#be(com)ing

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Science Fiction

Just now I touched my chest And felt my heart quivering there. This must be one of the bad times.

I think it is quivering with remorse And exhaustion. Once I saw a heart Beating in a documentary. I was a very

Little girl and the sight disgusted me. Throbbing and not stopping my heart betrays Me and yet remains sure and true, a thing

Of nature. Earth bleeding Its guts out on the sea floor exhausts Me with remorse and shame, and yet I have to trust it

As wealth is proven by how terribly it devastates Itself, and I am but one symptom among billions of the wealth Of Earth. A tired feeling that is recuperated by a passing spaceship

Or an infinitude like fame but more universal. I will have to miss you Earth; I miss you already. And yet when I touch myself whom I should Not trust it is still only the heaviest and most jealous feelings that bind me to you, like blood.

— Ariana Reines, "Science Fiction" from Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)

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  Setting history aside, try to enumerate from daily conversation around you what a sexual identity is supposed to do for its bearers. You might conclude—as I have—that such an identity consoles, trains, organizes, and markets those who wear it. Consoles: it grants a stable sense of belonging to something very much like a natural kind, a new family. As Lady Gaga says, you are "Born This Way." Trains: belonging to this natural kind requires a good deal of education. You have to be taught to listen to Lady Gaga, for example, rather than Anita Bryant. ... More urgently, you have to acquire a range of tastes, memorize a series of codes, and affirm a prescribed politics. Organizes: if a sexual identity is supposed to be a natural kind, it has also been, for several decades now, a political declaration or act of allegiance. Finally, most important, an identity markets you. It is your license to participate in various specialized exchanges, especially for sexual pleasures or, at least, motions.   With Sedgwick, I fear that the last point may be too obvious, but it can also disclose the multiple incoherence of claiming that the choice of a sexual identity is a free and authentic expression of your innermost self. Take as a concrete example the so-called gay handkerchief code. (It became popular about the time that identity language began to spread in gay manifestos and the underground press.) The idea was that you would stuff a colored hanky in the back pocket of your Levi’s—because of course you were wearing Levi’s and a black T-shirt, as perfectly autonomous declarations of your unique sense of style. The handkerchief’s color would signal what you were offering or seeking in the sexual marketplace. Wearing the hanky in the left pocket meant you were top or active; on the right, bottom or passive. If all of this strikes you as unbearably passé, glance at the “Tribes” on Grindr (Bear, Twink, Daddy, Geek, Jock, Leather, and so on) or the drop-down menus of self-categorization on any other hookup app.   The code was simple in theory, troublesome in practice. For example, the system supposed that you could distinguish, at 1:30 a.m., under dim bar lighting, fuchsia from lavender. A mistake could be awkward. You might end up being spanked when what you really wanted was to compare notes on drag queen hairstyles. But there were other troubles. In early iterations, you had to squeeze your desires into one of a handful of recognized colors. If there was no suitable color, perhaps there was something wrong with your desires. Then, after a while, there were just too many colors—and competing guides to decoding them.   So it goes with sex/gender identities. Whatever identities promise, one of their actual consequences is the oscillation between restricted choice and endless multiplication. If you haven’t looked lately at an online list of sex/gender identities, you should do so. The lists vary wildly in length and do not always agree on definitions. An average list will run to a hundred or so. If you combine all the possibilities on other lists, you end up near a thousand.   Sex/gender identities multiply because there are no clear criteria for how much of what kind of human difference constitutes a new one. For example, have you dated any Therians? Are you yourself perhaps a Therian without knowing it? According to one Internet questionnaire, you are a Therian or Therianthrope if you feel that you are a particular animal, experience a connection to that animal, find yourself at peace when you picture that animal, or transform into that animal (psychologically, to be clear). But Therians are not to be confused with furries or puppy players or any others who don animal costumes or mimic animal behaviors during sex. Some Therians do consider their identity to be a sexual identity. Others heatedly deny this. What is incontestable is that Therians have maintained websites, conducted actual and virtual meetings, run a YouTube channel, and circulated fan fiction. So why not count Therian as a new sexual identity? But if any variation of human fantasy can constitute a sexual identity, what is the meaning of the term?   Perhaps it was never meant to have a meaning in the ordinary way. From the beginning, the language of sexual identity has been candid about its contradictions. They are part of its charm, if they are not necessary to its core functions. A sexual identity is a same that is not the same. It doesn’t resolve the tensions of intimate individuality and political community, real self and revolutionary cadre, authenticity and group acceptance. It just restates those tensions with a smiling both . . . and. “Identity,” like older sexual terms, is powerful because it means whatever you need it to mean.

— Mark D. Jordan, "Our Identities, Ourselves?" published in Boston Review (2020) 

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Consider, now, what it is to see a human being. Perception represents a physical object, possibly in motion. It has a certain shape, rather like the one we ascribe to ourselves. Well, how do we really know what sort of physical object this is, and how to behave toward it? Do we ever have unimpeachable evidence that it is not a sophisticated robot or automaton? That it does indeed have a complex inner world of the sort that novels depict? How do we know, really, that this is a face before us—and not, say, a complex mechanical object with craters, a fiendishly clever machine? Where could such evidence ever be obtained? In this sense, Dickens suggests, all of human life is a going beyond the facts, an acceptance of generous fancies, a projection of our own sentiments and inner activities onto the forms we perceive about us (and a reception from this interaction of images of ourselves, our own inner world). We are all of us, insofar as we interact morally and politically, fanciful projectors, makers of and believers in fictions and metaphors. But the point then is that the "fact" school—which denies life to cows and horses, humanity to workers—engages in fiction making as much as do the novel-readers and fanciers, in its adamant denials of life and humanity, which go, like the other's assertions, beyond the limits of the evidence. We never know for sure the contents of this perceived shape's heart; we have a choice, only, between a generous construction and a mean-spirited construction.

—Martha Nussbaum, “The Literary Imagination in Public Life” (pdf)

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Social media structure creative effort (e.g., Barthel’s list above) ideologically as “self-creating,” but they often end up as anxiety-inducing, exposing the self’s ad hoc incompleteness while structuring the demand for a fawning audience to complete us, validate every effort, as a natural expectation. Validation is nice, but as a goal for creative effort, it is somewhat limited. The quest for validation must inevitably restrict itself to the tools of attracting attention: the blunt instruments of novelty and prurience  (“Kanye West in a balloon chair”). The self one tries to express tends to be new, exciting, confessional, sexy, etc., because it plays as an advertisement. Identity [in a digital age dominated by capitalism] is a series of ads for a product that doesn’t exist.

The process can’t quell anxiety; this kind of self-expression can only intensify it, focus it onto a few social-media posts that await judgment, narrow it to the latest instances of sharing. Social media’s quantifying metrics aggravate the problem, making expression into a series of discrete items to be counted, ranked. It serves as the infrastructure for a feedback loop that orients expression toward the anxiety of what the numbers will be and accelerates it, as we try to better those numbers, and thereby demonstrate that the self-monitoring is teaching us something about how to become more “relevant.”

Rob Horning, “Social Media Is Not Self-Expression” (2014)

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Opposite the platform was a row of temporary buildings, their steel structures now decaying, and wild grasses straggling up between the sleepers on the edges over which no trains passed. The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

— Han Kang, The Vegetarian (trans. Deborah Smith, 2016)

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Elsewhere, she gives. She doesn’t “know” what she’s giving, she doesn’t measure it; she gives, though, neither a counterfeit impression nor something she hasn’t got. She gives more, with no assurance that she’ll get back even some unexpected profit from what she puts out. She gives that there may be life, thought, transformation. This is an “economy” that can no longer be put in economic terms. Wherever she loves, all the old concepts of management are left behind. At the end of a more or less conscious computation, she finds not her sum but her differences. I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before: at every instant. When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975; trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, 1976)

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Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.

— WH Auden, from “The Masque,” The Age of Anxiety

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A colonized sexuality is one in which we have internalized the sexual values of dominant culture. The invaders continue to enforce the idea that sexuality and non-dichotomous genders are a sin, recreating sexuality as illicit, shocking, shameful, and removed from any positive spiritual context.

Qwo-Li Driskill, “Stolen From Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic” (2004)