In this episode we talk to Elizabeth Wilson, a professor of gender, sexuality and women's studies at Emory University, a leading scholar on the intersections between feminism and biology, and the author of Gut Feminism. We talk about everything from what feminism can learn from biology to TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists), penises, Freud and technology.
Note: this episode was recorded in Spring 2023.
Elizabeth A. Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Sydney, and her B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Otago. She was an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of New South Wales prior to coming to Emory, and she has also held appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2003-2004), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2011-2012), the Council of Humanities, Princeton University (Fall 2019), and Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2023-2024).
Prof. Wilson’s research investigates how psychoanalysis and affect theory can be used to foster conceptual innovation in feminist theory. Her most recent book (A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory) is co-authored with Professor Adam Frank. This Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins’s affect theory and with definitions of the key terms and conceptual innovations in the theory, enabling his work to be used in a wide variety of interdisciplinary contexts. The Digital Publishing in the Humanities Initiative at Emory has made A Silvan Tomkins Handbook available Open Access.
(An Extensive!) Reading List:
Wilson, Elizabeth A. Gut Feminism. 2015. Print. Next Wave (Duke University Press).
Kirby, Vicki. What If Culture Was Nature All Along? 2017.
Kirby, Vicki. Quantum Anthropologies : Life at Large. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2011. Print.
Cohn, Carol. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12.4 (1987): 687–718.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body : Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Second paperback edition, Updated. 2020.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1974. Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons? https://worlding808.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/leguin-1974-why-are-americans-afraid-of-dragons.pdf
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies : Toward a Corporeal Feminism. 2020.
Wilson, Elizabeth A., and Adam J. Frank. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook Foundations for Affect Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Print.
Buolamwini, J. and Gebru, T. 2018. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.
Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Parables for the Virtual. United States: Duke University Press, 2021. 25–48.
McInerney, Kerry, and Os Keyes. “The Infopolitics of Feeling: How Race and Disability Are Configured in Emotion Recognition Technology.” New media & society (2024): New media& society, 2024-03.
Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Elam, Michele. “Signs Taken for Wonders: AI, Art & the Matter of Race.” Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass.) 151.2 (2022): 198–217.
Edelman, Lee. No Future Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Print. Series Q.
Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries : Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Edelman, Lee. Bad Education : Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. 2022. Print. Theory Q.
Kerry
Hi, I'm Dr. Kerry McInerney. Dr. Eleanor Drage and I are the hosts of The Good Robot Podcast. Join us as we ask the experts what is good technology, is it even possible, and how can feminism help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, head over to our website, www.thegoodrobot.co.uk, where we have a full transcript of the episode, and an especially curated reading list by every guest.
We love hearing from listeners, so feel free to tweet or email us. And also so appreciate you leaving us a review on the podcast app. But until then, sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode.
Eleanor:
In this episode we talk to Professor Elizabeth Wilson, who is a professor of gender, sexuality and women's studies at Emory University. We talk about guts, bowels, penises, Freud and technology. I hope you enjoy the show
Kerry
Brilliant. Thank you so much for being here with us today. It's really wonderful to get a chance to chat. So just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what's brought you to thinking about feminism, science and technology?
Elizabeth
Well good morning Kerry and Eleanor. It's lovely to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation and I'm very grateful to be in the company of some really terrific guests over the last few years. I am Elizabeth Wilson. I'm a professor in the Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. I've always worked in WGSS, but I'm actually trained at both the undergraduate and the postgraduate level as a psychologist. Actually very traditional scientific environments. So I was, what I think now would be called a STEM kid, a STEM undergraduate. My postgraduate work was in Connectionism, which back when I was doing this work in the 1990s was this conglomeration of a cognitive model of mind with emerging neurological theory. So it was an attempt to put together biological and cognitive modeling of mind.
And what I realized as I started reading this work in the 1990s, all my colleagues around me were doing this work. Was that it looked remarkably like what Freud had done back in the 1890s, a hundred years earlier in his unpublished work on the project for scientific psychology. And there was a really virtuoso reading by Derrida of this early Freudian work. So there was this strange triangulation between then contemporary scientific and technical work with this both psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading practice.
There's a logic to say that my work has always been in feminist science studies, which is true. But there's another thread I think about that I've always been interested in questions of psychology, questions of mind, how to think about theories of mind. And I'm currently working actually much more explicitly in that area. So I'm working with Silvan Tomkins series of affect. I'm looking at anger right now and the work of Valerie Solanas. So I'm guessing we might get back to Tomkins a little as we talk.
Eleanor
So an extraordinarily diverse range of thinking and of disciplines. But actually it makes a lot of sense because as I tell everybody, feminism is useful everywhere. So we're looking forward to tracing those threads throughout, throughout today's conversation. So now we have our big three good robot questions, and I'm looking forward to your take on those. So, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminist thought help us get there?
Elizabeth
So a lot of your guests in the past have answered this question in the realm or the register of the social, like, what's good for us all as a group? As a culture, I'm gonna answer it much more individualistically. So what is good technology for me as a reader or as an academic, as a teacher and I think what makes a technology good for me is that it's surprising. So here, it allows me to read in a different kind of way. So here I'm drawing really directly on Silvan Tomkins understanding of what surprises, he calls it a resetting or a reorienting effect. So surprise has the effect of pulling your attention away from something and putting it somewhere else. And actually metaphorizes surprise through technology, through this was the 1960s through radio and television, the special announcement that might interrupt a television program or a radio program that you were listening to. And I guess actually these days with our phones, we're constantly being interrupted with, with the ding, ding, ding.
So, surprise for Tomkins is an interruption to feeling or thought as it has been proceeding. And the issue for him then is having been interrupted, how are you gonna respond? Are you gonna, you gonna respond to this interruption with interest, with enjoyment, with disgust, with anger, with sadness? And so then that is when the question of reading, which for me is the core political concern. How then do you read the technology? So, I dunno, Chat GPT. It's mildly surprising, I guess. And so some parts of it's surprising, some parts are not. Some parts of it are very consistent with the histories of these kinds of artificial objects. So, can I extract a good feminist reading from a piece of technology? That's what'll make it good for me.
Eleanor
That's so wonderful. And as you were saying that, I was thinking there's a really good Serge Gainsbourg song called Black Trombone, and at the end of it he says: plus personne ne m'etonne, je m'abondonne, c'est fini something like that. My terrible French. And that means nothing surprises me anymore. And when I'm depressed, it kind of feels that way. You know, there is no surprise. Everything feels exactly like you. Like you already know.
Elizabeth
And I think we have a tendency, we feminists, I guess, have a tendency to follow surprise with something that's a little bit melancholic. You know, that tends to be the way you, I'm thinking of Wendy Brown's work about wounded attachments. We tend to, we like a melancholic reading, but we don't have to read always that way. We could read for enjoyment.
Eleanor
Totally actually Kerry and I were talking about this this morning because I won't mention which talk, but I'm giving a talk this week and I was told to not be too bummed out, I think, for want of a better word, and it was a guy who told me that, and I think had it been a woman, there would've been an acknowledgement that actually saying the truth does, or reading the world in a way that means something to people does bring joy because it makes you feel understood. And so melancholy for whom, you know.
Elizabeth
Exactly. There has been a lot of discussions here about Chat GPT about that it's actually super useful. For example, for in college, for students for whom English is a second language. This might be a mechanism by which you could write the first paragraph of a paper, right? That it just, it gives you a start, right? And then obviously there's the concerns about cheating. So any one object can be read and used in these different kinds of ways. Sorry, Kerry, I interrupted you.
Kerry
No, no, definitely. And I was just gonna say to that as well that, and like Eleanor knows, I'm often a very cosmic pessimist in how I approach technologies and texts. But at the same time, something I've been trying to embrace a lot more my own feminist readings and practice over the past few years is this really, I think feminist spirit and ethic of play. And like I love Ursula Le Guin's essay, like Why Are Americans Are Afraid of Dragons? And it's kind of the way that she links this kind of seriousness to masculinity, to American capitalism through to this kind of profound failure of the imagination. The inability to imagine that things can be different. And so I think I like to be challenged, particularly by Eleanor, but also a lot of other feminists working in the tech space to say, where can we find the joy in this? Where can we find, as Maya Indira Ganesh puts in one of our other episodes as the sort of hackability in the exploration, in the play in these technologies? Which at first glance or first feminist reading might be, you know, just really negative or seems really, really harmful.
Elizabeth
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Eleanor
So from these breaking down, these dualisms between play and melancholia, another great dualism in feminist thought that we, this we tried to break down is the one between the body and the mind, or essentialism and constructivism, which. For those of you who who don't not familiar with these terms essentialism is the idea that gender is biologically determined. So you're born with genitalia and then that genitalia determines your gender, and then your gender determines your sexuality. And so feminist thought for, for many years, one of our greatest achievements is breaking down that continuum.
As a consequence, it's made feminism quite allergic to the biological, or at least not knowing what to do with it. And I definitely felt that in my early years before I encountered feminist biologists and feminist physicists like, like Haraway and Karen Barad. I wasn't sure really what to do with the biological. And now it's sort of made even worse by having lots of trans exclusionary feminists around who say that trans women aren't women. And if you have a penis, you have a propensity to rape. And so I was captivated by your work. I'm reading gut feminism at the moment, which I love. But previously you've talked about this in Psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body, and you offer wonderful examples of feminist approaches to biology. For example, how depression is also socioeconomic, how bulimia is a disorder of the gut. And there's a mood in the gut. How the bowels can mourn -this wonderful thing I was thinking about the kitchen of coffee this morning. So can you explain those things to us and how feminism should be reckoning with biology.
Elizabeth
It's really, it's, it's a really interesting question because I feel like the question itself and the answer to those questions has changed a lot over the years. So when I first started doing this work, it's now much to my surprise, 15 to 20 years ago. And what was available to me then when I was interested in this connection of stuff. So what if you do have a neurological theory of mind? What can we do with that? There was a lot of feminist philosophy of biology around Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ruth Bleier. But that wasn't really helping me to do the kind of work I wanted to do with that biological material. So I was very lucky to be trained as a postgraduate student in Australia. So there were a lot of people there, a lot of feminist work in Australia at that point that was really digging in on this. Elizabeth Grosz' work, obviously canonically, economically in particular Vicki Kirby's work has been very influential for me. She's a very, very good thinker of the biological. And colleagues around me at the time, Helen Keen, Catherine Waldby, there's a whole bunch of us who are all like, kinda alighted on the same kinda problem. So we did what we did and work like gut feminism and psychosomatic came out of that. I, I kind of feel what's happened more recently is that the wheel has turned again and now there's a lot of feminist work that's actually just a little bit too credulous about the biological. That’s a little bit too much kind of just, what can I say? Just inhaling it. Ingesting it whole, and not really metabolizing it, not really reading it.
And so there's a lot of allying with biological theories of this, theories of nature and that, and I think what's dropped outta that is a critical engagement or a reading of it. And so, you know, you say that, that at the beginning you weren't really sure. My undergraduates, I'm teaching Freud right now in an undergraduate class and my undergraduates are still oscillating in the same kind of way. And there's a movement between where for it, we're against it. Biology is good, biology is bad. And what that suggests to me is that despite all of this work, Grosz, Barad, you know Kirby, all of my colleagues. There isn't still widely available an understanding of something that isn't just a position for or against it, but how to read it and how to use it for feminist ends. So on we go. We just keep pushing to make that kind of data and that way of thinking about the body metabolizable to feminist politics. And I, and I, you know - this is the central argument of Gut Feminism - is I think there's an enormous amount. For us to use and for us to learn from so that it's going both ways.
Eleanor
Yeah. Absolutely. And as you said, the ways that feminism can develop as well through these readings. It's not just feminism is this stagnant thing that you draw on to make different readings. You can kind of push it in different directions. Another of these dualisms that you break down really beautifully is the one between emotion and computation. These two things seem to be very separate. Anything that's computed is rational. It has no emotion attached to it. And you show that that's not true at all. And you say that the assembly of machine and emotion was foundational to the artificial sciences. So Why is why is that the case? Can you give us some examples of that?
Elizabeth
Why is it the case that that that computation and motion have kind of seemed to be separate?
Eleanor
Yes, and how they actually are not.
Elizabeth
So I think yeah, as it turns out, they're kind of not. There's a whole strain to this argument that would be about the kind of cultural representations of robots, computers on the one hand and feelings on the other. And like, you know, science fiction to go back to Ursula Le Guin science fiction is full of like, oh, can the robot feel? And we never kind of ever get to the end of it. So I'm thinking here, kinda canonically, Data in Star Trek, right. So he can, he can't, and that's what's engaging in those particular narratives. Okay. But what I have looked at is some history of artificial intelligence in the 20th century, back in the 1940s and the 1950s. And there, when you go to the archives, when you start looking at the letters, when you start looking at the notes, when you start looking at some of the published and unpublished materials, as you said, it's an affect soaked environment. And this would take me again, back or forwards to Tomkins. One of the things he says about the affect of interest is it's absolutely essential for thought, so unless you're interested or excited in some mild kind of way or some very strong way, thinking just disintegrates. So using Tomkins as a frame, I was really interested in what are the interests and excitements of these predominantly men, predominantly young men in the United States and the United Kingdom as they were building these artificial devices. And they're delighted with themselves. There's a lot to read for there in terms of how you need excitement and interest for these machines to be built. What machines did they build? One of the machines they built was an atomic bomb. Some of the machines were imaginary, like Turing's work. That's a separate kind of issue, but I think to, to fully understand the machines that do emerge, you have to have some sense of the affective foundations that built it in the first instance alongside social economic capitalist concerns that bear on this kind of research. So the affective is as crucial to those outcomes as, let's say, the flow of capital.
Kerry
That's really fascinating and I think that's an angle that we don't maybe think about enough, or I shouldn't say we really, I should talk about myself that I don't really think about enough. You know, I look quite a lot ideas of affect, but specifically thinking about techno orientalism and there's like fear and fetishization of the so-called East and how this played into these like acts of technological creation.
But I love this idea of like that profound sense of self-satisfaction that people were feeling at the time and how I feel like, I don't know, when I'm looking at the history of AI and computing, that's not something I see maybe talked about as much, but it almost resonates for me like with work in feminist international relations work like Carol Cohn's Sex and Death, looking at the way that male engineers and nuclear scientists were talking about nuclear weapons through these like highly coded hypermasculine ways.
So for our listeners, if you haven't read this, an article from the 1980s, it's very understandable. Basically they just talk about them as though they're penises in a really overt way. And you know, and I think this kind of effect of project is so interesting and maybe a story that we should be looking back to more.
Elizabeth
So actually that's super interesting. Kerry, lemme just pick up on the penis for a minute cause it's come up twice now, the TERFS and now the engineers.
So is the penis a of excitement or is it a site of disgust? And that seems, because for the TERFs, it's a sight of disgust and maybe fair, the, there also seems to be some kind of perverse enjoyment in all of this for a lot of this trans exclusionary feminism and for the engineers, I don't know. I haven't, I don't know the materials that, that, that you would draw from to talk about what's going on there. What is the penis for them as they're building, I don't know, a robot or a rocket or whatever, and that that is a part of what gets built into the machinery.
Kerry
That's so fascinating cause when you put it this way, I feel like the one reason is that they both see like the penis or as like the sight of like immense power that, you know, they see it as it's so tied into this kind of nationalist, rhetorical, kind of cold war rhetoric of competition between US and the USSR. And so, you know, they kind of, of course, like using it maybe in quite a different way and they're sort of virility way trying together of like us nationalism with a kind of immense male power.
But yeah, I think there's like so much undue emphasis being placed on kind of this idea of the penis.
Eleanor
It's the same thing with the TERFs. There's a kind of primacy of the penis that overrides any gender identity. You may identify as a woman, but because you have a penis, it overrides everything else. Whether you have hair or whether you have testosterone or whatever.
Elizabeth
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And so the, the penis is themic. It means a bunch of different things because if it means virility, Penis is also a very vulnerable thing, you know, so, so why do I have to always think of my penis as a, as a sight of strength and virility, perhaps, because it's also a sight of fair and concern for me. So I think reading, not letting them have the argument of the penis as an object, as a tool for rape, or a tool for virility always. Always at every instance. At, at every time. It's a really important intervention.
The penis means lots of different things to lots of different people.
Eleanor
Yes, but it's not the answer. The penis is not the answer. It's it's being used as a scapegoat
Or do you think it is ..!?
Elizabeth
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to, so to, to read the penis in a more open kind of way is, which is, is what the transexclusionary are refusing to do. And it's what I'm gonna guess these engineers are refusing to do. My penis is always an object of strength and virility. Is it? I'm not sure that it is. And that to me seems one, one way to get a feminist reading latching onto that material.
Kerry
Absolutely, because I think, you know, ironically, I feel like one of the side effects of this like very narrow reading or this very singular story, is that I do feel like it then makes like what the penis means in real life or what it means to people when you first see it or whatever unintentionally hilarious because there's so much mystique built into this one piece of anatomy that, you know, obviously it could never live up to or never have that kind of meaning.
Elizabeth
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Exactly.
Eleanor
As a psychoanalyst, then this confusion between the penis and the phallus is that surely not just it, that there's a confusion. Oh, that's a whole other podcast, isn't it?
Elizabeth
I, I think I think, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, for Freud, penis is very closely attached to anxiety, not to virility, to anxiety and envy. And, you know, the envy isn't only for the girls. The boys are also in an envious relationship, so it's a complicated little bit of anatomy.
Kerry
That's very fascinating and I never knew that. Cause I'm like very poorly read on Freud, which is probably not the thing to say to you right now in it's, it's not what you think it.
I actually want to bring back to this question of affect and then thinking about how in a lot of contemporary technologies and scientific projects, we see a quite dangerous return, I think, to these very pseudo-scientific taxonomies of affect that even though they've been like quite roundly debunked in a lot of ways people are trying to develop all sorts of new algorithmic tools for trying to deduce emotion from someone. Face or their facial appearance.
So this is something that Os Keyes, who's also appeared on the podcast and now exploring in relation to the emotion AI firm Affectiva which again claims to have developed an algorithm that can effectively read people's facial expressions and deduce your emotional state from that.
And we talk about how ableism and racism really underpins this project because it was originally developed as a tool that was designed to quote, unquote teach autistic people how to feel according to existing societal norms. And then I also argue that it's very reliant on these ideas of normative cultural expression that, you know, then play out in the founder's description of these technologies not working in Chinese context. And tie this back to this notion of sort of the inscrutable Chinese face.
But this is something yeah, we wanted to bring to you because you've also explored these attempts to show where emotion is expressed on the face.
So Tomkins' example that in effect happiness lives in the micro-expressions of the smile on the face which. By the work of Paul Ekman who consulted with the FBI and other large law enforcement organizations on supposedly predicting whether or not a person is a suicide bomb through microexpressions.
So what do you characterize as work on recognition that is actually useful and how does it relate to these really misguided forms of research on emotion?
Eleanor
Before you start, can someone define affect for the listener?
Elizabeth
Yeah, that's that's the $64,000 question, Eleanor. For me I'm very attached to Tomkins' Theory of affect, and for him it's an experience derived from neurological firing and depending on how the firing, and this is a very metaphorical loose understanding of, of neurological firing. Depending on how it happens, one feels angry or excited or contemptuous or disgusted or so, so he, he, he, Tomkins has a theory of about eight or nine basic effects that co assemble with each other with thought. With behaviors to produce a kind of a rich psychological experience.
There are other different kinds of theories of affect and circulation right now. I mean, one of the ways that, that other traditions usually thought of as through the work of Deleuze and Spinoza and their effect is, To quote Brian Massumi, impersonal, it's a force that would operate between people and that that tradition tends to be largely uninterested in the psychological feel or experience, a phenomenology of the affect for a particular person, and more interested in how it moves across social spaces and how those social spaces are reconfigured as a result of that. So canonically Brian Massumi wrote a very influential piece on Ronald Reagan and the politics of fear.
Does that help?
And, and someone, someone like Berlant, Lauren Berlant is kind of a little betwixt and between these kinds of traditions, so it's a very undefined term in general. And now I've forgotten the question.
Oh, affect in the face. So, yeah, Kerry, like this is a, this is a tough one, right? So for Tomkins, an affect actually happens on the face, and that is super interesting. So in the Darwinian tradition Darwin says an effect happens somewhere else in your body and it finds its expression on the face. So the face is just doing the secondary work of expressing what you already feel. Tomkins says, no, the what your face is doing when it's smiling, that is the enjoyment or the excitement.
And when it's frowning or when it's when you're crying, those are the feelings. So the face and the skin and the musculature on the face for Tomkins is really. So that led to exactly the problems that you're talking about, Kerry, and in the book that Adam Frank from UBC in Vancouver, Adam Frank, and I've written about Tomkins.
Adam has written a chapter, a very, very good chapter on the face and a critique of Ekman. So I dunno if this is too much in the weeds for some of the listeners, but, you know, Ruth Leys has been very, very critical of Tomkins work and a lot of this work, scientific work on affect saying it's too reductive.
I think that that is a good critique of Ekman. I think Ekman's work is very narrow. It works very nicely with the FBI and the TSA logics of having to try and find certain kinds of persons and extract them.
I dunno if you've read the story in, it was circulated in New York Times recently. The owner of Madison Square Gardens is now using facial recognition technology to remove people trying to come into events for political reasons, the people who are trying to sue the company. So yeah, so there's all these kinds of usages of the face, and you know, when you're talking about Orientalism, I mean, I've just been teaching Joy Buolamwini’s work about how some of this facial recognition software can't manage gender and race very well.
Eleanor
The Gender Shades project.
Elizabeth
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's, it's terrific work.
And so for me, this is a question about the difference between a project that's interested in recognition, in a narrowly empirical project that's interested in recognition, and all of the politics are attached to that on the one hand, and on the other hand, reading.
And which I'm, I feel I've said reading a hundred times today, reading. We all read faces, you know, the students in my class, or some of them, you know, have just literally closed their eyes and fallen asleep.
Others of them you can tell by their faces that they seem interested or bored or whatever. So we're constantly reading faces and I think what Tomkins affect theory provides is this really capacious speculative theory for thinking about the face differently from what, what you're talking about in terms of Affectiva and Ekman and that whole tradition.
That's, that's, but, but what I will say, and this is the, this is the deconstructive DNA for me, you can't separate interesting reading from the horror show that might be something like Affectiva. They're always connected.
Kerry
That's really fascinating. And I do think, you know, I like sort of looking at this as sort of an interpretive project or if something's saying, okay, we're always, you know, coexisting with each other and we're involved in this process of mutual reading and how we read changes.
But yeah, also recognizing the way that we have such an impulse to taxonomize and such an impulse to try to recognize, and you know, and again, not as Keyes talks about gender recognition software, just, you know, instead of saying it's bias, let's talk about it as just bullshit.
Elizabeth
Mm-hmm. Exactly. Exactly.
Eleanor
I wonder, is this what Michele Elam was saying when she was talking about 'signs ' taken for wonders?' The face is a, you're looking for signs in the face, but those signs you take for something more sacred, something more fixed, more stable an essence per person.
There's, I mean, there's so much amazing. yeah. It's - go on…
Elizabeth
Yeah, it's very complex, like what we do with faces.
Eleanor
Yeah, totally, totally
Elizabeth
And, and that, and now faces have been captured for capital, for national security and so on and so forth.
Eleanor
Yeah, and even thinking about the face of a brand or something, you know, it's the, it's the outward side. It's, the side that needs to be scrubbed clean so that the internals can do lots of shocking things.
I wanted to just turn away from technology for a second. I mean, not the really, we've been focusing on it much, which is always a good thing because I think you find out more interesting things about technology when you don't talk.
So one of the kinda really important, an important part of queer politics is this idea that queerness is natural. And you know, when you hear Lady Gaga saying that, you know, I was born this way, that's kind of what, what that's about. So if I'm born this way, I don't have a choice, so, you know, get off my back basically. And that's been really useful in lots of different kinds of, of, of queer politic. But you point out that saying that queerness is natural also implies that natural is good and we shouldn't lose sight of how confusion, inversion, and other negative elements are at the heart of nature. So can you explain what the significance of that is?
Elizabeth
Yeah, so this would go back to my attachment to psychoanalysis and to questions of negativity. And I'm very attached intellectually to this whole tradition in queer theory of reading for negativity.
And there isn't a lot of it in, in feminist theory, so there isn't a lot of reading for. The constituent of work of negativity. We tend to read for things that are negative that we should get rid of. Whereas the queer tradition is trying to say, there's something about the negativity that's constitutional necessary, a part of how things emerge as such.
And so, yeah. I've written something recently about Karen Barad's idea of kind of a queer nature, and my feeling is that she under-reads for what, in another context we might call the tooth and claw of nature.
So, so, so nature under Barad suddenly becomes our ally. It suddenly becomes something we can work with. Interestingly, she figures a lot of this through acts against nature, which is a term for sodomy. And I think that sodomy retains, certainly here in the United States, what Jonathan Goldberg has called its world-destroying force.
A lot of the anti-trans politics directed towards children right now in the United States are unbelievably cruel. They are a response to what I would call the somedical nature of the trans child. The gender of the trans child is confusing, and it also defies traditional gender norms. It's a kind of "fuck you" to those norms, a declaration of disinterest in them. So there's something the trans child represents that we could call sodomitical, a negative force met with enormous cruelty.
For me, this negativity is always present in nature, the body, gender, and sexuality. It's not something to scrub out. Rightwing politics often try to eliminate this negativity. It's always a bit strange for me to see someone like Barad, whose work is terrific, immensely influential, and very important, think of nature without this sodomitical kick, without its negativity.
So she, she under-reads for the confusion and the nastiness of the so-called natural world, and I just think the feminist readings would be stronger if we could attend a little bit more to that.
Kerry
That's really fascinating and, and I think what you say about our sort of hesitancy to engage with the negative to me really speaks to the Edelman's work and queer theory in no Future
Yeah. For our listeners, maybe if you haven't read this book Edelman effectively argues that, you know, one of the kinds of. You know, compulsive needs that we have as society is to invest the child with a sense of kind of futurity and hope, and that queerness kind of flies in the face of that.
But yeah, Edelman's work is very, very controversial in a lot of feminist studies and there's been a lot of pushback against that, largely Muñoz's Cruising Utopia.
But my only reflection on this as a very, non well-read person is, you know, my main takeaway from Lee Edelman's book is that that the film, the birds is terrifying, it’s ruined birds. So thanks a lot, Hitchcock. But you know, maybe there’s something right in that, in that, like that fear of the complete awfulness of certain kinds of natural events and nature.So I feel slightly affirmed now, and that being my only takeaway.
Elizabeth
Yeah, and I think, I think, I think it's right in, in Edelman's new book, Bad Education expands this argument about the attachment of negativity to the queer to say it's also attached to blackness and transness and interestingly to woman and the figure of woman and that there is a lot of work that's kind of gone missing in contemporary feminist theory.
A lot of work back in the seventies where I'm thinking here of fatigue woman is this really caustic figure and, and a figure of negativity. So yeah, there's a lot to … there's a lot to explore there under the auspices of negativity.
Kerry
That's so fascinating and I think you know, the time always flies so fast. Whenever we get an opportunity to chat to fantastic people like you. Thank you so much for such an interesting, lively, free flowing conversation. It's been a real pleasure to have you on, and we hope to talk to you again soon.
Elizabeth
Lovely to see you both. Thank you so much for having me.
Eleanor
This episode was made possible thanks to the generosity of Christina Gaw and the Mercator Foundation. It was produced by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney and edited by Eleanor Drage.