politics of desire, without man or woman, without penis or vagina, without axe or gun.
Arles, 15 January 2018
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
HANDLE WITH BEAR
Lawrence Schimel (1971–)
Schimel is a multilingual writer and translator, working predominantly with the science fiction genre in graphic novels, children’s books and adult fiction. He finds that queer norms differ between nations and believes that literary translation can facilitate cross-cultural education and empowerment. He was born in New York and studied at Yale University, but has lived in Madrid for the last twenty years.
“It looks ridiculous,” I told him, looking up at his head as we stood at the crosswalk at Gran Via, waiting for the light to change.
“You need to relax and get into the Holiday Spirit,” Aiden replied.
“But Christmas is over already!” I complained. Which was technically true: Christmas Day had passed two days ago. Not that you would notice here in Spain, where the holiday was still in full swing. From what Nacho had told us last night, Christmas was a drawn-out affair here, which lasted until 6 January, known as the Día de Reyes, the Day of the Kings. It actually made a lot more sense to me, giving gifts on Reyes, which is when the Three Wise Men did actually show up bearing their gifts, rather than on Christmas Day itself. But then, I couldn’t imagine England practically shutting down for nearly two weeks of festivities and jollity; a demonstration of the difference between our Protestant work ethic and a Catholic country like Spain.
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” Aiden said, unflappable in his good humor, as we joined the surge of pedestrians crossing the street.
“First of all, we’re in Chueca, not in Italy,” I grumbled. Chueca was the “gay neighborhood” of Madrid, which we’d just entered by crossing the street. It wasn’t the source of my bad mood; on the contrary: with any luck, coming here would help me find someone to help perk me up.
I was somewhat jealous that Graham had abandoned us again, to go off to Nacho’s place and have sex. Not that I wouldn’t have done the same thing in his position. What I resented, if I was honest with myself, was not being in the position to abandon my mates.
“Second of all,” I continued, “did you notice how only the heterosexuals engage in this sort of frivolity?”
