It’s like being part of a river—we pass on to those below us just as we receive from above, the flow continues without end. - Gay Post Collective
When it rises the sea becomes a wave
And in fall it turns into water.
In a slavery it is the sweat and in revolt blood
Lying low like the solid, when aroused
It becomes agrarian revolution
Itself a commodity, pathway and a direction,
A ship and mariner’s compass
In defeat alienated,
The sea gets to know itself when it turns into a raging storm. - Varavara Rao
It is increasingly clear that among the antagonisms of the current crisis of social formation in imperial capitalism, trans-antagonism plays a key role. In the so-called “united kingdom”, reactionary lobbying around trans self-identification has been central to our culture wars with increasing ferocity over the past few years. Such lobbyists, popularly labelled ‘TERFS’, have support across a broad range of institutions from the major newspapers, to universities, to the various political parties. Much of the funding for these networks originates in the u.s., indicating the role of deepening imperialist integration in the escalation of this rhetoric over the past few years.
Whilst ‘TERF’ networks seem to find their support mostly in ‘the Religious Right’, trans-antagonism has in many ways acted to bond institutions and social formations that might otherwise be opposed. For example, following the u.s. election this month, the former Democratic senator for Missouri, Claire McCaskill attributed the Democrat’s lack of appeal to “blue collar voters” to their neglect of “meat and potato issues” such as “families” and instead concerning themselves with the rights of transsexuals. That the Democratic Party is concerned for them will certainly be news to many transsexuals. But it is worth noting that this rhetoric might be found as easily among “revolutionaries” in the united kingdom as the elected representatives of the liberal wing of empire.In his review of Red Fightback’s Marxism and Trans Liberation,[1] Lewis Hodder highlights that the
failure of communist parties to recognise LGBT struggles reveals a resentment towards those parties’ own estrangement from the working class [...] The image of dark and gloomy meeting places, to be stared down by men in flat caps who’ve pinned their identity around a fragile masculinity that is tenuously tied to the idea of real work, is all too often confirmed. (paragraph 4)
Hodder argues that the strength of Marxism and Trans Liberation is the way in which it articulates transness as situated within colonialism and the gendered division of labour, and as therefore essential to the processes of class formation Marxism strives to be accountable to (see paragraph 8). I would suggest that this schema allows for an understanding of the controversies around ‘TERFS’ over the past few years as not simply a discursive phenomena, but a reflection and reification of the wider crisis in british national capitalism, a reification - constituted specifically by hypervisibility - that can then deflect from the failings of both ruling class and left-wing opposition alike.[2]
However, the way in which Hodder frames this formation of transness also begins to reveal the limits of contemporary understandings of gender politics, in relation to both theory and its historical setting. Hodder argues that insofar as the text’s strength is its account of transness in class formation, its weakness is in its appeal to scientific legitimations of gender nonconformity, indicating a retreat from a historical perspective into a vulgar materialism. It is precisely this vulgar materialism and its rejection of “postmodern identity politics” that, he points out, underpins the trans-antagonism of reactionary Marxist parties and their reification of working class authenticity. As such, Hodder suggests that Marxists might return to Judith Butler, the primary source for contemporary gender theory, towards a sort of re-historicised understanding of performativity as essential to gender’s social function. For Hodder, performativity reveals the arbitrary nature of gender categories, and thus makes possible alternative gendered relations, as part of a trans Marxist project.
Responding to this argument, AJ rightly points out that trans people’s experience with the concept of performativity in the wild is not necessarily as liberatory as Hodder seems to think. Indeed, as it is popularly received, the idea of ‘performativity’ often seems to intensify hypervisibility and the potential violence that accompanies it, since trans people - by their refusal of cis gender - become the representatives of the supposed artificiality of gender as such. People have tended to receive gender performativity as indicating a distance from natural gender that necessarily becomes associated with trans people before cis people, especially trans women due to the intensified misogynist discourse around women’s ‘naturalness’ or ‘artificiality’. Acknowledging this, Butler herself has been keen to insist that performativity owes more to J. L. Austin’s understanding of ‘performative speech acts’, like wedding vows, that achieve their function in their utterance, than to a notion of the theatrical, but this is already confused in Gender Trouble itself by her introduction of it alongside drag performances, characteristically theatrical events, as indicative of the nature of gender as such.[3]
As such, AJ insists that Marxists do not need to resort to contemporary gender theory to theoretically account for trans liberation, but rather, ought to attend to engendering (sorry) more thoroughly Marxist understandings of gender.
To paraphrase Marx’s 18th Brumaire: We make our own bodies, but we do not make them as we please; we do not form ourselves from virgin clay, but from matter existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The gendered biologies, practices and forms of all dead generations weigh like nightmares on the bodies of the living. And just as we seem to be occupied with revolutionizing ourselves, becoming something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis we anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to our service, inheriting from them names, customs, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured drag and borrowed language. (paragraph 10)
Whilst this account seems to me more attentive to the historical formation of transness under capitalism than a recourse to performativity - which, similarly to AJ, I consider to essentially be a mobilisation of trans people for the service of a politics antagonistic to our own interests - Hodder’s key suggestion, that the critique of ‘gender theory’ may become complicit in a reactionary dismissal of trans liberation as alien to the “authentic” working class, seems to slip through the cracks of AJ’s analysis (see Hodder, paragraph 12). Given the significant divergences between intellectuals like Butler, Foucault, and Derrida, among others, “postmodernism” only exists as a unity in the conspiracies of neo-conservatives - and their left wing allies - attempting to reinvent the myth of Marxism as a Jewish conspiracy for the contemporary culture wars.
However, the apparent contradiction here between the dangers of Butler and of social chauvinism might be explained by the position of Butler and queer theory more broadly in wider trends between academia and revolutionary organising. Aijaz Ahmad has rightly noted that ‘poststructuralism’ begins its academic ascendancy in the imperial core in the midst of what is usually referred to in the west as ‘neoliberalism’, but that Ahmad frames as a global counterrevolution: from the early warning in the coup against Allende in Chile, to the defeat of the Communist elements of the Iranian Revolution, to the rightward turn across the Indian subcontinent, and the ascendancy of Thatcherism and Reaganism. These are just a few examples; other signs of the retreat might be discerned in the coup against Thomas Sankara, and the defeat of armed struggles in Nicaragua, South Africa, Angola, and Mozambique.
Given this context, and the role of Marxism as a key influence on many of these struggles, poststructuralism’s rejection of Marxism and turn, instead, to anti-humanist and even proto-Nazi theorists such as Nietzsche is indicative for Ahmad of western academia’s role in obscuring or legitimising this global counterrevolution.[4] Recalling my earlier warning against anti-semitism, we need not limit this critique to ‘poststructuralism’; many academics who are not poststructuralists, or who are even opposed to ‘poststructuralism’, might be situated in the same context - including many ‘Marxist’ academics with little concern for the global trends described above. Paralleling this, in her important work tracing the formation of contemporary abolitionism, Joy James has outlined a trajectory from the defeat of mass movements against imperialism and the carceral state in the era of Black Power to contemporary academic conversations about the prison-industrial complex emphasising nonviolence, in the same historical period identified by Ahmad. This is not only a question of theoretical content, but the political practices that accompany theorising and the material formations that proliferate it. Study in the university is, by nature, addressed to different audiences and sustained by different networks than the kinds of writing and publication produced by and for participants in mass struggles.
The appearance of queer theory in the 90s, then, as diverse as it is, can be situated in a number of different trajectories away from mass anti-imperialist struggle and towards the western university, in the wake of the Cold War. Indeed, this has been noted by numerous figures in the field itself.[4] Finn Enke, for example, has asked how it is that within a generation, the wide range of struggles represented by ‘the Women’s Movement’ in the 1970s, including women in the anti-war movement, Black power, Third World nationalism, and organising around workplaces and domestic labour, has become commonly referred to within academia as
“the second wave aka “white feminism” and “transexclusionary feminism,” and now, 1970s feminists is often used as a shorthand genealogy of today’s racist and trans-exclusionary feminists (TERFs). [...] Yet if we write off “1970s feminism,” we lose feminism’s deeply questioning, queer, coalitional and anti-imperialist past; we miss some relevant grappling of that era, and the way that the grappling itself offers useful lessons.
I would add, as Enke themself notes, that we miss what trans people have contributed to and gained from the mass feminist movements of the 1970s. As I have discussed elsewhere, for example, contemporary trans thinking owes its critique of gender not to Butler, but to older traditions of radical feminism, from which both Butler and simultaneous transgender/transsexual political movements emerged in the 90s. That these older traditions are now roundly dismissed in broad brushstrokes whilst queer theory maintains significant academic traction might even be read as evidence of the threat posed by the mass struggles of the 70s.
As the reference to Sandy Stone should indicate, this is not a simple either/or: the bad academic non-struggling Butler vs the good non-academic trans struggle. (Although there are numerous examples aside from Stone.) The contradictions involved here, between struggle against institutions, struggle within institutions, and mere participation in institutional power, run through trans culture and politics too, as far back historically as you care to look, and are implicated in wider issues of race, class, and nation. Indeed, part of why contemporary conversations on trans issues are so stilted is because it is not in the interests of those trans people with the capacity to shape public discourse to attempt to address these contradictions. Rather, what is at stake in debates about ‘postmodernity’ is the way in which specific forms of radical mass struggle are absorbed into the academy at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and thereby disarmed. That in dismissing these academic discourses, we also risk dismissing the lessons and legacies of the revolutionary movements they have cannibalised only makes interrogating them more urgent.
Yet interrogation alone is not enough; mere theoretical inquiry into these questions simply replicates the problem if it is not directed into struggles to change the material formations that determine the scope of what is possible. One crucial element of a response to this issue is developing practices of ‘political education’ as part of mass struggle. Whilst gender/queer studies departments are a favourite target of reactionaries worldwide, it can be easy to conclude - as Hodder implies - that defending these institutions is a necessary component of struggle on these issues, leaving the violence and exploitation they depend on to the wayside. However, since such a defense would require mass mobilisations, why should we not simply direct those mobilisations to re-cannibalise the university, and build study into revolutionary organisation outside its walls, that then might address the structural factors that expose us to such easy culture-war attacks?
In the talk linked above, James says
The goal is on the other side of the state, the state’s not gonna let you pass. They’ve already made that clear. Whatever we create, they own. Whatever we create will become a commodity.
As such, our task is to find and perfect forms of trans struggle that will bypass commodification - academic or otherwise - forms of struggle that might destroy the state.
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The first epigraph is from a manifesto by the Gay Post Collective - Marsha Johnson, Ralph Hall, Tom Brachen, Flash Storm and Osiris - in the May/June 1975 issue of Gay Post, reprinted here.
The second epigraph is from a poem by Varavara Rao, entitled ‘The Sea and I’, available here. Rao was a negotiator between the Naxalites, a Maoist insurgency in India that has been ongoing since the late 60s, and the local state government in Andhra Pradesh, in 2002 and 2004. He has been in and out of prison for decades for decades on trumped up charges, relating to his support for and association with the Naxal Movement. He was recently temporarily released from his current sentence to go to hospital for treatment with COVID-19.
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[1] I haven’t read the book, so cannot comment on it. I am not and have no intention of becoming a member of Red Fightback.
[2] I am thinking here of Joni Alizah Cohen’s essay, ‘The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project’.
[3] A more revealing clarification of Butler’s position might be found in her essay, ‘Is Paris Burning?’, where she critiques the Hispanic transsexual sex worker, Venus Xtravaganza, featured in the film, Paris is Burning, for aspiring to such a normative gender role as ‘suburban housewife’. This example should make clear how, in Butler, the relationship between drag, transness, and performativity is shaped by hypervisibility. The essay can be found in Bodies That Matter, but I would not bother reading it. The first chapter of Jay Prosser’s Second Skins is a useful account of transsexuality in Butler, though I would consider Prosser’s work to be heavily implicated in the critique I offer in this newsletter.
[3] See ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said’.
[4] See Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing in the 1930s, by Glyn Salton-Cox.